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Dashcam Video Shows Tesla Steering Toward Lane Divider - Again (arstechnica.com)

AmiMoJo shares a report from Ars Technica: The afternoon commute of Reddit user Beastpilot takes him past a stretch of Seattle-area freeway with a carpool lane exit on the left. Last year, in early April, the Tesla driver noticed that Autopilot on his Model X would sometimes pull to the left as the car approached the lane divider -- seemingly treating the space between the diverging lanes as a lane of its own. This was particularly alarming, because just days earlier, Tesla owner Walter Huang had died in a fiery crash after Autopilot steered his Model X into a concrete lane divider in a very similar junction in Mountain View, California.

Beastpilot made several attempts to notify Tesla of the problem but says he never got a response. Weeks later, Tesla pushed out an update that seemed to fix the problem. Then in October, it happened again. Weeks later, the problem resolved itself. This week, he posted dashcam footage showing the same thing happening a third time -- this time with a recently acquired Model 3. "The behavior of the system changes dramatically between software updates," Beastpilot told Ars. "Human nature is, 'if something's worked 100 times before, it's gonna work the 101st time.'" That can lull people into a false sense of security, with potentially deadly consequences.

4 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why do people think... by Jeremi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The only thing more hubristic than assuming something will definitely work is assuming something will never work.

    Of course autonomous driving software will have bugs in it, and those bugs will lead to accidents. The status-quo alternative (biology-based driving software) also has bugs in it, which regularly leads to accidents.

    The difference is that bugs in the autonomous driving software will eventually be diagnosed and fixed. Bugs in biological driving software, OTOH, will never be fixed, because every new person has to learn to drive from scratch; even if someone eventually becomes a flawless driver, sooner or later that person will die and replaced by another newbie, who will repeat the same newbie mistakes as everyone else. Lessons "learned" by software (and software designers) OTOH, can stay "learned" indefinitely, as long as they don't lose the source code.

    --


    I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
  2. Re:I can't believe it by ledow · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Duh. That's why anyone with a brain knows these things are deathtraps.

    You can't debug a NN, not in any reasonable manner, certainly not one that you're constantly retraining and tweaking all the time. In this case, even providing heuristics ("Hey, there's a bridge near this GPS location, so don't think it's a wall" is literally what Tesla are putting into their software in some places because they can't train the behaviour out of the NN).

    This has always been the concern of anyone that deals with such stuff since Tesla said they were using that technology.

    You're basically training a black box on unknown criteria from limited test data, and then acting shocked when people say they don't understand how the black box works, can't predict what it will do, can't retrain or untrain it easily, and are surprised that even a million miles of road data aren't enough to let it drive safely across the entire world in perpetuity?

  3. Re:Not driving towards "lane divider" by thegarbz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Will we expect all construction companies everywhere to adopt universal signage and clean it and maintain it accurately? Not bloody likely!

    Huh? You Americans have a problem with standardising road and construction signage? To answer your question: yes, it is perfectly reasonable for a construction company to put in correct the correct procedures and equipment in order to maintain safety. That is literally a good chunk of the job of construction management.

  4. Re:Not really AI at all by thegarbz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Tesla and just about everyone else in the "autonomous" driving game is using an Expert System.

    Sorry but expert systems are not what does the image analysis. Go back to start. Do not collect $200.