Tesla in autopilot mode crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser
latimes.com
latimes.com
I can see the benefit to Tesla and future Tesla customers of essentially crowdsourced fleet learning. But what is the benefit right now if you strictly follow the rule of remaining alert enough to intervene at a second's notice?
In previous threads the best explanation I got from Tesla owners was that it frees you from the "details of physically driving" so you "can now supervise instead."[1] That just seems suspect. Supervising autopilot to the degree required to correct sudden mistakes seems, to me, to be probably very close to the mental load of the details of steering yourself.
There's some threshold of interventions/minute that I think humans just aren't very good at. Which is why there are systems like Threat Image Projection, which turns baggage scanning into what is effectively a video game: https://www.rapiscansystems.com/en/products/rapiscan-threat-...
In my experience it’s LESS boring to drive with autopilot and I pay MORE attention to the actually important, potentially dangerous, things like what’s coming up (you’re actively aware of longer stretch forward, which also means you know you’re coming up to a stretch that autopilot won’t be able to handle well in advance and have plenty of time to disengage) and the cars around it (not watching lanes closely frees you to give all your attention to cars around you).
I engage similar system on my car before fiddling with the attention seeking touch screen, or when I need to give a quick look at the kids behind. Another is traffic jam: a lot of nothing going followed by a lot of things going on - focus on the wrong thing and you can rear end somebody. Minor benefit are some fuel saving if you are a "dynamic" driver, and it can make you more relax in stressful situation like the traffic jam above.
That's just to answer your question. I completely agree with you that the feature is overhyped, not worth paying much for it and actively promoting dangerous driving behaviour. However, it nowadays comes nearly for free as a consequence of other very useful systems: the whole set of emergency braking scenario (emergency, cruise control, safety distance, pedestrian, ...), line keeping assist, blind spot monitoring. It has its uses, if you remain aware of its shortcomings.
Autopilot basically adds autosteering to that. Seems to me that could lull you into more distracted situations that collision avoidance is unable to cope with.
Note: autopilot and collision avoidance both came out around the same time, so it's far from clear that autopilot has resulted in a reduction in accident rates, or if it was mostly just the collision avoidance.
...in other words, the feature partially works around some of the problems they introduced themselves by using an overly complex touchscreen UI instead of the traditional no-eyes-needed buttons and knobs.
Indeed. When reading Tesla's statement,
"The Palo Alto-based automaker, led by Elon Musk, has said it repeatedly warns drivers to stay alert, keep their hands on the wheel and maintain control of their vehicle at all times while using the Autopilot system."
...one can't help but think, "then WTF is it good for, if I still have to drive the car myself while using it?"
Supervising autopilot to the degree required to correct sudden mistakes seems, to me, to be probably very close to the mental load of the details of steering yourself.
I'd say the mental load is higher than manually driving --- not unlike being a driving instructor to a student driver who is OK most of the time but occasionally makes a possibly fatal mistake that you need to watch out for and quickly correct. Normally, a car will go in a straight line with no steering input, but the autopilot almost "has a mind of its own" and can steer itself in the wrong direction.
This is subtly different from cruise control, which lets you concentrate on steering and rest your foot on the brake so you can use it quickly if needed. Cruise control doesn't encourage lowering attention, but enhances it.
No doubt collision avoidance is a fantastic feature though.
Addendum: Looks likes the NHTSA has disavowed Tesla’s interpretation of that study. They did not evaluate whether autosteer (autopilot) was engaged.[1]
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/02/effectiveness-of-tesla-autop...
Wow. This is a story in its own, because that statistics has been touted a million time by the tesla/elon apologists..
Furthermore, no one is forcing anyone to buy Teslas. People should be free to do as they choose. I have no doubt, for example, that a corvette, lambo, m3, or convertible all increase certain risks for their drivers by far more than autopilot - which probably decreases their risks.
What has lead you to this conclusion? Autopilot is really just advanced cruise control. You can treat it the exact same way by leaving your foot on the brake and leaving a hand on the wheel. If people aren't using it that way, that is certainly something Tesla should try to fix. But I am just not sure I buy the argument that cruise control is inherently a safer technology than cruise control plus auto steering.
But it isn't fully assisted and doesn't completely remove the need for interaction. It just is another step forward from cruise control that is more assisted and requires less interaction. I am not sure why everyone assumes the sweet spot for driver assistance ends immediately after adaptive cruise control and before cruise control plus lane keeping.
>Your brain will stop spending power on backseat driving
That is an interesting phrase to use considering backseat drivers have zero responsibility or control of a car but still manage to pay attention.
Your characterization of autopilot as “just cruise control” is fundamentally incorrect. Mere cruise control still demands significant and continuous attention and manual control on your behalf (steering). Autosteer makes the leap to fully automatic, which opens the door to not paying attention for long stretches of time.
From a practical perspective, Autopilot still needs to be monitored. But more relevant to this discussion, the user still needs to interact with the car to keep Autopilot engaged. It is possible to do that while paying very little attention. It is also possible to drive a car with cruise control while paying very little attention. Both systems can be abused. I have already said Tesla should do a better job of trying to crack down on the abuse of Autopilot. But I don't know why it is controversial to say that if used properly both systems can lead to greater safety by allowing the driver to focus on other aspects of driving.
You're just trying to make them sound similar, e.g. "if used properly" or "both can be abused". But there is an ocean of difference. It is vastly easier to ignore a system that is capable of driverless operation for long periods of time.
A good start would be to not call it auto pilot, and rename it to cruise control plus or whatever.
And why are Tesla burning karma by promoting this technology?
For SpaceX, self-landing rockets are a direct method of reducing costs.
For Tesla, sort-of-self-driving cars are a distraction from the core product and are tainting the brand. Stick to selling top-tier electric vehicles with human-driving, people will still buy them on merit.
To me it's am example of what happens when software developers run the asylum. You can do nearly anything in software, but should you?
Except if the rumors about turnover in the Tesla software team are true, the exact opposite is the case. The hot goss is that they're under pressure to meet unrealistic goals, not vomiting their own hubris into the product.
...except when it doesn't, and you're forced to suddenly comprehend the unusual situation and react before its too late:
You feel comfortable looking away a full 400% more than you would under manual control. There is not supposed to be any delta. And for many people, it’s probably more than 2 seconds. Many of these accidents including the recent fatal one happened inside of a few seconds of distraction.
You have an extra failsafe for those moments where you fail to remain alert. People keep treating these incidents in isolation and failing to account for the fact that human drivers make exactly this kind of fuckup every hour of every day, and lives are lost. Every day.
You get that right? Cars. Kill. People. Every day.
Tesla is shipping systems in the absolute infancy of this technology that are already statistically indistinguishable from human drivers as far as safety goes. And the luddites here want to throw all that in the garbage because of "what is the benefit right now".
That’s a hell of a claim, I’d love to see some serious citations on it.
For comparison the overall casualty rate for the average car in the US is somewhere near 12 deaths per 1 billion miles driven.
I wouldn't say that Tesla's have proven safer, but I think saying they are "statistically indistinguishable" from human drivers is relatively fair at this point.
No, it's over a billion miles driven by Tesla cars that have the sensor hardware that Autopilot uses. The number of miles driven with Autopilot actually engaged is about 300 million, at least according to the data Tesla has released.
https://electrek.co/2016/11/13/tesla-autopilot-billion-miles...
EDIT: Here is a Tweet from April 2016 saying 47m miles. [1] Your linked article is from November 2016 and shows 300m miles. That is 250m miles in 7 months. Projecting that forward with zero growth, Tesla would have accumulated roughly 950m miles in Autopilot usage. That isn't including the over 100,000 cars Tesla has sold since November of 2016 or the miles those cars have accumulated in that time. I stand by my statement that Teslas have recorded over a billion miles while using Autopilot.
intuitively, the load seems higher. this is because your brain must now include predictions regarding an additional third party who is not there in cars without autopilot or with autopilot off. it’s similar to how i am more stressed and tired after riding in the passenger seat with a less experienced driver at the wheel than i am at the wheel myself.
Living in a high traffic area I would appreciate the time I don't have to pump my damn foot up and down every 10 seconds for hours straight while waiting in traffic.
Of course, there's zero data about how many accidents happen because drivers were staring at their phones, so you rarely see articles screaming "<non electric car> driven by an idiot staring at phone screen crashes <into what ever catches attention>".
I was skeptical about Autopilot from day one, but one test drive convinced me that this may not lead to zero accidents, but it certainly is way way better than vehicles that crash when driven by distracted drivers
> Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.
On the other hand, I'm wondering how much I want to read an article from a website where they must track me to when I just want to read something...
http://archive.is/http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-l...
And then sharing, trading (to expand the profile), and selling it to other companies? Really nasty stuff.
You'll see some sites have quite an extensive menu of opting in to various tracking etc. For example Engadget or TechCrunch have a popup asking you to give consent, or not, before using the website. This is how it should be done.
Then there's other websites that shows you all it's tracking and ask you to just accept, there's no option to refuse, which is against GDPR, as implied consent is no longer valid.
And then you'll have websites like latimes that just goes "fuck it, we'll just block 500 million people in EU instead!"
https://www.google.com/search?q=Tesla+in+Autopilot+mode+cras...
Blocking EU residents as a GDPR protection is dumb.
It may mean they are doing obscene tracking too, but you are making ideological assumption if that’s your only hypothesis.
And again using or not using the internet as intended isn’t the issue here but rather if they intend to provide services to the EU or not a message saying EU users should leave in the same manner as age conscent is verified is technically sufficient to indicate that you do not provide service to EU residents, geoblocking the IP also sufficient even if it’s not perfect.
How else should they do it? I concede it is not foolproof nor ideal - but for websites which you've not provided your location to yourself, how is it possible for them to determine whether or not you are in Europe?
You can maintain the records of an IP address (as well as other PII) for business needs e.g. security or to enforce other requirements such as geoblocking even without explicit consent of the user it's all about why you and what do you with it which is why legal/lawful grounds exist.
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-da...
Also for the most part if you do not have a lawful basis for collecting or processing PII consent is not a sufficient reason to so.
Every time I ask this question, the response is "radar as a technology has too much noise, not accurate enough to detect stationary objects".
But it DOES detect stationary objects. Otherwise no one would even turn on Tesla AP at all.
Why is it so hard to detect stationary objects in front of you?
Still, this answer doesn't quite satisfy, because it ignores the very strong signal that exists right before a crash, which crash avoidance technologies do (seem to) use.
Note: Tesla also has a collision avoidance system, which is actually on all the time and a distinct feature from autopilot (although it uses the same underlying sensors).
Tesla's fans always defend the failure of their AEB by pointing out flaws in radar, while entirely ignoring that Tesla's vehicles have contained front facing optical cameras for years now.
The Tesla shouldn't have hit the divider in the previous accident, the optical (visual light) camera should have seen it, even if radar didn't. Why doesn't Tesla's system work as well as Sabaru's Eye Sight?
How else would they do it than incremental?
How about... not?
I'm not being disingenious here.
If there's autonomus tech, then I find it scary that it might change its behaviour. You see, I've learned how (say) Autopilot responds in certain situations. I know when to trust it, and when not to.
If this behaviour changes (perhaps even if it changes for the better!), that's a very dangerous thing. Some of my experience is now invalidated, but I don't know which part. But it mostly works as before, which gives me a false sense of security.
Changing the driving behaviour of a vehicle, especially in totally un-obvious ways, is super dangerous, and such changes must have very strong justifications.
Just think of that poor guy whose Tesla drove into the divider. Oh look, it behaves just like before -- except for its lane following behaviour.
Pretty much everything humans do is incremental improvement. I understand your point that we dont want to introduce weaknesses in 'upgrades' but this should be a discussion about how to create robust QA rather that stopping incremental improvement.
I wonder if we're talking past each other? Sure, incrementally improve during engineering. But don't incrementally change the safety-critical behaviour of a car once it's in the customer's hands.
> Build it perfectly the first time? That's not realistic.
Absolutely agreed.
But for subjects such as autopilots, predictability may very well trump improvement.
I'm assuming that the initial iteration is already reasonably safe and useful (if it isn't it shouldn't have been shipped, right?).
If the behaviour changes unpredictably (how will you predict autopilot changes caused by an update?), this may well be less safe than keeping the existing system, whoose quirks the dirver has noww learned.
> Pretty much everything humans do is incremental improvement. > I understand your point that we dont want to introduce weaknesses in 'upgrades'
The nasty thing is that even a change to objectively superior behaviour may be problematic, because the driver will expect the car to behave one way, when it now behaves a different way (regardless of merit).
Not even a changelog would help in such cases. I feel like the autopilot ought to inform the driver in each situation where it used to decide one way, and now decides another way. That might be a reasonably safe way of allowing incremental change, but is likely too annoying for most people.
> but this should be a discussion about how to create robust QA rather that stopping incremental improvement.
Robust QA is certainly a must.
(side note: I used to work in safety-critical automotive projects. I may have a more intimate understanding of the issues)
This could only be said by someone who has never worked on the problem. I don't get it, why is programming so hard, you are just telling the computer exactly what to do?
Obviously this doesn't seem to be the case but maybe you can enlighten us why this is hard?
Maybe radars can't be pointed at a narrow space, if that's the case why not use lidar instead?
Lidar only used by R&D + taxi services, price not reasonable for car buyers yet.
A static object has a negative Doppler shift rate linearly in proportion to vehicle speed and a y-axis position greater than zero but less than four metres. What makes that difficult to detect or distinguish?
(Lidar really does matter, but also extremely rigorous testing.)
I mean that plastic bag could contain a rock or something, driving through it is just a bad idea.
it’s dangerous to stop in the middle of the road unexpectedly too
as distance increase, the angular size of an object decreases inversely.
a radar requires an increase in power both to see at a longer distance and to see a smaller object, because the signature reduces with 2*distance^4
( this is an oversimplification to help introduce the topic, you can see the details here http://www.radartutorial.eu/01.basics/The%20Radar%20Range%20... )
a static object is the worst case scenario: you can't use its doppler signature because it's not moving against the background and the radar becomes less efficient the moment you need it the most (at high speed)
as an aside, given the problem statement it should be possible to find a maximum speed that allows for timely detection and stopping.
chances are it's still slow.
I wonder why the radar/lidar isn't helped by an ir coincidence rangefinder.
Even among non-Tesla cars, whose manufacturers don't try to "mislead", 71 percent of people believe automatic emergency braking can avoid all crashes [0]. Is this percentage higher or lower for Tesla, and is that difference warranted?
[0] https://newsroom.aaa.com/2016/08/hit-brakes-not-self-braking...
[1] Quote from above "When traveling at 45 mph and approaching a static vehicle, a scenario designed to push systems beyond the stated limitations, the systems designed to prevent crashes reduced speeds by 74 percent overall and avoided crashes in 40 percent of scenarios. In contrast, systems designed to lessen crash severity were only able to reduce vehicle speed by 9 percent overall."
I mean there is a warning telling you that it's not self driving. People are dumb, that's it.
The system exists in a bad gray zone — one that works well enough most of the time you stop paying attention. But it’s not full proof, so you get the worst of cognitive bias here.
Personally I think this faux self driving (literally falsely named auto pilot) should be outlawed. We cannot depend on people to take over when the car generally is handling the situation most of the time. Either manual or fully automatic — this in between will continue to cause too many bad accidents.
I'm far from an expert on the subject, but I assume real data must be acquired for that to happen.
[1] I think it's pretty debatable, and as far as I know it's still something of an open question to determine the minimum amount of hardware required for a fully autonomous car
Oh, and Tesla does disable Autopilot if you ignore the hands-on-wheel warnings.
Does Autopilot actually make the problem worse, or is it just more newsworthy?
Learning a "new" thing like that would probably make me hastily begin to wonder what else I might be missing.
A lot of police officers were being struck because you tend to steer in the direction you stare.
I recently mentioned self-driving cars to somebody and her response was "Oh, one killed a woman recently, didn't it?" That was about the extent of what she knew about them because she watches the news.
What I don’t get is all the HN commenters acting like a few crashes proves that Autopilot is irredeemably dangerous.
I can't find an NTSB investigation or study that pegs traffic aware cruise control as the cause of the accident in any case except in Tesla's cases.
Of course, it seems to Tesla folks this is just evidence they are gunning for Tesla instead of evidence that maybe it is actually worse :)
Also, 18 crashes so far where autopilot was enabled? vs so far, literally zero known crashes across everyone else?
Do you not find it somewhat interesting that in zero other cases has the NTSB found that TACC or the design of a TACC played a role in the crash?
I'd also point out: the supplier of their original crash tech broke up with them and ordered them to stop using it because they felt what was happening was unsafe (see Mobileye's letter to Tesla).
Tesla later tried to spin it as "they are made we are breaking up with them" but Mobileye then produced data showing tried to renew the contract and Mobileye refused.
In fact, plenty of other car companies are building self-driving tech, and currently relying on Mobileye, and Mobileye has not refused to supply them - only Tesla.
Like, i'm not sure how this set of stuff doesn't tilt a person into "hey, maybe this is something to be worried about, they should produce data why it isn't".
So far the data in this conversation has been incredibly one sided, with me providing data, and you providing skepticism.
These systems exist in a lot of cars, yet nothing until Tesla suggests any issues anywhere (i'm ignoring things like news reports which are fairly biased) Therefore, the extraordinary claim is not that Tesla is worse, it's that Tesla isn't worse.
Do you really believe other cars' automatic emergency braking works 100 percent of the time with perfect reliability? They don't show up because it's non-news.
So yeah, what i want is a citation or anything other than smug hand waving and dismissivenessm, to actually make it a useful discussion.
1) A link to IIHS crash avoidance test results. The Model S got a perfect score in those results, so those results don't at all support any claim that the Model S is worse. (I can certainly accept that the test is not definitive and the Model S could be worse than others while still getting a perfect score. My point is merely that this is not relevant data.)
2. A mention of 18 crashes with Autopilot enabled. Without a baseline to compare it to or at least some sort of rate based on the total fleet activity, this is more of an anecdote than data. Note that the average American driver crashes about once every 18 years (https://www.forbes.com/sites/moneybuilder/2011/07/27/how-man...) and there are around 175,000 Teslas on American roads right now (https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1115454_tesla-expects-2...). If Tesla drivers crash at the average rate, we'd expect to see about 175000/18/365 = 26.6 Tesla crashes every day, and that's just in the US. 18 Autopilot crashes ever is... not very high.
3. A completely unsourced and frankly implausible claim that the crash rate for other manufacturers' driver assistance features is zero.
Okay, i'm out.
I cannot find any current (2018) car that crashes into the parked car.
(I only spot-checked prior years). I found one in 2014 (audi q5) that hits the car at 1mph when going 12mph.
http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/vehicle/v/audi/q5-4-door-su...
By contrast, the 2014 subaru outback avoids collision even at 25mph.
http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/vehicle/v/subaru/outback-4-...
I can also find no data that suggests any other TACC is crashing into vehicles (no NTSB studies, investigations, etc) at all.
So yeah, i'm going to conclude, based on what i've seen so far, that autopilot is part of the problem.
If you have data that says autopilot is not worse, i'd love to see it.
Also, I wasn't asking about how Autopilot compares to similar systems from other manufacturers, I was asking how it compares to the Mark I Human, which is a driving system that crashes into stationary vehicles with distressing frequency.
That isn't what you originally asked (and as you see, i wasn't the only one who interpreted it this way), and imho it's not a useful comparison. I have no idea why one would ask "is autopilot worse" and then say "but only compared to humans, not taking into account the other systems that do the same thing and humans are also using on a regular basis"
It doesn't answer the question whether autopilot is really worse or not, because nobody cares if it's better or worse than a straw man human who has disabled the collision avoidance on their car.
The data you provided is clearly not sufficient to reach conclusions about actual crash rates, so I really don't see how it's useful to present.
I'll take insufficient data over zero data any day of the week.
Of course, as usual, their obstacle detection failed to detect a stationary obstacle that didn't look like the rear end of a car in the same lane. We need a minimum standard for a vehicle which takes automated control of steering and braking. It must reliably stop for obstacles.
Today I read Tesla is getting into the insurance business because premiums are getting out of hand. It makes some sense since internally they’ll have more data they can use to deny claims.
It’s interesting how reality plays out.
https://electrek.co/2018/05/29/tesla-insuremytesla-insurance...
Claiming that the driver is still responsible for driving the car, while using a system designed to encourage the "driver" to not pay attention is a dumb idea, and all I can see is this kind of thing leading to regulations the delay actual self driving cars.
I'm not a self-driving car fanboy or anything. I don't think it's just around the corner, but it's clearly going to happen /eventually/ and I can't imagine it being more dangerous than regular drivers. But this kind of "self driving but not" features feel like the sort of thing that calls to government agencies for regulation, and sufficiently "dumb" mistakes from these systems seems like the sort of thing that triggers a reactive over-regulation.
A spokesperson pointed out that the owner's manual reads, “Autosteer is not designed to, and will not, steer Model S around objects partially or completely in the driving lane”.
I haven't seen the encouragement to not pay attention. In some ad on TV, maybe it was for a new Cadillac, the driver opens a soda with both hands off the wheel, and that seemed to be as far as they were willing to go.
They should be legally required to call it something like "lane assist".
An autopilot maintains heading, and that's all. Many sailors are not techies --- an autopilot on a boat will run you right into an obstacle.
Aircraft autopilots can follow a flight plan, maintain an altitude or rate of climb/descent, do an instrument approach, and (using ADS-B) perform an automated avoidance maneuver when another aircraft is too close.
Cadillac has an eye-tracking system that deactivates the self-driving features if you aren't watching the road, and their system is limited to specific highways they have mapped.
Tesla has a ridiculously inadequate attentiveness control, and they do little to nothing to remind people who regularly fail to keep their hands on the wheel. They don't nag people because they want them to believe the car is more capable than it actually is.
And, I say that as a proud owner of a Model S with Autopilot v1.
I don't even get the point of that. Why even take one's hands off the wheel(or if knee-steering, one's foot off the pedal) if they can't even take their eyes off the road? I haven't driven one of these vehicles so maybe I'm missing something. It seems intuitive that automation would free us to do other tasks, but I'm not seeing that in these early "self-driving" implementations. It's more like these car companies are actually selling these cars as experiments, at the expense of people's wallets and possibly their lives.
Self driving vehicles have been used at Rio Tinto's Pilbara mine for a couple of years. Sure, it's on private land and the complexity of the task is far smaller than for public roads, but it's happening now.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-18/rio-tinto-opens-worlds...
Personally, I don't see mining operations as anything remotely close to public roads autonomous vehicles because you have a controlled environment in which paid workers that have been trained to interact with equipment and be aware of its limitations and dangers are performing the said interactions in a strictly constrained manner with the autonomous equipment clearly visible as such and while protected by all kinds of insurance and work-specific regulations.
There's none of that even in the testing stage of current "autonomous" driving vehicles.
All vehicles can safely communicate with each other and are controlled from central location.
It is automated driving but not even close to "self-driving".
Accidents still happen up there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WZCweaakOg
(*video may not explicitly of an autonomous truck, I'm not entirely sure, but just using it as an illustration)
He's been promising "self-driving" for years, except the damn technology isn't ready/safe enough for what people are clearly using this from. The manufacturer puts a warning label, but the usage model/UI is clearly flawed.
His engineers know this, which is why Tesla's self-driving group has had such a high turnover rate over the last few years. Musk keeps overriding them.
Not just the model/UI but the actual sensor suite. Remember, the Tesla that resulted in a decapitation had over-saturated cameras that couldn't see a tractor trailer. Of course, that's where the UI comes into play, because if the driver hadn't been watching Harry Potter, he would have seen the tractor trailer as well.
Maybe with AR the car could highlight the objects detected so that the driver can brake if the car doesn't see an object it knows about, but a head mounted display seems pretty clunky.
So there's no need for a UI. If there's something ahead of you, you must stop or you will hit it full speed without braking.
See page 93 of this owner's manual, for example: https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/model_s_owners_man...
(What it won't do is steer around obstructions in a lane, either full or partial.)
Autopilot is not designed to steer around obstructions.
Autopilot is designed to brake for obstructions.
It sometimes fails to brake for obstructions. But it sometimes succeeds in braking for obstructions. It never steers around obstructions, even if it senses them perfectly.
The avoidance feature is designed to stop the car in the event of an unavoidable obstacle directly ahead. It doesn't guarantee a stop but it will still apply the brakes faster and more fully than a human can react and thus shed more speed from the impact. Pre-crash safety will also tighten the seatbelts, move seat positions, close windows, and inflate auxiliary airbags in preparation, and these are all well-tested and proven features.
It doesn't learn anything about the environment from that, so to me it doesn't change anything.
Reports at the time said he was watching it on a portable DVD player, not the Tesla screen. Not sure about the NTSB report someone just cited though. If that report really said he wasn't watching anything, I wonder how that rumor started?
This was proven to not be true: https://jalopnik.com/the-ntsb-to-partially-blame-teslas-auto...
Idiots are using as if Tesla is Level 5.
A commercial pilot doesn't flip on autopilot and start browsing the internet on a phone or take a nap. And that's at 30k feet where there's little traffic to worry about.
It seems like a misunderstanding of what the technology does, by consumers and the media. I'm no expert on Tesla's marketing history, but I'm of the opinion that these crashes are due to drivers misunderstanding that the system does and what its capabilities are.
It's extremely likely it happens more often than we think and that most pilots simply just aren't going to voluntarily give up that information.
And that seems to be “I don’t have to care while this is on“.
And that’s a big problem.
See Tesla's page on "autopilot" here: https://www.tesla.com/autopilot
The first (and only) thing you see at first is "Full Self Driving hardware on all cars", and a blurb about how all Tesla's have the ability to be self-driven. It does not mention here, nor anywhere else on the page that the current implementation of autopilot in Tesla cars is not fully self-driving. The video just underneath the headline is a video that shows a car using self-driving capabilities, not autopilot.
The entire rest of the page is like this as well. It talks at length about how Tesla's have the capability to drive themselves, and hardly ever mentions that self-driving and "autopilot" are not the same thing. There is only one single sentence, buried in the middle of the page, that mentions that drivers must remain alert and ready to take control.
And again, this is on Tesla's home page for their autopilot function. This is the first page that comes up when you Google "Tesla Autopilot". It's really shameful for Tesla to have marketing materials like this.
CAT-III landings are automatic, but the pilot needs some visibility to decide if the plane is going to touch down in the landing zone. If they are totally blind they will divert.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system#ILS_...
Some commercial aircraft are equipped with automatic landing systems that allow the aircraft to land without transitioning from instruments to visual conditions for a normal landing. Such autoland operations require specialized equipment, procedures and training, and involve the aircraft, airport, and the crew. Autoland is the only way some major airports such as Paris–Charles de Gaulle Airport remain operational every day of the year. Some modern aircraft are equipped with Enhanced flight vision systems based on infrared sensors, that provide a day-like visual environment and allow operations in conditions and at airports that would otherwise not be suitable for a landing. Commercial aircraft also frequently use such equipment for takeoffs when takeoff minima are not met.
Perhaps the name "autopilot" has something to do with that misunderstanding.
She was adamant that a safety was infallible, and any damage from failure was the manufacturer's responsibility. As someone who grew up with guns, I realized that only an idiot would put someone's life in the hands of a 'safety' mechanism.
If people have dumb, uninformed ideas about what words mean in context, they should probably educate themselves. Based on videos and articles I've seen, people are doing extremely stupid things that are clearly warned against by Tesla, like driving down a winding country road, or assuming it's going to somehow know about road work.
If everyone misunderstands you, you may have a problem.
That's rich, you may want to actually do some research into what commercial pilots do when flying before making such claims.
I don't think you are aware of how much traffic on the "air roads" really is....
I drove around five miles to my friend's house and back today. I'd estimate that I was in near proximity with potential for collision with around 1,000 cars on that trip.
During the portion of a flight where traditional autopilot is used, how many planes are on a potential collision course? They're traveling at specified altitudes, along specified paths through 3D space. So tell me, how many planes is a jet airliner likely to collide with at cruising altitude when operating on autopilot?
Commercial pilots are trained professionals; Tesla drivers are not.
The first car with Teetor's system was the 1958 Imperial (called "Auto-pilot") using a speed dial on the dashboard.
More details here:
http://www.imperialclub.com/Yr/1958/58AutoPilot/index.htm
http://www.imperialclub.com/Articles/58AutoPilot/index.htm
How ironic. I wonder how many drivers using that system crashed, thinking it would do everything for them...
> [1995] This guy saves up his money and finally gets the van he always wanted. Fridge and tv in the back, all the works. He starts driving out on a country road that leads to his home. He sets the van on cruise control and gets out of the drivers seat and goes into the back to get a beer. The van of course goes off the road, and when the paramedics ask him what happened, he said he thought he had auto-pilot.
> [1993] An old china man was driving along in his motor home. He turned on his ‘cruise control’. Apparently misunderstanding the function of ‘cruise control’, he then went into the back of the motor home. The motor home drove off the road and crashed. Apparently he did not realize that ‘cruise control’ is not ‘autopilot.’
But nobody in 1958 would have the slightest expectation that the car would actually drive itself. Tesla has been using the terms "self driving" and "autopilot" together since they started markting the car.
The state of the art in computers at the time was the RAMAC 305, a vacuum tube computer which featured IBM's first disc drive. The computer itself was meant to be installed in a room 30'x50'. The disk drive itself was 4' across, weighed about a ton, and held 5 million characters (6 bits each). All this could be yours for only $300k/year (in current dollars).
Given that, and given that the transistor radio was introduced only a few years before, I doubt anybody expected the sort of magic we see as commonplace today. And if they did, they would let go of the wheel and find out in about 2 seconds that it was not staying on course.
^ I wouldn't have bothered to read the article. BUT it is the exact same thing. [Just a system to help you drive]
A more mainstream paradigm was 'disrupt!' as in disrupt old industries, by applying the rules in ways that they couldn't aided by technology that they are disinclined to use. For instance Uber used 'disrupt!' as the centerpiece of their business, by acting as contracting service for limo companies, before finally expanding the definition of 'limo' to include any Toyota made after 2015.
Weird, the tweet was dated 2018-05-22 but the Youtube video shows easter eggs already deployed by 2018-05-23. I know all Tesla vehicles have automatic over-the-air updates but that's still surprisingly quick. Must be Musk playing around with his time machine again.
I guess you don't consider that a video game, which is a perfectly valid opinion. But I'd just wish you had made your first comment "I don't consider Tesla's interactive easter eggs to be video games" instead. That way you clearly communicate your intent and this whole needless bikeshed could have been avoided in the first place.
No you don't. The Mars map is exactly like the Earth map, with a Mars texture instead of the map, and a rover instead of an arrow. Technically you control where the rover goes by using the steering wheel, because the steering wheel controls where your car goes, and the rover's movements come from your car's GPS. But it's not the sort of video game you describe. There's no way it could possibly work as you describe. The steering wheel is mechanically connected to the front wheels and still steers the car even when Autopilot is engaged, so it could not possibly be used as a video game control.
The problem isn't my failure to disclose my opinion of the easter eggs, it's your misunderstanding of what they actually are.
It seems pretty clear to me that Volvo only has Pilot Assist in the first place as a method to gather data via telemetry for the next generation of self-driving vehicles, because it otherwise doesn't seem to add anything useful to the driving experience. Consequently, I haven't heard of any notable incidents where Pilot Assist caused an accident.
I haven't test driven Enhanced Autopilot but I see people on YouTube taking their hands off the wheel completely for much longer than the Volvo let me do. Tesla seems like they're pushing something half-baked out and representing it as something it isn't.
It’s not going to drive for you. But it does an amazing job of basically canceling out crosswinds when you find yourself driving down the highway. It makes a huge difference, it makes it much less tiring/frustrating.
Going slow on a windless day? Straight street? Not that useful.
For helping with very gentle curves or very annoying crosswinds it’s quite nice.
It may be, but is not necessarily “consequently”. That Volvo is not cool to write about plays a role. You don’t read about boring daily crashes either.
If you want to fix the problem, just charge him with attempted murder of a cop.
It is not really surprising when our whole system of existence has the stupidity and weakness of its inhabitants at its foundation. Point is, this will only get worse. Because any "progress" along the current lines asks the common man to be more stupid...
https://www.google.com/search?q=pedestrian+killed&prmd=nvi&s...
That said, the reality is that the types of self driving systems currently deployed - Tesla or whomever - are all fundamentally flawed because they do two things:
* Require attention from the human driver at all times * Cause driver inattention
The first is fairly clear, literally every one of these products is prefaced with "the driver is still in control of the vehicle and must remain attentive", and the latter is clearly demonstrated because of all of the different mechanisms that the manufacturers are deploying to try and deal with the fact that if you tell a human to pay attention to a specific task, but they aren't doing that specific task, they will not pay attention. Every system tried just increases the time required for a human driver to adapt to unconsciously managing the various "pay attention" alarms.
The solution is fully self driving cars. We don't have that yet. I fully expect them to be safer once we get there.
What I do know is that the Autopilot system will never be distracted, will never fall asleep, will never drive intoxicated or recklessly, will never disobey traffic laws like humans do. Tesla also has a financial incentive to improve their technology to prevent this from happening. Unlike humans who, for the most part, have far less incentive to drive more carefully.
Outrageously false. These incidents are so rare that they have whole news stories written about every single one. How many crashes were there in Laguna Beach yesterday?
Tesla accident rates in aggregate are quite good. Under autopilot the data is noisy but still underneath the level of an average car (not as low as luxury vehicles in the same price range, though).
Claiming that it "isn't ready" is innumerate nonsense. It could clearly be better, sure. So could you. And no one is demanding to revoke your license, because you aren't a scary AI.
Seems to me that it's premature to me making bold claims like this. Of cars costing over $100k, what's the accident rate?
And the "bold claims" bit is exactly backward. You are the one claiming that the technology "isn't ready" based on sensationalist local news story and not actual numbers.
So we get to the problem of "if it can't do handle the specific obvious case where it should be absolutely superior" (I would argue an automated system should not have ever been able to make either the police cruiser or the 280 crash in any circumstances. Those were both in perfect conditions - clear weather, etc, etc), how can we trust it to handle any of the complex situations that a self driving car necessarily must handle?
The Tesla system solves this by simply saying "the driver is still driving, we're merely assisting", but that assistance leads to inattentiveness - that's human nature, you have to design around it - which should be fine, if the systems were able to handle that, but that clearly are not.
I would argue that given the configuration of the Tesla system they are less safe, not necessarily due to net accidents, but rather because of the failure modes of the accidents. Bumper to bumper accidents on a freeway happen all the time, even driving perfectly you can end up in them because not everyone else is driving perfectly. The problem with things like the Tesla system is that it's generally fine, except in those cases where it drives at speed into objects because it gets confused.
If your vision or mental state leaves you unable to safely account for large obstructions you aren't allowed to drive. Because it isn't safe.
What data are you basing this statement on? Or is this just your vague gut feeling based on reading about a few accidents in the news? I thought statistical data showed otherwise, that the technology was safe enough (ie. better than humans).
Edit: removed "debunked stats".
US interstate deaths are about 1 per 183 million miles, so while Autopilot may be safer, it's not as clear depending on the uncertainty of the 320 million mile figure. Also, German drivers on the autobahn have roughly half the fatality rate, which is better than the claim for Autopilot. All in all, I think an honest assessment would be that it's probably as good as an average driver in good conditions who isn't drunk. But rhetoric about saving 900K lives raises my hackles - I do not want to trust the source of this sort of PR with my life.
Self-driving tech has been there for decades. Convoy driving of trucks (one human-driven truck in front, several trucks following its lead) on highways was developed in the 90s.
On well-maintained infrastructures, automated driving is a problem that was solved before deep learning. The fact that we don't have an automatic lane-driving mode for highways as a standard feature in new cars is a political failure.
In 1997 a huge and successful demonstrator for an automated highway system was made. And legislator did not follow up by allowing on the road the systems they spent more than 10 billions to develop. [1]
In my opinion, a technology should be considered ready/safe enough if it is x times safer than the average driver. Zero accident is a crazy requirement. 10 times safer as human is much more reasonable but no politician will accept that.
And obviously it is easier to develop a safe system on some well known and well maintained road segments (e.g. highways) than on 100% of the roads and dirt roads on the North American continent.
So yes, the only way for an economic actor to get into there is to bend the existing rules, as rules for automated vehicles were never made. You can't sell a car saying "no need to look at the road, I'll drive for you" so you put a disclaimer, while making sure people understand that you actually made a self-driving car.
You can't sell a self-driving car and argue that your rate of accident is acceptable because the laws for such a notions are not there. A single accident in your self-driving car (that may be 10 times safer than a manual car) and you will be considered responsible.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-national-automate...
Auto pilot literally means vehicle operation without human participation. The name autopilot should be banned.
Secondly, I have a Model 3. The idea that the name is misleading people is the dumbest thing i’ve ever heard. Even if people were confused, their confusion would be cleared up very quickly within a few days of use. When you pick up the car they talk to you extensively about what it can and can’t do, and there are many warnings in the car that explain it. People who make this argument probably haven’t tried using AutoPilot.
Put this is context. you can’t just release a perfect system on day 1. In order to get the software to that level earlier versions need to be seeded into the public. I am 100% convinced the software is a huge safety and convenience win as it is.
This is just like Fox "some people say" - Fox people say! Or Javascript Bitcoin miners - Monero is not Bitcoin! It's snowing so there is no global warming - It is "climate change" but the entire globe is warming! This hurricane is just weather, not climate change - it is the 10th 1 in 500 year hurricane we have had this month!
I could go on. Sure, talking about the future self driving features (and selling them) is poor form to avoid this from Tesla, so they aren't helping - but they have always been clear that it is not self driving. It is the listeners/ readers that are incorrectly connecting the dots.
They should also retrain their sales staff because on my test drive the saleswoman specifically told me the car could drive itself and that I should take my hands off the wheel to test it out.
They should also retrain their CEO who keeps talking about "self driving" in reference to existing cars:
https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...
> "All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware"
Auto pilot - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopilot
"An autopilot is a system used to control the trajectory of an aircraft without constant 'hands-on' control by a human operator being required. Autopilots do not replace human operators, but instead they assist them in controlling the aircraft. This allows them to focus on broader aspects of operations such as monitoring the trajectory, weather and systems.[1]"
You are doing the exact conflating I am referring to.
Regardless, the actual people who have gotten into an accident because of this should be proof enough that Tesla is misleading people.
You must have missed the definition of autopilot in my comment.
Tesla likes to play both sides, it is "autopilot" when it works, but when it doesn't then the driver has literally under six seconds (according to Tesla) to avert a fatal accident.
Any system that randomly needs a massive correction in under six seconds between potentially several minutes of inaction is too dangerous to be used on public roads.
I didn't sign Tesla's little disclaimer, I shouldn't have to share roads with people beta testing dangerous software.
This is what gets me the most. Right after a tragedy Tesla is always quick to put out a victim blaming PR piece claiming that it's all the driver's fault and that they had i.e. "6 seconds" where they could see the divider yet they never publish anything like how long they had between when the car left the lane and the collision. Sure it was 6 seconds where they could see the barrier but how long was it between when autopilot went into casual murder mode and when it hit the barrier?
We've all seen videos like this one https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/8a0jfh/autopil... where autopilot swerves towards an obstacle and the driver only has a split second to react or be the next fatality. I think it's about time that Tesla acknowledges that their sensor platform is fundamentally dangerous. They never should have made such huge promises without lidar of any form. They aren't just going to be able to magically fix this with a software update.
http://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1026435
Autoland has been around for more than 80 years and been used commercially for 60 of those.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland.
It's pretty obvious what Tesla is getting at when they are advertising "every car sold with self-driving hardware".
The asterisk is of course that the hardware is self-driving capable, but the software isn't. But it's not hard to see where people are getting that idea from - it's Tesla's advertising and sales material.
"Your Tesla will match speed to traffic conditions, keep within a lane, automatically change lanes without requiring driver input, transition from one freeway to another, exit the freeway when your destination is near, self-park when near a parking spot and be summoned to and from your garage.
Tesla’s Enhanced Autopilot software has begun rolling out and features will continue to be introduced as validation is completed, subject to regulatory approval. Every driver is responsible for remaining alert and active when using Autopilot, and must be prepared to take action at any time."
You have to go way down to "Enhanced Autopilot" section to read the smaller text that mentions that its subject to regulatory approval, and that the driver is responsible.
If you don't think that's misleading advertising, I don't know what is.
I will admit showing a video of full hands off video, not on a highway, underneath a statement about the hardware, showing off software being used in a way that is not recommended in the manual is bad.
As I stated before in my first comment, they shouldn't be selling "self driving" that isn't available. I see no issue with promoting the hardware though and selling future proofing.
But a company that advertises software against JavaScript-Bitcoin-miners knows exactly that people will think their software helps against JavaScript-Monero-miners.
If it's a reasonable company, they'll try to deal with this public misunderstanding and point out that their software can't help with Monero-miners.
If it's an asshole company, they'll cash in on people mistakenly buying their software. And even worse, those people will then think they're safe when they're not.
Such an asshole company deserves all of the negative PR, so that they're hopefully at some point forced to change their business practices.
People just lump all crypto together because of ignorance. As is the case here. Autopilot is not fully self-driving.
Those people being Tesla's marketing team, presumably.
> they have always been clear that it is not self driving
That is very far away from the truth.
> what I say is always what I mean, and if you misunderstand, it's your fault.
Linguistic pragmatics 101: communication is a two way street.
(If we saw a commenter calling another a smug pedant, of course we'd tell them not to. I didn't see it though.)
Being called a rude name is bad (though I think the commenter edited it out?), but like every user here, you still need to follow the rules regardless of what someone else does.
The core issue is the flamewar thing—by which I mean high-quantity, low-quality controversies—which is the essence of what we're asking people to avoid in comment threads.
I contend that while that's true, it's not something your typical consumer is aware of. There is a common misconception that modern airline pilots simply press a button then kick back as the plane takes off, flies and land itself.
> Audi development engineer Thomas Müller and his team sent “Lu Ban” and “Kong Ming”, two piloted Audi A7 Sportback prototypes, on a very special kind of test drive.
This is a very far cry from what Tesla and Musk are doing. For starters you can't even buy the car yet. If you look for information on "Audi Piloted Driving" [2] you can see they're just as cautious as you'd imagine a German company to be:
> In 2017 Audi will introduce what’s expected to the world’s first to-market Level 3 automated driving system with “Traffic Jam Pilot” in the next generation Audi A8. The system will give drivers the option to travel hands-free up to 35 mph, when certain conditions are met prior to enabling this feature — for instance, the vehicle will ensure it is on a limited-access, divided highway.
Note that it will only work on highways, but also only at non-highway speeds. Stop and go traffic.
> In 2020-2021, Audi will introduce a Level 4 “Highway Pilot” feature—technology similar to what has been demonstrated in our concept vehicle “Jack”—that offers hands-free driving at posted limited access highway speeds in which the vehicle can execute lane changes and pass cars independently.
Seems pretty cautious to me.
[1] https://www.audi.com/en/innovation/piloteddriving/piloted_dr...
Tesla is outlier mostly in the disproportionate amount of flak it takes.
http://www.autonews.com/article/20160801/RETAIL03/308019956/...
As an example, rationally speaking credit bureaus and financial institutions are 100% responsible if they give someone a loan or open an account for them under your name. But they were allowed by the legal system to put the onus on the victims of the fraud to prove they are victims not perpetrators of it, and they called it "identity theft" instead of "bank fraud," and now we have victims who never did anything wrong or could have done anything differently battling CRAs and FIs for years to get out of a situation they should have never been put into in the first place [0][1].
If the laws allow companies to sell Level 5 autonomous vehicle while keeping the passenger (because it's not really a driver anymore) responsible for all legal matters, they would do so, and they would lobby against any law which puts the burden correctly where it belongs. And we would be forced to put our financial, mental, and legal well-being on the line just to get from point A to point B because it will be impossible to avoid autonomous tech then like it is impossible to avoid credit bureaus now.
[0] Like this case: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/credit-report-error-f...
[1] Obligatory Mitchell and Webb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c57WKxeELY
Well, law is allowing Tesla to sell a Level 1 vehicle as Level 5. They have to start applying false advertisement laws first before they can think about other laws.
uh, isn't a self-driving car you have to drive an oxymoron?? does anybody understand words??
> "Tesla has always been clear that Autopilot doesn't make the car impervious to all accidents, and before a driver can use Autopilot, they must accept a dialogue box which states that 'Autopilot is designed for use on highways that have a center divider and clear lane markings,'" a Tesla spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
From the picture at the top of the story, it is clear there is no divider on the stretch of road where the accident occurred.
Maybe it should detect when it is being misused, and start blaring loud noises, do its best to make the driver carsick, or simply immobilize the car.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AO33rOofFpg&t=2m18s
Also takes his hands off the wheel while using it in a manner that if someone else did and died, Tesla would slam them in the press for doing so, using dodgy-from-a-privacy-perspective and potentially-inaccurate (frequent reports of hands on wheel false negatives) telemetry.
This is a lot like rocketry. A rocket that meets 95% of its design requirements explodes, crashes, or fails to reach the proper orbit. Its damn near 100% or failure. Too bad Elon can't see this.
I think Tesla's obsession with autopilot is misplaced. Give me a solid reliable affordable EV with good range. Autopilot would be nice but only if it works. I can wait for that. But a solid EV is something I'm actually more excited about believe it or not.
I'm sort of afraid Tesla will throw the whole game in pursuit of self driving tech.
Eventually, you're not marketing to consumers but to fleet owners.
Outside of that, he's in the grey area where he can build product excitement and fall back onto the "Keep your hands on the wheel" type of fineprint. I agree with those saying that it's far from ideal.
To align with your statement, I can state; "I really wish all people would stop this bullshit "auto pilot means it can drive itself and I don't have to do anything" nonsense.
I feel this is quite a critical analysis of an ambiguous product title; [1]'Telsa Autopilot (& Enhanced Autopilot)'.
I read the title; "Tesla in Autopilot mode crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser"... and wondered how this article is even news..
Where, besides future plans for their vehicle product (Which, as suggested by Wikipedia - may be an independent product itself, and not an extension 'Tesla Autopilot / Enhanced Autopilot'), does Tesla's product in question indicate it's self driving? Autonomous Car? I do admit, the 'summon' feature of their vehicles makes this slightly confusing...
Additionally; what is the criteria to be 'self driving'? I assume; you are talking about 'auto pilot'..?
If so; this over-simplifies the entire scenario.
The very definition, and scope, of the title 'autopilot'/ 'automatic pilot' is far from specific. In fact; most of them are applicable only to [2]aerospace.
> Claiming that the driver is still responsible for driving the car, while using a system designed to encourage the "driver" to not pay attention is a dumb idea, and all I can see is this kind of thing leading to regulations the delay actual self driving cars.
This part of your post, I actually agree with. Having said that; I believe this is more so associated to an applied opinion of what a 'self driving' car is, and what we are seeing with these vehicles - and not because of any lack of technology advancements.
But again; I urge caution in applying your, or anyone else', opinion of what a 'self driving' car is.
FINALLY: I really wish we could start taking some responsibility of what we agree to. If the driver, even once, must agree to a clear scope of requirements to use the product - then blatantly disregards this; how, or why, is this even news?
We all accept terms and conditions of use, and privacy policies - with almost every product we use - and don't expect to be shown them every time we use that same product. I'm one of the few that read these documents - and more often than not; refuse to use the product. I made the choice not to agree.
There's other comments to this article that clearly indicate they believe a 'once off' popup is questionable at best - but I really don't understand this. Without a doubt; having to push a button to enable this Telsa/Enhanced 'Autopilot' feature, then scroll through a dialog to the end (Yes, okay, exaggerated) - and then click 'ok' would be a huge hazard.
I don't believe the user should be prompted with the same notice every time they use a product.
However; I do not necessarily believe prompted once is the right answer.
What if someone else uses the vehicle? Or you sell it?
I do not pretend to have the answers...
--
Disclaimer; I know Wikipedia is not gospel.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot [1.1] https://www.tesla.com/blog/dual-motor-model-s-and-autopilot [1.2] https://www.tesla.com/autopilot [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopilot
I'm not saying that's what happened, but it's certainly possible. The mere fact that it's possible to me casts doubt on this entire design philosophy.
Finally, you could use this as input to a planner like Model Predictive Control where a higher cost is incurred for approaching anomalous objects.
This video (https://youtu.be/wsixsRI-Sz4?t=1h18m28s) shows Elon Musk, two years ago, saying the following:
"I basically consider autonomous driving to be a solved problem".
"A Model S and Model X can drive with greater safety than a person, already. Right now."
"We are less than two years away from complete autonomy".
I'm not trying to downplay the impacts of the driver or Autopilot here, but even if a police officer was in the cruiser, it doesn't look like it would have been as catastrophic as the article implies.
> "Tesla has always been clear that Autopilot doesn't make the car impervious to all accidents, and before a driver can use Autopilot, they must accept a dialogue box which states that 'Autopilot is designed for use on highways that have a center divider and clear lane markings,'" a Tesla spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
Does this dialog box appear every time the car is started or is it a one time thing, just like terms of services?
Basically this is a well-known issue in aviation. As automation gets better and better, humans rely on it more and more and get less and less able to handle even minute failures in it. Additionally humans are absolutely terrible at being able to be dropped into a complex situation and have to make immediate rational decisions about it - thus the failure mode of "in case of error, tell human to handle it" is a bad idea if time between "tell human about it" and "crash into things" is under ten seconds or so. This has been the subject of many NASA studies and NTSB reports and the above article does a good job presenting this info in a form a layman can understand.
There are currently no known easy solutions, sadly.
(French Guyana, Martinique, Réunion etc.)
Tesla really is sticking it to the man!
Nobody is going to set a cruise control to a certain speed and look away from the road!!!
But somehow they (or just Elon?) seem unreasonably averse to doing that. The man is losing hero-status by the minute.
Why can’t we solve the most basic use case? We don’t have the sensors and it’s all done with cameras?
We clearly don't have an epidemic of cars with forward collision warning systems slamming on their brakes for no reason, so those systems must be able to deal with the false positives somehow.
The first milestone for vehicular automation is not perfection, but to simply be better, and in the worst case - comparable, to humans. Given the media's tendency to try to make big news out of every single self driving vehicle crash, it seems like we're already approaching (if not passing) this first milestone, as these articles are relatively rare while these vehicles have driven hundreds of millions of miles in autopilot. I can't find the latest number, but back in October 2016 Tesla already had 222 million miles under autopilot. It's safe to assume it's now some substantial multiple of that.
Some time it would be interesting to see media releases around the time we transitioned from horses/carriages to automobiles, to see how the state of the media has changed. Or perhaps it has always been this way. "I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. - Thomas Jefferson, 1807"
https://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-so...
I realize this particular case is different with us talking about assistance/safety features, but I still feel we're going the wrong direction here. These features reduce your awareness. They're like a teenage driver you constantly have to monitor, but worse.
They teach people to be comfortable and less alert with systems that have potentially fatal bugs that we can't yet identify.
We can build mass transit now, at a fraction of the cost of developing the tech for automated vehicles. There are so many corner cases, with highways, city driving conditions that simply cannot pan out for autonomous vehicles without a lot of testing; and a lot of people getting injured and dying.
I wish people would shelve this pipe dream for now. Maybe once we have really solid rail transport again in the US, like we use to decades ago, and rich and poor people can have a means to work even in smaller cities; then we can work on frivolous junk that will benefit the few that can afford it. Right now we just run the risk of killing more people who can't.
Knowing you can get on a train at 2am and make it home does play a significant role in reducing drunk driving, and can benefit people of all income levels.
How many crashes do we have from people using regular cruise control features? Is the incident rate per mile when using Autopilot from Tesla higher or lower than regular cruise control?
Those are the right questions in my opinion.
- accident rate of Tesla drivers that don’t use autopilot
- accident rate of other cars in the same market/category as Tesla’s (are wealthy people better drivers?)
- accident rate of cars with Tesla Autopilot engaged
- accident rate of other cars with similar ‘assistive’ technologies.
That's right. It's your fault either way, driver, just like it is in airplanes with autopilot.
So why would the Tesla have been heading toward the roadside? Was the cruiser perhaps parked in the middle of the roadway?
Edit: so they don't use lidar... Is this a machine vision failure, then?
This is because almost everything in the environment is stationary to the car, so it is hard to distinguish between stationary things in your way and stationary things just off to the side.
So if the car in front of you slows down, it's obvious that you'll hit it if you don't slow down.
A car parked partially in your lane might just look like regular noise to the sensors. That is, using the current technology, if they (correctly) classified the parked car as an obstacle then they would (incorrectly) classify so many non-dangerous situations as obstacles so as to make the system infeasible; the car would emergency brake constantly as it drives down the road.
Some would say that until those obstacles can be classified correctly such technology should not be used at all, but I think it's probably doing more good than harm at the moment and hopefully a good solution can be found quickly. Even if they do fix this problem soon, I'm sure we'll hear plenty of stories where something goes wrong anyway, but hopefully they won't seem so obviously avoidable (who hits a parked car!)
Either having more than one sensor or using mirrors or something.
In fact, I'm sure that the camera systems in place are already doing this to some degree. I think it's more that it's not yet good enough at picking out these stationary objects that are in the path of travel.
Issue is, with every complex system, there are few ins and outs that users need to know - like lane merge buffer lines, sharp lane merges by another vehicle in front of view, etc. Within your first few rides(below 10), users could pretty much guess when it works and when it might have issues.
On labeling the feature, it is marked clearly BETA and wiggle prompt is shown pretty much in all the confusing cases - so alert is never missed for me.
My only gripe is with all these incidents, Tesla is forced to update the feature to make it less user friendly or take out completely. I genuinely feel safe and come home every single day with less stress. Elon's tantrums are not helping the situation either.
there’s not a single piece of software i trust in my daily life. i mean, something as simple as an iPad, phone, computer, tv, etc. hardly goes a day without a glitch, but yet people are ready to trust “self-driving” auto features as if they’ve never experienced a software failure before. and normally, it isn’t a software failure in the strictest sense. it’s a human error embedded in software. so i ask myself, do i trust the however many overworked, sleep deprived, wide-eyed engineers’ abstract and concrete thought now embedded in cars’ active driving systems? the answer is no way.
It seems Teslas autopilot cannot reliably do much more than conventional lane assist etc.
Tesla could disable autonomous lane changing and autonomous changing of streets, requiring driver's input for all changes of direction (that are not smoothing out, but staying in lane), and it would be really good.
But Tesla needs the impression of game-changing, not just best-in-class for financial markets reasons.
I believe authorities should order call-backs and force Tesla to disable all traces of autonomy.
"Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism."
Maybe we should develop a habbit here on HN not to link to geo-fenced sites?
I can't read the article. Weird. is this because of GDPR?
That Tesla is taking so long to learn what "human factors" are is painful, especially since HF has been part of other industries for decades.
How convenient for non-autopilot auto manufacturers... to have a competitor out there boasting semi-autopilot capabilities...
I wonder how many of these "autopilot crashes" could be machinations... if not already, then in the future perhaps?
Since they're required to, the us dept of transportation puts it at just over 6 million.
Priceless is of course the right answer, but engineering wise you're in the 5-10 million range.
Its AutoPilot, why the hell are all those people expecting it to Pilot the car Auto matically? ....
Three times in a row, has this article been written by a robot? It doesn't feel like something a human would write.
Perhaps Tesla should consider a new CEO and Elon take a move to a more figurehead position?
After multiple deaths now the head of marketing at Tesla should be criminally prosecuted (or whoever is the big shot who signed off on this name).
I have a lot of problems with Tesla, including the way they market this, but the name is accurate.
Some one should study you. Because I don't know how someone with a brain can be so stupid...Not considering the possiblity that you are paid for it, because everyone knows that there are no shills on hackenews...
But think about it like Elon Musk would: If AutoPilot is statistically saver that a car without AutoPilot then it's good enough to be sold on production cars. Tesla cars are saver that normal cars statistically.
Off course, picking one crash and saying AutoPilot sucks is statistically not the right approach. I do agree that Tesla should improve on this. But crashing into a parked car probably means that the driver was playing with his phone, or the cars touch screen too much. Tesla should have systems in place that detects the driver not paying attention. (something better than touching the steer)