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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

I mentioned this repeatedly in the thread yesterday, but I don't think that autopilot was actually in use here. The environment was a tiny cul de sac, and this was a high speed collision. Autopilot simply won't accelerate like that, it won't reach the speeds observed.

More likely they were playing with launch mode somehow and I guess thought that autopilot would magically engage and keep them safe? But IIRC those aren't compatible features.

I think it's correct to say that no one was driving the car. I just don't believe the CAR was attempting to drive itself either.

Edit: And per Musk, the card didn't have the FSD beta software (nor had even purchased it) and autopilot indeed wasn't enabled: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1384254194975010826

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Newspaper: "You're self-driving car killed people!"

Company: "Nah bro, it was my car's feature X that killed them, not the self-driving feature"

Newspaper: "But self-driving cars are supposed to be safe!"

Company: "They are safe. It's just feature X cars that aren't safe. And we give people a choice."

Newspaper: "But self-driving cars are supposed to be safe!"

Which is to say, no one paid to attention to the exact breakdown because most people aren't going to dive into the options. If Tesla wants self-driving to seem safe, they sure as better disable all unsafe self-driving features.

But... "Feature X" in this case is the accelerator pedal.

Yes, if Tesla marketing leads people to believe their cars safe just launching with no driver, Tesla technology should probably prevent drivers from just pressing the accelerator peddle from the passenger seat.

I mean, just automatic transmission imposes a few restrictions on the driver that standard doesn't. "Maybe self-driving" is going to create driver behaviors that definitely-not-self-driving doesn't. Cars have been elaborately idiot-proofed for a long time 'cause a lot of idiots drive.

Agreed. Even if they somehow had autopilot enabled, they defeated multiple safety measure to do it like the steering wheel weight and sitting on the buckled seat belt.

Right, but I think it's important to note the conflation of arguments here. If autopilot had been successfully engaged, and the only thing these drivers did wrong was to sit in the wrong seats while the car made all the decisions, then I think it would be very reasonable to view that as an autopilot failure and something that needs to be fixed. The car clearly would be guilty of trying to drive them into a tree at high speed.

That said, what seems much more likely here is that they were engaged in some kind of manual work to get the car to accelerate ludicrously. And that's not a situation against which the autopilot should be reasonably expected to protect against.

At a minimum, to drive with AP from the back seat, you would need to

a) Plug in a seat belt defeater, or plug in the seat belt after you hop out.

b) Hang a weight off the steering wheel so it feels torque.

At some point, it's hard to ban people being stupid. You can buy a woodchipper and take the guard off and shove your arm in, do we need to ban woodchippers? Or if we build something with layers of guards and safeties.. at some point you the user are responsible for what happens when you bypass them?

> Autopilot simply won't accelerate like that, it won't reach the speeds observed.

They said the same thing about the Toyota acceleration problem.

I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it seems poorly justified. Tesla autopilot and FSD footage is EVERYWHERE on youtube. If there was really some kind of anomalous acceleration problem surely someone would see it. There are all sorts of other persistent gripes about the system, but AFAIK rapid acceleration and overspeed simply hasn't been observed.

Didn't this turn out to be floor mats getting stuck under the accelerator?

That was a story Toyota used to evade investigation, which came later anyway.

Which was never concluded to be a Toyota software issue.

Then there's the pesky fact that a car needs like 1000HP to overpower the brakes on something like a modern Camry. So if people were actually pressing a brake pedal, which is physically connected to the hydraulic brake system, the car will stop.

Yeah, they were successfully sued over it, but all that means is that they were probably responsible based on the information the jury was allowed to hear. And I believe much of the culpability came down to the fact that the floormats did actually move into the pedal box for that era Toyota (mine did it all the time, even post-recall).

If I remember correctly, they found many bugs in the Toyota software which could cause unintended acceleration and also could cause braking to be ignored. This report has some info: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman14_toyota_ua_...

PS: I had a Prius during this time. Even after selling it, without experiencing any acceleration issues, Toyota wrote me a $2k check to agree to never sue them.

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