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Comment by abalone | Hacker News Reader

> In May 2015, Eric Meadows, then a Tesla engineer, engaged Autopilot on a drive in a Model S from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Cruising along Highway 1, the car jerked left toward oncoming traffic. He yelped and steered back on course, according to his account and a video of the incident.

Is this video online?

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> Mr. Meadows said he was later dismissed for what he was told were “performance issues.” Tesla declined to comment on Mr. Meadows but noted that the incident happened months before the release of the technology, giving the company plenty of time to work out problems that had been discovered during test drives.

We used to treat our test pilots with the highest regard. How low have we fallen?

Public video of a problem during testing is a big no-no. Here in Germany nobody shows issues Porsche test drivers have during >300km/h tests on public highways in the night, only if they cause a major accident.

This is the third or 4th time I've heard that story repeated and the details change each time Meadows tells it, in my opinion. The date and viability of the system changes when I've read it and that leads me to believe that his motivation may not be altruistic but vengeful instead. He probably did get fired from Tesla for performance issues and so he feels the need to fire back at them by noting an incident that happened in the very early stages of the technology's development. We treated test pilots with the highest regard because they were separated from the technology/machinery itself. There was no personal stake in it for them other than making it out alive and exposing issues with the systems being tested. In the current cases, the "test pilots" have a vested interest in the system because they are the ones designing it and deploying it. That's why I have to stifle my gut reaction when I hear stories like Meadows'. Which is more likely, that Tesla would risk its entire reputation by releasing software that was dangerously inadequate or that he's a little butthurt about getting fired and threw a bit of a tantrum?

> We treated test pilots with the highest regard because they were separated from the technology/machinery itself. There was no personal stake in it for them other than making it out alive and exposing issues with the systems being tested.

I think this is an extremely salient and important point, and I've never thought of it before!

Test pilots only care about a good product, not success or failure of the product. That's not the case anymore.

Maybe this would be a good time to propose a new "test pilot core" for cars, made up of perhaps some elite drivers who don't work for any car company.

Or heck, maybe the army wants to test self driving cars!

Exactly. I would love to see a "test pilot core" but that's never going to happen as long as the major players involved in these technologies are companies that are looking to make the most profit possible. A "test pilot" that has access to all the different self-driving programs is a prime point of weakness for any kind of confidentiality or security that might be in place for these programs.

> I would love to see a "test pilot core" but that's never going to happen as long as the major players involved in these technologies are companies that are looking to make the most profit possible

Wouldn't top companies lobby for a standard when they can meet it and other companies can't? Doesn't this happen in every industry, e.g. food and drug, aerospace, manufacturing, all the time?

> A "test pilot" that has access to all the different self-driving programs is a prime point of weakness for any kind of confidentiality or security that might be in place for these programs.

How do you propose evaluating them, then? Just use people as guinea pigs and see which system causes the fewest accidents? Do you think people will elect politicians who completely ignore public safety to satisfy the whims of corporations?

> Maybe this would be a good time to propose a new "test pilot core" for cars, made up of perhaps some elite drivers who don't work for any car company.

Yes, having more neutral testing programs like CA's standardized testing would be nice, particularly if the tests were mandatory for all manufacturers.

I'm surprised there isn't a national testing system in place for that, but I guess it is our system to leave most control to the states.

This isn't exactly an isolated incident, YouTube has lots of videos of autopilot steering wildly off course. The biggest problem is that Tesla allows turning on autopilot on roads that are not a highway and feature significant turns and hills obscuring "perfect lane vision", and the system is not prepared to handle that at all:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBaolsFyD9I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOnuKrzCLYc

I'd like to point out that the first video you linked is nearly 2 years old.

This is software released to the public which doesn't pass a basic d(yaw rate)/dt sanity check and steers hard into oncoming traffic.

Not sure who cares about version here. Your airplane went down? Yeah, should be fixed now, no worry, try the new version!

What's your point? The second video is only a month old and in that video the car still drives in the way only a total jackass would drive, in the most favorable possible conditions for a self-driving car: clear and sunny with little traffic, clear road markings, and no pedestrians or bicycles.

Wow, if I were a passenger in the second video, I would insist on taking over if a human were driving. I don't know anything about the technical issues, but this is so not ready for prime time, it seems from that test autopilot drive to be super amateurish.

That's absolutely terrible. If a police cruiser would be behind you while driving like that you'd have a hard time arguing you were in control of the vehicle and not being cited. Unacceptable.

If this is May 2015, this is prior to the system in question (HW2 or AP2) even existing in prototypical forms.

The previous system (HW1 or AP1) is a MobileEye chip, which is found in most other cars that also have "lane keeping" features. They all use the same chip with the same model provided by MobileEye, and can choose to overlay features on top of it or augment the system with other sensors (such as radar on the Model S/X). For that system, it is essentially the same performance whether it's a $150k Tesla or $30k Honda.

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