Tesla Model S adaptive cruise control crashes into van
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youtube.com
https://www.teslamotors.com/sites/default/files/Model-S-Owne...
> Warning: Traffic-aware cruise control may not brake/decelerate for stationary vehicles, especially in situations when you are driving over 50 mph (80 km/h) and a vehicle you are following moves out of your driving path and a stationary vehicle or object is in front of you instead. Always pay attention to the road ahead and stay prepared to take immediate corrective action. Depending on TrafficAware Cruise Control to avoid a collision can result in serious injury or death.
Bad to hear that they released it knowing this was an issue, because I wouldn't expect myself to be able to react to this.
Humans are not capable of handling these types of nuances well at speed. Being an active driver and being an inactive driver that needs to stay alert enough to catch the few cases where you run into "known issues" is just not going to work well.
As I'm typing it I'm suddenly having a wave of guilt for all kinds of software bugs I've written where the answer was "it's a known issue".
Or is it crazy to expect a user to be able to react instantly to the 1% use case?
It is crazy to see a situation in which you should brake and to intentionally choose not to with a non-autonomous car.
If a person was behind that stopped van, trying to figure out what the van's problem was, or if they had the van jacked up on one corner to change a blown tire, this same crash could easily have been fatal.
Stationary vehicle, in a traffic lane, on a major artery, is a bad situation whether or not your car is piloting itself.
I have a recent BMW with ACC that shows the same behaviour.
It's not an ultra rare event (I experience it roughly once every other day) and it's also not a problem as a driver.
Also with ACC: Just swerve right and ACC will happily crash you into any other stationary object like a lamp post or a wall.
What is the sense of it then? If you can't depend on it, you need to keep alert constantly, with your hands on the wheel and foot ready to hit the brakes.
Which essentially defeats the purpose of TrafficAware Cruise Control.
[Edit: a user was kind to point that Tesla's Autopilot ISN'T an autopilot, and should NOT be relied upon to avoid accidents, requiring indeed full attention when driving]
It's almost like american football helmets.
My concern is that semi-autonomous vehicles become good enough that humans trust them to drive (that is, people consider the vehicle to be driving rather than providing an aide to driving such as automatic-shifting, and standard cruise-control); yet not so capable as to be a true autonomous vehicle. Do these features simply making driving safer across the board, or is there a point where the human stops taking responsibility and accidents increase?
Eventually people figure this stuff out, but as was discussed in other Tesla threads, there is a risk of entering an uncanny valley where it's actually more dangerous to have the assistive tech in an emergency, but safer in non-emergencies.
Most of them may even know that they're supposed to be actively driving but, seriously, that's not how humans are wired. And tsk, tsking about how people shouldn't do that isn't going to change anything.
It will be "interesting" to see how this plays out because it's apparent that we're rapidly heading for a point where we'll have cars that are "pretty good" at highway autopilot that are in no way certified or approved for hands-off operation by drivers playing a video game.
Not that I have an answer per se -- if I still have to be driving, inputting the obvious strategy doesn't help me much because I already know how to do that. Collision avoidance is pretty much the only thing I have anxiety about, so saying it's not supposed to be used for that means this is a very very expensive mid-range sedan (to consumers like me).
I was more responding to the second statement with, essentially: "Yes, it does default the 'autonomous driving' purpose of TACC".
Have they not mentioned, time and time again, that this is not an autonomous car? I have adaptive cruse control in my Mazda, automatic breaks, but they're not a replacement for paying attention to the road.
I'm of the opinion that Tesla probably needs to back down on their "autonomous" stuff-- their half-baked semi-autonomous stuff is getting enough bad press that it's going to kill true autonomous tech before it can even make it onto the road.
Even in aviation, 'autopilots' don't mean the pilot can leave the cockpit unmanned. Human pilots are needed at all times in case the autopilot disengages due to unexpected conditions.
The bottom line: TrafficAware is bad technology.
It's not intended to be an autopilot. Just a better cruise control
Telsa is just hyping up the same shit that all automakers can do right now.
Tesla brands this feature exactly as 'Autopilot'.
In that case your right foot thanks you for cruise control.
In the same way that modern web server systems try to sanitise database inputs, etc. rather than just blame the developer for not knowing best-practices themselves, real-world engineering is all about understanding how the system may be misused and designing to eliminate the capacity for misuse.
Yes, you'll never eliminate misuse completely, but the court of law is littered with examples that didn't bother to try and so couldn't defend against a claim of negligence in their design engineering process.
Simply saying in a manual that 'hey, this may cause you to crash in these circumstances - pay attention!' isn't enough.
From a corporation's perspective, in an at-least-partially subsidized healthcare system, such as the U.S. and EU (to different extents, duh!) the health issues are an externalized cost.
[edit] Looks like AEB did engage at the last minute, but that only happens when there will be a collision.
I don't think the tech is at fault here at all, if you were using regular cruise control in this scenario nothing would've changed.
I mean if the CC slammed on the brakes every time it passed a bridge pylon or a stationary car THAT would be broken.
I give the same response as above. Tesla names this feature 'Autopilot'. The tech is not at fault (though it could be better), but the user expectation and understanding of the tech is faulty, and I think part of this is the name Tesla is using. In this case their ambition is ahead of common sense.
See 'Autopilot' as a major feature on their site:
I suppose you could go hands free because in the event of a road hazard you might just have to brake (although coming to a stop on a highway is dangerous - the person behind you might not stop).
For me the value of an auto-pilot feature is the gain of time. One can respond to emails, read, field a call w/out risking the safety of themselves or others, etc.
In all seriousness, how is this an issue at all?
It clearly sees obstacles (like a wall in a curve) and takes corrective action. How does it not do something (if even just applying the brakes) when there's an obvious obstruction right in front of it?
Its like the Microwave saying that most of the time it'll work fine but may blow up the house sometimes, please pay constant attention and stop immediately if you see smoke.
However, if you, the human, are following said car, you may have fractions of a second to react, after the car moves out of the way and you can finally see the obstacle.
EDIT after watching the gif; yeah, this was pretty much the opposite case: big van stopped, clearly visible over the compact car in front. Gross negligence on the part of the driver to not see this and respond _before_ the car did.
It is not responsible to expect humans that are sitting behind the wheel of a car that covers 90% of situations to pay attention for the 10%. This sort of situation puts the human at eases and gives them false confidence in a vehicle.
Even if the fine print SAYS they are in control. They are adding a layer between the human and the car that delays their reaction speed a little more. Because the human is not trained to drive in a buggy ass car, they aren't trained to respond to this sort of thing.
Liability for these sorts of accidents should fall on Tesla, and they should not be having their drives be guinea pigs. If a driver wants access to this autonomous mode they should have to sign a release because by default Tesla should be responsible. Again the law isn't current with this.
I also want to say I love what tesla is doing but I think the bad PR of irresponsibly integrating autonomous driving when it isn't ready (or they don't have the proper sensor bank to make it work) is going to delay the acceptance of self driving cars in the public in general.
Tesla's self driving car is to Googles self driving car as the Blue Origin landing was to Space X's landing . But in general people don't know or see the difference they are just cars that drive themselves or rockets that land. Also google's car is typically driven with a trained driver.
I also want to say I'm a huge proponent of self driving cars.
Does it turn? No, then no responsibility for turning.
If I can rely on the car to break and go, then I should be able to RELY on the car to do so. This seems like a feature that makes people complacent and will end up hurting self driving car adoption in the long run.
Look at how many people harp on the few accidents Google has been in, and they have a well trained driver in it. Tesla is just putting a 1/2 measure in place so that they can leverage their users as testers and pawning off responsibility when the users turn out to be TERRIBLE testers.
Except that this car's manual, along with every other car I've ever owned and seen that had active cruise control, specifically states that the car will not stop for stationary objects. People need to RTFM. It comes with the vehicle for a reason.
This was a situation where the driver plainly needed to take over, had plenty of time to take over, and the issue was sufficiently obvious that even a non-alert driver who was looking forward would see they needed to take over.
There's an argument to be made that relying on partial automation is a fundamentally bad idea because the driver will not become sufficiently alert in time to save themselves. This is not an example of such a situation.
This isn't even a Tesla issue: most car makers now ship cars with adaptive cruise control with stop-and-go. If they stop 95% of the time in this situation, do we really have to ban them because some drivers insist that past experiences constitute a valid test?
Regular cruise control has always deactivated with a momentary brake tap. Been this way since cruise control started coming on cars.
A tap can disable the current braking completely, resulting in an unexpected change in velocity. Frequently a bad idea, since the ACC is braking for a reason.
Applying normal braking pressure can add your braking pressure to the existing braking pressure, resulting in an abnormally large braking force, sometimes enough to initiate ABS on dry roads. Very disorientating, and it makes you unpredictable to drivers behind you.
The solution is to tap, then press a second later, but this requires you to be aware of the need to take manual control early in the situation.
[0]: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/04/25/elon-musk-t...
Highways have an accident rate about 1/3rd of urban roads.
Where is cruise control mostly used? Highways.
How can you compare human drivers on urban roads AND highways with a system that is nearly always used only on highways.
If you compare Tesla's stat with humans on highways only.. Tesla is actually less safe.
That stat is complete bullshit.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/04/2...
The point is no matter how many accidents autopilot gets into, its safer than human drivers. And it will only improve.
Autopilot could kill ~30K people a year, and that's still less than the number of people killed by people driving in the United States alone.
But this isn't a self driving car - it's automated cruise control. It's not going to let you snapchat and drive safely. You still need to be aware, and rhetoric that presents it as a solution to distracted driving is dangerous, leading to situations exactly like this one.
Sure it's still safer; that's not the point.
That's entirely the point.
Really? Snapchat has a feature that is basically designed to get people to use their phone while driving/moving?
It happens in airplane industry (where people forgot some basics because they use to much autopilots)
It happens in science when people use too much black magic statistic metadata (and forget to check the details in the slight differences of inputs).
But be aware that more automation of dangerous industry also will have the same effect ; mass transport, nuclear plant, chemical plants, medical practice, energy grids.
Well, aren't coding with google&SO and/or frameworks kind of a growing autopilot for most coders?
Also, there are variable settings for breaking, right? Has anyone tested what happens if they're intentionally set too low to prevent accidents?
So many experiments I'd run with a Model S and an EM mocked up crash pad...
HR would have a field day with all this box checking
Vehicles equipped with these features are actually more dangerous, based upon the preliminary data. I'm all for new technology, but if you want to use clearly "beta" -- and that's putting it lightly, as its clear there are definite hardware/sensor/sampling problems here, not software -- you should be required to carry high risk insurance.
It's not fair to the rest of us drivers who have to be on the road. We did not agree to be Tesla's beta testers too, and its only a matter of time before someone is seriously injured or killed by one of these "features".
I'm sure someone here will chime in and say, "but its safer than a human driver, a reckless teenager". To that I say, that's why teenager's insurance rates are so high! We need to increase the insurance rates here to reflect the risk presented to both the driver and general public of this reckless, half-backed autonomy.
What are you waiting for?