Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier | Hacker News Reader

Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

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433 pointswalrus01465 comments

Here is my armchair diagnosis: right before the car veers towards the barrier it drives through a stretch of road where the only visible lane marker is on the left. Then the right lane marker comes into view at about the point where the lane starts to widen out for the lane split. The lines that will become the right and left lane markers of the split left and right lanes respectively are right next to the van in front of the Tesla, and at this point resemble the diamond lane markers in the middle of the split lanes. My guess is that the autopilot mistook these lines for the diamond lane marker and steered towards them thinking it was centering itself in the lane.

If this theory turns out to be correct then Tesla is in deep trouble because this would be a very elementary mistake. The system should have known that the lanes split at this point, noticed that the distance between what it thought was the diamond lane marker and the right lane line (which was clearly visible) was wrong, and at least sounded an alarm, if not actively braked until it had a better solution.

This is actually the most serious aspect of all of these crashes: the system does not seem to be aware when it is getting things wrong. I dubbed this property "cognizant failure" in my 1991 Ph.D. thesis on autonomous driving, but no one seems to have adopted it. It's not possible to engineer an autonomous system that never fails, but it is possible to engineer one in such a way that it never fails to detect that it has failed. Tesla seems to have done neither.

> It's not possible to engineer an autonomous system that never fails, but it is possible to engineer one in such a way that it never fails to detect that it has failed.

This is a very good point: just like a human driver should slow down if they can't observe the road ahead well enough, an AI should slow down when it's not confident enough of its surroundings. This is probably very difficult to do, and I'm skeptical about your claim that an AI can be engineered to always detect its own failures. Further, I naively believe that Tesla is already doing a lot to detect conflicting inputs and other kinds of failures. Maybe being careful enough would prevent autopilot from working at all, so compromises have been made?

I probably don't understand AIs well enough to understand how they can be engineered to (almost) always recognize their own failures. But if a simple explanation exists, I'd love to hear it.

> if a simple explanation exists, I'd love to hear it

Basically it's a matter of having multiple redundant sensors and sounding the alarm if they don't all agree on what is going on, and also checking if what they think is going on is in the realm of reasonable possibility based on some a priori model (e.g. if suddenly all of your sensors tell you that you are 100 miles from where you were one second ago, that's probably a mistake even if all the sensors agree). That's a serious oversimplification, but that's the gist.

That's exactly how a lot of commercial aircraft systems work, they have three, if two agree and one disagree then that one is ignored.

But it is more complicated than that when you're talking about algorithms and complex systems. If you had three of the same exact system, they'd likely all make the same mistake and thus you'd gain no safety improvement (except actual malfunctions, not logical limitations).

I would like to see auto-braking taken out of autopilot completely, so if autopilot drives you into a wall at least the brakes slow you.

I'd say that Kalman filters are perfect for this-- they optimally blend estimates from multiple sources, including a model of the system dynamics (where you think you're going to be next based on where you were before, i.e. "I'm not going to suddenly jump 100 miles away"), and all the various sensor inputs ("GPS says I'm here, cameras say I'm here, wheel distance says I'm here").

On top of that, Kalman innately tracks the uncertainty of its combined estimate. So you can simply look at the Kalman uncertainty covariance and decide if it is too much for the speed you are going.

I really wonder if Tesla is doing that...

I feel that’s the problem. Techniques like SVM can provide reasonable definitions of confidence. Reinforcement Learning.. DNN... the mechanisms behind autonomous cars... are they able to do this??

> Reinforcement Learning.. DNN... the mechanisms behind autonomous cars... are they able to do this??

Sorta. There are ways to extract kinds of uncertainty and confidence from NNs: for example, Gal's dropout trick where you train with dropout and then at runtime you use an 'ensemble' of multiple dropout-ed versions of your model, and the set of predictions gives a quasi-Bayesian posterior distribution for the predictions. NNs can be trained directly via HMC for small NNs, and there are arguments that constant-learning-rate SGD 'really' implements Bayesian inference and an ensemble of checkpoints yields an approximation of the posterior, etc. You can also train RL NNs which have an action of shortcutting computation and kicking the problem out to an oracle in exchange for a penalty, which trains them to specialize and 'know what they don't know' so they choose to call the oracle when they're insufficiently sure (this can be done for computational savings if the main NN is a small fast simple one and the oracle is a much bigger slower NN, or for safety if you imagine the oracle is a human or some fallback mechanism like halting).

I have some cites on these sorts of things in https://www.gwern.net/Tool-AI and you could also look at the relevant tags https://www.reddit.com/r/reinforcementlearning/search?q=flai... and https://www.reddit.com/r/reinforcementlearning/search?q=flai...

Yes.

In particular, it's possible to learn the variance of the return using TD-methods with the same computational complexity as learning the expected value (the value function). See [0] for how to do it via the squared TD-error, or [1] for how to estimate it via the second moment of the return, and my own notes (soon to be published and expanded for my thesis) here [2].

It turns out that identifying states with high variance is a great way of locating model error-- most of the real-world environments are fairly deterministic, so states with high variance tend to be "aliased" combinations of different states with wildly different outcomes. You can use this to improve your agent via either allocating more representation power to those states to differentiate between very similar ones, or have your agent account for variance when choosing its policy. For example, Tesla could identify when variance spikes in its model and trigger an alert to the user that they may need to take over.

Additionally, there's work by Bellemare [3] for estimating the distribution of the return, which allows for all sorts of statistical techniques for quantifying confidence, risk, or uncertainty.

---

0. https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.08287

1. https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.00446

2. http://rl.ai/posts/fun-with-the-td-error-part-ii.html

3. https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.06887

Yes, there is an active branch in deep learning (Bayesian deep learning) trying to model uncertainty measurements into neural networks.

Older ideas are http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/yarin/blog_2248.html or http://papers.nips.cc/paper/7219-simple-and-scalable-predict...

Basically Bayesian neural networks were able to model confidence but are not applicable in current real-world scenarios. Thus, lots of methods rely on approximating bayesian methods.

not an expert, but aren't the output nodes thresholded to make a decision? How far you are from the threshold might be interpretable as confidence possibly?

I dubbed this property "cognizant failure"

I like that term. When I was involved in the medical instrumentation field, we had a similar concern: it was possible for an instrument to produce a measurement, e.g., the concentration of HIV in blood serum, that was completely incorrect, but plausible since it's within the expected clinical range. This is the worst-case scenario: a result that is wrong, but looks OK. This could lead to the patient receiving the wrong treatment or no treatment at all.

As much as possible, we had to be able to detect when we produced an incorrect measurement.

This meant that all the steps during the analyte's processing were monitored. If one of those steps went out of its expected range we could use that knowledge to inform the final result. So the clinician would get a test report that basically says, "here's the HIV level, but the incubation temperature went slightly out of range when I was processing it, so use caution interpreting it."

Like most software, the "happy path" was easy. The bulk of the work we did on those instruments was oriented towards the goal of detecting when something went wrong and either recovering in a clinically safe manner or refusing to continue.

With all the research into safety-critical systems over decades, it's hard to see how Tesla could not be aware of the standard practices.

"here's the HIV level, but the incubation temperature went slightly out of range when I was processing it, so use caution interpreting it."

there is no "slightly out of range". Its either in the range or outside. Valid or invalid, when it comes to critical tests like these.

if temperature deviation is outside of acceptable deviation range then thats a system fault and result should have been considered invalid.

Back in the days there was much less regulatory oversight and products like that could slip through the cracks, Resulting to deaths, missed diagnosis etc etc.

The same with Teslas AP: its either 100% confident in the situation or not. If the car is not confident in whats happening - it should shut down. If that happens too often then the AP feature should be removed / completely disabled.

How many more people have to get into accidents? I know, if Musk's mom (knock on wood) was a victim of this feature then things would be taken more seriously.

It's so nice to see people critique products they know nothing about with absolutely no useful context!

You do realize that I gave a much simplified view of the situation as this is a web forum discussing a related subject, not an actual design review of the instrument, right?

To any process I can set multiple "acceptable ranges" depending on what I want to accomplish. There can be a "reject" range, "ok, but warning" range, "perfect, no problem" range, or a "machine must be broken" range

Everything is context dependent; nothing is absolute.

> I like that term.

Thanks!

> It's not possible to engineer an autonomous system that never fails, but it is possible to engineer one in such a way that it never fails to detect that it has failed.

That is an extremely surprising result. How is that possible? Are you really claiming that any control system can be engineered to detect that is has failed in any possible manner? What's an example of actual real-world system like that?

> Are you really claiming that any control system can be engineered to detect that is has failed in any possible manner?

No, of course not. But it is possible to reduce the probability of non-cognizant failure to arbitrarily low levels -- at the expense of cost and the possibility of having a system that is too conservative to do anything useful.

I totally agree with your analysis. What is more worrying is that even following the rest of the traffic would have solved the problem. If you are the only car doing something then there is a good chance you are doing something wrong.

Also: the lane markings are confusing but GPS and inertial readings should have clearly indicated that that is not a lane. If two systems give conflicting data some kind of alarm should be given to the driver.

> lane markings are confusing but GPS and inertial readings should have clearly indicated that that is not a lane

GPS is not accurate enough to reliably pinpoint your location to a particular lane. Even WAAS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Area_Augmentation_System) can have up to 25 feet of error. Basic GPS is less accurate than that.

In fact, it's possible that GPS error was a contributing factor here but there's no way to know that from the video.

RTK [0] systems definitely can have centimetre-level accuracy, though they require a fixed base station within 10-15 miles or so to broadcast corrections. It would also require roads to be mapped to a high level of accuracy.

I have seen self-driving test cars in Silicon Valley (frequently, especially in the last year or so) using these types of systems, so they are at least being tested. I've also heard discussion of putting RTK base stations on cell-phone towers to provide wide area coverage, but I'm not sure if much effort has been put into that. I do know vast areas of the agricultural midwest are covered in RTK networks -- its used heavily for auto-steering control in agriculture.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Time_Kinematic

I've heard on and off for many years (15 years?) about ad-hoc wireless networks for cars. Whether it's car to car, or car to some devices on the ground (lane marking, stop lights) so it knows where it is at in relationship to the road and other cars - and it would know if the car ahead is going to break or slow down.

Now the cars are relying on cameras, lidar to figure things out. What has happened to putting sensors on the road to broadcast what/where the roads is. Is that out of the question now because of cost?

I drive a lot with my GPS (TomTom) on and it rarely gets the lane I'm in wrong, usually that only happens in construction zones.

So even if the error can be large in practice it often works very well.

It would be very interesting to see the input data streams these self driving systems rely on in case of errors, and in the case of accidents there might even be a legal reason to obtain them (for liability purposes).

"GPS is not accurate enough to reliably pinpoint your location to a particular lane."

My phone has GPS accurate to within 1 foot. I use it for mining location all the time. It uses differential GPS plus Inertial sensors.

When I think of self-driving car technology, I think of all of these inputs (maps, cameras, GPS, etc.) being fed into a world model from which inferences are drawn.[1] Here, the car could have known from cameras and maps that there was a lane split, and should have been able to detect that the line following was giving a conflicting inference compared to those other sources. The question is: does Tesla actually do that? Because if not, it's not really self-driving car technology. It's not a glitch in a product that's 90% of the way there; it's a fundamentally more basic technology.

[1] See https://www.ri.cmu.edu/pub_files/2009/6/aimag2009_urmson.pdf at 21-23.

The whole problem seems to me that to get a 90% solution for a self driving vehicle is now no longer hard. The remaining 10% is super hard and the degree to which the present day solutions tend to get these wrong is worrisome enough that if the quality doesn't jump up very quickly the whole self driving car thing could end up in an AI winter all of its own making. And that would be a real loss.

This is not a field where 'move fast and break stuff' is a mantra worth anything at all, the stuff that is broken are people's lives and as such you'd expect a far more conservative attitude, akin to what we see in Aerospace and medical equipment software development practices.

But instead barely tested software gets released via over-the-air updates and it's anybody's guess what you'll be running the next time you turn the key.

I agree with you that the software should have been able to detect that something was wrong either way, either it was already halfway in the wrong lane or it was heading to be halfway in the wrong lane, a situation that should not have passed without the car at least alerting the driver.

And from what we have seen in the video it just gave one inferred situation priority over the rest and that particular one happened to be dead wrong about it's interpretation of the model.

> What is more worrying is that even following the rest of the traffic would have solved the problem.

That's what makes this example bizarre to me. I had thought that AutoPilot's ideal situation was having a moving vehicle in front of it. For example, AP does not have the ability to react to traffic lights, but can kind of hack it by following the pace of the vehicle ahead of it (assuming the vehicle doesn't run a red light):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXs4qZlDWbQ

That's a heck of an ass-u-mption. Running the red light as the n-th exponentially increases the probability you'll get into collision.

If you are the only car doing something then there is a good chance you are doing something wrong.

I’m surprised self-driving systems don’t do this (do they?). One or more vehicles in front of you that have successfully navigated an area you are now entering is a powerful data point. I’m not saying follow a car off a cliff, but one would think the behavior of followed vehicles should be somehow fused into the car’s pathfinding.

"Follow the leader" is a main ingredient in flocking behavior in birds, who rarely if ever collide in flight.

> If you are the only car doing something then there is a good chance you are doing something wrong.

Following this principle would probably result in a lot of people angry that their autopilot had gotten them a speeding ticket.

> lane markings are confusing but GPS and inertial readings should have clearly indicated that that is not a lane

Aside from GPS’ accuracy as mentioned in other replies, also take into account the navigation’s map material. The individual lans are probably not individually tracked on the map, but a single track per road with meta data specifying the number of lanes amongst other featerus. So even if GPS would have provided very accurate position readings, the map source material might not even match that level of detail.

Pretty sure I heard an audible warning in the vid.

No, that's sound you hear when you override and take over the autopilot

> It's not possible to engineer an autonomous system that never fails, but it is possible to engineer one in such a way that it never fails to detect that it has failed

This seems to me to be a clearly incorrect (and self-contradictory) claim. It entirely depends on your definition of failure.

Your analysis seems fine. The big problem is that the "autonomous" driver is using one signal (where are the lines on the edge of the road?) to the near exclusion of all others (is there a large stationary solid object in front of me?)

Maybe Tesla should have hired George Hotz (sp?) if only to write a lightweight sanity-check system that could argue with the main system about whether it was working.

> This seems to me to be a clearly incorrect (and self-contradictory) claim.

I guess that means I was able to pull the wool over the eyes of all five members of my thesis committee because none of them thought so.

> It entirely depends on your definition of failure.

Well, yeah, of course. So? There is some subset of states of the world that you label "failure". The guarantee is not that the system never enters one of those states, the guarantee is that if the system enters one of those states it never (well, so extremely rarely that it's "never" for all practical purposes) fails to recognize that it has done so. Why do you find that so implausible?

> The guarantee is not that the system never enters one of those states, the guarantee is that if the system enters one of those states it never (well, so extremely rarely that it's "never" for all practical purposes) fails to recognize that it has done so. Why do you find that so implausible?

Stated so, that is plausible. However, "it is possible to engineer a system that never fails to detect that it has failed" is not; I claim that any subset of states which is amenable to this level of detectability will exclude some other states that any normal person would also consider to be "failure".

Arguing that it's possible to build an autonomous that is sometimes wrong but always knows when it's wrong seems like a stretch to me.

Humans have moments like this too. I remember suddenly driving into dense fog on the freeway and not able to see more than 20 feet in front of me. I had a definite "failure mode" where I slowed down and freaked out because all my previous driving experience was "failing" me on how to avoid a potential accident.

> my armchair diagnosis

> my 1991 PH.D. thesis on autonomous driving

Going to hide in a corner and stay quiet on HN until I forget about this comment!

:-)

Just in case you're interested:

https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/handle/10919/38880

and the associated conference paper:

http://www.flownet.com/gat/papers/aaai92.pdf

Most of the work was done on a Mac II with 8MB (that's megabytes, not gigabytes) of RAM.

The progress that has been made since those days boggles my mind.

shameless plug! haha just kidding and WOW! Autonomous driving so early on, JPL, Google..

Im going to go hide in the corner as well.

I think more people need to embrace and understand the fact that we are a long way from having fully autonomous vehicles that you can just give the steering reins to from start to finish. The term 'Autopilot' gives off the wrong idea that the driver can sit back and relax while the car brings you from point A to point B safely.

The same is happening with chatbots - more and more businesses think they can put a chatbot on their site and assume it'll handle everything when in fact it's meant to assist you rather than take over things for you.

> I think more people need to embrace and understand the fact that we are a long way from having fully autonomous vehicles that you can just give the steering reins to from start to finish

Apparently, we're not, as Waymo has shown.

> The term 'Autopilot' gives off the wrong idea that the driver can sit back and relax while the car brings you from point A to point B safely.

Agreed, the "but that's not how autopilots work in airplanes" canned response is irrelevant.

Yep it took Google/Waymo 8 years to get there but Musk and Uber just wants to move fast and crash into things. Musk wouldn't be selling self-driving since Oct'16 if it's not any day now or would he ?

> Apparently, we're not, as Waymo has shown.

The only things Waymo has shown so far are a bunch of marketing videos and a few tightly controlled press rides.

> Apparently, we're not, as Waymo has shown.

Does Waymo drive at high speeds all the videos I have seen are at low speeds.

> Apparently, we're not, as Waymo has shown.

Can you point me to a website or store where I can buy my fully autonomous waymo car? I doubt waymo is even at par with tesla, considering tesla is actually selling cars. Waymo is just vaporware at this point.

Waymo has shown no such thing. In controlled, limited circumstances, yes, but in complex, poorly mapped, degraded conditions, not yet.

>This is actually the most serious aspect of all of these crashes: the system does not seem to be aware when it is getting things wrong.

Although serious, this is working as designed. Level II self-driving doesn't have automation that makes guarantees about recognizing scenarios it cannot handle. At level III, the driver can safely close their eyes until the car sounds the alarm that it needs emergency help. Audi plans to release a level III car next year, so we'll see how liability for accidents actually shakes out.

Unfortunately level II is probably the most dangerous automation even with drivers that understand the limitations of the system. They still need constant vigilance to notice failures like this and react quickly enough to avoid collisions. Just imagine poorly marked or abrupt and ramps or intersections that drivers hardly have enough time to react when they're already driving. Add in the delay to notice the computer is steering you into a wall and yank the wheel can turn some of these accident prone areas into accident likely areas.

> level II is probably the most dangerous automation

I'll go further and say that level II is worse than useless. It's "autonomy theatre" to borrow a phrase from the security world. It gives the appearance that the car is safely driving itself when in fact it is not, but this isn't evident until you crash.

I disagree. It’s not as though level II is a hard and fast definition - Tesla wants level 4 and claims the cars possess the hardware for that already. So you’d think their level II would still be smart enough to detect these problems to some degree. It’s not a fixed system but one they keep upgrading. I would expect this nominally level II system to have more smarts than a system that is designed never to exceed level II.

> Tesla wants level 4 and claims the cars possess the hardware for that already.

You can't possibly determine what hardware is required for Level 4 until you have proven a hardware/software combination, so that's just empty puffery, but even if it was true...

> So you’d think their level II would still be smart enough to detect these problems to some degree.

No, because the smartness of their system is about the software. They could have hardware sufficient to support Level 4 autonomy and better-than-human AI running software that only supports a less-thsn-adequate version of Level 2 autonomy. What their hardware could support (even if it was knowable) gives you no basis for belief about what their current software on it supports, except that it won't exceed the limits set by the hardware.

That's probably right or very close to what is happening, but what I cannot understand: what about damn black-and-yellow barrier board right in front of the car closing in at the speed of 60mph? Some sensor should have picked up on that.

This was my thought as well. Doesn't the system have the equivalent of reflexes that override the approved plan?

I've been skeptical of autonomous driving since it started to become a possibility. I spend a fair amount of time making corrections while driving that have nothing to do with what's happening in my immediate vicinity. If it can't handle an obstruction in the road, how will it handle sensing a collision down the road, or a deer that was sensed by the side of the road, or even just backing away from an aggressive driver in a large grouping of vehicles in front of you? I've had to slow down and/or move off on to the shoulder on two lane country roads because someone mistimed it when passing a vehicle. I don't have much faith in how this system would handle that. Not to mention handling an actual emergency failure like a tire blowing out.

I'm sure they will get there eventually, but it looks like they have conquered all the low-hanging fruit and somehow think that's enough. I'm now officially adding "staying away from vehicles studded with cameras and sensors" to my list of driving rules.

What is someone drives down the road with lane-marking painter? I have witnessed two or three times in my life, it used to just be funny, but now it can be deadly.

The cars will for survival should outweigh the lane marker following algorithm. Maintaining distance and trajectory relative to things with mass is more important than coloring within in the lines.

> It's not possible to engineer an autonomous system that never fails, but it is possible to engineer one in such a way that it never fails to detect that it has failed.

That sounds highly dubious. Here's a hypothetical scenario: there's a very drunk person on the sidewalk. As a human driver, you know he might act unexpectedly so you slow down and steer to the left. This will help you avoid a deadly collision as the person stumbles into the road.

Now let's take a self driving car in the same scenario, where, since it doesnt have general intelligence, it fails to distinguish the drunk person from a normal pederstrian and keeps going at the same speed and distance from the sidewalk as normally. How, in this scenario, does the vehicle 100% know that it has failed (like you say is always possible)?

An even more extreme example: suppose someone on the sidewalk suddenly whips out a bazooka and shoots it at you. Does your failure to anticipate this contingency count as a failure?

"Failure" must be defined with respect to a particular model. If you're driving in the United States, you're probably not worried about bazookas, and being hit by one is not a failure, it's just shit happening, which it sometimes does. (By way of contrast, if you're driving in Kabul then you may very well be concerned with bazookas.) Whether or not you want to worry about drunk pedestrians and avoid them at all possible costs is a design decision. But if you really want to, you can (at the possible cost of having to drive very, very slowly).

But no reasonable person could deny that avoiding collisions with stationary obstacles is a requirement for any reasonable autonomous driving system.

Way to dodge the question. And how did we get from always knowing when you're failed to "just drive very, very slow when", when dealing with situations that human drivers deal with all the time.

Let's not pretend that anticipating potentially dangerous behaviour from subtle clues is some once-in-a-lifetime corner case. People do this all the time when driving -- be it a drunk guy on the sidewalk, a small kid a tad bit too unstable when riding a bike by the roadside, kids playng catch nex to the road and not paying attention, etc etc. Understanding these situation is crucial in self driving if we want to beat the 1 fatality per 100M mile that we have with human drivers. For such scenarios, please explain how the AI can always know when it failed to anticipate a problem that a normal human driver can.

You don't even need to go to the level of a drunk person. Imagine driving down a suburban street and a small child darts out onto the road chasing after a ball.

Some local knowledge: they blocked off lane to the left side is the same lane used when the express lanes are in their opposite configuration, in the morning. In the morning with the express inbound towards the city, that lane is a left-hand exit from the main flow of Interstate 5, onto the dedicated express lanes. There should be a sufficient amount of GPS data gathered from hundreds of other teslas, and camera data, that shows the same lane from an opposite perspective.

> This is actually the most serious aspect of all of these crashes: the system does not seem to be aware when it is getting things wrong.

That’s exactly my experience as a driver:

You learn to anticipate that the ‘autopilot’ will disengage or otherwise fail. I have been good enough at this, obviously, but it is sometimes frightening how close you get to a dangerous situation …

>Here is my armchair diagnosis:

Odd how your "armchair diagnosis" matches perfectly with the top ranked comment in the reddit thread that was posted 1 day ago.

courtlandreOwner 815 points 1 day ago

It sees the white line on the left, the white line on the right and thinks its a big lane. Its trying to center the car in the lane.

The comment above is saying the split looks like a diamond lane marker indicating an HOV/electric car lane, so the car is centering itself on the diamond. That's a completely different idea from the Reddit comment about the car centering itself between the right and left white lines. My guess is that both inputs contributed to the car "thinking" it was following a lane.

The conclusions are the exact same. The autopilot was trying to center the car between lines.

>My guess is that the autopilot mistook these lines for the diamond lane marker and steered towards them thinking it was centering itself in the lane.

It sees the white line on the left, the white line on the right and thinks its a big lane. Its trying to center the car in the lane.

Is it really odd that two people could reach the same conclusion when presented with the same video?

Of course not. But it is odd when the top rated comment directly below the video is essentially the armchair theory that was proposed.

> It's not possible to engineer an autonomous system that never fails, but it is possible to engineer one in such a way that it never fails to detect that it has failed.

Wouldn't the system doing the checking be considered an autonomous system...that could also fail?

No, because the monitoring system doesn't interact with an environment, so its job is much simpler. This is actually the reason that cognizant failure works.

Thank you for the concise answer. I was just about to ask if you have a blog, but found your website in your HN profile. I know what I am doing for the rest of the night :P PS: Funny that we've both written a double ratchet implementation in JS :)

I don't mean to call the OP lier but anyone knows if there is any evidence whatsoever that this video was taken on an autopilot engaged Tesla? Just want to be sure about it before I form judgment against Tesla.

More basic lane assist in other cars already solve this problem. 100% teslas fault. My car will disable lane assist the moment the lane gets too wide.

Sounds like an easy fix then. After that we move on to the next edge case and so on ad infinitum.

If you are aware when you are wrong... you would not be wrong.

If you are referring to assigning confidences/probabilities to decisions, this is standard in ML.

> If you are referring to assigning confidences/probabilities to decisions,

There's a little more to it than that but yeah, pretty much.

> this is standard in ML.

Yes, I know. But not, apparently, standard in embedded autonomous systems.

I don’t know you, sir, but Tesla should hire you!

Estimating errors or confidence level reliably is still one of the biggest unsolved problems in AI.

In other words an old ambiguous parsing problem.

It might be fixable in software. I'm a bit annoyed at Tesla for over reliance over painted lines. They fade, they can be covered, be outdated ..

That old fail video of a SDV stuck inside a circle is not funny anymore.

> SDV stuck inside a circle

Off topic: I never understood why this video was discussed that much, especially in order to blame SDVs. It's an example of pointless road markings and a perfectly behaving vehicle. It's like driving into a one way street that turns out to have no exit. The driver can't be blamed.

I know, and partly agree. Still when you have something that hints at leaping into the future, a simplistic automata behaviour like this brings all to the ground.

We'd expect at least 'cycle' detection ;)

This comment from OP (beastpilot) is pretty frightening:

> Yep, works for 6 months with zero issues. Then one Friday night you get an update. Everything works that weekend, and on your way to work on Monday. Then, 18 minutes into your commute home, it drives straight at a barrier at 60 MPH.

> It's important to remember that it's not like you got the update 5 minutes before this happened. Even worse, you may not know you got an update if you are in a multi-driver household and the other driver installed the update.

Very glad the driver had 100% of their attention on the road at that moment.

Elsewhere from the comments: "Yes the lane width detection and centering was introduced in 10.4. Our X does this now as well and while it's a welcome intoroduction in most cases every one in a while in this instance or when HOV lanes split it is unwelcome." So basically, if I'm understanding this right they introduced a new feature that positions your car a little more consistently in the lane at the small cost of sometimes steering you at full speed head-on into a barrier.

Remember Tesla's first press release on the crash and how it mentioned "Tesla owners have driven this same stretch of highway with Autopilot engaged roughly 85,000 times"? I imagine the number that have driven it successfully in that lane since that update was rolled out sometime in mid-March is rather smaller...

And that's exactly what makes Tesla PR so disingenuous, they know better than anybody what updates they did and how often their updated software passed that point and yet they will happily cite numbers they know to be wrong.

So, now regarding that previous crash: did that driver (or should I say occupant) get lulled into a false sense of security because he'd been through there many times in the past and it worked until that update happened and then it suddenly didn't?

I'm a huge fan of Tesla and I thought that bit of PR was horrifyingly bad. It came across as completely dismissive of any further investigation or accepting of even the possibility of responsibility.

Now that these other videos are showing up, and further details (the update) are emerging, that PR should bite them in the ass hard enough that they decide never to handle an incident that way again.

I don't want this to kill Tesla -- I sincerely hope they make their production goals and become a major automobile manufacturer -- but their handling of this should hurt them.

I'm also curious if any of the people at Tesla saying, "we call it autopilot even though we expect the human driver to be 100% attentive at all times" have studied any of the history of dead man's vigilance devices.

I've got to take issue with you there. Tesla Engineering knows better than anybody what updates they did and how often they update etc.

Tesla PR knows nothing about what updates the engineering team did. At least some people in Tesla PR probably don't even know the cars update their software regularly.

It's bad practice for them to speak out of turn, but I can absolutely see the PR team not having a good grasp of what really indicates safety and their job is to just put out the best numbers possible.

It seems like the collective pack of Teslas would feed telemetry back to the mothership as unit tests for any new versions. In other words, any change has to redrive (simulate) a big sample of what has already been driven, especially where the human had to correct.

Life and death patch notes. I think I'm going to wait a while before using this feature.

> Very glad the driver had 100% of their attention on the road at that moment.

Yes, and 100% is critical. That required pretty quick and smooth reactions. The car started to follow the right-hand lane, then suddenly re-centered on the barrier. The driver had about a second to see that and correct. That's just the sort of situation where even a slightly inattentive driver might panic and overcorrect, which could cause a spinout if the roads were wet or icy or cause a crash with parallel traffic.

So your basically paying (A lot) of cash to beta test their software for them... at your own (Very personal) risk!

And endanger others who have decided to opt-out of the beta test. Keep in mind that in any accident all bets are off with respect to the traffic around you, even if you ram into a stationary barrier you could easily rebound into other traffic.

Not to mention the fact that, if they're software screws up and kills you, they'll rush to to Twitter in an attempt to smear you using personal data and deceptive statements.

I don't know why people use this thing. The cars are nice, and justify their purchase on their own, without this autopilot feature. But I don't think you can do good autopilot without lidar.

  People shouldn't use it.

Not just your own risk... There are other people on the road who share that risk. It makes me angry at Elon Musk himself. First he didn't sterilize that stupid thing he sent into interplanetary space. Now he's putting peoples lives at risk.

> The driver had about a second to see that and correct.

And if there had been a crash, Tesla probably would have said that the driver had an unobstructed view of the barrier for several seconds before impact (conveniently omitting at what point AP started to swerve).

And don't forget pointing out that the driver forgot to use their blinker a week before the crash so clearly they just aren't a responsible driver.

From the OP's comments on Reddit - he said that it happens about 90% of the time on that stretch and that he has more footage of the same exact incident.

He was likely prepared for it, which kinda makes it even scarier in a way. An inattentive driver would have totally botched this.

After working in large codebases I discovered that there are all sorts of assumptions in the code, and that a small change in one function can break an assumption used a long ways elsewhere. I came to the conclusion that any change basically invalidates all your tests. An update could introduce any possible problem that wasn't there before, so now all your experience with the system as a driver is actually reset to zero.

This is just about what I expected it to look like when software engineering safety standards are let loose on the physical world.

And this is why if I ever get a self driving car I want:

1) root

2) control over updates

3) everything to be completely open

You do not want root on your self driving car.

Or to put it differently, I don't want to be driving on the same road as you with your rooted self driving car. You can be great sysadmin/coder, tesla guys may be too, but both of you changing random stuff without any communication with each other.. I've seen enough servers.

I am trying to imagine the typical arch Linux enthusiasts modifying the lane detection software on their cars and shudder at the thought.

Everything to be completely open is really important, but I don't want you to have root or control over update if you are using your car on a public road.

Only certified (by the government) updates should be allowed on self driving cars. It should be at least a misdemeanor to have your own code on the car.

Do these things really matter unless you are going to verify the software yourself? (and if you are, kudos to you!)

While, in principle, users could organize their own communal verification programs for open software, that does not happen in practice, even when the software is widely used and needs to be safe (or at least secure - OpenSSL...)

I just don't understand the willingness people have to put their lives in the hands of unproven technology like this. I mean, I don't even trust regular old cruise control in my cars and I keep my finger on the "cancel" button whenever I use it during long highway drives.

This kind of video makes me wonder: what is the "autopilot" feature actually for? Do people generally like it? (I don't own a Tesla and I've never driven one.)

If you're supposed to keep your hands on the wheel, and given videos like this that show you really need to keep your hands on the wheel and pay attention, is automatic steering really that big of a deal?

Cruise control, now, that really is useful because it automates a trivial chore (maintaining a steady speed) and will do it well enough to improve your gas mileage. The main failure condition is "car keeps driving at full speed towards an obstacle" but an automatic emergency brake feature (again, reasonably straightforward, and standard in many new cars) can mitigate that pretty well.

It seems to me that autopilot falls into an uncanny valley, where it's not simple enough to be a reliable automation or a useful safety improvement, but it also isn't smart enough to reduce the need for an alert human driver. So what's the point?

If you're excited about self-driving cars because they'll reduce accidents, as many people here claim, what you should really be excited about is the more mundane incremental improvements like pedestrian airbags. Those will actually save lives right now.

To directly answer your question: people buy autopilot so they can check their phone while commuting down the freeway to work. I was talking to a group of people about the difficulties of commuting in the Santa Clara Valley, and one guy shrugged and said, "just get a Tesla, move to the left lane, and manage email until you get to work".

Yikes! I really hope that's a joke...

What else would people be using it for? It's a "drive my car for me while I send this text" mode that allows you to take your attention off the road every few seconds. Otherwise, the system makes no sense at all.

I see people attempting that on the roads around here without the Tesla. That is why I always honk at cell phone drivers. Sometimes I wish I had a fully-charged Marx bank in the trunk.

Proponents keep touting this as the real benefit of self-driving cars, so it's hardly surprising that some people have taken them at their word and not realised that the car is not, in fact, truly autonomous and may drop out at any moment.

It's not a joke. I was in a bus crossing the Bay Bridge a few weeks ago. I was watching a Tesla driver play on his phone. He didn't look up once in the span where I had visibility (about half of the bridge).

I have seen pictures of iPads strapped to steering wheel in Nissan Altimas, so yes people are really this dumb. Airbag issues entirely aside.

Agreed. I really hate that Tesla named the feature "autopilot" as it gives the impression of being fully automatic (yes, I realize boat and airline "autopilots" aren't fully automatic - that is likely lot on most consumers).

My VW has Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) which does the normal cruise control, plus basic distance keeping (with an alarm if the closing speed changes dangerously).

My parents' Subarus have ACC plus lane-keeping. The car will only do so much correction, plus alarms.

These seem like much better solutions, given the current state of driving "AI".

Yeah, I have a recent Subaru with those features. It beeps when I'm backing out of the garage and there's someone driving or biking up the road before they even come into my sight lines.

It can help keep me in a lane, either by beeping or nudging the steering wheel if I drift - I only turn on active lane assist on long highway stretches, it is more of a security blanket than anything else - just in case I space out for a sec, here's another layer of defense.

Adaptive cruise is also great. Between the two, in long road trips I can put the car in a travel lane and just go. I still have to attend to my surroundings, but it is a lot easier to focus on that when I'm not worried about accidentally creeping up to 90 mph because suddenly there's nobody in front of me.

I also had the auto brake feature activate once when a car in front of me stopped unexpectedly. I was in the middle of braking, but the brake pedal depressed further and there was a loud alarm beep.

None of these are autopilot, and honestly I wouldn't want autopilot until it is legit reliable. Instead, these are defense in depth features. The computer helps prevent certain mistakes as I make them, but never is in primary control of the vehicle.

Subaru's system is simply fantastic and you can tell they thought a lot about the "human condition" (human weaknesses) while designing it.

Lame keep assist is very subtle, I describe it like wind blowing on the side of the car. You can trivially over-power it and it will beep if you exit the lane (without blinker on) with or without lane keep assist active.

The whole package of safety features is wonderful and impressive for something starting at around $22K.

I think Tesla is losing out here by calling what is little more than adaptive cruise control plus lanekeeping "autopilot." Adaptive cruise control + lanekeeping + collision avoidance is available on a ton of cars now, even economy cars, and it works great. I regularly make a ~200 mile drive on the Honda system and it is 100% the whole way. But when you sell it as Autopilot instead of driver assist, people have much higher expectations and blame your car rather than the driver - though there very well could be serious problems with the Tesla implementation.

Lanekeeping is actually very nice. The system in Teslas and most (all?) others do require you to keep your hands on the wheel and pay attention, but having to constantly manually steer the car is much more fatiguing than you would think. It's really annoying to drive cars without lanekeeping now.

My concern is, if you have both cruise control and lanekeeping, what's left to keep your attention and stop you zoning out?

I don't find steering onerous, but it requires just enough attention to keep you alert.

(I've never used a lanekeeping system, though. Maybe I'd like it, I dunno)

I use lanekeeping on the freeway, usually with adaptive cruise control as well (subaru). I focus more on the Big Picture of all the cars around me, can see further and have a better sense of who is doing what. That's anecdotal, of course, and could well be placebo effect, but I still pay a lot of attention to the road.

Plus, lanekeeping can be really annoying if you rely on it all the time. The car sometimes tends to drift back and forth in a lane a little between corrections, instead of just going straight. So: you're still steering. It's just that you're steering less and have a defense in depth against loss of focus, and can drive without exhausting yourself.

I've rented a model S for a weekend and drove about 1 000 kilometers in it.

Naturally, I tried the auto pilot feature on a highway but I wasn't to impressed. There is a major "bump" (negative G-forces), and the car tried to swirl into the other lane (this was within the first 40 minutes of my drive), and that made me distrust the auto steering feature.

As I think you're onto, I DO feel that auto pilot is the future, but we're not there yet - let's improve the existing life saving features (and not disconnect them, looking at you, Uber).

Personally I hate cruise control. I prefer to be actively engaged when driving. Either I am driving 100% or I am not at all, there is absolutely no middle ground in my opinion

I can understand that. I like cruise control because it lets me focus 100% on steering and watching the road around me.

Trying to maintain a steady speed and conserve gas is a fun challenge, but a bit pointless, because a) it's a distraction from more important tasks, and b) the computer can usually do it better than I can.

It's also more comfortable for your passengers.

I did a 6 hours trip with a friend continuously putting his foot up and down on the throttle, and it was the most gruelling car trip I've had I think.

When I asked he said it was "to keep control on the car". I'm a patient friend.

Cruise control on my car actually gains me about 1 mpg. This is specifically because the car "knows" that the speed won't be changing much so it locks the torque converter completely and drops the engine RPM by 100~200. Many of those things are direct results of the mediocre Ford implementation of the 2005 Five Hundred CVT and the fact that it predates Adaptive Cruise Control, but it has a physical reason and follows directly from new assumptions in the code only viable from the state I put it in.

We've actually moved quite a bit away from "100%" direct control.

Anti-lock brakes were the first such system. Before, you had to pump the brakes in an emergency, a practice that was difficult to execute even without the shock of an impeding accident. That system alone certainly saves thousands of lives every year.

Ahem. That is purely semantics -- ABS makes the car perform more like what you are conditioned to expect (under normal driving conditions). That's the whole success of ABS; it saves lives precisely because it conveys the illusion of you still being 100% under direct control when in fact you would be careening out of control otherwise.

The average driver will probably never actually experience abs. It's a good failsafe that is rarely employed...if it is, you definitely realize it

Cruise control is great where there's long stretches of open road, light traffic (LOS A or B [1]), and little need for frequent braking.

The star usecase is to set cruise to be very near the speed limit, such that after acceleration events like overtaking, you coast back to highway speed.

It's a low-effort way of ensuring that one will be compliant with speed laws most of the time, yet maintaining a steady pace. I too prefer to be 'actively engaged' while driving, but in my opinion the reduction of constant acceleration input is a welcome convenience.

'Adaptive' cruise control, on the other hand, feels to me like riding on a tenuous rollercoaster. It's intended to let cruise control be usable in packed traffic, but it requires one to cede a lot of trust and control to the machine in ways that physically make me uneasy -- and it doesn't help that the exact behavior differs between models and manufacturers, so that trust doesn't automatically transplant into a different car.

Part of the problem is, again, with terminology. Ever since Adaptive Cruise Control proliferated as a term, it drew a parallel to classic 'Cruise Control', which I think is a mistake. Classic Cruise Control is a fire-and-forget, non-safety feature that's simple to reason about: do I want the car to gun it at a constant 70 mph, or no? You can run a quick mental judgement call and decide whether to engage it or leave it off.

'Adaptive' cruise control fundamentally about maintaining following distance, i.e. tailgating restriction. It's a safety feature. It's a button to "proceed forward not exceeding target speed", but if it gets disengaged for any reason then you can easily overrun into the car ahead. It's a safety feature with the UI/UX of a non-safety feature, so it's always opt-in (!) -- which is simply horrific.

All safety features in vehicles should be either always-on, or opt-out, and NEVER opt-in. On a modern car, tailgate restriction should be on by default, with a button unlocking the car into free-throttle mode. Braking -- alone -- should never disable a safety feature.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_service

ACC/ICC is not a safety feature in the general sense. It might be termed as a safety enhancement to cruise control, in which case it should be opt-out when entering cruise control (which it is, in my case) and which disengages when exiting cruise control (which is done by braking, and that is well known).

On ceding trust - at least with the ICC system in Nissans, it's A) far back, which gives more reaction time B) quite easy to tell when it sees the car in front vs when it doesn't. You're ceding trust, sure, but you can also verify easily.

Your 'tailgate restriction' bit is effectively a more agressive form of collision warning/forward emergency braking, and FCW+FEB as far as I know is available on all or at least most vehicles with ACC/ICC. Unfortunately, the realities of city driving means that 'maintaining distance' is a goal in some cases (i.e. just got cut off, tight merges, etc) rather than an absolute directive - frankly, something trying to force me to a certain distance away from the car in front of me would be more aggravating than useful.

> if it gets disengaged for any reason then you can easily overrun into the car ahead

Are there cars that have ACC and don't have AEB (Automatic Emergency Braking)?

I like it when driving through areas with strictly enforced speed limits. Otherwise I'd collect way too many tickets.

I've been wondering exactly the same thing over the last week once all this came to light. Seems it would be the worst of both worlds. Would personally feel safer to me knowing either I'm supposed to drive or not. This half way system means actually means the better the auto pilot is the more reliant I would naturally become and then not be ready to react or be in the frame of mind where I can. How airline pilots stop themselves becoming overly reliant on their autopilots is also a concern. It's that classic situation where two people each think the other will take care of it, then no one does. "I thought you were going to do it."

I don't own a car so I drive very rarely (once a month or less). I recently went on a week-long roadtrip in a rental Subaru which had their EyeSight system which does adaptive cruise (follows the speed of the car in front) + lane keeping. I'd say at the end of the day I was noticeably less exhausted than I usually am after a day of driving.

The Subaru system will not let you let go of the wheel for more than 15 seconds (after that it will instantly disengage), so it's more to save your effort of continual minor corrections. It also disengages as soon as it's confused in the slightest (faded lines, lines at an angle etc)

I'm looking forward to trying adaptive cruise control on the new Subaru my dad got recently. I pretty much stopped using regular cruise control years ago because the roads where I mostly drive are busy enough I find that it encourages driving in a way that prioritizes maintaining a constant speed even when that's different from the flow of the traffic.

So human drivers are terrible at driving for any long period of time, especially on relatively consistent "boring" highways.

Guess what computers excel at? Driving consistently on consistent highways.

The Tesla Autopilot is supposed to be the always aware and paying attention portion on these cases where a human driver would be very likely to start texting or dozing off. Now, it's not fully autonomous and may well decide it can't handle a situation (or apparently try to drive you into a barrier to see if you're still awake...). In this case the human driver who is somewhat zoned out needs to take control instantly and correct the situation, until they can safely re-engage autopilot (or pull over and make sure they're still alive, etc).

  Guess what computers excel at? Driving consistently
  on consistent highways.

Watching the video, would you say the computer was excelling, or that the road was radically unusual? I wouldn't.

The location is the end of some tidal flow lanes rejoining the main freeway lanes with an unusual configuration of lane markings and barriers. I drive past the spot all the time and can totally see a computer messing up here.

It might not have been radically unusual, but that doesn't make it consistent either.. (looked like lanes where closed to me)

> "Guess what computers excel at? Driving consistently on consistent highways."

Possibly on paper. In reality, as of right now, computers are clearly far from excelling at this specific task.

Assuming perfectly spherical cars on perfectly consistent highways in a vacuum.

OK, but there are clearly cases where the autopilot gets into trouble, and the human needs to take control again quickly. The human driver absolutely cannot doze off.

Now, I realise people in old-fashioned non-autopilot cars can and do doze off, and that's very dangerous. But it's not clear to me how the autopilot improves that situation. Relying on the autopilot actually encourages you to doze off.

We already have simple remedies like "pull over if you feel tired" and "never ever pick up your phone while driving (or you'll lose your licence)"

Expecting "drivers" to be able to instantly switch from "somewhat zoned out" to having the situational awareness to resolve the problem that AP fails at is unrealistic.

The are two very real issues/threats here.

the first being people are being put in harms way by either false sense of trust invoked by the name or the mixed messages from Tesla

the second is that if the first is left unchecked Tesla could single handily set back Autonomous driving for all by souring public and government opinion.

it needs a new name that aligns better with what it can do. it could be a safety system which gently corrects a driver and takes over in an obvious emergency internal or external. as it stands now it is just dangerous

The problem is autopilot actively engages you even less than highway driving. I argue this exacerbates some of the problems that cause humans to checkout.

I don't know what the answer is but it feels like GM's super cruise does a more adequate job of acknowledging the realistic limits of the technology and explicitly white lists roads where the technology is available for use.

I personally think that without some sort of sensors or beacons in the road, autonomous driving via camera and LIDAR sesnors is ever going to be good enough to achieve level 5 autonomous operation.

I think the world modeling is the part that autonomous cars can obviously be better at. They have all sorts of advantages over humans; access to much more detailed maps than the average person can recall, multiple types of sensors pointed in multiple directions, a system designed to integrate all that information in a way that is advantageous for driving (we have a system evolved for whatever it evolved for) and so on.

It's the sophisticated behaviors necessary to safely drive through that world model that are the issue.

The success of emergency breaking systems (that aren't advertised as "driving" assist) are pretty good evidence that the sensors can serve well as input to safe behaviors.

If a human can navigate current roads, why shouldn't a computer be able to? We may need to develop a new types of sensors for vehicles, but that seems like a better/easier plan than installing beacons on every road, everywhere.

And what about beacon maintenance? Seems like most cities have a hard enough time keeping up with pot holes, lines, etc. as is.

Beacons is a great idea -- have some standardized beacon system, and a public map of autopilot-approved roads.

Following the beacons safely would be a vastly easier problem than trying to completely replace a human driver in all situations, but it would still give you about 90% of the benefits.

I use Autopilot every day. I think it's amazing and borderline life-changing if you are like me and dread the monotony of a daily commute. I don't think most people realize just how mentally fatiguing the act of driving (constantly making all sorts of micro adjustments) is until they use Autopilot for a while and see the difference for themselves. I certainly didn't. I can now drive for many hours and feel just as alert as when I first got into the car. I was never able to do that before Autopilot.

Yes, you still need to pay attention. It is hard for me to believe that any Autopilot user doesn't know this because you learn it by experience almost immediately. People text and drive all the time in manual cars, but for some reason when they do it in a Tesla, we declare that Autopilot lulled them into it.

While I agree that you need to be ready to grab the wheel or hit the brake on short notice, I disagree about what that means. There is a big difference between having to be ready to do those things and actually having to do them every few seconds. This difference wasn't intuitive to me, but in practice I've found it to be extremely mentally liberating and true beyond question.

I've also found that Autopilot makes it easier to take in all of your surroundings and drive defensively against things you otherwise wouldn't see. One thing that has struck me, as I now see more drivers than just the one in front of me, is how many people are distracted while driving. If I glance continually at an arbitrary driver on my way to work, there is a greater likelihood than not that within 10 seconds they'll look at a phone. That is terrifying to me, but it is also good information to have as I drive -- I am now able to drive defensively against drivers around me, not just the one in front of me.

I've also found I'm more able to think or listen to music or podcasts than I was before Autopilot. I could never get much out of technical audiobooks, for instance, while driving manually. But Autopilot has changed that. I hesitate to say this because I worry that I will give the impression that I am focusing less on the road, but I don't think that's what's happening. My mental abilities feel much higher when I am not constantly turning a wheel or adjusting a pedal. I'm listening to music, podcasts, or audiobooks either way -- I just get a lot more out of them with Autopilot. I think it goes back to the lack of mental fatigue.

Whatever you make of my experience, I urge you to try it on a long drive if you ever get an opportunity. I have put over 60k miles on Autopilot, I have taken over on demand hundreds if not thousands of times, and I've never had a close call that was Autopilot's fault.

> I think it's amazing and borderline life-changing

That's a very unfortunate choice of words.

> I have taken over on demand hundreds if not thousands of times, and I've never had a close call that was Autopilot's fault.

Maybe you are an exceptional driver, to be able to be vigilant at all times even when AP is active.

Even so, it would probably only take one instance where you weren't in time to change your mind on all this (assuming you'd survive) so until then it is a very literal case of survivors bias.

Which makes me wonder how that person that died the other week felt about their autopilot right up to the fatal crash.

> That's a very unfortunate choice of words.

Solid lol, but I stand by it!

> Maybe you are an exceptional driver, to be able to be vigilant at all times even when AP is active.

I've had driving moments I'm not proud of. But it's because I was being dumb, not because Autopilot made me do it.

I think the relevant question is: does Autopilot make people less attentive? I have no data on this. My personal experience is that most drivers are already inattentive, and Autopilot (1) makes it easier to be attentive (for a driver who chooses to be); and (2) is better than the alternative in cases where a driver is already inattentive.

> Even so, it would probably only take one instance where you weren't in time to change your mind on all this (assuming you'd survive) so until then it is a very literal case of survivors bias.

I hope I'd be more thoughtful and independent than that, but maybe you're right. But I don't think my view in the face of a terrible accident should be what drives policy, either.[1]

On the issue of survivorship bias, I would add that "Man Doesn't Text While Driving, Resulting in No Accident" isn't a headline that you're likely to read. I see a much greater quantity of bias in the failure cases that are reported and discussed than in the survivorship stories told (as evidenced by the proportions of comments and opinions here, vs in a user community like TMC or /r/teslamotors). I posted my experience because I think it brings more to this comment thread in particular than my survivorship bias detracts from it.

> Which makes me wonder how that person that died the other week felt about their autopilot right up to the fatal crash.

See: [1]

I rented one yesterday (s), it was my first time in a Tesla. There are a lot of things I didn't like - the interior is ugly and the giant ipad console is stupid and hard to use while driving without any tactile switches. But it IS the future. And WHAT a car. Just f'n brilliant as a package.

BUT...I feel like autopilot should only be for traffic jams on highways. It's downright dangerous the way it forces the driver to disengage. The adaptive cruise control is much better as at least you still have to pay attention but the car manages the throttle and following distances efficiently.

> Cruise control, now, that really is useful because it automates a trivial chore (maintaining a steady speed) and will do it well enough to improve your gas mileage. The main failure condition is "car keeps driving at full speed towards an obstacle" but an automatic emergency brake feature (again, reasonably straightforward, and standard in many new cars) can mitigate that pretty well.

Adaptive cruise control also helps; if the system detects a car in front slowing, it'll slow at a roughly equivalent pace to avoid a collision.

I think right now it's only good for stop and go traffic conditions and that's about it. That's still really useful for a lot of people.

So, like the traffic every day along US-101?

This self-driving car craze would be in a very different place if Silicon Valley had halfway decent mass transit...

It’s good in traffic jams. You can relax a lot more than driving yourself or autopilot at high speed. The worst case scenario is a fender bender.

People aren't going to tolerate this kind of stuff. These aren't cosmetic or aesthetic flaws. This is an area that deserves transparency.

I'm out on the road too, and I don't get to make "consumer choices" for other people I share the road with. People are putting their market power into companies that lack the basic integrity to build these technologies with safety and transparency as the first priority, who evidently see peoples' lives as necessary sacrifices.

Please remember that we are talking about vehicles speeding down the road at 70+ MPH.

Nobody's forcing autopilot on anyone. I think instead, tesla will / should opt to disable autopilot earlier in non-ideal conditions like this - that way they won't be held liable either. ATM it really feels like they're being put on trial here.

All the other people on the road are having autopilot forced on them by reckless early adopters.

> by reckless early adopters.

That's a pretty important point. We aren't going to ban alcohol are we? Aren't we even trying to allow marijuana consumption? Both of theses put you in dangerous situation on the road, yet we aren't talking about blocking their consumption.

It still the responsibility of the adopters, just like it's the responsibility of the drinkers.

At least doing it safely actually improve security in long term. Theses systems NEED to be driven to improve their performances.

The market puts all business on trial, on a daily basis. Users discover flaws in a product, and don't buy it. We SHOULD be critical of flaws in things that we buy, and that are forced to interact with.

Ford was put on market trial after the Pinto started going up in flames. Tesla should be held to similar if not greater standards.

It's not any different than the situation with bad human drivers, but anyone on the same road is exposed to these systems.

It is different, though.

You can't push an update to stop humans from endangering themselves and/or others.

Tesla, however, is able to do exactly that with their cars.

That they haven't, when their technology has been proven to be fatally dangerous, is unconscionable.

Autopilot tech in general should be open and shared among ccompanies and universities. The more brains we can put on this the better imho. If these things happen too often, Im afraid regulators will start making laws that prevent the use of this tech, which I believe has the potential to really make life better for all... one day.

I have always wondered why each company is developing their own software and algorithms... How will NTSB certify the software? Or will they? I mean, they certify car safety features now through crash tests, roll over tests, etc... Why is Tesla, or anyone manufacturer, allowed to modify vehicle safety features through OTA updates without recertification?

I realize it adds more regulation...and I'm sure there can be a middle ground. But I foresee a scenario where an OTA update is pushed and the next morning there are car crashes everywhere.

Patents and the ability to earn money by licensing out technology. That, or hoping they are the best and get more customers through it - I think that's currently the case for Tesla, selling the only commercially available semi-autonomously driving car ATM.

The regulators have been really easygoing so far with automated cars. I strongly suspect its because they take the optimistic comments of the tech industry at face value that these technologies are road ready. Meanwhile, I think Tesla and Uber perceive this as more of an open alpha. This will not end well.

For someone in the medtech space, it's been interesting to see how loosely (not at all?) marketing is regulated in automotive and tech in general. Were the FDA regulating automotive, there is absolutely no way that Tesla's driving assist package could be marketed with the name "Autopilot", for one. More broadly than just marketing, it's also amazing to me that Tesla could have released a feature (I know they've revised it since) that was designed for human supervision but did not require hands on the wheel for long stretches of time. What did the risk management look like there?

I think (at least in the US), the relationship the automakers have with regulators is such that if the automakers think they can make money by selling a feature, they will be able to get the regulators to come up with a way to allow it.

Not necessarily one as simple as OTA updates whenever the manufacturer feels like it.

As far as regulations preventing use of the tech, if level 2/3 systems end up causing more crashes than human drivers, we shouldn't allow use of them.

I would guess people would just stop using it

Serious question: how will it make life better for all? I haven't given that question a lot of thought, and I haven't heard legit answers from others yet.

> Previous autopilot versions didn't do this. 10.4 and 12 do this 90% of the time. I didn't post it until I got .12 and it did it a few times in case it was a bug in 10.4.

This is why the idea of self-updating cars terrifies me. I'd never allow autopatching on a production server - Why would I allow it on hardware I'm betting my life on?

I'm amazed that this is even being permitted. And in almost all territories; practically no-one has banned this practice. It seems absurdly risky, especially once someone finds a security flaw in the Tesla software updater.

It adds a whole new level of frightening to the term breaking change.

"Move fast and break things". Taken literally.

“Move fast and break humans.”

Move fast and break barriers.

I can't understand the blindness of the Tesla/Elon fanboys in that thread; the comments on that thread are so defensive of Tesla and still show little concern for safety. Despite fairly damning video evidence, a fatality, many reports of accidents and near accidents...

People have a lot invested in Tesla-- sometimes emotionally, sometimes literally. It is difficult to be objective in that case.

What does this say about the quality of the automatic emergency braking, if it can't detect a substantial metal object directly in front of the car?

Autopilot has trouble with stationary objects.

https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/

What would it take to get Tesla to admit the product is unsafe and should be disabled until they get it right? Or will they simply plow on until a regulator steps in?

> What would it take to get Tesla to admit the product is unsafe...

People should start to vote with their purse. In other words, stop buying these cars, or start selling their stocks.

How is that OK? O.o

So it can't drive for shit. Right? "Autopilot" my ass!

Depends on how close it is and what it is. Have to weigh the energy of the impact against the pitch introduced by braking. You need the bumper to take the hit, so that it and the crumple zones can do their job.

However, for a wall or highway barrier, it's probably almost always worthwhile to shed as much energy as possible. You're going to pitch yourself under the barrier where the bumper won't take the hit, like you might when colliding with another vehicle.

> Have to weigh the energy of the impact against the pitch introduced by braking. You need the bumper to take the hit, so that it and the crumple zones can do their job.

Eh? The vast majority of real frontal impacts will be under heavy braking. If a few degrees of dive under brakes is enough to compromise the crumple zones' effectiveness then your car is bad (and I don't believe any Teslas are bad in this way.)

I believe the parent is talking about small overlap crash?

Small Overlap tests: this is where only a small portion of the car's structure strikes an object such as a pole or a tree, or if a car were to clip another car. This is the most demanding test because it loads the most force onto the structure of the car at any given speed. These are usually conducted at 15-20% of the front vehicle structure.[1]

Modern cars are surprisingly good at small over crash tests, see this video someone linked on HN a few days ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHlj8-JcWa8

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_test

I mean, this advice is pretty firmly held for hitting things like animals. Albeit for other reasons -- it helps prevent them from going over the hood and towards the windshield.

Generally the pitch won't matter that much in vehicle-to-vehicle collisions. Only when the pitch would angle the front bumper completely under the other vehicle, which I admit isn't much of a concern. And not really a concern at all in vehicle-to-barrier collisions.

However, if we're talking about idealized automated driving systems, I hold by my original assertion. I would expect such a system to be able to correctly analyze when releasing the brake right before collision to reduce pitch would be beneficial.

You can pry the steering wheel out of my cold dead hands. Might be true that on paper these things cause less accidents and less deaths, but I want to be in control of my life. If I die in a car I don't want it to be because of a software bug.

I hate to break it to you but it could still happen to you because both you and those Teslas are part of the same traffic stream. So you could easily get killed because of a software bug in someone else's vehicle.

touche. seems like they're more interested in concrete barriers than other cars at the moment.

You already don't have control over any of the other drivers on the road, some of which are unlicensed, impaired or even homicidal or suicidal.

Not to mention your car already has software that can kill you, even if it doesn't steer.

Even ignoring software, hardware can have "bugs" in it too that kill you. I'm not sure why you think engineering mistakes are "worse" when they are in the software vs the hardware.

Basically, no matter what it "feels" like, you are subjected to many many many forces outside your personal control.

Yeah there can be other bugs in my car, or other people that do something stupid, but I feel like I am more in control. It is unlikely I die from my engine blowing a gasket or my ECU completely dying. It might be a slight danger to those around me while I coast to the shoulder. But at least it's not going 60 mph into the shoulder...

I wouldn't even say it's that they're safer on paper, it's that they're purely hypothetically safer. In the same manner that you're "safer" when entrusting your data to the Googles and Facebooks of the world. Smart people know what they're doing, right?

I mean I don't disbelieve the figures that they reduce traffic accidents in vehicles that are using auto-pilot. It greatly reduces trivial human error. But it doesn't change the fact that it sucks when people die from beta testing a software update they didn't ask for.

Most modern cars are drive-by-wire, entirely relying on computers and the software. And their software is huge blobs of proprietary compiled code. It's guaranteed to have bugs.

1. It's more than most, it's almost all modern passenger cars that are drive-by-wire. But drive-by-wire is a term of art that specifically means that the throttle is not a direct mechanical linkage. Very, very few cars are steer-by-wire and even fewer are brake-by-wire.

2. You're using "proprietary" as a pejorative. It's not proprietary, compiled code that has bugs. All software is guaranteed to have bugs.

3. An entirely insignificant number of accidents are caused by bugs in the drive-by-wire control system. (Even taking into account that an insignificant fraction of cars on the road are drive-by-wire as you mean it.)

Very few modern cars actually decouple the steering wheel from the power steering mechanism fully, like a fly by wire jet airplane no longer has cable linkages from control stick to control surfaces.

yeah I guess. That buggy code doesn't drive people into walls or give people the feeling they can read the newspaper while doing one of most dangerous things they do in their day.

Probably not that huge, really. Embedded systems on most vehicles are fairly minimal and reliable, at least compared to modern consumer operating systems and (apparently) Tesla's systems.

> You can pry the steering wheel out of my cold dead hands.

There's a non-neglible chance that will actually happen.

If Tesla autopilot relies on good quality road markings, then it's not yet usable in 80% of the world.

It's not usable anywhere. What if I draw a fake line on the road? will it follow it? what if you have wet paint and another vehicle smudges it diagonally to the lane?

When I was a kid there was a cartoon where a truck painting a white line in the middle of the road, drove off a cliff for some reason (and therefore, so did the line).

The punchline was that all the other cars also fell off the cliff because they were following the line instead of looking at the road.

It's crazy to think, that's where we are now with so-called self-driving cars.

Exactly. This is what I’ve been saying. It is so dangerous. I love Tesla but I think autopilot is currently a death trap.

I've seen construction crews paint new lines on the road e.g. to reroute traffic due to one lane being closed for expansion. A human driver can easily tell the difference between the fresh new line they should follow and the worn out old one. Can a Tesla?

I have a pretty simple lane keeping aid in my car that keeps me within the lines. Yesterday it suddenly steered towards a wall. I think it may have been confused by either glare (low sun right in front of me) or a shadow line on the road.

If you draw fake markings on the road people will follow them, especially if the sun rises parallel to the road.

I have personally watched this happen, last year (I think?) the where repainting the lines on interstate 64 near shortpump and for ~ a week that summer my commute there was insane, just a bunch of cars going 70MPH with no real lanes.

This isn't new, but what if it snows? I live in Calgary and snow covers our roads for about 30-40% of the year.

I wonder how it works when there is some road work, and there are multiple overlapping lines at once.

I don't think fake lines is a genuine concern. What if somebody plants anti personnel mines under the road? What if your tesla just assumes it's a normal road and drives over it?

I agree. I think this technology needs smart roads to succeed, whatever this entails.

I wonder what "AI updates" are going to mean from an insurance point of view. Don't know about the US, but some countries in Europe insure the driver and not the car (eg. Ireland). How far fetched is for insurers to argue that an autonomous car software update constitutes a change of driver and demand that the updates must first be validated from them before installing?

It's a good point.

Here in the UK I am insured to drive vehicle A as specified on my insurance documents. If I modify that vehicle my insurance policy is void and I need to inform the insurance co. and probably pay a premium.

In your scenario the same could be true on a software update.

And it wouldn't be unreasonable from the insurers point of view, since any update carries a risk. What's going to happen I think is that insurance companies will probably need to vet the updates before allowing you to install them, much like android phone vendors. Running un-authorized updates will void your policy.

I don't understand why people use Autopilot, or why Tesla has released it.

To use it safely and according to Tesla's instructions, you have to remain 100% vigilant at all times - so you might as well just drive yourself.

And if you fail to remain vigilant, which is likely since you are sitting passively in the drivers seat, you might kill somebody.

Where's the upside? Why on Earth would I want to use such a product?

> Where's the upside? Why on Earth would I want to use such a product?

I use it because it makes my driving less stressful. The car and I work together which means I don't have to work so hard to keep to the speed limit, to keep a sensible distance from the car in front and stay in lane.

So no different than a regular adaptive cruise control.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/apples-steve-wozniak-doesnt-... "Man you have got to be ready — it makes mistakes, it loses track of the lane lines. You have to be on your toes all the time," says Wozniak.

"All Tesla did is say, 'It is beta so we are not responsible. It doesn't necessarily work, so you have to be in control.' "Well you that is kinda a cheap way out of it."

2018 the wild wild west of robot cars.

Pay an extremely high cost including your life to ensure technological advancement. Is that not part of their marketing? If not SNL needs to do a skit!

I can see the skit now, "You looked S3XY in that Telsa," "Did you get the update last night?" "Oh your right and it made me feel so S3XY until it drove me straight into a barrier at 60 MPH."

The ability to discern when the car needs to stop for a stationary object right in front of it needs to be an ironclad requirement for self-driving.

It seems that sophisticated LIDAR is currently the best way to achieve this, but LIDAR is expensive. So companies like Uber and Tesla skimp on the LIDAR, and build self-driving cars that can more or less follow lanes but plow right into obstacles? Whoa.

The feasibility of widespread "self-driving" tech is going to advance only as the cost of LIDAR falls.

I wonder why they can't just use a less sophisticated lidar. Just have a few fixed beams that just look ahead. Do you really need a scanning system to detect an obstruction?

Lidar isn't reliable in conditions that are less than ideal (rain, fog, snow, etc). If you build a car that is dependent on real-time lidar observations, it is worthless much of the time in some climates and some of the time in all climates.

Most companies are pursuing a Lidar approach because dev_speed(Lidar approach) > dev_speed(camera approach). Tesla is pursuing a camera approach because max(camera approach) > max(lidar approach).

I wonder if Tesla has a way to visualize how disruptive a change to Autopilot. They've supposedly got all this driving data lying around. Would they be able to apply the updated algorithms to that data and quantify how many decisions would be affected, and by how much? i.e. 30% of past decisions would have been changed with the new algorithm, 5% changed by an angle of over 2 degrees.

On a similar note, shouldn't customers be getting release notes for these updates? I let my customers know when we're updating a web page. Tesla should surely be informing them when cars are going to start lane centering.

The problem is you can't simulate the video that happens after your new decision.

So this steering update would take you 0.3 degrees to the right. So what? Well those 0.3 degrees might change the angle of the line which influences the car to steer another 0.3 degrees, etc. But without that followup video (which you can't simulate from a 2D recording) you don't know how it would react to the change in environment.

The only way to regression test these things is in a simulated 3D environment (or miles and miles of real test track)

I really don't think they could do this effectively unless each car also uploads 20GB per day of 60fps high quality video, which would collapse the cellular networks they use.

I don't think they have that much data that's useful for this purpose. They may have billions of miles of some kinds of data, but they only upload occasional samples of the camera video that would be required to test a feature of this sort. I can't find the exact link now, but someone reverse-engineered it and it was something on the order of a few seconds a few times an hour.

How do you define a 'decision' in something like autopilot though? Also, if I remember correctly, only a couple of images per second are sent to Tesla. If there's a fraction of a second where it may decide to run into something, it may not actually appear in test results.

Scary as hell for me since I go through this exact location on a regular basis. The location is the Seattle i-5 northbound express lanes, where the express lanes end and merge into the main freeway at Northgate.

  Previous autopilot versions didn't do this. 10.4 and 12 do this 90% of the time. I didn't post it until I got .12 and it did it a few times in case it was a bug in 10.4.

It looks like software updates will soon won't just break your workflow. They might break your spine or your head or take away your life entirely.

Musk wanted to regulate AI to combat existential threat; in reality, it's not super intelligent self-aware AI, but buggy/shitty AI that's trying to kill people.

We will be killed by AI developers and the dunning kreuger effect, not armies of Skynet T-800s.

Everyone's afraid that AI will become too smart and take over the world. They should be afraid that it's too dumb and already has.

The scariest bit for me; in the comment's it's claimed that it has only done this for the last two software updates. Currently the worst I have to worry about when getting an OTA update is that it may make my phone less stable. Apparently in the future it may also influence precisely how my car tries to kill me.

Tesla makes amazing cars, but their attitude to self-driving is terrible. Waymo's approach is way mo [sic] safer.

Perfect example of a system doing what it's supposed to, but that's not the right thing. I don't believe it was headed toward the center barrier - I believe it was neatly avoiding it. Here's what I think was happening:

The car did an admirable job trying to stay in that left lane. Each time it saw a red and white diagonal lined barrier, it gracefully edged a comfortable distance away.

The problem is, most humans catch on, "Gee, three scary-looking barriers in a row! Maybe they're trying to tell me something. "Maybe this road is closed."

But I assume the car's system perceived each one as in individual, isolated obstacle to be handled without making inferences. And it did that much well, and when it realized the third or 4th barrier was impassable, it had to cross the other side of the yellow barrier and it did that well, too.

Could someone fill me in on collision detection? My 2016 BMW has Front Collision warning which can be set to min/med/max range. I've got it set to max range. It can detect a solid object that is coming up to collide with my car and warn me via sounds and HUD. Do Teslas not have some method of solid object collision that should supersede any driving directive? As per my previous comment, could a prankster paint a set of white lane markers that verve into a concrete wall or even off a cliff? That's freaking scary to me that these systems are so reliant on lane markings. At highway speed, a distracted driver, would have little time to be alerted, assess the situation and take the correct corrective action before a collision occurred.

I would argue that these incidents indicate a need for aerospace levels of quality assurance.

With the right tooling this does not need to be expensive.

I hope that incidents like this encourage people to develop open source tooling to support safer software and higher levels of quality.

We can see how lives might depend on it.

Aerospace QA is expensive by definition, because reliability nines generally are, whatever the industry: an additional nine costs 10x. You can go cheaper, but with a corresponding decrease in reliability.

They should have settled https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/04/tesla-owners-sue-enhanc... last year instead of dragging it on. These round of videos are more damning than ever.

https://www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/21195146/Dean_Sheik...

This seems to be one of those problems that you can solve 90% of the way very quickly with a seemingly simple set of rules. 1) stay in your lane

2) dont hit other objects

3) obey traffic laws

Then that devil that is the details shows up...

The reddit thread (of largely tesla drivers) seems to have concluded that the resolution is “stay alert especially when updates get pushed.”

To me it doesn’t capture the gravity of the situation.

Whoever approved this change in the code needs to be out. If I was Karpathy, I'd be very worried right now that he isn't liable in a civil or criminal suit.

I assume they have a test suite that allows them to run 1000s of situations on the latest version of software to see if it crashes/almost crashes on any of them.

If so, it seems like it would be fairly easy to add this situation to the corpus... especially if they are recording data from their cars live.

They should have 100 people going out there and recording this lane split situation into their test data ASAP.

Tesla says that the driver needs to be constantly watching the road in autopilot mode. But what kind of autopilot is that? If I have to constantly pay attention, I might as well just drive. I think it's safer, too, since I am bad at paying attention for something that rarely happens.

Here's the exact location where the video ends, in case anyone wants to go "troubleshooting" this weekend:

https://goo.gl/maps/Y2kag6yYc3N2

Why isn’t the traffic ahead of the car taken into account? When I’m driving, following the car in front is a pretty good way to decide where it’s safe. Conversely, going somewhere no car ahead is going seems like a bad idea.

They need to move those damn barriers. This is happening alot. /s

I just read at https://www.lemberglaw.com/self-driving-autonomous-car-accid... about this matter, and I think that these autonomous cars haven't been ready to be publicly released to citizens now. Automakers and law makers should think about the regulation and law.

Does Tesla record when people override autopilot? Seems like this would be a good source of information about sections of road with obvious problems.

An honest question. Are any of these autonomous driving systems open source or peer reviewed in any way? If not, isn't it really weird that we are talking about regulations even though the underlying technology is not even peer reviewed? How do we know (mathematical proofs, etc.) that a self-driving car manufacturer has done a good enough job if all of that is proprietary?

In one of the earlier discussions about this(like, last year) I remember an engeneer's comment about how one of the major manufacturer's (Toyota maybe?) code base for the monitoring system of the car was something to behold. On the lines of hundreds of global variables and basically unexisting standards. Now, I don't say that their or Tesla's autopilot are the same, but it wouldn't really surprise me either.

No, no, yes, we don't.

One way to help might be to disable AP following an update for X days or weeks. Let AP run in a disabled simulation mode while you drive your normal routes. If it determines your course of action in any situation breaks the threshold of what it was thinking it should do next, auto-report video feed to Tesla, and prevent AP from being used in a X-mile radius around that area.

It seems that with current developments, that's a complicated way of saying "turn it off."

Does anyone know if all these recent accidents are with the old MobilEye technology or the new Nvidia system? Or was it a rumour that Tesla was moving towards Nvidia rather than MobilEye (I think MobileEye was the one that didn't want to renew their contract?)?

I would be careful calling it just the MobilEye system or the Nvidia system and assigning blame accordingly. They both create autonomous driving components, but at the end of the day, Tesla, Uber, etc. write their own software, and are responsible for the whole of the systems that are actually in their cars.

It's hard to be sure in every case because most 'news' stories and most HN comments don't specify even the model of car involved. But the incident in which the driver was killed running into the divider was a model X so that means hardware version 2 and Tesla's own software rather than Mobileye that is in, for instance my 2015 S 70D.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot#Hardware_2

Does anyone know how software updates are tested for such autonomous driving software ? Is there a possibility for this driver's video to be added to a regression suite and tested, or can they take the data from his car and build a regression test based on it ?

I sure hope they do have a regression suite with thousands of real world sensor-data samples in some normalized format made amenable to unit testing. Assuming such a normalized format is possible to generate, I expect these samples to be open-sourced and standardized. That would give the NTSB a systematized certification procedure: just run the new version of the software on all the known test cases before allowing it to be released.

Still, I suspect that may not be enough - a new weird road condition or construction site can be created at any time. This is why I believe self-driving companies would be better off spending their budget upgrading and certifying specific routes as safe for automation. Certified routes could be subject to special construction protocols and regular road quality audits that ensure automated cars won't run into a non-automatable condition on those routes. It's also easy to verify and confirm that a car works on all certified routes, rather than trying to test the entire North American road network.

I think tesla needs to build a high performance cell network and upload continuous 1080p stereoscopic video at 60fps and factor that into their training. No sensor data can be a substitute for high quality video.

I don't mean to call the OP lier by any means. But anyone knows if there is any evidence that this video was taken on an autopilot engaged Tesla? Just want to be sure about it before I form judgment against Tesla.

ha ha i dont see how this is supposed to improve safety. Maybe it's safer than having no driver at all but if we're talking about being better than typical human then the safest thing to do is to switch this thing off.

It still could be safer than most human drivers. We only have a few examples of their AI misbehaving. If it consistently crashed into the barriers, we would have thousands of deaths per day.

Calling this well intentioned series of mistakes "Autopilot" has got to be the dumbest fucking thing Tesla has done.

Actually, I stand corrected. Their stock gamble is about as dumb too.

My hands started to sweat watching that video - this is not good.

One thing baffles me. Where is the insurance industry in this? I would expect them to drastically increase premiums in light of these developments.

Here in Norway insuring a Tesla is no more expensive, in fact probably cheaper, than insuring a petrol car in a similar class. I'm pretty sure that the insurance companies wouldn't do it if it meant losing money.

Wasn't there (or perhaps still is) a government subsidy for electric vehicle purchases in Norway? There may also be a government subsidy for insurance, to further encourage people to shift away from ICE vehicles.

Cheaper insurance may have nothing to do with the quality or safety of autopilot in Tesla vehicles.

Man I cannot imagine how they will debug the issue in the algorithm and how they will re train it to get that barrier mistake out

I commented on the first one that humans could easily make the mistake the Tesla made. This, however, is a scarily bad fuck up.

Why is autopilot feature still allowed to exist? It should be disabled until further improvements. This blows my mind.

This is the biggest wtf. We've now seen at least three videos of similar trivial mistakes by autopilot only this week with one fatal crash and it is still not disabled.

When aircrafts crash all planes of that model are grounded until the root cause is found. Self driving cars need similar processes.

I’ve always thought self driving cars are a monumentally dumb idea. There, I said it. I feel better now.

The soundtrack fits the video perfectly.

Problem is the other SDC companies are doing dangerous things trying to keep up with Google.

Changelog (latest changes on top):

* fix issue where "Marvin" autopilot keeps complaining (rip out voicebox)

* Boost intelligence of "Marvin" autopilot. This car now has the brain the size of a planet.

* test new smarter "Marvin" autopilot

When are they going to release the software patch?

AV driving seems to be ripe for disruption

This is such a gross techie statement. No it’s not. Human life is on the line, this is actual engineering. This isn’t writing some stupid social app on MongoDB written in JavaScript over the weekend.

Google has been at this for years, and with far better sensors, and even they aren’t there yet.

Any 16 year old can already "disrupt" the industry just by getting a license and driving. Humans are and will continue to be far more capable, rational, and economical drivers for the foreseeable future.

Sounds similar to tech bros who want to radically "disrupt" carbon sequestration. Here's an actually proven idea: plant a tree.

Go to Washington DC, head West on Congressional, cross the Roosevelt bridge and take the exit for the GW.

If there isn't a car smashed into the middle of the north/south Y junction, you'll get the chance to count the skid marks at that Y junction from humans making this exact same error.

Tl dr; humans make the same mistake, at a higher frequency, which is why the accordian barrier exists.

humans at least are aware that they made a mistake and can avoid collision. Tesla makes no mistake, tesla has no idea whats going on so you cannot call it a mistake. Its not a bug, its a feature.

If both drivers (human and autopilot) can make the same mistake, doesn't that make your crash rate higher?

Honestly who is to say that a human driver wouldn't have done the same thing?

To be fair it steers _toward_ the barrier. No barriers were harmed.

Does Tesla run some sort of regression suite on this stuff? Can they get a copy of the sensor data from when this happened so they can reproduce those conditions as part of their test suite?

You don't need the sensor data, it's obvious. The lane markers widened, and 'straight' is into the (not seen yet) barrier. If the barrier end had a mockup of the ass-end of a car stuck on it (about three times as wide) the Tesla would freak out, panic brake, and still think it was in the center of a single widening lane. It's not mysterious what the car was thinking.

If the overall shape of the road wasn't veering slightly to the right, the car would probably not have chosen to swerve to the left into a barrier, but the car sees the lane widening equally in both directions. Simple as that.

One of the great things about self driving cars is that we are going to start "debugging Roads".

From my point of view all accidents until this time could be attributed to the civil engineer that build the road as much as the driver of the car.

You make a pedestrian pass between roads made only for aesthetic purposes so you put a sign forbidding the pass and call it done. But people of course use it and get killed.

You put concrete barriers between roads but make it so people could crash frontally against it, something you won't find in any European high speed road without deflectors that will make vehicles not crash against concrete.

Self driving will give us scientific evidence of what creates accidents like black boxes did with airplanes. Thanks to that we know that what looks like insignificant details like the color and placement of buttons, turns out to be essential.

> One of the great things about self driving cars is that we are going to start "debugging Roads".

We've been debugging roads since Roman times. This is mostly about debugging software, and even more about crappy software development processes. After all, if your update is not monotonically improving things you have a real problem if your product is mission critical and lives are at stake.

> something you won't find in any European high speed road without deflectors that will make vehicles not crash against concrete.

You find those on the German highway between Berlin and Poland, for example.

> From my point of view all accidents until this time could be attributed to the civil engineer that build the road as much as the driver of the car.

On the other hand, other solutions would provide other "bugs", to stick with your terminology.

>Self driving will give us scientific evidence of what creates accidents like black boxes did with airplanes.

No, it will only give us data on what causes accidents for self-driving cars. Most new cars apparently are already fitted with EDRs[0], the only difference with self-driving cars is the number if sensors involved.

Suprising observation about the debugging of roads. Who knows we might even learn that certain States / Countries do better in this respect and the desing aswell as the signaling might benevit from this.

Thank you.

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