Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

It's not Silicon Valley hype that's the problem. It's Tesla hype. Tesla's "autopilot" is way under-sensored. One TV camera, a bumper-level radar, and some ultrasonic range sensors. That's just not enough. (Tesla is supposedly adding more cameras in later models. They still need windshield-height radar.) It's also not clear how much redundancy Tesla has in the control system? Backup processors? Redundant steering motors? Redundant brake actuators. Google has all of those. Does Tesla?

The Tesla crash and rollover on the Pennsylvania Turnpike is troublesome.[1] That's the situation Tesla's "autopilot" is supposed to handle. Here's the crash location - Penna Turnpike mile marker 160, eastbound.[2] Concrete center divider, metal guard rail on the right, clear pavement markings, summer driving conditions. There's no excuse for a crash in that situation. That may have been an outright system failure. NHTSA and the Pennsylvania State Police are investigating.

Autopilot bug reports are written in customers blood. Musk seems to be in denial about that.

Denial isn't going to work. Look how much trouble General Motors got into over ignition switches with weak detent springs.[3] Keyrings with too many keys could under some circumstances move the switch and turn off the vehicle. (It wasn't just loss of propulsion; power steering, power brakes, and airbag power were also lost.) GM has paid out $3 billion so far, recalled 800,000 cars, and fired 15 people.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/07/business/us-safety-agency-... [2] https://goo.gl/maps/TfcuZR67oXr [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch...

What I find interesting is that the tech for the autopilot largely comes from Bosch and has been in kther cars for a long time. It's branded "assist systems" in German cars and they are super anal about the driver oeeping the hand on the wheel at all times. I have a passat eith lots of the assist systems and I honestly think that in the current form it's also a safety risk of you start to depend on it too much. It encourages bad behavior.

Audio, BMW, Mercedes etc don't sell the driver assist as being an auto pilot. The driver is made aware that these are assisting tools and nothing else.

Without disputing your points about Tesla, there are a couple issues with your comments on the Pennsylvania crash which cannot be overlooked.

The Google Maps image date is September 2014 (fine print at bottom of page) and we must assume it looked the same on the accident date. It's entirely possible it looked very different on the accident date. Paint spills, fire or previous accident damage to road surface, debris on roadway, etc.

Also missing from all the reports are weather conditions. Did I miss them? I don't see it mentioned at all in the Times or Detroit Free Press articles. Are we assuming it was a sunny and clear day? That view is going to look very different during a thunderstorm.

Pennsylvania seems to be way ahead of other states in their willingness to research safety issues and make changes to their roads and laws. It was the first state I know of that made it a law that you have to have your headlights on if you are using your rain wipers. Makes sense now but they did it first and it definitely helps others see you. They also paint big white circles on the interstate in areas where rear-end crashes are a problem, so you have a very clear visual and know to keep at least three 'dots' behind the car ahead. There are plenty more examples but I feel like this is the perfect state to have something unfortunate like this happen.

> It's also not clear how much redundancy Tesla has in the control system

There need to be enforced standards. Prove to us that your car can handle itself (no pun intended), then we'll let your "autopilot" operate unrestricted. Not before.

We also desperately need auditing of the code running their systems. This is a situation where an if statement could kill somebody. These types of problem is why the NHTSA exists.

Tesla has now reviewed the logs and says that there’s “no data to suggest that Autopilot was engaged at the time of the incident."

http://electrek.co/2016/07/06/tesla-model-x-rollover-acciden...

Tesla's response is evasive and designed to be misquoted as above. Here's their official statement:

“We received an automated alert from this vehicle on July 1 indicating airbag deployment, but logs containing detailed information on the state of the vehicle controls at the time of the collision were never received. This is consistent with damage of the severity reported in the press, which can cause the antenna to fail. As we do with all crash events, we immediately reached out to the customer to confirm they were ok and offer support but were unable to reach him. We have since attempted to contact the customer three times by phone without success. Based on the information we have now, we have no reason to believe that Autopilot had anything to do with this accident.”

Tesla has no idea if their autopilot was engaged. They lost communications during the crash, probably when the vehicle rolled over.

The customer told the Penn. state trooper involved that they were on autopilot at the time.

> Tesla has now reviewed the logs

This is an extremely misleading interpretation of the article. The article says Tesla has only reviewed the basic crash logs, which don't contain information about autopilot state. The detailed crash logs, which have this information, have not been received because the antenna was damaged in the crash.

So Tesla has only reviewed cursory information that says nothing about autopilot state; therefore, they can state they have "no data [suggesting] autopilot was engaged". But you cannot conclude autopilot was not engaged, because there is critical data missing.

Very misleading.

> Tesla has now reviewed the logs and says that there’s “no data to suggest that Autopilot was engaged at the time of the incident."

is a quoted directly from the article. It is also the title of the story.

Quoted from the part of the article the author crossed out and rewrote because it's inaccurate. And the title is a quote taken out of context.

I had not seen that edit. Agreed that the title is inaccurate.

The trend on these Telsa / EV blogs has been to take Tesla's logs as gospel and discount human observation.

There have been other reports of users claiming autopilot being engaged when it was not and reports of not noticing that summon was enabled even though one can't really miss that (that has subsequently been redesigned).

Human factors for these systems is incredibly challenging since such a wide audience of users useses them.

For the record, the crossed out and updated section was added two days before you posted your comment. At that time, the author added a link right at the top to a newer, more accurate article. The author also added the word "[Updated]" to the title so people would notice this change.

>> Tesla's "autopilot" is way under-sensored.

That actually makes it easier to develop the AI. More sensors means more noise and more work to get rid of it, it means more data and more expensive computations to crunch through it.

This is not to defend Tesla (I could care less) but to point out that "more sensors" doesn't solve the fundamental problem, that of creating a piece of software that can autonomously navigate an arbitrary environment.

We're nowhere neare developing that kind of software and, like people say in academia, it's really not clear how we're going to get to the point where we do.

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