Tesla is just handing it out to anyone who can afford to buy a Model S/X (and now Model 3) with the absolute minimum of warnings that they can get away with.
And also the idea that an automatic driver is easier to improve over time (skewing the trade-off better and better) than human drivers. Which of course will snowball when reliance on automation keeps making drivers worse than better, and at some point you're past the point of no return.
Whether that's right data must show.
From the videos in the article it's clear that auto-pilot should be disabled when there is bright low-light sunshine. Tesla should be prepared to tell customers there's certain times of the day when the reliability of the software is not high enough and turn it off.
These are all 'beta' testers after all so they shouldn't complain too much.
Imho, they should detect that situation (by using cameras and/or the current time + GPS) and not allow you to switch it on. You should not give drivers the choice between safety and lazy (from which I assume that auto-pilot driving when currently feasible it SAFER than manual -- which I assumes, but read elsewhere in the thread is not yet properly demonstrated).
Any statistics released by Tesla should be compared against similar statistics from say modern Audis with lane-assist and collision detection.
This could happen because Tesla vehicles are more expensive than comparable conventional vehicles, less attractive to those with risky lifestyles, inconvenient for people who don't have regular driving patterns that allow charging to be planned, or more attractive to older consumers who wish to signal different markers of status than the young go-fast crowd.
You'd possibly want to compare versus non-auto-pilot Tesla drivers on the same roads in similar conditions, but the problem remains that the situations where auto-pilot is engaged may be different from those when the driver maintains control.
In sum, it's hard to mitigate the potential confounding variables.
Yes - that's why I suggest comparing it to modern Audi drivers. Basically any of the BMW/Mercedes/Audi drivers are where Tesla is getting most of its customers. Those companies all have similar albeit less extensive safety systems.
They're brilliant because they augment humans by leaving humans to do all the driving and staying focused on that but then taking over when the driver gets distracted and is about to hit something.
Auto-pilot does it the opposite way round. It does the driving but not as well as the human but then the human can't stay as alert as the car so isn't ready to take over.
I really hope it does get to the point were all drivers are automatic and interconnected. Cars could cooperate to a much higher extent and traffic could potentially be much more efficient and safe.
Say, like computers on the Internet (information highway)?
Rings a bell.
Use it just for additional input to err on the side of safety. If the car ahead says "hey, I'm braking at maximum" and my car's sensors show it's starting to slow down, I can apply more immediate braking power than if I'd just detected the initial slight slowdown.
Or, "I'm a car, don't hit me!" pings might help where my car thinks it's a radar artifact, like the Tesla crash last year where it hit the semi crossing the highway.
You realize you say that in a thread about a car's sensors failing to understand it was in an unsafe condition (again), right?
We're discussing car-to-car mesh networks being used to provide self-driving cars with more decision-making input.
In other words, "all other road users should accommodate my needs just to make life a bit easier for me" is a terrible idea.
Having cars communicate information to each other has the potential to be an additional safety measure. It's like adding reflectors to bikes - adding them wasn't victim blaming, it was just an additional thing that could be added to reduce accidents.
I think you can make some conclusions from the current software industry and see how many defects are deployed daily, I see Tesla and Uber have same defects as any SV startup and not as NASA, having this starups controlling all the cars on the road sounds a terrible idea.
I think the question of using self driving vehicles comes down to this. Do you want to be part of a statistics that you can control, or do you want to be part of one that you cannot?
When we go in trains or planes, we are already being part of statistics that we cannot control. But those things also are extremely reliable.
So there seems to be a threshold, where someone should opt for being part of a statistics that you cannot control.
The people who are pushing SDV's, by some sleight of hand, seem to hide this aspect, and have successfully showcased raw, (projected) statistics that implicitly assumes the rate of progress with SDV's, also assume that SDV ll continue to progress until they reach that capability.....
>And also the idea that an automatic driver is easier to improve over time (skewing the trade-off better and better) than human drivers.
But there is always are risk of catastrophic regressions [1] with each update, right?
well, even if you are in control with your hands on the wheel, you can still get heart (and even die) in a car accident where you have no responsibility at all. Sure you can control your car, but you cannot control others'...
(this is even more obvious from a cyclist point of view)
Everyone everywhere says the same thing. It's information-free discourse.
With half baked self driving tech, you have absolutely no control..
The UK has the 2nd-lowest rate of road deaths in the world (after Sweden).
The roads in the UK are not intrinsically safe, they are very narrow both in urban and rural areas which means there are more hazards and less time to avoid them.
However, the UK has strict driver education programme. It is not easy to pass the driving test, with some people failing multiple times. It means that people only get a license when they are ready for it. Drink-driving will also get you a prison sentence and a driving ban.
Actually, paradoxically that means they are actually safer. People drive slower on narrower roads, which means that accidents are within the safe energy envelope that modern cars can absorb.
Very, very few people will ever die as a passenger or driver in a car accident at 25 mph / 40 kph. At 65mph / 100kph, the story is completely different.
The country roads one has always dumbfounded me though - why some of those have national speed limits I will never know.
The thought of doing this now scares me and I don't do this and suggest that no one else does either. But I know many people still drive like this.
Why not? Even roads with lower speed limits you're required to drive at a speed appropriate for the road, the conditions, and your vehicle; the speed limit merely sets an upper-bound, and it's not really relevant whether it's achievable. Just look at the Isle of Man where there is no national speed limits: most roads outside of towns have no speed limit, regardless of whether they're a narrow single-lane road or one of the largest roads on the island.
IIRC, the workshop was about three hours, but it was surprisingly useful. The instructors treated you like adults and not children or criminals, and they gave fairly useful tips on driving and looking out for things like lights suddenly changing, ensuring you are in the right gear, how you're supposed to react if an emergency vehicle wants you to go forward when you're by a set of traffic lights with a camera, etc.
However, on the drink driving front, given the news with Ant from Ant and Dec I think it's safe to assume that not everyone gets a prison sentence for drink driving.
Has he been sentenced?
In Scotland, the BAC limit is lower than in England and the punishment is a 12 month driving ban and fine for being over the limit - no grey areas or points or getting away with it.
In England a fine and penalty points are common, repeat offenders can be suspended and jailed. The severity of the punishment can often depend on how far over the limit you are and other factors.
The UK went through a major cultural change relating to drink driving several decades ago, it isn't viewed as acceptable, the police get tip offs on a regular basis.
https://www.sentencingcouncil.org.uk/offences/item/excess-al...
I would think to look carefully at all directions and, if visibility allows, pass the red light, then contest the fine with an "emergrncy vehicle passing through" defence. But what is the official position?
Although, if you are at a set of traffic lights and an emergency vehicle tries to get you to cross the line, what you should do is write down the registration plate and contact the relevant service to report the driver. The instructor on this course was ex-police, and according to him police, paramedics, and firefighters in the UK are taught to not do this under any circumstance, and if they are caught trying to persuade someone to cross a red traffic light then they can get in a lot of trouble.
The only case that trumps a red traffic light is when given a signal by an authorised person (e.g., police officers, traffic officers, etc).
I think under a literal interpretation of the law you are obliged to commit an offence if you are beckoned on across a stop line at a red traffic light; you can either refuse the instruction to be beckoned on (an offence) or you can cross the stop line (an offence). That said, there's plenty of habit of the beckoning taking precedent over the lights.
Basically the only time you see any police officer instructing traffic from a vehicle is when on a motorbike, typically when they're part of an escort.
At least, that's how it works in Germany and Denmark. But I don't think Denmark has traffic light cameras. I've never seen them anyway. But I've seen them in Germany.
Of course, this is assuming you don't actually cross the entire junction, but rather just moves out into the junction, so the emergency vehicle can get through.
Police cars will have dash cams, not sure on ambulances or fire engines.
That being said, scariest thing I did on the road was going through a red light to let an ambulance through at a motorway off-ramp. You better hope everyone else has heard those sirens.
I'd also note that most European countries are hot on the heels of the UK, Sweden and Switzerland by the above measures. By comparison, the US numbers are 10.6, 12.9 and 7.1, respectively. Most European countries are well below those numbers.
Particularly in Western European and Nordic countries, the driving tests are very strict. Even for all the stereotypes, France's numbers of 5.1, 7.6 and 5.8 are quite good, and they are moving in the right direction.
Sources:
* http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/road_safety_st...
* https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/transport/road-safety-annual-r...
Notes:
I use death rate, not incidents/accidents rate.
I ignored "smaller" countries for the above listing, such as San Marino and Kiribati.
All numbers are from 2015, and they are also presented in the Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
And that's the way it should be. The driving test may not be easy, but it's not any more difficult than driving is. People should be held to a high standard when controlling high speed hunks of metal.
"but autopilot still lowers the death rate on average"
That's not what they said, they said the death rate was lower than the average. And yet you can't help hearing that it lowered the death rate. I think it's very likely turning on autopilot massively increases the rate of death for Tesla drivers, but they've managed to deflect from that so skilfully.
It is certainly designed to do that, but even for airline pilots there are limits to what is possible.
You cannot train a human to react within 1ms; that's just physiologically impossible. Nor can you train a human to fully comprehend a situation within x ms, where x depends on the situation.
So the autopilot would have to warn a human say 2x ms before an event that requires attention, where it can of course not yet know of the event, so that amounts to 'any time there could possibly be an event 2x ms in the projected future'. Which is probably: most of the time. Making the autopilot useless.
In a car, the requirement is fractions of a second.