The Half-Life of Danger: the Tesla Model X Crash | Hacker News Reader

The Half-Life of Danger: the Tesla Model X Crash

thedrive.com

16 pointsypzhang28 comments

This article doesn't add much to the discussion. Very little is done to describe what the proposed "parallel automation" should look like, even though it is being held up by the article's author as the holy grail of driver assistance technology.

Sensors that prevent running into pedestrians are already being deployed. Collision avoidance is getting better and better.

Not driving into walls should be the next pri0 feature cars implement, but aside from that I see little actionable improvements being proposed here.

They're just talking using the same technology to add back-up responses and leaving the driver primarily in charge, instead of making the technology primarily in charge with the driver only there as a failsafe. So they're advocating automatic emergency braking, lane departure warnings, etc. rather than autosteer and adaptive cruise.

> aside from that I see little actionable improvements being proposed here.

There were three concrete and actionable proposals at the end:

Ban all active lane keeping

Mandate geofencing of all series automation

Mandate Driver Monitoring Systems, to include both camera and capacitive touch

None of those are "new technologies". They are, at best, temporary measures until current tech gets better.

> Does this absolve Tesla of responsibility for using "Autopilot" for their branding of a car-based automation suite? Legally yes, but effectively no. Yes, in the sense that Tesla Autopilot does automate many repetitive driving tasks, and includes a system to warn users of when that automation may cease. No, in the sense that some people ignore warnings, conflate automation with autonomy, overtrust systems they don't understand, and often lack the skills to safely retake control even when they do.

I still think it is silly to discuss the use of te term "autopilot" as the key mistake here rather than the choice to produce cars with auto-steering functionality implemented as series automation rather than parallel.

How is this “unavoidable” when existing cars already have automatic emergency breaking when they detect a collision is imminent?

These cars don't always stop when a collision is imminent.

The incentives around Autonomous Emergency Braking is to avoid false positive at all costs because unnecessarily braking on a highway can easily injure or kill.

Avoiding false negatives is somewhat less important.

>Avoiding false negatives is somewhat less important.

that's kind of funny, given that its primary purpose is a secondary actor on the human's false negative

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