Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot
kqed.org
kqed.org
I wonder if that is just me, but when new technology is introduced and hyped, I usually take a quick look at implementations, research, and talks just to get an idea of what the state of the art really is like.
As a result, I have become the late adopter among my group of friends because the first iteration of any new technology usually just isn't worth the issues.
You know this effect when you open a new book and immediately spot a typo? I felt that way looking at state of the art AI vision papers.
The first paper would crash, despite me using the same GPU as the authors. Turns out they got incredibly lucky not to trigger a driver bug causing random calculation errors.
The second paper converted float to bool and then tried to use the gradient for training. That's just plain mathematically wrong, a step function doesn't have a non-zero gradient.
The third paper only used a 3x3 pixel neighborhood for learning long-distance moves. Doesn't work, I cannot learn about New York by waking around in my bathroom.
That gave me the gut feeling that most people doing the research were lacking the necessary mathematical background. AI is stochastical gradient descent optimization, after all.
Thanks to TensorFlow, it is nowadays easy to try out other people's AI. So I took some photos of my road and put them through the state of the art computer visible AIs trained with KITTY, a self-driving car dataset of German roads. All of them couldn't even track the wall of the house correctly.
So now I'm afraid to use anything self-driving ^_^
But then I went into consulting and saw that big companies have teams of lawyers that settle proactively out of court to keep inconvenient truths out of the public opinion.
Like the first few exploding iPhones.
(Just an example, never worked there)
BTW, did you hear about the Uber crash where their AI couldn't track a pedestrian and then killed her?
That being said, I’m a huge skeptic of the current state of self driving cars. I would have assumed these systems use LIDAR as well as vision and could have at least slammed on the brakes.
A vehicle traveling 43 mph (69 km/h) can generally stop within 89 feet (27 m) once the brakes are applied.
The police explanation of Herzberg's path meant she had already crossed two lanes of traffic before she was struck by the autonomous vehicle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg
I was also misled by the poorly exposed "official" video. Given the numbers above there was time for a human driver to see her and even come to a complete stop. Further since she was moving from one side of the road to the other and only entered directly into the vehicle's path in the last 1.3 seconds (image in "Software issues" section of wikipedia article) it is likely that all that would have been needed to avoid the collision would have been a minor slow down and she would have completed her crossing safely.
Also, I'm quick to reach for a simple pneumatic cylinder to solve a problem. Perfectly capable of using new electric-servo-ballscrew-hotness to do a similar move, but the value provided by tried-and-tested systems is hard to overstate.
I'm in the same boat but unfortunately you have to share the road with these things so it's hard to completely avoid them. I do find myself avoiding Tesla's on the freeway more and more.
These requirements can be easily fulfilled with a well designed paper ballot system. I don't see any chance of doing the same with anything computerized.
But we don't apply this rule to the votes where bribery and coercion are most practical to start with, where there are a small number of voters that can be intensely targeted, and swinging a small number is sufficient to decide major outcomes.
Granted, we're not quite ready for self driving, but there's no question that the neural network subfield of ML has absolutely exploded in the last 5-10 years and is bursting with productionizable, application ready architectures that are already solving real world problems.
There is no doubt in my mind that an AI with billions of parameters will be excellent at memorizing stuff.
I also have no doubt that research activity has exploded, which might be related to the generous hardware grants being handed out...
But all that research has produced surprisingly little progress over algorithms from 2004 in the field of optical flow.
The papers I looked at were the top-ranked optical flow algorithms on Sintel and KITTY. So those were the AIs that work best in practice and better than 99% of the other AI solutions.
If it's as bad as you say, it seems like a critical evaluation would be pretty interesting and advance the field.
Source: Used to work for an 80s-era "AI Company"
We're way past memorization. We're into interpolation and extrapolation in high D spaces with Bayesian parameters. Sentiment analysis and contextual searches - search by idea, not keyword. Heuristic decision making. Massively accelerated 3D modeling with 99% accuracy. Generative nets for text, music, scientific models...
Sorry, but you're behind the times, and that's ok - one of us will be proven right in the next 1-5 years. Based solely on the work we're doing at the startup I'm working for, we're on the cusp of an ML revolution. Time will tell, but personally I'm pretty excited. And don't worry, I'm not working in adtech or anything useless.
That said, the driving problem seems to be quite far from being solved, I agree though it is outside my expertise; but I think the primary issue is that this is an application where error must be unrealistically low, a constraint which does not apply to many other domains. You can get away with a couple percent of uncertainty when people's lives aren't on the line!
And yet it's literally in cars on the road.
I'm not saying you're wrong because of that. I just wonder how far from "ready" we are, and how much of a gamble manufacturers are taking, and how much risk that presents for not just their customers, but everyone else their customers may drive near.
Yes, it's a hard problem, yes we are not nearly there and there is a lot of development/research to do. Yes, accidents will happen during the process. But humans suck at driving and kill themselves and other people daily. It's the least safe form of transportation we have.
Based on Tesla's safety report, 'more than 1 billion' miles have been driven using autopilot. Given the small data sample and the fatalities already attributed to autopilot, I think we're some way from proving it's safer than letting drivers drive alone, never mind close to being a driver substitute.
>> After accounting for freeways (18%) and intersections and junctions (20%), we’re still left with more than 60% of drivers killed in automotive accidents left accounted for.
>> It turns out that drivers killed on rural roads with 2 lanes (i.e., one lane in each direction divided by a double yellow line) accounts for a staggering 38% of total mortality. This number would actually be higher, except to keep the three categories we have mutually exclusive, we backed out any intersection-related driver deaths on these roads and any killed on 2-lane rural roads that were classified as “freeway.”
>> In drivers killed on 2-lane rural roads, 50% involved a driver not wearing a seat belt. Close to 40% have alcohol in their system and nearly 90% of these drivers were over the legal limit of 0.08 g/dL.
I don't think people give enough attention to whether broad statistics actually apply to cases of interest. That's about 40% of all driver fatalities occurring on rural non-freeway roads, of which 35% (~14% overall) were legally driving drunk.
People compare various fatality rates associated with riding an airplane vs driving a car all the time, but I've never seen anyone point out that an incredibly simple mitigation you're probably already doing -- not driving on non-freeway rural roads -- lowers your risk of dying in a car accident by more than a third. And it gets even better if you're not driving drunk!
If you measure driving quality in terms of fatality rate, it is actually the case that almost everyone is better than average. A lot better than average. But public discussion completely misses this, because we prefer to aggregate unlike with unlike.
If half of all driving occurs on highways and half doesn’t, and half of all accidents are on highways, then avoiding highways will have absolutely no effect on your accident rate.
It’s possible that driving on these roads leads to a disproportionate accident rate, but you haven’t actually said that.
You're right in spirit. I actually addressed this in passing in the comment "an incredibly simple mitigation you're probably already doing". Rural roads carry less traffic than non-rural roads for the very obvious reason that most people don't live in rural areas. The disparity is documented: https://www.ncsl.org/research/transportation/traffic-safety-...
We can also note that freeway vehicle-miles (excluded from this rural roads statistic) are going to be an inflated share of driven miles precisely because the purpose of the freeway is to cover long distances.
But as to the specific number I provided ("more than a third"), you're on target in accusing me of a fallacy.
Have they released all the data to be analyzed by independent people?
Also autopilot only runs in the best of conditions. Are they comparing apples to apples?
The numbers show that Teslas experience a lower crash rate than other vehicles. Granted, this can be to a number of reasons including the hypothesis that humans deciding to buy Teslas drive more carefully to begin with. And the numbers show that turning on autopilot further reduces crash rates.
This at least tells us that letting the vehicles with the automated driving and safety features on the road doesn't increase the risk for the driver and others, which was the original premise I responded to.
- The mechanical state of the car (Teslas with autopilot tend to be new/newish vehicles, and thus in excellent mechanical shape)
- The age and competence of the driver - I'm guessing people who make enough to buy a Tesla are usually not senile 80 years olds or irresponsile 18 year olds
- Other security gizmos in Teslas that cheaper cars may lack
Overall, it would be more fair to compare against cars of similar age and at similar price point.
It kinda seems self evident that a car that drives you into a wall randomly is less safe than one that doesn't.
I grant that Teslas might be safer than eg a drunk driver, and so we might be better off replacing all cars with Teslas in some sense, but we'd also be better off if we replaced drunk drivers with sober ones. But would safe, competent drivers be safer, and would that be ethical? At that point are you penalizing safe competent drivers?
Drunk drivers in Teslas are actually interesting for me to think about, because I suspect they'd inappropriately disengage autopilot at nontrivial rates. I'm not sure what that says but it seems significant to me in thinking about issues. To me it maybe suggests autopilot should be used as a feature of last resort, like "turn this on if you're unable to drive safely and comply with driving laws." But then shouldn't you just not be behind the wheel, and find someone who can?
Unless you're serious about bringing the bar way up for getting a driver's license, I think it's fair to compare self-driving technology with real humans, including the unsafe and incompetent. In most of the world, even those caught red-handed driving drunk are eventually allowed to drive again.
You mean the company that has staked it's future on selling this technology claims the technology is better than any alternative?
This is aside from the fact that the NHTSA says the claim of "safest ever" is nonsense and that there is zero data in that PR blog post.
A fun example, someone was selling some meat, he said it is 50% rabbit and 50% horse because he used 1 rabbit and 1 horse. The conclusion is when you read some statistics you want to find the actual data and find if statistics are used correctly, most of the time as in this case the people doing the statistics are manipulating you.
There was an article about a city in Norway with 0 deaths in 2019, if I would limit my statistics to that city only, to that year only I will get the number of 0 people killed by human drivers.
Were not at the self-driving level of kicking back the seat and watching netflix on your phone yet.
I doubt we will ever get there; there will always be edge cases which are difficult for a computer to grasp. Faded lane marking, some non-self-driving car doing something totally unexpected, extreme weather conditions limiting visibility for the camera's etc.
-This is the scariest bit, IMHO. Basically, autopilot is well enough developed to mostly work under normal conditions; humans aren't very good at staying alert for extended periods of time just monitoring something which mostly minds its own business.
Result being that the 'assist' runs the show until it suddenly veers off the road or into a concrete barrier, bicyclist, whatever. 'Driver' then blames autopilot; autopilot supplier blames driver, stating autopilot is just an aid, not a proper autopilot.
This is the worst of both worlds. Driver aids should either be just that - aids, in that they ease the cognitive burden, but still require you to pay attention and intervene at all times - or you shouldn't be a driver anymore, but a passenger. Today's 'It mostly works, except occasionally when it doesn't' is terrifying.
A model where a driver is assumed to disengage attention, etc but then be expected to rengage in a fraction of a second to respond to an anomalous event is fundamentally at its core flawed I think. It's like asking a human to drive and not drive at the same time. Most driving laws assume a driver should be alert and at the wheel; this is what...? Assuming you're not alert and at the wheel?
As you're pointing out, this leads to a convenient out legally for the manufacturer, who can just say "you weren't using it correctly."
I fail to see the point of autopilot at all if you're supposed to be able to correct it at any instant in real-world driving conditions.
-The cynic in me suggests we need autopilot as a testbed on the way to the holy grail of Level 5 autonomous vehicles.
The engineer in me fears that problem may be a tad too difficult to solve given existing infrastructure - that is, we'd probably need to retrofit all sorts of sensors and beacons and whatnot to roads in order to help the vehicles travelling on it.
Also, highway lane splits are very dangerous in general. It's a concrete spear with 70mph cars whizzing right towards it. Around here, they just use barrels of material, sand I believe. Somebody crashes into one, they clean the wreck, and lug out some more sand barrels. Easy and quick.
For the foreseeable future, there's simply too many variables outside autopilot manufacturers' control; I cannot see how car-borne sensors alone will be able to provide the level of confidence needed to do L5 safely.
Oh, and a mix of self-driving and bipedal, carbon-based-driven ones on the roads does not do anything to make it simpler, as those bipedal, carbon-based drivers tend to do unpredictable things every now and then. It'll probably be easier when (if) all cars are L5.
So - humans need to adapt to new behaviour from other vehicles on the road.
When ALL vehicles are L5, though, they (hopefully) will all obey the same rules and be able to communicate intent and negotiate who goes where when /prior/ to occupying the same space at the same time...
And, of course, they should all obey the same rules (well, traffic regulations being one, but also how they handle the unexpected - it would be a tough sell for a manufacturer who rather damaged the vehicle than other objects in the vicinity in the event of pending collision if other manufacturers didn't follow suit...
Autonomous Mad Max-style vehicles probably isn't a good thing. :/
>Autopilot enables your car to steer, accelerate and brake automatically within its lane.
>Current Autopilot features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous.
It is not. There is no real self-driving on the road, at least not in conventional vehicles. Teslas autopilot is basically a collection of conventional assistive systems that work under specific circumstances. Granted, the circumstances where it works are much broader than the ones defined by the competition, but for a practical use-case its still very restricted. Self-driving systems can be affected by very minor changes in lighting, weather and other circumstances. While Teslas stats on x Million miles driven under Autopilot are impressive, they do not show the real capabilities of the self-driving system. For example, you can only enable the Autopilot under specific circumstance for example while driving on an Autobahn with clear weather. Under circumstances with for example limited sight the Autopilot won't turn on or will hand over to the driver, simply because it would fail. Of course, this is for passenger security, but these are situations real self-driving vehicles need to handle. Other leading projects like Waymo also test the vehicles under ideal circumstances with clear weather etc.
We'll most likely see fully self-driving vehicles in the future, but this future is probably not as close as Tesla PR makes us think.
Emphasis on real. There is definitely something that most people would refer to as "self driving" in cars on the road.
I'm not saying what is there is specifically good at what it does - I'm saying someone put it into use regardless of how fit for purpose it is.
> but this future is probably not as close as Tesla PR makes us think
Unless you're suggesting the PR team decided to make shit like "Summon" available to the public, then it's not just "PR spin".
Then you'd have to define what a self-driving car actually means. At least for me, self-driving means level 4 upwards. Everything below I'd consider assisted driving.
> Unless you're suggesting the PR team decided to make shit like "Summon" available to the public, then it's not just "PR spin". As I said, this Smart Summon feature also only works under very specific circumstances with multiple restrictions (and from what I've seen on Twitter it received mixed feedback)
Just because the car manages to navigate a parking lot with 5km/h relatively reliable, that doesn't mean that at the end of the year it'll be able to drive the car with 150 km/h on the Autobahn.
Edit: Fixed my formatting
I said "for most people". For most people I know, a car that will change lanes, navigate freeways and even exit freeways is "self driving". It may be completely unreliable but even a toaster that always burns the bread is called a toaster: no one says "you need to define what a toaster means to you".
> At least for me, self-driving means level 4 upwards.
I have literally zero clue what the first three "levels" are or what "level 4" means, and I'd wager 99% of people who buy cars wouldn't either.
> that doesn't mean that at the end of the year it'll be able to drive the car with 150 km/h on the Autobahn.
30 seconds found me a video on youtube of some British guy using autopilot at 150kph on a German autobahn last June.
Again: I'm not suggesting that it is a reliable "self driving car". I'm suggesting that it is sold and perceived as a car that can drive itself, in spite of a laundry list of caveats and restrictions.
This argument is leaning toward the ridiculous.
I think only you and Elon Musk consider a "greater than zero chance of making it to your destination without intervention" to be self-driving.
If you know any good paper that tries a novel approach and doesn't just recycle the old SSIM+pyramid loss, please post the title or DOI :)
I disagree, I saw such an awful number of bugs in ML codes going with papers that I now take for granted that there is a bug somewhere and hope that it does not impact the concept being evaluated.
(here having everyone use python, a language that will try its best to run what you throw at him, feels like a very bad idea)
if it was the case self driving cars wouldn't be on the road, I don't think we should aim for perfection, perfection will come. We should be looking for cars that make less errors on average than humans, once you have that you can start putting cars on the road and use data from the fleet to correct remaining errors.
Also, I was reviewing their public source code release and there was no approximation. That part of their loss function had simply never worked, but they had not noticed prior to the release of their paper.
And due to them training slightly different from what they described in the paper, the AI worked competitively well nonetheless.
In my eyes self-driving should still be called driving-assistance.
I think every human would slow down if they see things that they cannot explain. An AI will not.
It's basically the same problem as when an image recognition AI is 99% sure that the photo of your cat shows guacamole.
Current AIs do not have a concept of absolute confidence, they only produce an estimate relative to the other possibilities that were available during training. That's why fully novel situations produce completely random results.
Elaine Herzberg was in dark clothing crossing a dark street well away from any crosswalk or street lighting. Would a human driver have performed better? From the footage I saw she was nearly invisible, I would have hit her too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufNNuafuU7M
This was not a hard fail for the AI.
The vehicle was equipped with both radar and lidar. The victim was detected as an unknown object six seconds prior to impact, and at 1.3 seconds prior to impact when the victim entered the road the system determined that emergency braking by the driver was required, however the (distracted) driver was not alerted of this.
Why would the system notify the driver that emergency braking was required instead of simply braking?
With the sensor array available to it the car should have done better, no question.
But to make the claim "fails harder" I would be looking for a clear cut situation where a human would almost definitely have outperformed the AI.
Human eyes do have miraculous dynamic range so we would likely see more. Can we say with 90% certainty that a human would have saved the situation?
Moreover, try this dashcam video: https://youtu.be/typj1asf1EM It's 10 seconds long, and makes the pedestrian look almost invisible except for the soles.
However, when I took that video, both the crossing pedestrians were clearly visible, not vague shapes that you only notice when you're told they exist. So much for video feed fidelity.
Yes, given the misleading nature of the dashcam video I think we can. This was not a pitch dark road lit only by headlights where an obstacle "appeared out of no-where". This was a well-lit main street, with good visibility in all directions. An ordinary human driver would have had no problem identifying Elaine as a hazard and taking the appropriate avoiding action, which was simply to slow down sufficiently to allow her to cross the road.
The backup driver in the car was apparently looking at their phone or some other device and not watching the road at the time.
"According to Uber, the developmental self-driving system relies on an attentive operator to intervene if the system fails to perform appropriately during testing. In addition, the operator is responsible for monitoring diagnostic messages that appear on an interface in the center stack of the vehicle dash and tagging events of interest for subsequent review"
She was looking at a device, yes, but not her phone.
Uber put one person on a two person job, with predictable results.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg#Distr...
The rest of my point still stands though.
Just adding this if you think we should somehow give Uber the benefit of the doubt here. They released footage from a pinhole dashcam sensor that is not used by the system, knowing fully well it would be pitch black and send the ignorant masses into a "she came out of nowhere!" chant.
Just like LIDAR would have picked up https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/297901-ntsb-autopilot-de...
And just like LIDAR would have picked up https://youtu.be/-2ml6sjk_8c?t=17
And just like LIDAR would have picked up https://youtu.be/fKyUqZDYwrU
And just like LIDAR would have picked up https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50713716
These accidents are 100% due to the decision to use a janky vision system to avoid spending $2000 on lidar; and that janky vision system failing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg
The car had LIDAR.
"the car detected the pedestrian as early as 6 seconds before the crash" [...] "Uber told the NTSB that “emergency braking maneuvers are not enabled while the vehicle is under computer control, to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior,” in other words, to ensure a smooth ride. “The vehicle operator is relied on to intervene and take action. The system is not designed to alert the operator.”" [1]
'Oh well it was very dark' is not a factor in the crash that killed Herzberg
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/24/uber-in-fatal-crash-detect...
There are many other cheaper LIDARs, even in the Velodyne lineup, but they are less capable.
(Or, more charitably, "oops, somebody forgot that object persistence is a thing" does not excuse the result)
It’s clear that a) the road is well lit and b) visibility is far, far better than the Uber video would suggest.
An ordinary human driver would have seen Elaine & taken evasive action. This death is absolutely Uber’s responsibility.
Looks like this was a hard fail for the AI then. We can say with better than 90% certainty that a human would have saved the situation, probably would have stopped or avoided easily. My mistake.
We can reasonably assume that pja is aware of the existence of abysmal drivers and fatal crashes that should not have happened. I doubt their intent was for "would" to be interpreted as "100%".
Those failures include driving straight into barriers.
Other systems like OpenPilot show the same.
When it fails you better take control of the wheel or you will crash hard.
Still seems like people treat auto-pilot like auto-drive and die as a result.
Thats not a tech fail imho
These are high risk areas, if autopilot is "failing hard" with a regularity equal to or higher than normal than this would be good to demonstrate with stats. Guessing Tesla doesn't really release that info?
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/297901-ntsb-autopilot-de...
Citation needed, as far as I know this is not true at all.
"In the 4th quarter, we registered one accident for every 3.07 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.10 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot and without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 1.64 million miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 479,000 miles."
Yes, people disengage auto-pilot (or it does so itself), but it is at least plausible to say that in this like-for-like comparison of drivers and vehicles self-driving is at least comparable in safety.
I don't know what disengagement rate is for Tesla, but we do know that early 2019 waymo it was like roughly every 11k miles driven[0]. Given that waymo uses lidar/generally considered to be closer to actual autonomy than Tesla this speaks poorly of actual autopilot safety.
[0] - https://9to5google.com/2019/02/13/waymo-self-driving-disenga...
So far there isn't any evidence for this assumption.
When a self-driving car is involved in an accident, it's in the news all over the world.
Human drivers kill or get killed every day, in every country.
Unless you're talking about getting rid of the steering wheel and deploying the current system as Level 5. In that case, yes, interventions should count against it.
Tesla was criticized quite a bit at one point for comparing deaths per Autopilot mile to deaths per all motor vehicle miles. This was a bad comparison because motor vehicles included motorcycles, as well as older, poorly-maintained cars, etc.
Then Tesla released a comparison between Autopilot miles in Teslas and human-driven miles in Teslas where Autopilot was eligible to be engaged. This felt like a much more fair comparison, but Teslas are lenient about where Autopilot can be engaged - just because the car will allow it doesn't mean many people would choose to do so in that location, so there might be some bias towards "easier" locations where Autopilot is actually engaged. There's also the potential issue of Autopilot disengaging, and then being in an accident shortly afterwards.
This is morbid, but I also wonder about the number of suicides by car that are included in the overall auto fatality statistics. If someone has decided to end their life, a car might be the most convenient way (and it might appear accidental after the fact). That would drive up the deaths-per-mile stat for human drivers, but makes it tougher for me to decide which is safer - Autopilot driving or me driving?
So, the hard failure for humans is pretty bad, too, just different. I suspect there’s little overlap on a Venn diagram of the hard failure modes for AI and humans.
For instance, I was driving on autopilot on a section of 101 where they repainted the lanes. I let autopilot do its thing...but I closely observed and kept my hand on the wheel and foot on the brakes. Lo and behold...the car positioned itself right in the shoulder and was driving towards no-man's land. If someone wasn't paying attention in this situation, it would have been catastrophic.
I can't think of any time in my life where I've almost driven my car into a no-man's land even after thousands of hours of driving, and yet every Tesla owner I know has half a dozen stories about the time Auto Pilot tried to steer them into a barrier or took a corner way too fast or suddenly braked for no reason.
I totally get the appeal of a Tesla, holy shit that acceleration is amazing, but Auto Pilot just does not seem worth it at all.
Whereas once you feel that all agency is stripped from you, it's all someone else's fault, especially if the mistakes feel alien (as in "no human would err in this specific manner").
Let's say that you can go to work by feet or by bike.
Let's also say that by feet your probability of getting killed are 1 in 1,000,000, and the commute takes 20 minutes.
On a bike, commuting takes only 10 minutes, but the probability is up to 1 in 200,000. Five times more.
You end up deciding to use the bike every day to go to work.
In this example, you decided to trade comfort (faster commute) with a slightly higher probability to end up dead.
Imagine now you need to decide whether to commute in your Tesla with or without autopilot.
Let's assume (I might be wrong) that Tesla's autopilot increases your chances of getting killed. (for simplicity, let's ignore the consequences for other people on the road).
Would you still trade comfort (not needing to drive) with a slightly higher probability to die?
In other words, as a buyer, I do care about the occupant safety rating, you are correct in that. As a road user, I also care that other people's cars consider me as irrelevant, my potential death an externality to be amortized in the purchase prize.
Probably the production versions of those models are suboptimal in different ways but work better in practice...
It's followers see no other possible solution as acceptable.
Instead of putting our heads together to make really good driver assistance technologies and being satisfied, the darn thing needs to also drive itself everywhere otherwise we're leaving something on the table! Untill we have zero deaths, we cannot stop demanding self driving - as if somehow AI is a magical solution that's always better than humans.
Forget better frame, chassis, and body panel design to protect pedestrians! We won't need them if AI never hits anyone.
Forget better braking systems that apply themselves automatically. We don't need that if AI can always avoid the need for sudden stops.
Forget seat belt enhancements since that'll just inhibit nap time in my self driving car.
No, forget it all. My car needs to drive me all by itself, everywhere I need to go, no matter how hard or impossible of a problem that is. Driver assist is boring... Level 5 is sexy, and that's what I want!
He's still a bit too optimistic for my taste.
As cool as Comma.ai is, I really believe that their approach to allowing so much community involvement with little to no oversight is highly irresponsible.
That being said.... If they do succeed, and get some sort of government approval or oversight.... You bet I'm putting that stuff back in. Its cool A.F.
Perhaps it will be limited to specific "lanes" (it will be much more palatable to the masses if it must (like cars) keep to a limited area). But it will not need to recognize pedestrians and bikers and human driven cars, and some standard will be introduced to allow all them self driving cars to talk to each other.
At that point, Level 5 will be much easier, even obvious. All he effort invested in assistive driving will seem silly.
No idea if it's even theoretically possible, but would be neat.
If we care about noise, we should be addressing the motorcycle industry. I can’t hear a C-130 flying overhead at 1000 feet when I am in my house, but I can hear motorcycles zipping by on the freeway behind my house.
Blade shape can be tuned to an extent for minimizing noise but that also reduces efficiency (not much to spare). Larger, slower turning blades are also quieter but there are practical physical limits on size and weight.
Not so sure. I saw specific designs hyped in the 80s and 90s, and know of efforts hyped in the 70s as well. The reason they always fail is because constraints of designing a car to go on land and the constraints of designing a flying machine are different. You can sorta kinda build something that does both, and people have, time and again, but it will be good at neither of those things. Well, unless we develop "antigravity" or something...
Add the possibility of huge damage caused from a failing/failing/crashing flying car, not just to the road and other cars there (like with a car) but to any building, group of people, etc. If it was a car-replacement (and thus getting on it was laxer than flying a plane, with flight plans, airport checks, special licenses), it would also be perfect for suicide terrorism too!
Here's a funny but insightful post I've found, hammering on the topic:
Listen to most discussions of flying cars on the privileged end of the geekoisie and you can count on hearing a very familiar sort of rhetoric endlessly rehashed. Flying cars first appeared in science fiction—everyone agrees with that—and now that we have really advanced technology, we ought to be able to make flying cars. QED! The thing that’s left out of most of these bursts of gizmocentric cheerleading is that we’ve had flying cars for more than a century now, we know exactly how well they work, and—ahem—that’s the reason nobody drives flying cars.
Let’s glance back at a little history, always the best response to this kind of futuristic cluelessness. The first actual flying car anyone seems to have built was the Curtiss Autoplane, which was designed and built by aviation pioneer Glen Curtiss and debuted at the Pan-American Aeronautical Exposition in 1917. It was cutting-edge technology for the time, with plastic windows and a cabin heater. It never went into production, since the resources it would have used got commandeered when the US entered the First World War a few months later, and by the time the war was over Curtiss apparently had second thoughts about his invention and put his considerable talents to other uses.
There were plenty of other inventors ready to step into the gap, though, and a steady stream of flying cars took to the roads and the skies in the years thereafter. The following are just a few of the examples. The Waterman Arrowbile on the left, invented by the delightfully named Waldo Waterman, took wing in 1937; it was a converted Studebaker car—a powerhouse back in the days when a 100-hp engine was a big deal. Five of them were built.
During the postwar technology boom in the US, Consolidated Vultee, one of the big aerospace firms of that time, built and tested the ConVairCar model 118 on the right in 1947, with an eye to the upper end of the consumer market; the inventor was Theodore Hall. There was only one experimental model built, and it flew precisely once.
The Aero-Car on the left had its first test flights in 1966. Designed by inventor Moulton Taylor, it was the most successful of the flying cars, and is apparently the only one of the older models that still exists in flyable condition. It was designed so that the wings and tail could be detached by one not particularly muscular person, and turned into a trailer that could be hauled behind the body for on-road use. Six were built.
Most recently, the Terrafugia on the right managed a test flight all of eight minutes long in 2009; the firm is still trying to make their creation meet FAA regulations, but the latest press releases insist stoutly that deliveries will begin in two years. If you’re interested, you can order one now for a mere US$196,000.00, cash up front, for delivery at some as yet undetermined point in the future.Any automotive engineer can tell you that there are certain things that make for good car design. Any aeronautical engineer can tell you that there are certain things that make for good aircraft design. It so happens that by and large, as a result of those pesky little annoyances called the laws of physics, the things that make a good car make a bad plane, and vice versa. To cite only one of many examples, a car engine needs torque to handle hills and provide traction at slow speeds, an airplane engine needs high speed to maximize propeller efficiency, and torque and speed are opposites: you can design your engine to have a lot of one and a little of the other or vice versa, or you can end up in the middle with inadequate torque for your wheels and inadequate speed for your propeller. There are dozens of such tradeoffs, and a flying car inevitably ends up stuck in the unsatisfactory middle.
Thus what you get with a flying car is a lousy car that’s also a lousy airplane, for a price so high that you could use the same money to buy a good car, a good airplane, and a really nice sailboat or two into the bargain. That’s why we don’t have flying cars. It’s not that nobody’s built one; it’s that people have been building them for more than a century and learning, or rather not learning, the obvious lesson taught by them. What’s more, as the meme above hints, the problems with flying cars won’t be fixed by one more round of technological advancement, or a hundred more rounds, because those problems are hardwired into the physical realities with which flying cars have to contend. One of the great unlearned lessons of our time is that a bad idea doesn’t become a good idea just because someone comes up with some new bit of technology to enable it.
When people insist that we’ll have flying cars sometime very soon, in other words, they’re more than a century behind the times. We’ve had flying cars since 1917. The reason that everybody isn’t zooming around on flying cars today isn’t that they don’t exist. The reason that everybody isn’t zooming around on flying cars today is that flying cars are a really dumb idea, for the same reason that it’s a really dumb idea to try to run a marathon and have hot sex at the same time.
"By 2000 or so that curve had flattened out in the usual way as PV cells became a mature technology, and almost two decades of further experience with them has sorted out what they can do and what they can’t."
In fact, PV prices have dropped DRAMATICALLY since 2000 (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014... looks at the different trends 1986-2001 and 2001-2012), as have the prices/performance of the energy storage systems needed to make them practical.
I agree that it's not a silver bullet that will solve the fossil fuel crisis all on its own (at least not in time), but it is in line with the broader improvement in renewable costs and efficiency.
Can't open this, but the abstract also shares this:
"Market-stimulating policies were responsible for a large share of PV's cost decline"
This part is artificial though (subsidies, etc).
You can get around that by using an electric transmission. A turbine drives an alternator which drives 2 sets of electric motors one for the wheels and one for the propellors. As to the rest of the post it’s attacking a straw man. I don’t think people want a highway capable car that can also fly. If you can fly why drive on the highway?
A 50k to 100k VTL ‘flying car’ with maximum cruse speed of 80 MPH, maximum altitude of 10,000 feet, a range of 500 miles, room for 2+ people, and a cargo capacity of 1,000lb including people fits most people’s definitions of a flying car. Being able to move around on the ground at say 15 to 25MPH without giant spinning blades would also be a great feature.
Oddly enough I think we already have something close to flying motorcycles in autogyros, but the closest thing to a flying car is a vanilla small flying airplane and those run you 250k new.
PS: There is even something of a jet pack alternative https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpwd-T2Qvbk
Current-resolution lidar, cameras, and radar seem to provide sufficient sensor input. The costs are too high by a long shot, but that may just be a question of getting economies of scale established. Current PC graphics hardware has sufficient bandwidth to process those sensors. I don't think you can just throw current neural net training at the problem and get Type 5 autonomy out of it - there will be lots and lots of engineering hours in figuring out what to do with that sensor data - but that's just a problem of doing many man-years of straightforward work.
Flying cars don't have adequate power from a current-gen internal combustion engine running on petroleum, and especially not enough power from lithium-ion batteries and electric motors. If you could get a power source that provided an order of magnitude or two greater power density than the best of those technologies, flying cars would be viable. Until then, no amount of engineering hours will make it work.
So essentially thousands of flying nuclear reactors piloted by average joes around the city.
That sounds really safe!
If they want to land at some point presumably they have to avoid landing on these things?
I don't think safety space is a good criterion for predicting how widespread a means of transportation will become.
A fast mode of transportation, with a large safety space requirement, may be more efficient than other modes and/or become popular.
Now if we change to flying buses we might be able to pull something off, an express bus that picks up people for a few stops in the suburb for 10 minutes, then flys at >150mph downtown is a very compelling competitor to a car and will get anybody who currently drives 20 to minutes downtown to ride if the cost is reasonable (those in closer in suburbs will still drive). I don't think the business or environmental models work out.
What really bugs me, as someone working in consulting as a hands-on backend developer with a previous background in technical consulting at an accounting Big4 (student job), is the insane amount of PR, politics and marketing talk by people who have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what they are talking about. I witnessed politicians and C-level industry people talking out of their asses to ... idk ... drive stocks? Look smart in the face of Tesla? PR? No clue.
Self-proclaimed experts in magazines and talk shows raving about how AI is going to change everything. I had colleagues telling customers about the magnificent rise of AI and none of them could even spell "gradient descent". Backed by a law or accounting degree they KNOW that self-driving is just around the corner and they are very vocal about it while easily impressed by tightly controlled demos at some international tech fair. Everyone just seems to fall into the hype trap without a single brain-byte spent on researching the actual issues and what's most sad is actual engineers/technical people not doing their due diligence and informing themselves BUT THEN GOING OUT TO TELL THEIR NON-TECHNICAL FRIENDS ABOUT THE AUTONOMOUS FUTURE. Ugh.
I held a minor internal talk at work about self-driving cars for people generally with other backgrounds but light superficial interest due to "Tesla" and "the hype". They were surprised to see that we are likely decades away from actual Level 4 (not the marketing garbage that some companies put out) because even a slight change in weather can really fuck with all systems on the roads right now.
Fair enough it's not very good - that one just went 600m - but it's hard to argue it won't exist for decades when it exists now.
And historically going form sorta works but is rubbish in info tech eg. early cellphones, internet and so on - to works well doesn't seem to take that long. Five to ten years perhaps typically.
In reality, it seems like it would resolve quickly - you get out and yell at them, call the police if that doesn't work, etc. But it can get more sinister - criminals _already_ block the road to force drivers out of their car to rob them[1][2]. Now, if you know that might happen, you can just drive around the obstacle. Unless, of course, you're in a self-driving car where you might not even be able to get it to do a u-turn. Related issues would be areas where the practical advice is "don't stop" - not even at red lights - if you're there late at night due to the risk of car jacking[3][4] (this might be out-of-date now, to be fair). Can rules like that be encoded into a self-driving car?
OK, yes, you probably could find a way to do it. But that's almost certainly just the tip of the iceberg in terms of "ways people will fuck with self-driving cars" and "things people do that are technically illegal but still safer than the alternative." Could you solve enough of those in 5-10 years, _on top of_ making self-driving cars work in sun/rain/snow/fog/night/tornados/etc safely and consistently? I think that's very unlikely. Decades seems far more likely to me.
[1] https://abc7chicago.com/593111/
[2] (Non-EU only) https://wgntv.com/2015/03/31/robbers-set-up-fake-road-blocks...
[3] https://eu.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/201...
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskLEO/comments/2rzsdz/are_there_an...
It seems like it would take an endless list to cover every new edge case. Our technology is a amazing, but I almost think the edge case is places where autonomous driving makes sense.
The thing I trust the least is the operators they want to put in these cars. They better be completely autonomous, self-maintaining, and somehow tamper-proof. It's a really tall order, which I hope we do fulfill one day. But maybe I'm a pessimist, and they have it all figured out already.
Re all the edge cases - yeah that'll take a while.
Ther is always a way.
You can certainly have all the cameras that you need but if the bad guys have their faces covered and identifying marks hidden then you're not going to be able to do much.
I'm pretty sure there is an early scene in the movie Solar Crisis[1] that plays out similarly to what you're describing. This movie was on one of the cable movie channels when I was growing up, so I got a higher-than-normal dose of it.
I don't remember a cow, though (but then this probably isn't the only sci-fi movie out there with such a scene). I think one of the characters first parked a motorcycle in the road, but the truck plowed through it. After that, they stood in the road instead, and that caused the truck to screech to a stop right in front of them, blasting a message on a PA about how they were breaking the law by impeding it.
Going from early cellphones to smartphones was an engineering problem. All the technology was already available and it was a case of putting it all together in a way that worked and that could be manufactured at scale and for profit.
With vehicle autonomy, the problem is that we don't know how to create autonomous AI agents yet, so we don't know how to make a car driven by such an agent. Claims of level 4 autonomy should, at this point, be treated like claims of teleportation or time-travelling back in time: theoretically possible but we don't know how to make it happen in practice.
An other handicap for self-driving cars is that the problem is effectively harder at the start when the majority of the traffic will still be operated by human drivers who are a lot harder to predict reliably than an other autonomous vehicles.
Beyond that, I strongly believe that software engineering is still ridiculously immature and unable to deliver safe, reliable solutions without strong hardware failovers. We have countless examples of this. We simply don't have the maturity yet, we're still figuring out what type of screwdrivers we should use and whether a hammer could do the trick.
The visual recognition needed is well beyond the systems today.
It probably made a lot of sense in the Southern California design center. In Upstate New York, that camera is covered in road spray and salt, and my brain cannot see anything or act effectively without cleaning it. Even after doing that, it will get dirty again after a few minutes of driving.
I’d guess that a least a few dozen people will hurt by this decision.
Take this problem to the self-driving car and things get even worse. You’re going to have a lot of problems with sensor effectiveness that cannot be magically fixed with software.
I was waiting for my bus to work one morning after a large snowfall. The snow clearing crews were hard at work, but the street was effectively blocked by piles of snow, men, and machines.
Yet, my bus arrived on time *driving down the sidewalk".
I am not sure how any self-driving system could have figured that out :)
Something like half your human brain is devoted to visual processing.
There's a tendency to think that things like language is what makes the human brain special, or our ability to plan or think abstractly, and we talk about things like "eagle eyes", but the truth is humans are seeing machines with most everything else as an afterthought.
The reason your cat will attack paint spots on glass for hours and flips the hell out about laser pointers is because their visual systems are too simple to distinguish between those and the objects that actually interest them, like insects.
Vision is not the easy part of AI.
I think it is, actually. Going from raw pixels to objects is the (relatively speaking) easy part. It's the next part (using that for planning and common-sense reasoning) that's the hard part. Machine learning has already advanced past humans in this regard for many classes of problems - which is part of the reason why captchas are getting so hard.
This was several years ago, hence the move away from obfuscated text (which was getting harder and harder to read): https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/artificial-intelligence/...
I'd be surprised if basic perception tasks as human-ness tests last more than a few more years.
Why? It never exceeded consumer expectations, which are extremely high for automated systems. Even a correctness rate of 99.9% means multiple errors per day for most people. Consumers expected approximately zero errors, despite not being able to achieve that themselves, sometimes even with their own handwriting!
Because handwriting is made by humans, there is some percentage of it that simply cannot be reliably recognized at all. But people hold that against computers more than other people because computers are supposed to be labor saving devices.
Likewise because roads are made by people, and other cars are driven by people, so a self driving car will never be able to be perfectly safe. But that is essentially what advocates are promising.
That’s especially true if people expect the same level of convenience, especially in terms of time. People speed and take risks all the time when driving, in the name of saving time. I think it’s likely that an autonomous car optimized for safety would also be a car that just takes a lot longer to get anywhere with.
Speed matters. It’s a big reason we all use touch keyboards on our phones instead of handwriting recognition.
The only handwriting recognition system which ever worked correctly with a low error rate was Palm Graffiti. It forced the user to learn a new shorthand writing style designed specifically to avoid errors.
I think this supports the grandparent's point about using the actual strokes, including angle and azimuth, to reconstruct intent.
I was also fairly proficient with Graffiti, back in the day, but I consider that an input method, not handwriting recognition. I was facile with T9 as well.
Because it asked users to learn a new way of writing, when the recognition failed, users were more likely to blame themselves, like, "Oh, I must have not done that Graffiti letter right, I'll try again."
But when it came to recognizing regular (i.e. natural) handwriting, users believed inherently (i.e. somewhat unconsciously) that they already knew how to write, and the machine was new, so mistakes were the machine's fault.
There is little market demand for handwriting recognition, and thus little active research goes into it. Not because it is a difficult or problematic technology, but because better alternatives exist that make it irrelevant.
Even if someone were to come up with an absolutely perfect handwriting recognition system, most people wouldn't use it. Why? because the advent of multi-touch screens means that most people can type much faster than they can hand-write anyway.
What changed was that touch screens became better. The old capacitive touch screens were clunky, slow, inaccurate. You could put a keyboard on them, but the lag and poor accuracy meant you couldn't really touch type comfortably. Then multitouch came along and made on-screen keyboards much more responsive and accurate.
But also, Blackberry and (pre-smartphone) phones with SMS made people more comfortable with the idea of using keyboards for text entry on handheld devices. And crucially, auto-correct and predictive text entry covered up for accuracy errors and made text entry by keyboard even more attractive.
Excellent point, stealing that. I work in automotive and an engineer, traveled around the world, think the realistic possibility of self driving cars without major changes in how we make roads, everywhere, is extremely low.
This is a glorious Gibson-esq turn of phrase that I hope goes down in history and is picked up in common vernacular.
Back on topic: The more I know about technology the less I want it or trust it to work. I assume this is similar to Pilots not wanting somebody else to fly, or surgeons not wanting to go under the knife.
We know, that we don't know enough about autonomous driving. Instead of the 'unwashed masses' saying "gee-whiz that is cool", we think "this isn't ready yet!"
And you know what? It's wonderful. It really is. I am free to look around and see other people on the freeway. They look so bored. So tired. So used up. Meanwhile my wife and I, we turn on the careoke machine and sing our way to the destination. It is absolutely the way to go. You can take my Tesla and its AP functions out of my cold dead hands. Maybe that's how I go, and I'm alright with it.
I have seen this too much. People who have a deep understanding of how things work are busy learning and doing. People who can spent their energy with politics and marketing can do it because they are not busy learning and doing. I which there was a solution for this. Corporate IT departments are particularly full of this.
(I mean the ones who have been successfully marketed to here, not the marketers).
I got out by never really getting in I am afraid. I worked for 1.5 years in technical consulting as a student job while getting my informatics degree.
Once I obtained my degree, I declined an offer by said Big4 firm and took another offer where I got to go hands-on with coding. I had previous coding experience which helped and then amazing colleagues who boosted my start.
It is also completely bonkers, as it makes bold assertions about the real world, with which reality will eventually disagree, whereas older religions tended to keep their most dogmatic positions unfalsifiable (the afterlife, the soul, vague prophecies, ...)
It is clearly a goal and a realistic one within even a few decades pessimisitcally given that its ability is creeping upwards.
There’s lots of proof that autonomous vehicles are technically possible, but the leap to “definitely better than humans” is a very big one and it’s really being taken on faith right now.
In contrast, treating disease directly affect the incidence of that disease.
But I have a hard time believing that the technology is anywhere close to being mature. You need a lot of contextual knowledge to drive safely in unusual circumstances. I totally believe that within well-defined limits, AI already outperforms humans, but traffic has no well-defined limits. Anything can happen.
I'm bearish on both self-driving and the universal adoption of electric cars, but everyone will be plugging their car in at home long before they can make one that drives itself to the gas station.
Absolutely not. Having to wait for hours to get a few kms of driving distance is way too much of a friction point for EVs to ever be more than a novelty, in addition to the usual complaints of people with only street parking, garages without outlets, etc. Either we'll get the battery-swap situation rolling or invent a faster charging tech, but either way there'll be some sort of "station" in the picture.
I realize that a lot of people here are privileged enough to own a single family home, but the majority of humanity lives in apartments and parks on the street. Trickle-charging at home is not a universal solution. The only practical solution seems to be some form of rapid charging of the car's energy storage. Either by pumping huge amounts of amps into a huge battery pack, or adding some kind of chemical fuel that gets reacted in an internal combustion engine or a fuel cell.
At the moment, policy in Amsterdam is that if you own an electric car, you get a charging point in your street. I don't know how fast those are, but they don't have to be fast. They're still useful for overnight charging, especially if the city continues to add more when more people get electric cars. I don't understand the argument that this is not in any way a solution. It is.
Not sure that's what the self-driving cars proponents envisioned though.
This is Uber's endgame - get humans out of the loop. As long as cars still need human drivers this cost savings can't be realized.
> Forget better braking systems that apply themselves automatically.
This already exists: Mercedes, for example, first rolled out "Active Brake Assist" to a production model in 1996. Moreover any fully self driving vehicle will definitely need to be able to apply the brakes.
I think the manufactures will sell cars to those want to run a taxi company. This is, and will remain a race to the bottom because competition is fierce: people buy price and first to get to them.
They will also sell cars to normal people. Most people don't think about how convenient it is to have the storage of their personal car. If parking is free or cheap (which is it in the suburbs) having your golf clubs in the trunk or a spare diaper in the glove box are worth the little extra cost, not to mention your car is always there so no need to wait for the taxi to in busy times.
Of course there is also the city, but if you live in a city self driving cars still suffer from congestion and so public mass transit still has big advantages. In fact because the self driving taxi is spending time empty waiting for the next rider it adds to the problem meaning for even more people public transit is worth the hassles with it (which in turn means more demand to make transit better)
On the way something like UberPool would be needed. Or the taxi can just drive me to the nearest train station and I can take mass transit into the city.
A self-driving car is software and hardware... you can sell hardware but software only gets licensed. Software is really where the value is, and that won’t be owned by anyone but the company that made it.
Look at the history of mobile phones, which were originally sold to consumers only by the carriers. As the phones got better and better software, the business model attached more and more to the manufacturer.
A switch from 20/80 to 80/20 is transformative, changes the default attitude and has further societal effects.
Like parking or more specifically - not parking. Here's an example development: "And parking clocks in at a full 29% of the developed land here, taking up twice as much total space as the actual buildings."
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/2/6/movie-set-urban...
Not to mention sending a car out for errands. Self driving will free up parking garages, but fill up the roads.
I doubt it. One of the biggest obstacles you have is families and the need for infant car and child booster seats. Car ownership is here to stay for a while.
It does require some planning (and some support from the service providers) but it's definitely a solvable issue, if the people would want to do that, then it can be arranged.
As a passenger, there is no difference to me whether my car/bus/train is self-driving or not. As long as I'm not driving, it doesn't matter if a meat, or a silicon neural network operates it.
Given the above, how does this make self-driving a transformative technology?
Because that's the law... and...
> They don't even try Level 5 for now
That's not what Elon has been telling us for years... Full Level 5 is just months away!
When you have thousands of machines traveling in close proximity at speeds exceeding 50mph there will be deaths, this is unavoidable. We need to reduce those as much as possible but to demand ZERO before the technology can be used is just unrealistic
That said, Just because some people are working towards Level 5, does not mean all of the other things you are asking for are not also being worked on, it is not a zero sum game. There are enough people that we can have teams working on both.
This complaint is repeated for everything, "Well if people were not working on X drug that I don't care about they could cure cancer"
We can have a better braking system, better frames, etc AND still try to achieve level 5 autonomous driving. It is not an either-or proposition
How do we go about testing this? By tallying up autonomous deaths until there are fewer per year than human drivers?
>We need to reduce those as much as possible but to demand ZERO before the technology can be used is just unrealistic
Human driver skill varies immensely by person. The idea that anyone who is (or even considers themselves to be) a "good" driver will never accept "average death rates" as a risk when getting in an autonomous car. I know I wouldn't.
The goal has to be zero or it will never be accepted by the public.
What will happen is human-controlled cars will become $$$$$$ to ensure once Level 5 is better than humans. At that point, if you can afford it sure you can reject it but get out your wallet
Real life and ideals are different thing. You can't promise that accidents will never happen. But you can promise that accidents will be substantially reduced.
In the US, about 35k people die per year from motor vehicle related deaths. If you get it down to 10k, then that would be a major success. Of course, you will still be fine tuning until you could get below 1000 and as close to 0 as possible.
If we were actually serious about reducing motor vehicle deaths, we would mandate that every car be equipped with a breathalyzer device. No fancy new technology is necessary, and there's plenty of low-hanging fruit (Impaired driving) that we can deal with.
For some reason, though, the religion of autonomous driving does not consider this as a solution to minimizing road fatalities.
On average, humans are actually pretty good at not dying in motor vehicle related accidents - or avoiding them altogether, given the sheer number of miles traveled per day in the US.
That, however, just isn't the narrative Self-driving followers want everyone to know.
Also at the very least an self-driving car should reach the level of a good driver, having self-driving cars cause as many deaths as drunk or inattentive drivers do nowadays isn't defensible. Especially since there's usually no explanation and nobody to hold accountable.
Well, one of the issues is that someone more or less has to be held accountable. And that someone pretty much has to be the manufacturer. No one is going to hand over full control to a vehicle and accept the responsibility if that vehicle commits vehicular manslaughter because "software isn't perfect."
It's actually an interesting legal situation because, other than maybe drug side effects, there aren't a whole lot of consumer products which, properly used and maintained, sometimes randomly kill people and we're OK with that because sometimes stuff just happens.
Who's responsible if you get pulled over for going 75 in a 65 mph zone?
And a scenario we can easily imagine is that a buggy update goes out to the whole fleet overnight that starts killing people all over the place.
The common case of accidents being on par with manual human driving goes out the window until the software is rolled back and for 12 hours, 24 hours, however long, we get a number of deaths that far outpaces what humans are capable of. The "worst case" would never apply to a manual/human population as a whole, at once.
But wait, isn't that exactly why they are now in such a rush and cannot accept anything less than full autonomy?
From what I heard, Uber has been burning billions of VC money to capture market share. And their model just won't work financially if they need to pay drivers a living wage. So they attempted trickery to pay them less as "independent" contractors, but now that governments are stepping in to prevent that, there is only one option left:
Uber needs self-driving cars or else they'll go bankrupt.
At least, that's my theory.
I believe it--at least, I hope it would take an existential threat to make them push kludged-together pedestrian-killers into use on the roads.
An Uber driver is the very definition of an independent contractor. Many drivers also drive for Lyft. How can they be “employees” of Uber while also driving Lyft? Or doing Door Dash?
If Uber drivers were employees, they would have to work where and when assigned. As it is now, Uber drivers come and go as they please.
I am not sure how an Uber driver is any different than a freelance journalist or musician.
Just follow the money. The near future financials of companies like Uber and Lyft (and to a lesses extent Tesla), rely on fully autonomous self driving.
That said, there are legitimate issues with incrementally improving assistive driving. People text and drive today without assistive driving. If a car can mostly make its way in rush hour down the highway autonomously, does anyone think that people won't routinely watch Netflix on their commute?
I suspect it's because it's less interesting to the demographic that's more concerned about being driven to and from bars on their night out or who just don't want to own a car period. But highway driving seems like a huge convenience and safety enhancement even if you just punt on city driving for at least the next few decades.
Most car manufacturers have had this figured out for a long time with crumple zones and the like.
> Forget better braking systems that apply themselves automatically
Assisted braking technology is already implemented in some cars. Hell, Tesla implements basically exactly what you're asking for...
> Forget seat belt enhancements since that'll just inhibit nap time in my self driving car.
Teslas don't let you sleep in your car, you have to move the steering wheel periodically to prove you're still paying attention or it'll pull over and shut down.
Also, I'm not quite sure what you're expecting seat belt enhancements to be.
Far be it for me to defend the AI hype, but your "things we should be focusing on instead" don't make much sense when we ARE focusing on them.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/oct/07/a-deadly-prob...
1. Front crash test. Procedure: Crash car into stationary barrier at 35 mph. Is also applicable to face-to-face crash with car of same size, going at same speed.
2. Side crash test. Procedure: Slam concrete block into side of stationary car at 38.5 mph.
3. Side pole test. Procedure: Drag car sideways towards a pole.
4. Rollover resistance. Procedure: Compare the cars footprint to the height of the center of gravity.
The biggest thing to notice is that not one of these metrics involves pedestrians. Metrics 1-3 can be easily improved by making a bigger car, elevating the passengers and providing more crumple room. Metric 4 is unaffected, as the track width is increased to compensate.
If a low sedan hits a pedestrian, the pedestrian rolls over the car, having a lower impulse given over a longer period of time. If a high SUV hits a pedestrian, the pedestrian is knocked back, having a higher impulse given over a shorter period of time. Safety ratings need to account for the danger cars pose to others.
Source: https://www.nhtsa.gov/ratings
Source (SSF): https://www.safetyresearch.net/rollover-stability
In the U.S. at least, pedestrian safety concerns mainly affect prescriptive legislation (i.e. no pop up headlights). Some countries and blocs have testing similar to crash tests, but I'm not really sure how effective something like that is: any meaningful standard would need to have exceptions for different categories of vehicle. Though honestly I can't see that much can be done about pedestrian safety once your vehicle is colliding with a human being.
> I can't see that much can be done about pedestrian safety once your vehicle is colliding with a human being.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrian_safety_through_vehi...
I don't agree, there some definitive choices in car design that affect the aftermath of the collision that can have effect on the pedestrian surviving. As pointed above if a pedestrian is hit by a car he has a better chance to roll over the hood of the car vs an SUV where the pedestrian would probably would be hit and fall under the car.
Obviously no one is going to survive if you hit them at 70, but you can make a big difference in the 25-35 region that is the normal speed where there are a lot of people around.
> Forget better braking systems that apply themselves automatically. We don't need that if AI can always avoid the need for sudden stops.
> Forget seat belt enhancements since that'll just inhibit nap time in my self driving car.
Source? I never seen anyone arguing theses things for the sake of self driving. Are you just assuming that because people that want self driving really want self driving and the auto industry couldn't possible works on 2 things at the same time?
example: stop-and-go traffic - instead we could unlock millions of hours of human productivity (or provide entertainment).
example: self-parking and come-to-me, esp in closed garages. Parallel parking is hard for humans and we're poor at space utilization.
example: environments where obstructions are unlikely... airplanes have had auto-pilot for a long time... why not highway 80 in the middle of nowhere? why not trucks queuing to load/unload containers at port (or conference centers) - just drive up your incoming truck, grab your personal effects and take over the next outgoing truck while it queues for hours delivering a load and getting the next load.
There's lots of uses for self driving vehicles even before we deal with the hard cases. But they're not sexy and of course a tiny fraction of the labor savings and freedom-making.
You don’t get a stalled car on a Victor airway in the sky. You also don’t have to worry about obstacle avoidance for the most part, in the sky. If an aviation autopilot can’t hold the altitude or heading (such as in turbulence or in mountain up and downdrafts,) it will simply keep the wings level. Airplane autopilots follow explicit instructions: fly heading 143 at 14000 feet; descend at 500 fpm. Hold over a VOR using 1 minute legs at 200kts.
A car autopilot on the other hand, has to react to the physical surroundings. Not only “follow the I-10 at 75mph,” but also, watch out for incoming traffic, lane closures, or some kid on a bicycle that wanders into the road, or a dead animal in the road, or wet roads, icy roads, etc. There is no such thing as Instrument Flight Rules for driving, meaning a car autopilot has to be aware of the visual, while an airplane doesn’t: it just flies the precise route programmed without any awareness that the route might fly through a flock of geese. An airplane autopilot will fly you right into the ground if you let it. There is a lot of skill and training around airplane autopilot, and while it’s amazing and useful, it’s a lot more than simply turning it on and it flies you automatically to Denver.
Frame and chassis have never been safer and manufacturers continue to improve. Many (most) new cars have automatic emergency braking that continue to improve. New cars seem to have an ever increasing number of air bags to protect passengers.
All these things are happening at the same time that self-driving is taking place. Tesla FWIW is pretty good at all the above despite their focus on self driving as well.
I agree it is just as ridiculous to say we need level 5 to be make something useful. Will it be decades before we have cars without steering wheels? Sure, maybe even longer. But what exists is already pretty great in most environments and only getting better. (IE, crawling along in a traffic jam at ~15mph is something I would really love to never do again and it seems self driving systems can handle this with aplomb these days)
For example, we could have embedded special markers (or spikes with RFID, or more active wireless, or any number of things that could have provided far more accurate lane detection as long as we were willing to require some up-front work to deploy it for special routes. Combined with very reliable lane detection and restricted to specific deployed areas where it could be tested, computer vision and/or radar/lidar for vehicle and large object detection (which would be mostly sufficient for most highway/freeway use) could likely provide a very safe system. The lower requirements for achieving safety might mean we could actually get some busses outfitted as well.
But that would require some actual state action, as no private company would (or should, if they were to keep it proprietary at least) deploy along large stretches of highway freeway. Covering I-5 from Northern California to Southern California would provide many opportunities, but be an enormous cost.
for cars to be safe for drivers and riders, we need to optimize two things and strip away the rest (especially an over-reliance on technology as savior):
1. minimize distraction and maximize attention on the act of driving 2. maximize the skill of the driver in controlling the vehicle in all sorts of (unexpected) conditions
technology can actually reduce safety, either because it allows drivers to pay less attention or it lowers the skill bar. driver assist technologies--lane assist or automatic braking--fall into this category.
that's not to say safety technologies shouldn't continue to be developed--structural crash safety improvements, for example, don't have the same detrimental effects on driver attention or skill (with the caveat that ever-increasing weights can decrease control and increase lethality).
it's important to distinguish technological advancements that acually improve safety rather than our perceptions of it.
Self-driving is only as hyped as it is due to the futuristic lure of the idea.
0: https://youtu.be/6owYPHpmDLU 1: https://www.autoblog.com/2017/12/13/patent-gm-external-airba...
I would never call myself an engineer, although I have worked in environments where there were lots of engineers (not in the software world) and one definition of "engineering" that I heard was:
"Meeting the requirements while doing as little new as possible"
There's just something dubious about how it seems like you consistently find mistakes and problems in these papers. I'd be stunned if there was any expert that wasn't aware of the shortcomings of using a kernel that's as small as 3x3.
Another thing, just the time alone needed to evaluate technology the way they are talking about sounds quite staggering.
I try new technologies all the time to get a sense of where it is in coming to fruition. I think what you mean is, you’re more skeptical of claims.
The same way you claim you can’t learn anything about NY in your bathroom, you don’t know anything about Tesla or Self-driving if you haven’t tried it. You should at least test drive it under controlled conditions where you feel comfortable before closing yourself off completely.
Who cares what the car does under controlled conditions? I'm sure the manufacturer did exactly that in their testing. Even when they test on public roads, there's a hands-off safety driver behind the wheel, who is paid to be on the lookout and sufficiently alert to take over in case of an unexpected excursion. (Unless the self-driving car under test is from Uber, in which case the safety driver simply watches video on their phone. Too soon?)
This is nowhere near how these cars are used in the real world. The real world is not a set of "controlled conditions", so any comfort one builds up in such a situation is merely a false sense of security.
> [...] where you feel comfortable before closing yourself off completely.
So, here's the thing: I'm comfortable driving myself. I don't get distracted, I use good judgment, I consistently prioritize the safety of my vehicle's occupants over everything else. I know exactly how flawed self-driving cars are, and how far behind the curve of my driving skill they will remain within my lifespan. That's the sum total of everything I need to know, and no amount of "controlled conditions" demos will change my mind.
P.S.: If you're from the future and you're reading this because I got mowed down by a self-driving car: ha ha! Joke's on me.
Maybe not today, not tommorrow, but maybe six months in the future when the weather and road conditions happen to be just precisely right to confuse the system at just the most dangerous time.
In the meantime I will just read/watch the stories of people more trusting than me about how well the technology works, and currently those stories don't fill me with confidence.
IMO, this is currently dangerous technology that should not be allowed on the road at all.
Common-sense tells me that these half-self-driving systems are dangerous.
I would like to see a study that tested the reaction times of a person who sits doing nothing for a hour and then is suddenly expected to take evasive maneuvers, versus a sober - or even a drunk - driver who is actually driving the car continuously.
Then have an opinion, otherwise it’s like reading about NYC and saying you hate it because you read the reviews.
Of course I can have an opinion without going for a ride in one, and that opinion is that I don't trust it and I won't "experience it".
It's far more janky and susceptible to confusion than Tesla makes it out to be in its marketing, and the reality is that people simply do not pay as much attention as they are required to when using it because Tesla has convinced them it's magic that's safer than anything else on the road.
I have a Tesla, I usually use autopilot for highway traffic only, summon it like a valet to where I am in my parking lot, and not have to idle in hot and cold weather.
I agree, I wouldn’t use it for local roads and unclear highways, but isn’t this what they tell you? I don’t think they ever tell you that it’s full self driving right now. Also, I’ve experienced it being janky but over time it’s improved dramatically.
As a car and efficiency enthusiast, I totally try to keep my gasoline powered car from idling unnecessarily.
But what does "idling" mean in the context of a 100% electric car?
It can drive by itself from where it's parked to where you are?
From your description, I was thinking more of something like waiting at the entrance to a public carpark and the car comes to you.
This is called smart summon. It can turn, reverse. It’s not perfect and if you know it’s limitations you can manipulate it so that it works 99.999% of the time
I’ve been similarly untrusting of a lot of “high tech” approaches to various things, and I derive a lot of joy from products/services/etc that take a “back to basics” or at least minimally- or non-digital philosophy. In particular: I have an affinity for automatic watches and carbureted motorcycles.
If nothing else, it’s a bit of a break from what feels like a constant struggle to keep all the gears turning at work.
BUT... I’ll confess I’m also a sucker for innovations / the occasional new hotness. I recently upgraded a Kawasaki KLR650 (a competent but... “well tested”, shall we say? motorcycle) in favor of KTM’s top-of-the-line adventure bike. The technology difference between the two (despite only 3 model years between them) is incredible: the latter adds 5x the power, ride-by-wire, cruise control, lean-sensitive ABS/traction control, an up/down-capable quickshifter, probably a thousand other improvements.
One day, about 1100 miles into owning the new bike, the dash pops up a low tire pressure warning from the tire pressure monitoring system. It showed the rear pressure was fairly low, and sure enough, I’d picked up a small screw between the treads.
Certainly a TPMS is nothing compared to anything self-driving, but honestly it was a bit of a wake-up call — I WANT systems on my bike to increase my safety level.
I’m not really sure what the lesson is here. Maybe “Look for the middle grounds (the ABS/TPMS-maturity systems) between ancient technology (anything on my beloved KLR) and bleeding edge (non-replicable papers on self-driving cars)”? Seems like this holds up ok, especially as a consumer of those techs... But maybe not for the innovators?
Can't find it now but there was a poignant quote or anecdote I read the other day that expresses this exact sentiment - the more you know about technology, the less likely you are to use it. I think it was in the context of e.g. smart homes and voice assistants or online tracking - if you're aware of how much data they hoover up and what can be done with that, you'd be Very Afraid.
Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!
Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
https://biggaybunny.tumblr.com/post/166787080920/tech-enthus... (via foxrob92)
However, by saying "AI is stochastical gradient descent optimization" you're equating AI with Machine Learning/Deep Learning.
The list of AI technologies also includes things like Artificial Life, Genetic Algorithms, Biological Systems Modeling, and Semantic Reasoning.
I suspect that when we get true AI, i.e. Strong AI or Artificial General Intelligence, we will achieve it through a combination of these techniques made to work together.
Why don’t we work on drones that pick us up and take us places to really leap ahead, get out of traffic, and do something amazing?
Cars driving themselves? How incremental.
But for other things like the original iPhone, sometimes new tech is just better than whats out their even if there will always been some flaws in the first versions
Exactly my thoughts when reading about the blended wing aeroplane, yesterday.
I don't find this to be the case with most ML researchers. Is it possible you have misunderstood some of these papers? It is, after all, hard to jump straight into a new field.
> The second paper converted float to bool and then tried to use the gradient for training.
This sounds like binarized neural networks. If that's the case, they keep the activation before binarization to use for backpropegation.
> The third paper only used a 3x3 pixel neighborhood for learning long-distance moves.
A single layer of 3x3 convolutions would not be able to model long-distance moves. But I have not read a single paper where they have only used one layer. Is it possible they stacked multiple conv + pooling layers? The receptive field of each unit higher up in the stack grows pretty large in the end.
Going through that experience has 1000% made me more weary of autonomous vehicles.
Only when comparing aggregate statistics. Not all humans are equally (un)safe drivers; insurance rates vary based on driving record for good reason.
I also don’t get how everyone is forgiving him for being on his phone, in a construction zone no less. Reckless driving is reckless driving, being an Apple Engineer and Tesla owner doesn’t somehow negate that he was being a belligerent driver.
And, Autopilot being a technology that, among other things, enables (or even encourages) idiotic behavior, there's real risk that placing too much blame on the driver's choices lulls us into an attitude that enables the next idiot to kill themselves and/or someone else.
This guy was on his phone in a construction zone and crashed because of his lack of intervention, using a driving assist feature doesn’t somehow absolve him from being so preoccupied that his vehicle veered off the road and into a wall. Imagine if instead of him dying he had killed a construction worker; I have no doubt a jury would find him guilty of manslaughter. When you get into the driver’s seat of a car you are taking on responsibility for a death machine. I find it troubling that this conversation is happening at all, the blame should be put squarely on his shoulders.
Iff the car suddenly slammed the wheel to the side causing him to lose control or became unresponsive to his inputs, that would be another matter. But this could have been prevented if he wasn’t being grossly negligent of the risk he was partaking in behind the wheel.
(Unless you're plaintiff's counsel, of course.)
This is maybe one of the most important lessons of the 20th and 21st centuries (at least thus far): knowledge does not automatically prevent us from errors in judgments nor does it necessarily protect us from misfortune.
Relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/795/
I was in this very situation at the top of Pikes Peak. A storm moved in and the park rangers closed the place and sent everybody away. They knew the statistics of being hit by lightning in that very place.
Frankly the whole point of automated control is to reduce this kind of mistake fatality, and... I mean, it's working. This was a tragedy for sure, but it was also fully two years ago. These events haven't been recurring, it's likely the specific proximate causes have been addressed, and by all reckoning these systems (while still not flawless!) are at or above parity with alert human drivers in terms of safety.
Basically, I read the same facts you do and take the opposite conclusion. People make bad risk/reward decisions all the time, so we need to take them out of the loop to the extent practical.
(Definitely not singling out Apple here.. at IBM I had a coworker who was in an accident during a phone meeting- luckily non-fatal).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2020/02/11/tel...
> Records from an iPhone recovered from the crash site showed that Huang may have been using it before the accident. Records obtained from AT&T showed that data had been used while the vehicle was in motion, but the source of the transmissions couldn't be determined, the NTSB wrote. One transmission was less than one minute before the crash.
For all we know, that could mean he had spotify on.
Anyhow, "he was worried about it" is no reason to shift the blame to him.
Also:
> Recovered phone logs show that a strategy game called “Three Kingdoms” was “active during the driver’s trip to work,” the NTSB said. Investigators said the log data “does not provide enough information to ascertain” whether Huang “was holding the phone or how interactive he was,” though it said “most players have both hands on the phone to support the device and manipulate game actions.” Huang’s data usage was “consistent” with online game activity “about the time of the crash,” according to the NTSB.
Or does Tesla allow you to set the speed?
I have a Tesla and there are definitely problem areas. You learn them fairly quickly when you are taking the same route all the time and you’re trained to either turn off autopilot or at least be alert when going through those areas. Or maybe you test it out with your hands on the wheel ready to take over to see if they fixed the bug.
There were a couple spots on my normal driving routes where the car would inexplicably swerve. It happened one time in each spot and that was enough. Both those spots have been fixed since, but there’s no way I’d be on my phone not paying attention driving through there. I’m still cautious. There are two more spots where the car will brake to 45 mph on the highway and then speed back up after a few hundred feet. I am always on high alert around there and usually won’t even use autopilot in those areas.
It's a well known phenomenon that the more you automate away routine tasks, the harder it is for the driver to stay alert and take over in non-routine situations. My understanding is that airplane pilots are specifically trained in strategies to avoid falling into that trap.
Isn't holding the wheel always required now in Tesla's autopilot?
ML is only one part of 'AI'
There is a saying where all software (security) engineers dont have IOT or any "Smart" devices in their home.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/34.868683 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.8.9...
However, safe self driving is coming, slowly but surely (I work at a company which produces tech for these guys). The hyped companies are in trouble, but car OEM's, partnered with companies you've never heard of, are making slow, steady progress, all the while being subject to government functional safety requirements, particularly in the US and EU. There is zero chance that a Tesla or GM car will be allowed to fully self drive, so no matter how advanced these systems are, they're sold as level 2 systems requiring driver oversight and qualify as cruise control in regulations.
Today, we have full autonomy in some truck routes (only as proofs of concept), in ship yards, parking shuttles, mining equipment, quarry trucks, etc, places where the problem domain is more constrained. Generalized self driving is a ways off, but by the time you can make use of it, it will be safe, it just won't come from Tesla or Cruise or Uber.
I remember going with a friend on a Tesla test drive. He was eager to try the Autopilot system. And within a few minutes we got freaked out with what seem to us as unpredictable action and we turned it off.
I think the engineer should have never relied on it. Especially if he had concerns with the system.
At the same time, "Autopilot" is misleading and Tesla does own responsibility here. Even if it's purely a marketing term it's designed to up sell you on a half-baked technology.
They should call it "Driver assist" or something like "cruise control plus".
It's a heartbreaking story.
Tesla should put Lidar in their Semi Trucks. Since they'll be constantly driving the whole country, they would have a lot of regularly updated scan data that they could deploy to their lower price point vehicles that only have cameras.
Otherwise they're the same. Except Tesla's keeps getting better with each update and GM stays the same until you take it in to the shop...
Over the air software upgrades are supported by GM.
"When the work is done, an over the air software update will turn it back on."
https://www.wired.com/story/cadillac-super-cruise-ct6-lidar-...
Current estimates of AutoPilot miles driven is ~ 2 billion miles. [1]
That's 400x the number of miles driven under AutoPilot. I think it mainly comes down to number of vehicles. SuperCruise is only availble on CT6 which sells about 1,000 vehicles a quarter, and not all trims even have SuperCruise. The CT5 is supposed to be offered with SuperCruise eventually in 2020, but that just went on-sale without SuperCruise, and sales figures seem to indicate it is selling extremely slowly.
If you look on YouTube it's virtually impossible to find a SuperCruise video of just an owner taking it for a drive offering their thoughts. There are dealer demos, or pro car reviewer demos, but nothing remotely like the thousands of AutoPilot videos.
You'll encounter an AP driving Tesla multiple times a day in major cities. You may never have driven along side SuperCruise. We'll see if Cadillac can deploy the feature more widely. They promised all vehicles in 2020 will offer it as an option but it doesn't look like it's going to happen.
"According to GM president Mark Reuss, the feature will be available as an option on 22 vehicles by 2023, with seven vehicles getting the feature next year and 12 more in 2022 and 2023."
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a30795396/gm-super-cruise-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopilot
> Autopilots do not replace human operators, but instead they assist them in controlling the vehicle.
Names don't really mean anything, it could have been named anything. If people think it's 99% reliable and it's convenient, they will use it.
From what I've seen, the general public has an inaccurate perspective on airplane autopilot systems. Loads of people think pilots simply push a button then sit back and relax as the plane automatically taxis, takes off, flies then lands itself.
In choosing to name their technology after another technology which the general public has misconceptions about, Tesla chose to inherit those misconceptions.
Edit: I'm surprised there is any incredulity here, I've been hearing people say "planes basically fly themselves" and "all it takes to be a pilot is pushing a button" for years. Most often this misconception is surfaced in casual conversation, but here is one example of the misconception getting published: 'A computerized brain known as the autopilot can fly a 787 jet unaided, but irrationally we place human pilots in the cockpit to babysit the autopilot "just in case."' - https://www.wired.com/2012/12/ff-robots-will-take-our-jobs/
Edit 2: Re: Autoland
Modern airliners have autoland, but always take off under human control. Autonomous takeoff is not used by any airliner.
Anyway, to your point, a modern airline's autopilot system allows pilots to take their hands off the controls. Tesla's manual says that is forbidden: "Warning: Autosteer is a hands-on feature. You must keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times." (page 106: https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/model_x_owners_man...)
So no matter which way you slice it, Tesla has chosen misleading terminology.
Where? How? That's not a scientific statement.
> Loads of people think pilots simply push a button then sit back and relax as the plane automatically taxis, takes off, flies then lands itself.
Who thinks that? That seems like a hyperbole and you can't possibly know.
> Tesla chose to inherit those misconceptions.
Assuming all those above assumptions are true and assuming Tesla reached those same conclusions as the people that didn't know how airplanes work.
Just loads of speculating and attempted mind-reading...
> Autopilot -> Automatic Pilot
Autopilot is one word and has a specific definition in avionics. It keeps the altitude and heading.
If you rip the word apart and magically transform Auto to Automatic you have Automatic and Pilot, but there is no such thing as an automatic pilots, just pilots, that's why autopilot is one word.
Under that same logic automobiles should be automatic mobility devices that self-drive already.
You can't change the definition of a word to meet your argument. You also can't speculate that people probably might think the word may mean this.
Autopilot !== automatic pilot. That's not a thing.
Autopilot -> Automatic Pilot. Automatic: working by itself with little or no direct human control. Pilot: one qualified to control a vehicle. I'd argue if autopilot requires intervention it is hardly automatic and definitely not qualified to operate a vehicle.
Further, consider other automatic devices in most cars, such as the automatic transmission. How do people expect to intervene with a gear shift during normal operation? Never.
It's like how 'act' means one thing, 'god' means one thing, but in the right context 'act of god' doesn't mean a supernatural being intervened.
Demanding a rigorous scientific study on human understanding of a word is simply not necessary when there are multiple recorded videos of people asleep at the wheel with a fucking banana on a string dangling from the steering wheel to fool the system.
People trying to fool the system is not Tesla's fault and indicates they are aware of the warnings alerting them they need to pay attention.
If people are dangling bananas they're doing it for attention and you guys are feeding it and blaming the manufacturer.
Changing the product name will not change anything.
Humans will always be a piece of shit sometimes.
Is this just being pedantic? If you say the autopilot doesn't land the plane, maybe a pilot would agree for all I know, but "autoland" seems to be a thing, right? When I read about "autoland" systems, I also notice they use the phrase "autopilot-controlled landing". I'm not convinced this is about inaccuracy so much as imprecision.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopilot#/media/File%3AFMS_...
In fact, it's more of "hold this heading and glideslope" than anything else - a smarter cruise control, if you will.
Sounds like Autopilot on Teslas is the same thing as an autopilot on an airplane, so why is everyone angry at them again? Somehow they're responsible for the majority of the public having misconceptions about both?
Asiana Airlines Flight 214 is irrelevant because (1) it was not correctly configured for approach, (2) the autopilot was switched off over a minute before the crash, and (3) the autopilot did not fail.
The parent of this thread was an argument over whether a aircraft flying on autopilot needs the pilot monitoring it to have subsecond reaction times to avoid a crash. It doesn't.
Names absolutely have meaning. Why do you think Tesla named it “auto pilot” and not something else?
Plane pilots have to pay very little attention with autopilot on compared to Tesla drivers with Autopilot on.
Autopilot in VNAV/LNAV modes does not do this, it follows a programmed flight path.
TCAS is the anti-collision system, but it's a secondary system that only gives information to the pilot. It's up to the pilot to make inputs to avoid a collision.
Pilots are the primary anti-collision system - by using their eyeballs to look for other aircraft when flying under visual flight rules (VFR) and also following clearances/information from controllers when flying under instrument flight rules (IFR).
> Plane pilots have to pay very little attention with autopilot on compared to Tesla drivers with Autopilot on.
This is not correct at all.
The real autopilot in planes is called Auto Flight System and is very recent and needs to be monitored closely. It can lift off, fly and land on it's own, but basically only in good weather condition.
"The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself"
They are not saying "use with caution, autopilot is an assistance feature", they are saying "The car is driving itself".
I have a car with Mobileeye. Mobileye recently demonstrated fsd in Jerusalem. Fortunately, like everyone else who can read, I know that system is not the same system that I have installed on my car.
Tesla’s wording really isn’t that different here.
Several interesting things are here: 1. Construction zones -- ProPilot should not be used there. It isn't realiable when lines are incorrect. 2. The wheel is moved automatically to a large degree. In the video it appears to be a larger movement than the system actually supports. 3. This commercial implies that it is actually a solution for inexperienced drivers, but it definitely is not.
Less than 10 seconds in it's demonstrating functionality that Autopilot does not have - turning from one road onto another, stopping at intersections, etc.
https://web.archive.org/web/20161213042716/https://www.tesla...
> Less than 10 seconds in it's demonstrating functionality that Autopilot does not have
It's on a page called "Autopilot", as the hero video. It's not very clear that this is functionality that Autopilot does not have, and it helps add to the confusion about what Autopilot is and what it is not, something seem keen to take advantage of.
They have had 4 years to possibly push that video down the page, perhaps add a title or a disclaimer saying that this is not Autopilot, perhaps clear up the confusion. Whether it's intentionally like this, or just plain old incompetence, either way it's not a great look for Tesla.
You're conflating FSD with Autopilot.
This is so, so wrong. Names explicitly set people's expectations.
On the one hand, I'm affected by the FUD and will not buy a Tesla, and perhaps also will have schadenfreude to the extent their CEO has misfortunes.
On the other hand, to be fair, other driver assistance features are creating problems too. I think it was Subaru I was just reading about having serious problems (and a recall) where automatic braking triggers inappropriately and may cause an accident.
People have incredible faith in software and technology, and that's fine and all, but I wonder what people like that hang around HN for.
That being said, there is a place on my commute where going around a curve in one particular spot (southbound highway 17 in Santa Cruz, before the Glenwood Cutoff if anyone is playing at home) where 9 times out of 10 the car thiunks thinks I'm about to drive into a wall, sounds the alarm, and then regains its senses.
So I haven't had it fail in a harmful way but I also don't think I'd ever give it enough rope to hang me with.
This can happen on start off of a green light and can completely decelerate the Subaru. The eyesight detects the exhaust as obstacle the car behind you is now at a loss why you are now immediately breaking off the green light. I’m not a fan at all and eye sight.
Additionally, you have to turn off the backup sensor to leave my drive way or it will slam on the brakes as it detects flowers that may be leaning into the drive way.
Car smarts don’t seem all that smart. I get a kid could be saved here, but driving a car crying wolf all the time leaves a consumer very frustrated. Dealership has been zero help in both regards.
Ours only engages when it is truly justified. It has yet to flip its shit incorrectly. It’s adaptive cruise control on the other hand will sometimes freak out about cars in adjacent lanes and slow down more than it should.
"If I get in a wreck, I don't want to be trapped in the car. I want to be thrown clear!"
Our Mazda gets tripped up when adaptive cruise is engaged and someone pulls into the turn lane to make a left. It also can sometimes get “spooked” on the interstate when going on turns and trucks are in adjacent lanes.
Hasn’t freaked out with collision warnings though. Every time it has it was totally justified.
The warning lights and alarm went off and then the car slammed on the brakes. Thankfully no one was behind me.
I think the difference between me and the rest of these guys is that I see it as just an assistive technology and they're trying not to drive. I still have my eyes on the road and everything. It's just there to help, just like I still use my mirrors even when I have the blind-spot detector active. And it does a good job, especially since I can override the adaptive cruise and lane assist at any time pretty easily.
How exactly do you easily override the crash detection logic? I've had it slam on the brakes spuriously due to steam from manhole vents, and short of disabling the feature (which cant be done in a way that sticks between starts) I dont know how I would avoid this behavior, particularly easily.
I haven't had a fake brake yet and I've driven over quite a bit of steam myself so I guess I got lucky.
Maybe you just need to avoid the Toyota model you bought.
I had a late model C-class Mercedes for a bit and got rid of it for that exact reason. It auto braked twice in conditions that did not warrant it at all (and hard too), the first time causing the car to come very close to skidding into the support posts of a cantilevered bridge, the second time because of a traffic sign in a turn that apparently gave enough of a return to trigger e-braking. Very bad software. According to the company that sold me the car everything was as it should be.
Just the other day I was a passenger in a Peugot and it was raining very heavily. Cruise control automatically disabled when one of the tyres suddenly bogged down due to heavy water on the road causing the car to lurch.
Until these systems look at and analyse the road and traffic like we do, I see little hope in an automated system that wasn't deadly by design. For me the number 1 litmus test is to read the slope of the road: if about to go uphill- more gas required, about to hit a crest- back off and maybe allow engine braking.
I'm struggling to think of any combination of hardware/software that isn't asinine on first glance (e.g. feed the cruise control off only the rear wheel speed sensors on a FWD vehicle) where cruise control would be any different than a driver manually holding the same speed by putting their foot on the gas.
I bet the earliest ones were all mechanical too.
Of all the features in a vehicle, I don’t think you need to worry about “standard” cruise control.
Subaru did have a recall several years ago due to an electrical problem which could prevent automatic braking (not trigger inappropriately).
https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2015/06/subaru-reca...
The real problem is:
- Many people choose to live in big hubs like SF or Manhattan because that's where the high paying jobs are
- You can't legally turn SF into Manhattan (i.e. making it denser)
Look at Japan, they have a great train network but still use cars a lot. Because while train works well in cities, you still need people living in the country side to grow your food.
In rural Japan, cars are used. In suburban Canada, cars are necessary. There are definitely more rural areas in Japan than where I live. I live in an actual town. If you are up in the mountains, or live far away from a town, a car is probably necessary. However, for the vast majority of people who live in this country, it is not.
What an innovation that would be
Look at NJ Transit, in rural areas if you have a train station you get 2-3 commuter trains in the morning on week days and no service on the weekend or during the day/late at night. And thats for NJ, which has high population density even in rural areas, is physically small and is part of the north east corridor.
1. I cannot drive if I went to a friend a drunk alcohol or consume weed
2. Why would I drive if somebody/something could do it for me, and i get to do whatever i want during this time
3. Gazoline, insurance, maintenance, repair, ... a car can be very costly especially if use intensively
4. Cars are polluting a lot, maybe I don't want to contribute to the issue of global warming
How do you think all those issues are solved presently?
(Also, there is a body of fiction set in a future Earth where, since people several decades ago did have knowledge of the problem of climate change, they end up being collectively resented by their descendants for their inaction/ignorance in addressing it.)
Maybe, just maybe, the majority of people who live in those cities like the way they're arranged?
- people are spread out because they've owned cars, so the distance doesn't bother them
- If you take their cars away, they're too spread out to support themselves, because of how the towns were built.
Cyclists coming in at 857 in 2019 and people on foot coming in at 6,283[1].
That's not too trivialize those deaths... but from what we've seen so far, I'm not convinced self-driving cars are going to do any better.
[1] https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2019-10-22/pedestria...
First off, yes. It's a big country so figures like that don't mean a whole lot. I wager I'm more likely to be killed by cheeseburgers than by a car. 50,000 cheeseburgers are eaten every three seconds in America.
But another thing: if Tesla were really trying to save lives, they'd have this software turned on for all their cars. That's not what they're doing. Rather they're selling activation of this software for thousands of dollars. They're selling a luxury product.
https://southfloridareporter.com/the-average-american-consum...
Owning your own car will become a luxury for many people. Kinda like owning a horse.
I‘d still rent one every once in a while for road trips and camping though.
the EPA[1] says 4.6 metric tons of co2 from an average car. There were[2] 1bn cars in service globally, as of 2010.
“It has been estimated that just one of these container ships, the length of around six football pitches, can produce the same amount of pollution as 50 million cars."[3]
1bn/50m = 20 cargo ships equal the estimated world carbon footprint of automobiles.
There are 50,000 cargo ships globally. There's your problem, go nuclear or go home.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t... [2] https://www.worldometers.info/cars/ [3] https://inews.co.uk/news/long-reads/cargo-container-shipping...
When I look at data I find that transport is "20% of CO2 emission" (https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...) but shipping is "2.2% of the global human-made emissions in 2012" (form wikipedia http://www.imo.org/en/OurWork/Environment/PollutionPreventio...)
What does it means ? Well, shipping uses dirty fuel and is very polluting but that's also a scapegoat for individual consumerist culpability.
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...
Road transport is growinv catastrophically in addition to dominating other transport in absolute terms
I have difficulty understanding how you can present a figure like 4.6 tons per car and argue that it's not a lot, especially as developign countries are headed dangerously toward widespread car ownership.
The "50000x" number about cargo ships isn't CO2 emissions, it's about other pollution due to cargo ships using bunker fuel.
All that money and energy could have gone somewhere else.
I'd dispute this. I'd say humans are excellent at many aspects of it. The high mortality is simply because driving is inherently dangerous and we do a lot of it.
I imagine the solution is basically what has happened over the last 60 years: gradual changes to improve safe driving.
An additional 20-50 million are injured or disabled."
We do have them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...
Autopilot on planes does not mean the plane is self-flying and the pilot doesn't have to pay attention anymore to take over at a moment's notice. Why would you think it's suddenly different in a car?
If anything, movies portray planes as extremely hard to fly, and the heroic pilot always has to take over from the autopilot.
> They don't know
> They expect
> they probably think
The alternative is some people are terrible and there will always be people that abuse nice things on purpose.
They know what they are doing, that's why they are trying to trick the warning systems.
These are the same people on the phones and merging without looking in normal cars.
All of that is speculation, but imo it's more likely than yours.
IIHS did a survey of 2000 people and a driver assistance system named "Autopilot" received the most responses that overestimated the system's capabilities. For example, "Nearly half — 48% — thought it would be safe to take hands off the steering wheel when using the system." In general, about 50% more people overestimated the capabilities of Autopilot compared to the names used by industry leaders (ex. SuperCruise, ProPilot Assist). Other things users were more likely to think they could do with "AutoPilot" included texting and watching a video.
See https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/new-studies-highlight-drive...
So clearly not the majority in all aspects and the other names had similar results for those questions.
Exactly, similar tech has been named Adaptive Cruise Control since the 90s.
They are marketing primarily, function second.
My biggest concern is that since the company isn't profitable(?) That these highly risky things are acceptable. Other profitable auto companies cannot be this wreckless.
It's not like they can go after Personal assets.
"Data from his phone indicates that a mobile game was active during his drive and that his hands were not on the wheel during the six seconds ahead of the crash."
You have no idea how many Tesla drivers will openly admit to taking their hands off the wheel and eyes of the road in order to take off a coat, tend to a child, etc. I work with somebody who claimed to do just that routinely.
Here is somebody from a few days ago bragging about taking their hands off the wheel and eyes off the road: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22231927
This is the part where you call me irresponsible, right? It seems like every discussion on this topic follows that pattern. The fact remains, though, that humans are in cars, and have all the weirdness that goes along with it. AP makes it easier. A lot.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if we had something to help with that? Like, it doesn’t even have to do everything, just most of it, and keep you from running into shit.
That would be awesome, wouldn’t it?
Yeah, that exists. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than what we had before, which was nothing.
See also, this very thread. All though there seems to be a worryingly high number of people here and elsewhere who, like I said, brag about not paying attention to their driving in a Tesla while simultaneously claiming it isn’t actually “auto pilot” because airlines pilots have to pay attention or some hot garbage. You yourself openly admit to not lacking attention to your driving because you think the Tesla is in control. Basically, trying to have their cake and eat it too... kind of scary.
It is a scientific fact that AP is safer than not having it. Statistically, you are less likely to get in an accident if you have it. Anecdotally, I have witnessed this with my own eyes, having had it take drastic action before I was even aware of the danger.
I’m done with you specifically, though. I’ve come to believe that anyone who uses the word “fanboy” is almost never someone you can have a productive conversation with.
It would be awesome if we have something for that. For now we don't, there is not a system where you can do the tasks above responsibly while in the driver seat. So park your car first.
Well, yes. But let's say everybody does things like this: the problem is that on a normal car you'll try to keep the off-hand time at a minimum, keep half hand on the wheel, or just give up and stop the car.
If you rely on autopilot you'l could just lower your attention for a longer time, and you can't rely on autopilot to actually do the right thing, it may work fine ten times and then crash your car into another on the eleventh killing both you and your baby.
The stress you feel is a good thing.
Look at this guy. He even apparently noticed this behavior on this road before, but still wasn't paying attention and got killed.
You either need 100% self driving or 0%
(driving assist is fine, as long as it's assist, and requres your attention)
99.99% as in, roughly one in 10000 times when you take your attention of the drive (e.g. to soothe a child) you'll have an issue where you should intervene with the autopilot. The likelihood of someone actually having this happen this is low, let alone the number of times people don't notice and other drivers solve the situation. As such, many people feel totally comfortable doing it. At the same time, the roads would be a lot safer if people did not feel comfortable doing this stuff.
There is the note that, when you feel you absolutely have to take your attention of the road, having auto-pilot is a lot better than not having it. In the end, it is hard to say which of these effects is stronger. However, the fact that auto-pilot causes some people to not pay attention because they feel safe is simply a bad thing.
NTHSB investigated the crash and got this particular information with Apple's help.
You see this with every thread about tsla. Some grasp at any nonsense to attack it. I used to think the haters were financially motivated "investors" shorting tsla and I'm sure it was true in the past. But now, I'm thinking it's just people who dislike elon for some reason since they also attack musk/SpaceX in spacex threads. I mean "criminally responsible" for the autopilot name? It's hard to take them seriously at this point.
We also know that the misconception is widely held. The term itself is misleading (https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/new-studies-highlight-drive...) and Tesla's marketing so much more so.
What Tesla is doing is like selling a space heater that emits carbon monoxide and declaring it's for outdoor use only
How fair is to say that the driver should have had their hands on the wheel at all time and checked and acquired a pilot license or at least studied what is autopilot?
Does Tesla's have driver attention detectors and warning systems? Is the car beeping or something like that when you don't hold the wheel?
What I forgot to mention in the previous post: the autopilot does not only complain about hands off the wheel, but if you ignore the complaints long enough, it does stop the car. So people can't drive for long with their hands completely off the steering wheel, until they use some kind of defeating device.
Is that what happened in this case then? Serious question; never driven a Tesla. https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2018/11/30/los-altos-pla...
> it does stop the car
More specifically: in my tests, it eventually disengages autopilot as well as adaptive cruise control (which only controls the break and acceleration) while beeping loudly and harshly. This has the affect of slowly causing the car to decelerate.
With GM's Super Cruise you can go completely hands free, that's the intended use, but it has eye tracking to make sure you are constantly watching the road.
Which is how Tesla want to treat it according to the article: "Tesla says Autopilot is intended to be used for driver assistance and that drivers must be ready to intervene at all times."
And that’s the problem with an “autopilot 99.9% of the time, but still pay attention just in case” feature.
As an engineer - he should have known better than to continue to use the feature the moment it became unreliable for reasons unknown. Those kind of failure modes are extremely devious killers.
When you have mission critical pieces of software (aka stuff that kills you) starting to behave in unexpected ways with unknown failure modes you stop using it asap until fixed.
I will gladly continue using my bsoding pc for gaming, but I won't use it in data center or to control a shuttle launch.
If a person uses gas oven that leaks from time to time and only a bit - how will you classify him.
And FWIW I've never felt misled about Autopilot's capabilities. I started off skeptical and it's since earned my partial trust in limited scenarios. Ironically its hiccups actually make me more attentive since, ya know, I don't want it to kill me.
I think it's different: On long stretches of highway, it actually can drive mostly unassisted. It can't drive unassisted in city traffic or in construction sites, but I totally understand why people would overrate its capabilities. In clear and good conditions, it's actually more than a simple drive assistant.
No one does. Literally no one. No owner, not Tesla themselves, not their website, not their sellers. Why do people keep bringing this up. Everybody knows it is not full self-driving, yes we all know, yes and? Where does this zealotry come from?
(Let's just assume it was a problem, even though I don't ever remember being fooled by it or seing any commercial or anything without a disclaimer "NOT FULLY AUTONOMOUS SELF-DRIVING, REQUIRES DRIVER ATTENTION".)
Besides, Tesla claim that it can drive you unassisted on the highway, so they are very much coining that definition as well.
> Full Self-Driving Capability
And in my experience 9 out 10 people take that literally.
- Autopilot has an option for "full self driving capabilities" (with lots of promises for the future and an unclear description what it actually can do right now)
- People buy a Tesla and indeed seem to have a self-driving car if they sleep at the wheel
- Tesla doesn’t attempt to make it right that this shouldn’t be done as far as I can tell
- Some people believe that Teslas drive themselves mostly.
Is Tesla directly responsible for these videos? Not directly, but at least they benefit from a highly suggestive product.
Could they do more to reduce the suggestive marketing? Absolutely. Do they want to? Probably not. Should they? I don’t know. That is what we’re discussing here.
I have a bit of a background with medical devices. For these, you have to make it absolutely clear what the device is for and what not. You also have to have a post market surveillance system that monitors how people use or abuse your medical device. From that perspective, Tesla could be doing more to have their driving assistant be perceived in a more realistic way.
Quite a few commenters insisted the issue was a non-issue -- that all datasets are noisy and mislabeling occurs all the time, that nobody's building actual self-driving cars from it, that surely if an object isn't labeled in one frame it'll be labeled in the next.
Now obviously we don't what the cause of this particular crash was.
But I will say that I found people's willingness to defend widespread sloppy labeling in training sets used for literal high-speed life and death situations rather shocking.
And that, hopefully, crashes like this serve to remind us of the far greater responsibility we have with regards to quality and accuracy when it comes to building ML models for self-driving cars, rather than when we're merely predicting how likely a credit card customer is to pay their next bill on time, or which ad is likely to be most profitable.
The only player in autonomous vehicles that doesn't understand the gravity of the technology is Tesla/Musk.
Anyone who has driven with autopilot, how quickly might it react to a perceived obstacle? Would it take a hard turn into a median faster than a person could reasonably react if it thought there was something in the road or that the road took a hard left?
Edit Ready to intervene can mean a lot of things - ready to take over in traffic or inclement weather vs firm grip on the wheel to resist rogue hard turns
Actual quote from the article
>Tesla says Autopilot is intended to be used for driver assistance and that drivers must be ready to intervene at all times.
It also takes very little interaction for it to pop out of self driving
That itself could be dangerous if it isn't very obvious to the driver that autopilot is no longer engaged.
In cases where the driver takes over, there is audial, visual, and tactile feedback letting you know it has been successfully disengaged.
Even worse, if you are taking an action the autopilot should have taken but didn't, you are axiomatically already late no mater how fast you react.
This is inherently absurd, even if you remove the last three words. You could write an essay, or a book, on why this is an example of a class of impossible problems. Or, inverting it, it's practically the generic framework of all catastrophes.
It makes the driving experience 10x better at least. It's weird to describe but you can almost "feel" the AP working. I've only had to intervene a couple times but when I did you can instantly tell when you need to, and it's quite easy to do. It's almost like you're a supervisor who is overlooking everything rather than micro managing every little adjustment to the steering wheel.
It has improved a lot in the 9 months I have had it.
A system like this should not have noticable changes in behavior over such a short period of time. In other words, I don't think they should launch it (let alone call it "autopilot") until it's done and stable.
Under autopilot, there are times when the "do I need to make an adjustment" instinct kicks in and you decide that you don't, but it was borderline. Things like being centered in the lane while passing a semi.
Second-guessing the system while driving just does not sound like something I'd want to deal with (as someone pointed out above [0]).
It is a skill like driving. But it is not driving. It was way less frustrating and draining than driving and so is a very valuable feature. But we are all in agreement that it is not autonomous driving.
> how quickly might it react to a perceived obstacle?
I've had it head towards a curbed median in the middle of the road and within 10 feet swerve to the right to miss it (in a spot that I've driven by hundreds of times, but this time it kinda decided to head towards the curbed median). Auto pilot can react surprisingly quickly in a good way.
So far, for me, it has never swerved quickly towards anything. There are situations, like on blind curves in the mountains, where it doesn't know what to do. At this time, it will start beeping, showing red on the screen and try its best to keep driving: even if that means quickly heading off the road. But, it doesn't act aggressive in any way. This is what I've experienced so far.
I've had auto pilot take me, hands free, between freeway interchanges, merging, changing lanes, etc. and I'm totally amazed. At other times, it does seem to do dumb things and I wonder what it had seen to consider taking the action it took.
Even with all that, there is still a huge advantage to auto pilot. Driving with it on seems to remove >a lot< of micro adjustments that I would normally be taking. I do drive with my hand on the wheel (enough pressure so I don't get the warning messages). On long drives, I really am a lot less tired: even keeping my hand on the wheel all the time.
I also have more time to scan the road for anything going on. Looking down to see my speed, for example, (basically any action that takes my focus off the road for a second or two) is less stressful.
It is utterly amazing technology and I still can't believe it is happening while I'm alive.
Faster than me, sometimes. There was one time when I was driving through southern Illinois and some idiot decided to cross the highway. I was passing a semi, who was in the right lane, and doing around 10mph faster than him.
The car starts flipping out, beeping and flashing red. I see a car that apparently appeared out of no where, perpendicular to me and pulling across the highway. She had made it — barely — in front of the semi, but didn’t see me.
The car saw her before I did. I think it was because of the radar. But whatever, it braked hard and I barely missed her.
Saved my ass.
The only thing my car has ever abruptly/unexpectedly done was brake, usually in response to an overpass it mistook as a stopped car. It's happened maybe 10-20 times in 10,000 miles. Not enough to cause a rear end collision or even an angry honk. I've always had time to take over.
It's never taken a hard turn. The only times it catastrophically failed were when I knowingly put it in confusing situations: winding roads, poorly marked lanes, city driving, etc. In those cases I always have a death grip on the wheel, and the software seems to literally loosen its hold when it's feeling uncertain.
A plane or a boat is roaming in a vast, mostly empty space, in a straight line. Other planes/boats are both pretty far away and also following a mostly straight line.
On the other hand a car operates in a very packed space, full of obstacles all moving in sometimes unpredictible way.
That makes a huge difference when it comes to autopilot.
Very quickly, you have a split second to avoid whatever it decides to steer towards. The problem becomes even worse after you factor in that autopilot only works in easy to drive conditions (i.e. highways with high speeds). To make things even worse, you get less attentive when you are passive for a long period. I.e. if the autopilot fails in your first 20 seconds of driving you may very well be able to react, but if it has been driving perfectly for 20 minutes, you're probably already lulled into a passive state, and way to slow to react.
It shows Teslas have much fewer accidents than the average car, and that Teslas with autopilot enabled are substantially safe per mile than with autopilot disabled (25-50% more miles driven per accident).
The article says a Prius hit the same place as this Tesla the week before. But the NTSB isn't investigating Toyota.
Which is what it was designed for and which is a much easier problem to solve than inner-city driving.
Which IMO I feel like more self-driving companies should have focused on first to perfect their systems. We used feature phones before smartphones for a reason, hardware/software is best developed incrementally.
I don't know where you get that idea from, when I'm out cycling it's generally the people in expensive cars that don't pay much attention.
But at the same time, the kinds of people that get into accidents will be a different distribution.
How you drive factors a lot into how likely you are into getting in an accident, even allowing for the other drivers.
If the distribution becomes essentially random then you might actually have a higher chance of getting into an accident than before, if you were a very careful driver.
(Obviously those that benefit the most are the bad drivers since they'll no longer be bad)
Just remember that whenever you summarize a distribution into a single number like an average, you loose a lot of information in the process.
I agree that anyone who feels uncomfortable with Tesla's ADAS should simply turn it off. But don't you think it's unfair for the company to place an unfinished product in the hands of a consumer and pass off the risk-management responsibility to them? Tesla's cavalier attitude towards autonomous vehicle safety is concerning to me. They seem to adopt the "move fast and break things" approach, whereas teams like Waymo and Cruise are releasing things in a slower and more controlled manner. And not coincidentally, they've have far less accidents that way.
Then Tesla should be given it away, not charging extra for it. To do otherwise would be immoral.
Autopilot is standard in every single car Tesla sells now, for exactly this reason.
Here is the blog post on their website where they talk about making it standard: https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-our-vehicle-lineup
> I assumed you meant that they should include safety features for no extra cost, which they do
I could buy a car without it for 37500 and now I can't but I can now buy a car with it for 39500 and you would still consider this is no extra cost?
I must be misunderstanding what you are saying
There arguably is a moral problem selling a product with optional safety features that cost extra.
If tesla invented immortality fields within their vehicles, I have no doubt they would jack up the price, and that would be fine, because it’s now a much better car. To think otherwise would be silly.
What’s immoral is that they allow people to turn this thing on and then play Candy Crush on their phone while the car does the driving, fully aware that this might lead to fatal accidents in some cases. Their marketing is misleading because they suggest that the system is safe and they don’t inform customers about the freak accidents that can happen when the system glitches (bad for sales). That’s not very ethical if you ask me.
You and I probably agree that this might be wishful thinking to expect some portion of the driving public to do so faithfully.
Perhaps additional technology can help better guarantee attention and participation on the part of the driver.
In Tesla's case, AutoPilot's lane keeping feature did not keep the car in the lane. Instead it drove the car into concrete at 71mph killing the driver. More over anti-collision feature did not stop the car from colliding with the concrete barrier. See where the issue lies?
Will you tell the people who faced safety issues with their Takata airbags to get rid of them? or the Toyota owners whose vehicles had unintended acceleration that they should rip out their accelerators?
Accidents without AP's overreaching half-baked features meant to serve as a marketing gimmick, but with safety technology that's been iterated for almost 20 years like LKAS and AEB, and is now getting affordable, is what's interesting.
Now a Corolla, the most conservative car in the history of mainstream cars, can return you to your lane and warn you if it feels you're making too many mistakes due to being tired.
These features save lives when they work, and more importantly, do not kill you when they malfunction, and do not lull you into a false sense of safety nearly as actively as a system literally named "Autopilot".
AP could literally be the same system, not pretend that lane centering is so easy to do, be much more aggressive about disengaging like other manufacturers (see SuperCruise, which literally tracks your eyes to ensure focus is maintained), and be infinitely more palatable an experiment than it currently is
-
If it seems I'm being aggressively anti-AP here, it's because I didn't sign up to be a part of this beta, yet I have to drive on the road with these people.
I like that a bored developer can't push updates to the lane guidance in my cars. AP has had regressions that brought back deadly bugs.
I'll take a crusty system that was put through thousands of hours of testing then never "improved" again over that any day.
(1) Comparison against all other cars in US (and across all states) just introduces lots of sampling bias. Teslas are like much more common in states like CA, than say Tennessee. Tennessee accounts for much more accidents in general than California and that adds up in overall stats, but not in Tesla stats.
(2) What kind of variation do we have in Tesla drivers vs other car drivers. As comment above mentions, Tesla drivers may be more responsible drivers.
(3) What accounts as accident? Minor collisions (fender benders) vs Major collisions. More specifically, I want to know, how does Autopilot react when it encounters something it has never seen before (like the crash in article). Humans can handle things pretty well IMO given they are not way beyond speed-limit, and all kind of random shit happens on road.
(4) Autopilot vs Manual Tesla stats is promising IMO. However, a little more information would be nice to have, like proportion of 1-billion miles logged as autopilot miles.
Makes sense to investigate Tesla since it's always the same driver causing the accidents. It still makes sense even if this driver is safer than everyone else.
Tesla’s Driver Fatality Rate is more than Triple that of Luxury Cars (and likely even higher)
https://medium.com/@MidwesternHedgi/teslas-driver-fatality-r...
To be clear, I think Tesla has been cavalier and careless in their approach to autopilot.
But Walter Huang knew what he was doing and did it anyway. His death is largely by his own hand. I don't see this as different from people who knowingly take other careless risks and pay a price.
Maaaaybe? I'm not a hydraulic engineer and won't pretend to be one. So I hire plumbers when things go wrong. If they screw up, I don't tend to blame myself though. I think the same logic would apply to the deceased.
While this is somewhat callous, if this engineer had taken that seriously he would still be alive.
Are companies bound to only selling failsafe products? Of course not, we'd never get anything done.
I do find it somewhat immoral that Tesla are using their customers as beta testers for this, but nobody has been forced into this. Nobody is forced to use Autopilot.
If a Tesla was a bespoke machine, I'd have no issues. But they know that if they position a feature and posture just-so-and-so, a certain fraction of their customers will get it "the wrong way". What did they do to alleviate this?
Nothing, in my not so humble opinion.
His inability to anticipate the system's caveat that led to his death is a testament to the unpredictability (from the user's perspective) of the vehicle's behavior.
The argument I have heard (Which I disagree with) is that "Autopilots" in aviation (where the term comes from) does not mean "You can go to sleep" but still needs constant monitoring.
Therefore calling this "Autopilot" is technically correct and therefore accurate.
My argument that the technical definition and the definition known by the general public (Which seems to be closer to the sleepy-time definition) is different enough that calling it "Autopilot" is dangerously misleading.
California is rich in capital but so poor infrastructure. Moving here from South Carolina(where taxes are much lower and roads are paltry) I was shocked at how dismal a state many of the roads are and at the sheer amount of time it takes to complete.
Patrick Collison of Stripe actually wrote a blog piece(1) condemning SF for their lack of speed when it comes to road maintenance.
There is no end in sight. Until we we a nation hold our governments accountable for road maintenance and proper engineering we will never have any great resolution.
I am sure California and others could do more and be held accountable (every service provider should and must be), but that attitude has to change too.
It was a left-hand exit (why are those even a thing?).
The seperator did not have contracting protectors because a car had previously crashed into them, I wonder why.
No one ever dies in car accidents.
Hence, Tesla is super bad for marketing its autopilot according to HN.
At this interchange, I've seen lots of human drivers change between the exiting HOV lane and the continuing HOV lane (or vice versa) much later than is safe; presumably because they were surprised that their lane was exiting, or they noticed the exit too late, but didn't want to miss it. I haven't seen anyone drive in between the two lanes as if it was a lane, though; and usually the late lane changers are braking, not accelerating.
It is unfortunate that the crash attenuator wasn't reset. Looking at the docs for a similar attenuator[1], it seems like resetting is somewhat involved, and you'd need a trained and properly equipped repair crew to do it, even if the time required is not that much. Scheduling is probably an issue.
[1] https://www.dmtraffic.com/assets/sci_smart_cushion_design_an... page 9-13
>Walter Huang's family tells Dan Noyes he took his Tesla to the dealer, complaining that -- on multiple occasions -- the Autopilot veered toward that same barrier -- the one his Model X hit on Friday when he died.
I guess maybe there's a small chance that the old article was wrong, and he didn't in fact complain to the dealer. But that in itself would be newsworthy in my view.
A slow rollout could happen where this short renewal time only applies to new licence holders, but then it'd take 20 years to really see its effects.
It's not onerous and I think you're right, a sit down with an instructor every two years to correct any minor bad habits before they get out of control is an excellent idea.
I just don't get this situation. With Autopilot, it takes a tiny amount of pressure on the steering wheel to take over. The pressure is so small that, when Autopilot jerks the wheel, you're more likely to turn it off.
So, assuming the driver was paying attention, with his hands on the wheel, this makes no sense. The only way the accident makes sense is if the driver fell asleep, wasn't paying attention, or accidentally turned off autopilot.
And falling asleep, or not paying attention, is a real risk in any car.
(Note: What I remember from older articles about this topic is that the car was nagging him for awhile to put his hands on the wheel.)
The system will beep hard at you when the vision system doesn’t have confidence. It only has confidence in well lit, well marked roads. Otherwise it yells at human to take over.
Take eyes off the road, it yells at you. The disengagement rate is pretty high but I like it. I know it does 405 and I5 highways well and that’s where I use it.
Easy to understand the limitations. They also make you explicitly say yes to all the limitations on first start.
> In the three years before the Tesla crash, the device was struck at least five times, including one crash that resulted in fatalities. A car struck it again on May 20, 2018, about two months after the Tesla crash, the NTSB said.
The article also says the engineer had complained about his Tesla veering towards this particular barrier. I don't understand why he still relied on the autopilot while driving past it.
I don't mean to dogpile on Tesla in particular, I think autonomous driving will eventually be far, far safer in the long-term than human-error piloting, but it won't be outlawed because of egos.
>>> Q: Is it still the case that there are several classes of insufficiently-solved autonomous driving problems? IIRC one of the big ones is/was recognizing stationary objects in the motorway when traveling at high speed (80 mph / 129 kph). Shouldn't one of the "prime directives" of autonomous driving be that it cannot operate at speeds higher than it can stop or avoid objects and people? These conditions include blind curves in the hills, children darting out from in front of parked cars, fog, rain or headlights/darkness.
IIRC, is another difficult problem recognizing pedestrians or people on strange modes of transport, such as winter clothing, different heights, skin tones or doing things like being on stilts or riding a unicycle?
PS: when a type of system becomes relied on pervasively, so-called "edge-cases" become everyday occurrences.
> https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20200211.as...
Looks like the ntsb.gov site is currently down and they haven't been indexed on archive.org yet.
I really hope the government isn't too aggressive in hindering companies from doing self-driving car R&D on public roads, but I would be fine with the government saying consumers shouldn't be used as guinea pigs for systems that are less safe that typical human drivers. Anecdotal evidence can't establish that self-driving cars are less safe than humans (even if it establishes that they make mistakes that humans wouldn't) so I would expect a numbers-driven standard, but self-driving technology shouldn't be unleashed on consumers until it achieves at least a human level of safety.
Another docket was updated today, a Tesla crash in Florida eerily similar to the one a few years ago: semi turning across the highway, Tesla goes under the trailer. Not a great failure mode.
It’s also very dodgy at certain merges. I take it off autopilot.
On a slightly diff note: I wanted a demo of auto parallel parking and also reverse parallel parking and summon feature after the last update. I went to the Tesla showroom. They were super nice but refused to demonstrate due to liability issues. They stood aside and a little away ..gave me instructions. Worked like a charm and it was awesome...but didn’t inspire confidence.
> “The driver had received several visual and one audible hands-on warning earlier in the drive and the driver’s hands were not detected on the wheel for six seconds prior to the collision,” Tesla said. “The driver had about five seconds and 150 meters of unobstructed view of the concrete divider with the crushed crash attenuator, but the vehicle logs show that no action was taken.”
https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/03/30/tesla-autopilot-was-o...
Also, the safety barrier that would've reduced the force of the impact had not been replaced after a recent accident just days before.
> Earlier this week, Tesla said the divider was missing a safety barrier designed to reduce the impact of a crash. The automaker provided an image of the location taken a day before the collision that appeared to show the barrier had not been replaced following a recent crash.
Reddit thread and Youtube video with a Model S driver reproducing the AP behavior due to the lane markings and uneven pavement:
https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/899i1w/my_mode...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVJSjeHDvfY&feature=youtu.be
This is also why SAE autonomy levels are a poor measure of a vehicle's capabilities, but that's another rant.
There are a few coming out soon (SuperCruise, Pro Pilot) that will offer some degree of level 2/3 operation. It'll be very interesting to see how that goes liability-wise.
That's one of the theories given for the cause of the 2008 Chatsworth train crash.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chatsworth_train_collisio...
The title should be "Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot but continued to use it and didn't have his hands on the wheel when the crash occurred."
* Tesla clearly states, that the autopilot is a driving aid and should not be used unobserved.
* The engineer complained about the autopilot not working perfectly at the very place of crash. (Quite understandeable when seeing the state of the road and mostly absence of line markings in videos of the crash site).
* Evidence seems to show that prior to the crash he did not pay attention while driving on autopilot at this very part of the road.
So I really don't get why anyone whould trust their life to a driving assist by not paying attention and closely supervising the system.
Where I think the lawsuit should have a merit and a good chance of succeeding is the state of road and the maintenance by Caltrans. They are in my eyes liable for the deadly outcome of the crash and that there was a crash at all:
* Left exits by themselves are a safety issue and should not exist (extremely rare here in Europe).
* The line markings were almost non-existant. Potentially dangerous sections of roads should have very good line-markings.
* As a consequence, it seems to be common that cars crash into this divider. That there was a "reusable" crash protection at it, should show the dangers of this section clearly.
* The crash protection was not active which lead to the deadly nature of the crash, as a car had crashed into it a week before. No other protections were in place (traffic cones, barrels)
So this section is shown as being very dangerous as human drivers regularly crash into the divider, there are no traffic cones (or have been destroyed by people almost crashing into the divider) and it was not secured after the last crash. The exit and the left lane should have been closed for traffic as long as the crash bareer is not in place.
Bad pavement markings and "work in progress" sections, exist in almost every major highway... it is not an exceptional case, and it should not be treat such. The expectations is that the technology should work, or give you enough advance warning for you to take control...
There have been plenty of videos, where the tesla autopilot seems to just steer straight towards a side wall, with no warning whatsoever...
A Lidar would/might have prevented it... it would have served as a warning that the car is going to smash straight ahead into a solid wall and that the visual cues (lines in the pavement) are misleading.... I don't think just a camera system is good enough for automated driving.... I feel Elon is beta testing with people's lives...
And independently who was in control of the car, I showed why this section was in a miserable state of maintenance and dangerous by its setup, as humans regularly crash into this very section. So this section is dangerous and should not exist in such a dangerous form, especially, as the installed safeties were not active at the time of accident.
From Tesla's own promotional video[1]:
> The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-hardware...
That's not an autopilot is it. It's driver assist. Like every other car manufacturer calls it (and incidentally, they don't have these problems).
In any case, while one might ask Tesla not to use the term "autopilot", they always clearly stress the requirement of supervision by the driver, including giving warnings and eventually stopping the vehicle, if not having hands on the wheel.
Being a responsible person and not driving while drunk, or driving in a reckless manner will no longer improve your chances of not being seriously hurt in a car crash. While driving on the roads already removes a lot of self-determination due to the fact that you can't control all the high-speed objects flying around you, there was at least some degree of improvement possible by being responsible.
Once self-driving cars are available, whether you live or die will be up to random chance. Some people will be better off due to the self-driving cars, and others will be worse off, depending on if they were above the average or below in terms of their driving behaviour.
I understand these things are probably necessary step but maybe it shouldn't be possible for a car to drive in complex traffic without steering and focus of the human driver, yet.
I have trouble thinking of any such places on the German Autobahn where drifting of would lead to a full head on collision with a concrete barrier.
It really sucks that this specific interchange has cost so many lives - and it’s apparent that there’s some frailty of the code that makes autopilot vehicles more susceptible.
In general when it comes to crashes on Autopilot, it’s important to keep perspective. If you take your hands off the wheel and look at your phone for 6 seconds in any other car you’re going to have a bad time. On Autopilot, it took a confluence of bad road design, poor road maintenance, and an unlikely software fault to initiate a crash.
Which is why you don't do it in any other car. I don't know much about autopilot, but because we as humans don't know when it can go wrong, it's easier to get it into situations it wasn't designed for. This is not true for the 6 seconds any other car scenario as we will be predicting what the steering wheel and traffic in front of us might do.
If you call something a knife you can't 100% blame the customers if they try to use it to cut stuff, even if you say "Knife™ should not be used for cutting"
And you shouldn't, because their numbers don't adjust for demographics, type of road use, or driving conditions.
Do Ford Focus drivers have more accidents than Tesla Model S owners? Yes. Is it that down to the fact that Tesla owners are primarily middle-aged nad Ford Focus's are owned by spotty teenagers? Who knows.
There are fewer crashes when you're on autopilot. Is that because Autopilot is better than humans or is it because Autopilot only gets enabled when its safe? Who knows.
You don't know that the driver would still be alive if the lanes were painted correctly etc.
Autopilot could still misidentify the barrier as we've seen it do in other situations.
It is absolutely a road design and maintenance issue.
It just seems like an edge case that's catching inattentive drivers off guard, which IMHO is a category including Tesla's on autopilot. And it seems Tesla agrees here; they require drivers pay attention when using Autopilot. If your vehicle runs into a barrier on Autopilot, you weren't paying attention.
For a good portion of the year, you can’t rely on being able to see any road markings in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest.
If a self-driving car isn't safer than a sober professional driver, then wouldn't it be logical to just have people ride the bus instead of wasting resources on tech? I knew a bus driver who went a million miles without an accident.
If every million human drivers have one accident and every 1000 Teslas have a similar accident then yes, it is a vehicle safety problem.
An auto driving system needs to have a higher margin of safety than a human driver not the same or worse.
> which the NTSB determined had been damaged and repaired more frequently than any other left-exit in Caltrans' District 4, which includes all of the Bay Area.
...and CHP not doing their job:
> The California Highway Patrol responded to the March 12 crash but did not notify Caltrans of the damage as required, the NTSB said.
> Huang's 2017 Tesla Model X was traveling at 71 mph when it crashed against the same attenuator, which the NTSB determined had been damaged and repaired more frequently than any other left-exit in Caltrans' District 4, which includes all of the Bay Area.
Where these Corp dummies are trained to claim that <the thing we totally screwed> is our top priority? This keeps repeating after every incident exposing ignorance and lack of care and attention to essential things.
Automonous driving cannot yet handle all the edge cases, and when it fails people die. What's worse is when it fails it cannot explain why it failed, so we just throw more training data at it and hope for the best. That's not engineering; that's ML cargo cult voodoo.
Modern ML is great for finding family members in your photo collection, but nobody dies when it labels your dog your grandmother.
Tesla makes great cars but I never use their autopilot. They should focus on what they do best and give up this obsession with autonomous driving.
We'll hear the same canned response about how many lives have been saved, but just veering off into a concrete wall spontaneously? That's completely fucked.
The fact that millions of these vehicles are deployed with this software running should concern every other driver on the roadway. Remember when Tesla said 1 million robotaxis by 2020? o_O
Tesla issued a statement placing the blame on Huang and denying moral or legal liability for the crash.
“According to the family, Mr. Huang was well aware that Autopilot was not perfect and, specifically, he told them it was not reliable in that exact location, yet he nonetheless engaged Autopilot at that location."
According to the World Health Organization, road traffic injuries caused an estimated 1.35 million deaths worldwide in the year 2016. Or ~3700 per day.
You probably should not be driving.
I use it because it usually brakes faster than I do when traffic suddenly slows down. It also slams on the brakes at random points on a 3 mile stretch of highway on my way home. For some reason it thinks the speed limit is suddenly 45 and brakes aggressively. I’m afraid one day I’ll get rear ended when it does that.
That didn't made me think that cars are too complex and should no longer by driven, that made me think that I should be more careful on my driving. Yet here we are arguing whether that's a signal that we shouldn't allow autopilot feature.
Autopilot or not, YOU are still the driver. If there's a mistake, YOU should be responsible for it. As long as there's a steering wheel, and I believe there will be one for a pretty long time, you are still the one responsible to make sure theses things doesn't happen. If you can't manage it, don't use autopilot, just like if I can't manage to drive, I won't use a car. Getting a driving license may seems like a formality, but it's not, it's a test to see whether you are apt to drive.
But that totally defeats the purpose of autopilot...
Of a true autopilot, sure, but for now they all are pretty far from being one. For now it's only purpose is to have to make less effort while driving.
My thought was that the public would fear and refuse to use the technology but some brave souls are jumping right in.
My opinion: full self driving is only a matter of time. At some point in the future insurance companies will figure out that self driving is less dangerous than human drivers and start offering cheaper premiums and deductibles to self driving only cars.
Where does the faith in the tech and its future come from though? Wouldn't it be more logical to wait and then say "hey, Geico is offering a 20% discount if I buy a new car with these features, guess they must really make a difference" rather than going around proclaiming how much safer they are in advance?
Well now that you've put me on the spot like that and I have to think about it: baseless I suppose. Just a general faith that technology always improves.
> Wouldn't it be more logical
Yes, it would.
People seem increasingly angry about technology and tech workers though.
So it seems like the climate is oscillating between extremes. Maybe people are getting disoriented.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/security-tech... (The Cambrian Explosion in Technology, and How It's Affecting Us | Seeing the progress made across various fields over the last few years, we can ask if we are witnessing a Cambrian explosion in technology today)
This means that if a model has sold 1 million cars they each need to drive 100 000 miles with autopilot enabled before the insurance company has enough statistics to say "this is safer than a human".
Tesla for instance does that statistic against "average driving" but the "Average driving" happens in cities. And most Teslas enable Autopilot on highways, where Tesla recommends enabling it, too.
Accidents happen much less on highways, so of course this "statistic" looks better. Put Autopiloted Teslas in the cities and then see how that statistic fares. My guess is it will become much, much worse.
The more real statistic is that even Waymo, which is about an order of magnitude better than anything else on the market, has an "incident" where a human driver would need to intervene every 5000 miles. For everyone else, a human driver would need to intervene every few hundred miles.
That's far from the "self-driving" technology we were promised.
Two relevant posts from someone that used to lead the Waymo project, before it was named Waymo:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2019/06/10/gmcrui...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2019/04/18/are-ro...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/04/uber-goog...
I compared your recent comments to 6 months ago. They seem a bit better now.
Why not just email and apologize? We all have bad days. Why let a string of bad days tank your 8-year history?
Regardless of what you decide, I wanted to leave an encouraging comment. At least one person is thinking of you and cheering you on. Good luck.
Others will lead the way, even if the US succumbs to regulatory paralysis.
A crash at 55 mph would have 40% less energy than at 71 mph.
"At 3 seconds prior to the crash and up to the time of impact with the crash attenuator, the Tesla’s speed increased from 62 to 70.8 mph, with no precrash braking or evasive steering movement detected."
The autopilot accelerated into the barrier.
Or are you suggesting that the Autopilot accelerated beyond the top speed set by the driver?
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/tesla-model-s-model-x-aut...
This man already knew autopilot would have trouble in this spot and yet choose to play on his phone. He is an idiot.
And to those who way 'they shouldn't call it autopilot if it can't do full self driving!' I suggest you go read up on auto pilot. Direct from the definition: 'Autopilots do not replace human operators, but instead they assist them in controlling the vehicle.'
Until the moment it kills you. Then you become the statistic.
Better buy some life insurance with that expensive robotic car.
Plays video game in the car with hands off the wheel.
Well, okay.
People complain a lot. Engineers are people. People still do things they complain about. People die in crashes. Cars crash. Teslas are cars. What am I missing?
I think the intuition is that like, if a piece of technology repeatedly shows itself to drive your car into a concrete barrier, maybe don't play video games while passing that same concrete barrier.
They really need to work on this, or they will ruin self-driving for everyone. This is basically a new class of collision, this is not the ordinary way people die on highways. If they can not avoid actively smashing their customers at over 100km/h into solid concrete barriers, on major roads near their company headquarters, then I don't know how they can make this feature so accessible to a broad customer base.
Is it possible to buy a Tesla completely devoid of autopilot, or is this type of accident potentially a risk in all of them?
I know, I know -- you can design software so that this type of flaw is completely impossible, but as a user I have no way of verifying this, and my trust has already been eroded by the feature I'm trying to disable so I really want to verify it.
That means the hardware and software are in the vehicles for purchase via the website. Hence my question.
There's never been a Tesla incident, that I know of, where the system has turned itself on. Every single crash has been after a deliberate engagement by the driver.
There is an additional cost you can pay for called "Full Self Driving". This fee enables some new functionality like summon mode and the car changing lanes itself when you indicate a lane change. This fee is borderline fraud as people who leased early model 3 cars didn't receive anything close to the functionality described.
Autopilot is not ever active unless the driver enables it. You pull a stalk to turn on adaptive cruise control which only manages your speed and doesn't do any steering. Another pull of the stalk turns on autosteer, which is really just fairly fancy lanekeeping assist. You can buy a tesla and never use autopilot. There is some automatic emergency braking you can't disable, but that's true of nearly all new vehicles.
Most people either feel comfortable with a software cut-off or feel comfortable with it present.
How many non-Tesla drivers were killed in the same timespan by driving manually?
This seems like a very naked appeal to emotion, and not relevant to the situation.