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Comment by astrojams | Hacker News Reader

I’ve got a Tesla model X and I’ve been in situations where the autopilot screwed up and required me to take over to prevent an accident. Most recently the car was autonomously changing lanes on a highway and didn’t see a guy on a motorcycle who was following too closely to the car in front of him. It’s probably an edge case, but still makes me weary of using it more.

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As someone who rides, this is scary. I'm going to begin giving semi-autonomous vehicles a wide berth.

Whatever car company exec said that humans are going to "bully self driving cars" was very wrong. I'm very scared of them and I'm not going to mess around.

This is a very rehashed point; but just because these cars crash into things in stupid situations doesn't mean that they are less safe than what we already have. Shouldn't you already be giving semi-autonomous, fully-autonomous and non-autonomous vehicles wide berth?

I assume you mean rides [a motorcycle], which is ~35x more dangerous than driving a car according to Wikipedia, and I'm guessing driving a car is already the most dangerous thing people do in a day. They would be completely illegal if we worried more about safety than about cost-benefit ratios. Even if AutoPilot/SuperCruise vehicles are 10 times safer than regular drivers they are still going to take out the occasional motorcyclist.

With human-driven vehicles there is often a chance to make eye contact to confirm that you see each other. Perhaps the robot cars need some equivalent. Interesting interface design problem.

> Interesting interface design problem.

And so Don Norman (of The Design of Everyday Things book fame) is at it from UCSD: http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~norman/

Eye contact doesn't insure the safety of either party.

That's not true. Human brain has evolved to pick up subtle things that even our conscious brains don't recognize. An eye-contact is a reaffirmation that the driver has seen me (and vice-versa) and notices my intent. Of course, people can misread. But in my experience riding a bicycle or crossing a sidewalk a simple eye-contact and a head nod goes a long way in resolving a conflict on who goes first or if it's ok to cross.

In the Illinois Motorcycle handbook it definitely states that just because you and another driver make eye contact, that doesn't mean they actually see you. Either way, as a motorcyclist, I'm not gonna count on eye contact to make sure of my safety. I ride and drive defensively at all times. I assume the worst in most situations.

> I assume the worst in most situations.

If that was really true you would never ride a motorcycle.

Eyeballing the other guy is no guarantee of anything, but it provides quite a lot of information about the risk you face in the interaction. I think we would miss it when dealing with fully autonomous vehicles, and that the vehicles might add something to tell you they see you. I've done some work on this idea in the lab with mobile robots.

> If that was really true you would never ride a motorcycle.

This is such a garbage statement. We check our parachutes twice before jumping, and whilst not jumping is inherently safer - having decided to jump you can still protect yourself from risks inherent in the activity.

If you assume the worst, there'd be no point checking the parachute. You assume it will fail.

Since this is not how people really behave, we are very rarely actually assuming the worst.

Of course it doesn't. But it's better than nothing. We do it all the time.

Motorcycles are dangerous because of other motorists. Most are actually intending to do you harm e.g the California study on lane splitting. Only advantage you've as a rider, is speed and nimbleness. My rule, when I'm riding I automatically assume no one sees me. I act accordingly. Try make sure, I'm the not sandwiched by cards.

Motorcycles are still dangerous without other motorists. My car will protect me from a lot of mistakes that would be fatal on my bike.

I've been passed by bikes doing slalom at ~300 kph. It's not common, for sure, but it's memorable. So my rule about bikes is that they're unpredictable.

25% of motorcycle accidents don't involve cars, just riders screwing up.

> They would be completely illegal if we worried more about safety than about cost-benefit ratios.

If we worried about safety, there would be much, much less drivers on the road.

See, society have decided that practically every adult is perfectly capable of controlling a several thousand pound piece of metal while practical evidence points to somewhere else: some or even most people drive so badly they shouldn't be doing so.

We build a world where the motorist rules and we are paying for this with a huge amount of dead and disabled people. Is it truly worth it? Could we live another way (sure, once we did, but we want to do better now)? Transit and such is mostly sold on the merits of climate change these days and noone dares to say this: you should be on transit because you can't drive.

Not here to defend Telsa, but drove 2014 Audi A6 and its blind spot assist would sometimes miss motorcycles and small cars (e.g. Mini Cooper, Fiat)

That's very sad as a motorcyclist who hoped that this would be a huge improvement. Most of the near accidents I've had have been inattentive drivers not checking their blindspots.

I've noticed blind spot detection on other car being unable to pick up small (empty) trailers when I pass them. They probably assume anything with less cross sectional area than X is a false positive in a config file somewhere

Or they were right, since we don't even have fully self driving cars yet...

To be fair here, and for people who might not know, Teslas do not "autonomously change lanes". When autopilot is active, the driver must initiate the lane change themselves, and it's the driver's responsibility to do so when it's safe. Tesla does not claim otherwise.

Most would describe that as autonomously changing lanes (after user initiation).

On my Model S test drive the salesperson-not-called-a-salesperson used the language “It changes lanes for you”

The article actually discusses the lane change feature specifically. He argues that, if the car requires the driver to look and confirm that the lane change is safe, you're probably better having the driver be in control of the whole process.

As a driver, this makes sense to me. I've definitely had cases where someone driving quickly "has appeared out of nowhere" while I'm changing lanes. I'd much rather be fully engaged in the lane change process and prepared to immediately back off than to have given an autopilot a thumbs up and let it handle the details.

I for one would read autonomously changing lanes as the system choosing the optimal lanes - and swapping - itself.

What you're describing is more like assisted, user initiated lane change.

Yeah, sure they would...

Seems reckless to do autonomous lane changes with only blind spot detection. I can't how ultrasonic sensors could detect lane splitting motorcycles.

I believe Tesla's "Enhanced Autopilot" has additional cameras pointing backwards for this reason. They claim they were added to address the issue of cars approaching more quickly than the ultrasonic sensors are useful for, but I wonder if they would have found this biker too.

Lane splitting should be illegal anyway.

People will do it even if it's illegal, and it would be better for everyone involved if autonomous cars can deal with it safely.

This is why self driving cars are so much harder than one might think. Just getting the basics of self driving down is challenging. Now throw in all the possible edge cases, some of which shouldn't ever happen, and you've got a wildly interesting and challenging problem. It would be a blast to work on that team.

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