NTSB: Tesla Model S in Crash Couldn't Have Been Using Autopilot
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Musk tweeting about whether or not the driver purchased certain features is insane. He shouldn't have access to that data, let alone be allowed to publicize the information.
I recognise the risk — these days I assume that entirely innocuous facts about me today can become socially unacceptable in the future, having witnessed this happen to multiple people in my life already.
I also recognise that if Tesla doesn’t get out in front of every single incident, it may set back the replacement of human drivers with safer AI drivers.
I also also recognise that Musk is wildly overpromising on the self driving tech, and really only trust him as a rocket scientist and salesman (be the thing he’s selling cars or visions of the future), not digital privacy.
I don’t really trust any famous person for privacy, because they necessarily don’t have even close to as much of it as a normal person.
Tesla doesn't need to get out in front of every incident. Musk feels the need to because of the outlandish claims he continues to make about how close Tesla is to having autonomous vehicles. This is something Tesla's board should have reined him in on long ago.
>I don’t really trust any famous person for privacy, because they necessarily don’t have even close to as much of it as a normal person.
I agree that famous people have less privacy, and there's a lot of unfairness around that. But even if Musk hadn't chosen to become a public spectacle, that doesn't give him the right to treat others the same way.
Of course.
What I’m saying is, I don’t expect the famous to be able to empathise with the rest of us, not that it’s good that they can’t.
Tesla has been attacked in the past so maybe Elon takes such issues personally.
I also worry that mixing autonomous systems with people will result in more accidents, both in the case of drivers nodding off instead of supervising the car, and in the case of other drivers being surprised by the autonomous car's behavior. On top of this, it would not be surprising if autonomous car accidents were more psychologically devastating - they would likely commit different categories of error than human drivers.
Conversely, if the tech industry wanted to save lives on the road, easily the most impactful thing they could do is shut off any phone screen moving faster than five miles an hour. This would inconvenience passengers, but we did after all survive for many years without phones in the car.
I would be surprised if level 5 self driving requires an AI smarter than a mouse or an eagle — freeform environment, arbitrary weather, hostile others, camouflage(!), long range navigation.
The rest of your points I broadly agree with though.
I don’t think this a great comparison. Firstly, sheets of glass are not a common road obstruction, and even if they were cars have the added advantage of more sensor types (doesn’t require much more brain, it’s equivalent to just another ‘colour’); Secondly, I’ve also been hit by a car driven by a human.
The driver had stopped at a give-way (major-minor junction) [0], then failed to look in my direction and pulled out into me as I was turning into that road.
[0] right where this unrelated white van is in this Google street view photo: https://goo.gl/maps/Xe87aruFbbUazXhp7
I came to the conclusion years ago that we're going to need RFID tags on everything (or something similar) to make FSD work safely enough without AGI. We'll probably also need dedicated lanes in some places. Nothing I have read or seen yet has given me any reason to think differently.
Edit: The common counter-argument I see to this is that tags could be altered maliciously. My response is that we've already been building systems which scan for and filter out malicious changes for a long time, and we keep getting better at it. It seems to me like this kind of system would be far easier to design & update than any FSD software I know of.
If you need every possible obstacle to be tagged with a locator beacon, you’ve essentially just reinvented 1970s autonomous subway or PRT technologies that require the track to be completely fenced off from surprise animal or humans or debris ended up on the track.
And Waze doesn’t need a professional troll to go around garnering media support 24/7.
* Operates in a tiny geographically fenced area
* Despite success, has not expanded to any new areas or rolled out any further.
* As a consumer, I have no access to buy Waymo, but I can buy at least the current implementation of Tesla Autopilot.
My understanding is that Tesla is extremely behind on these fronts compared to Waymo, and that gap keeps widening every day. I know who I would bet on
I believe Waymo works better in a pre scanned area, where there are no construction sites or major changes, but in a general context you can atleast attempt to use Autopilot, which you can't with Waymo. Thus I would not say that Waymo is miles better.
I had the great fortune of living in "Old Palo Alto" (think "mega rich tech CEO paradise") for a year while my wife was at Stanford. This is a grid of low-traffic, low-speed, sidewalked residential streets, ~10 minutes on all sides from the nearest highway, with typical mid-Peninsula weather (in other words, essentially perfect driving conditions).
I would would frequently see Waymo vehicles going all through the neighborhood at 6-9AM on Sunday mornings when I was out on long runs. They would often be essentially the only cars I saw on the road.
If there is a better way to pad your urban safety statistics, I do not know of one.
Old Palo Alto on Google Maps, for the curious/unfamiliar: https://goo.gl/maps/cAqifusdRL647YgWA
I have my mom Texting me that I shouldn't drive my Tesla because of this, and I should sell it and buy something else.
How many of those people will read the follow up paper from the NTSB?
This is literally the definition of smear. Shout something bad about a successful X, and by the time the actual truth comes out, the damage is already done and people have moved on.
Tesla needs Musk to do two things: 1) Stop wildly over-promising Tesla's FSD capabilities, and 2) stop publicly posting rebuttals to any news about accidents involving Teslas. Combine this with recreating a PR team for Tesla who can work to push out real information about what the cars can do plus respond appropriately when asked to comment on any accidents, and the public and media will move on before you know it.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/07/tesla-engineer-to-california...
You seem to complain about it being more based on a PR angle rather that facts and truth, but the whole point of what parent is saying is that this is a game Musk himself is pushing.
When the truth is the PR angle, it should be pushed.
A lie shouldn't be made up to advance PR, but if someone is reporting an actual lie? Anyone speaking up their truth has my 1000% backing, even if I do not agree with that position.
I am not willing to join the post-truth era of American politics.
I agree with you up to this phrase. A company knows exactly what you purchased from them, so knowing what a certain customer bought is just a call away, and not only for the CEO.
Regarding publicizing if you bought a certain feature or not, I think withholding that information when the media, and even the police, were blaming the non-existent feature for the accident, is more than you could ask of most of us.
Choosing between risking a fine for divulging shopping data, or a costly and unfair reputation hit while the police investigates. The decision seems obvious.
What they care about is all the rage they can spark from anything seemingly bad that can be associated with Tesla and/or Musk.
I'm sure they would change their coverage if Tesla were paying billions to them through advertising. But they don't, so here we go.
However, prior to any tweets by Musk, the media already claimed that autopilot was (likely) on as there was no person in the drivers seat.
Is it possible that Tesla's response would have been different in case there were no such claims being made initially?
Its one thing to say that a car cannot do something because of a physical issue on the car, vs some software that can be updated or have bugs that haven't been caught yet.
I mean, come on. This is what people were saying within hours after the crash: autopilot as shipped simply doesn't have behavior consistent with this accident. It won't command the accelerations that would have been required on that tiny street and (as measured by the NTSB) won't even engage in that particular environment.
Basically every Tesla owner that saw the story knew right away that it was being sensationalized.
I was very surprised to see the LA times jump on it when they certainly have numerous employees that drive these vehicles.
That is an anecdotal result
> There was no update that took that functionality away
Maybe not explicitly, but we all know how software works
Why an experiment? Isn't there a Black Box, like on aeroplanes, with logs to definitively answer the question?
The report said the car's lithium-ion battery case was damaged, and in the ensuing fire the infotainment system's onboard storage device was destroyed.
However, the "restraint control module," which stores data such as whether seatbelts were in use, how fast the vehicle was going, acceleration information, and airbag deployment, although damaged by fire was recovered and turned over to the NTSB's laboratory to evaluate.
What conspiracy? majormunky is saying Tesla might push out updates every so often, and that might effect whether autopilot can be used, and the investigators might not have realized that.
That one. To do so for a very specific location with no visible lane markers (implied by the article) to disable the lane guidance system seems very much like a stretch. "I don't think they would, but are there safeguards" implies the author of the comment is describing intent. I don't think it's a stretch to say that's a statement of conspiracy.
Can you imagine a second wreck on that same stretch of road and the accusations against Tesla for not doing the manual review envisioned above?
Have Tesla said definitively that they cannot override capabilities without updating the version number?
tl;dr it doesn't scale and would be a logistical nightmare to maintain individual configurations for every road the system struggles on
It’s the same as assuming that because someone regularly wins the lottery a specific ticket must have good odds. The space of all possible bugs is so vast, if the odds of every possible bug where as high as a lottery ticket then the software would be unusable. Some bugs are of course more likely than others, but assuming this one is more likely than average requires justification.
A man who uses his celebrity status to pump cryptocurrencies in order to enrich himself and the companies he owns has no moral standards and no credibility.
"Self-drive? Our records say he never bought it!".
Doesn't matter what you think of the character, it has nothing to do with this instance.
Also, I don't think this feature actually uses map data.
"But I used autopilot" is probably the most used excuse to avert fault away from the driver. Especially in the most broken insurance system on the planet where an accident like this leads to such a change in life that the driver is scared of the outcome.
This goes against intuition-wouldn’t a machine that behaves very reliably be better than a human driver - but my dad used to say that the insurance company’s calculation was only ever about how likely they thought they could win if they sued the other party. I don’t know if that’s true, but something rings true about it.
As Teslas are safer over time, one would expect rates to gradually go down. Some repairs are a bit more expensive, so could be a bit of a balancing act.
In Germany it's currently the opposite due to the overly high amount of Teslas that are declared as total damage because the auditors that work for insurers usually don't know that their frames can be partially replaced.
Additionally there's no availability to repair a Tesla in practice at that point, but the given software lockout policy of Tesla is a different story.
At least in the mainstream press, they seem to have reported what the police were saying at the time, and indicated that they were quoting the police. For example, from the NYT [1]:
> Two men were killed in Texas after a Tesla they were in crashed on Saturday and caught fire with neither of the men behind the wheel, the authorities said.
> Mark Herman, the Harris County Precinct 4 constable, said that physical evidence from the scene and interviews with witnesses led officials “to believe no one was driving the vehicle at the time of the crash.”
They also attempted to get Tesla's side of the story, but Tesla didn't respond:
> Tesla, which has disbanded its public relations team, did not respond to a request for comment.
I'd be upset with the police for making such confident statements that were contradicted by later investigations. But the media, who may not have had access to the accident scene, seems to have done a reasonable job reporting, at least from what I've seen.
In an ideal world, maybe they'd do an independent investigation instead of relying on police statements, but it's a question of how to allocate resources across all things they could be reporting. It probably makes it more difficult to do this when Tesla won't talk to them.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/18/business/tesla-fatal-cras...
To be fair, that's a little disingenuous given that Musk was literally tweeting denials at press time. Tesla certainly didn't refuse to respond, they had lots of things to say. But the article didn't get them in time so went to press trying to imply they had something to hide.
As far as the media reporting the story: it's fine. It was newsworthy. The "there was no one driving the car" business from the fire chief seems in hindsight to have been the real failing. That quote seems to have been a lot jucier than was warranted. In fact it seems almost certain that someone was manually operating that car via some mechanism or another.
> Since dissolving the team at the beginning of the year, I had hoped that Tesla would try to build a new one, but it doesn’t seem to be the case.
> Instead, Tesla is leaving all press inquiries unanswered and doesn’t seem to comment on any story.
But I agree with you that the local authorities really screwed up here when communicating with the press.
[1] https://electrek.co/2020/10/06/tesla-dissolves-pr-department...
Saying they didn't respond would be fine for almost any other topic, but it's bad reporting for this one.
Then why didn't they update this article? Again, it's not like Tesla didn't say anything relevant. You're making what amounts to a process argument: Tesla didn't respond in the right way and so the Times is allowed to claim that they refused to comment because it's technically true.
But "technically true" isn't what journalism is supposed to be about, and the Times is usually pretty good about that in its hard news coverage. Which is why you can tell that this is really a business/investment story being pawned off as news.
Tesla says that Musk's tweets about autopilot are disconnected from reality:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/7/22424592/tesla-elon-musk-a...
So why would and why should anyone else take his tweets seriously?
“A Fatal Crash Renews Concerns Over Tesla’s ‘Autopilot’ Claim” (Wired)
“2 Killed in Driverless Tesla Car Crash” … “no one was driving the vehicle” (NY Times)
“Tesla on Autopilot crashes in Texas” (driving.ca)
“Tesla crash: investigators ‘100% sure’ no one driving car in fatal Texas incident” (The Guardian)
Reporters have a duty to verify their sources and information and not report on rumors or hearsay.
Sure. Here you go.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/04/19/tesla-texas...
Headline: A driverless Tesla crashed and burned for four hours, police said, killing two passengers in Texas.
Lede: "Just before midnight Saturday, a Tesla drove swiftly around a curve, veered off the road, struck a tree and burst into flames in The Woodlands, Tex., a suburb north of Houston, police said."
"Driverless" is used here to relate the reader to "Driverless cars," aka "self driving car." Note that the police only said that the driver wasn't in the driver's seat at the time of the crash.
The lede puts the agency for the driving on the car: "a Tesla drove..."
Looks like NBC did it too:
The vehicle, a 2019 Tesla Model S, was driving at high speed when it ran off the road, hit a tree and burst into flames, he said.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/2-dead-tesla-crash-afte...
Here's Yahoo News with a video, headline "2 killed after self-driving Tesla crashes into tree, bursts into flames":
https://news.yahoo.com/2-killed-fiery-tesla-crash-210032357....
But wait, isn't that "technically correct" (the best kind of correct) to what the original investigation said?
Sure! But then why did other news sources go to great lengths to avoid using the phrase? Here's The Verge:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/18/22390612/two-people-kille...
"Two people killed in fiery Tesla crash with no one driving"
"Preliminary reports suggest the car was traveling at a high rate of speed and failed to make a turn, then drove off the road into a tree."
Notice the hedging in the paragraph. Notice the use of passive voice "was traveling."
Professional writers know the meaning of words. They know what those words mean to readers. They use them deliberately.
From your The Verge article, that supposedly is the example of trying very hard not to divulge this fact.
> Authorities in Texas say two people were killed when a Tesla with no one in the driver’s seat crashed into a tree and burst into flames, Houston television station KPRC 2 reported.
It's the first line of the article.
> Preliminary reports suggest the car was traveling at a high rate of speed and failed to make a turn, then drove off the road into a tree. One of the men killed was in the front passenger seat of the car, the other was in the back seat, according to KHOU. Harris County Precinct 4 Constable Mark Herman told KPRC that “no one was driving” the fully-electric 2019 Tesla at the time of the crash. It’s not yet clear whether the car had its Autopilot driver assist system activated.
That's the third paragraph. I don't think they're hiding that they're parroting police officials.
I don't think it has anything to do with smearing Tesla. I think that people have anxiety about self-driving cars and publications know that, so they play to that. This isn’t about Tesla, or AutoPilot. It’s about getting the details right.
If these publications are claiming to quote the police, they're doing a shitty job of it, because the police said only that there wasn't anyone in the driver's seat at the time of the crash. The police didn't comment on auto pilot, didn't comment on the car being "driverless" (which would imply that it never had a driver to start with, which it did. If someone takes their hands of the wheel to stop their kids in the back seat from fighting, does the car become driverless for that moment? If so, where are all the other news stories calling those crashes driverless? Car accidents happen all the time while the car is cruise control. Is that driverless? Why not? It's essentially the same technology that Tesla has for adaptive cruise control).
A writer in the LA times straight up called for federal regulators to step in based off this. I've seen newspapers go full activist before in the past but this was shocking because they were doing so based off of what is obviously a false premise.
It doesn't take long to speak to a few Tesla owners and realize that autopilot even the non-FSD doesn't operate this way.
The media moves on to its next money-making event. No real repercussions are to be found.
This is simply not true.
Almost every day media around the world are subject to libel lawsuits. Recently, Newsmax and Fox News were sued by Dominion Voting Systems and their employees and Meghan Markle sued Daily Mail for publishing personal letters.
And most of the respectable news organisations still abide by the core tenets of journalism e.g. multiple, vetted sources.
And which ones are those?
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2019/12/28/rachel-maddows-defen...
Turns out, that was all nonsense too:
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a36189237/tesla-model-s-fi...
Better form would have been not publishing reactionary articles in the first place.
> It was "strongly implied" because no one was in the driver's seat. Now there is evidence there was a driver, after an investigation. Why should they retract anything?
A publication which does not retract or correct misinformation is a key part of the problem.
I would guess they just panicked in a strange an extremely expensive car and weren't able to lift their foot off the pedal once doom was imminent. It happened to me when I was a kid, I ran over a fence while turning my dad's girlfriends car around in a tight parking lot. I accidentally goosed the throttle while backing up, panicked, then stomped it to the floor while backing over that poor fence. Very strange experience, almost like my leg was being shocked and I couldn't control it.
If you have those carpets, I would recommend sewing the velcro patch to the carpet so it doesn't come loose.
And he was arguing that the plaid 0-60 time of 1.99 seconds had an asterisk: with 1-foot rollout
Rollout is when you put your car tires between the two light beams at the drag strip. When the lights change, and the car starts moving and the front tire clears the first line that is the 1-foot rollout location.
What I found interesting
@ 1 foot a tesla will be going 5-6 miles per hour
@ ~100 feet it will hit 60 mph
@ 550 feet... a P100D can probably be going pretty fast.
Only when going on a sub-page do you get an asterisk with a footnote mentioning the difference.
Plus, it was a 100D on a back road, I can't imagine they'd be doing a leisurely pace... Conjecture, of course.
edit: Indeed [https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/19/business/tesla-fatal-crash-no...]
I suspect once you control for vehicle age the difference is marginal. Statistically nobody is burning to death in late model luxury sedans (Tesla included) because they're well enough designed that practically nobody is getting trapped in the vehicle in the first place.
https://www.nfpa.org/-/media/Files/News-and-Research/Fire-st...
Wrangling statistics to try and suit your argument is one thing, but that's more than one person a day that's burning to death in a car.
It's not playing games with statistics to point out the effects of large numbers.
What's the percent for teslas?
I'd say the stupid doors are a much bigger problem than the ability to catch fire.
I'm not aware of a direct comparison of post-crash fires. Anecodally, it seems the post-crash fires are rare with the 3 and Y and much less rare with the S/X.
This is maliciously false. There's a manual door handle just like you'd find in every other car; to the point where people new to them almost always use it by accident instead of using the button.
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-y-vs-model-3-differenc...
It's in an identical place on the other models. Please don't trot out hot takes like this on something you don't understand.
Tesla's front doors have internal mechanical levers that can be used in the case of power loss.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01lXcD_Uz74 https://www.manualslib.com/manual/1234782/Tesla-S.html?page=...
Every day around the world, hundreds (1000s?) of people are killed in standard car accidents, whereas, as a proportion of the market, driverlss cars cause a tiny number of crashes, yet people panic, regulators bear their teeth and protesters speak up as soon as single accident was caused by (or assumed to be caused by) a driverless car.
I guess it is an illusion of control in normal cars, despite the fact that electronics should be better in almost every regard for safer driving.
Maybe in the future. For now electronics are still handicapped by AI that is not anywhere even remotely close to humans.
"AIs" ability to reason about traffic situations and, by extension, planning are laughable and even if that properly worked it would still be handicapped by image recognition I wouldn't trust to tell a trashcan from a car.
At this point it's pretty obvious that until better AI comes along we're stuck with terrible. Certainly just pouring ever more resources into "current gen" NNs won't get us anywhere.
Hundreds? Lol. In India alone 150,000 people die in road accidents every year. That is almost 500 a day for 1 country. So over the world it must be well into multiple 1000s.
Of course determining so on individual feelings is dubious (and perhaps there is or soon will be no person outperforming the AP).
> The report states that when the car started, security video shows the owner in the driver's seat, contradicting reports at the time of the April 17 accident that the seat was empty when the car crashed.
Those two things aren't contradictory at all. The car's journey could have started with the driver in the driver's seat, but been empty when the crash occurred. A lot can happen in the time between the start and the end.
A Tesla is happy to slam into a parked emergency vehicle at full speed, as has been demonstrated several times; it's not surprising they don't stop for trees either.
The car it braked for was also in motion, or recently in motion, right?
I took a look at how Subaru Eyesight works. It uses a dual camera system to identify a vehicle ahead and apply braking if it slows down, pedestrians and other specific patterns. Some of it is limited to a 19mph closing difference (surprise).
So the statement above that “mine emergency brakes with objects ahead at any speed” is, unsurprisingly, incorrect.
It doesn’t react to any object and would probably happily hit a tree under the right conditions, or a parked car. Happy to be proven wrong with a demonstration video of the car at full speed.
Source: own a Subaru, have driven it at a cardboard box in the middle of the street, and have had it slam on the brakes. Have also had it slam on the brakes when swerved into my lane, saving me from an accident. So... worth it.
Have you tested yours again a stationary emergency vehicle or a tree? Otherwise there isn’t much to discuss here.
Here's an explanation of why written on here a long time ago by @chowells: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16239612
This user wrote:
To add even more detail, as there still appears to be a lot of confusion:
The radar systems in these vehicles send out a radio pulse in a broad approximate-cone forward. They get bounces back from everything that reflects radio in front of them. Distance from the object is calculated by time between pulse and response. Speed towards/away from the object is calculated from Doppler shift of the radio frequency.
There are two main things that these systems can't detect.
1. Speed of the object perpendicular to the direction of radio wave travel.
2. Location of the object within the approximate-cone the radio pulse travels in.
Note that thanks to the second, you can't calculate the first with higher-level object tracking, either.
So the data you get back is a list of (same-direction velocity component, distance) pairs. There's no way to distinguish between stationary objects in the road and stationary objects above the road, to the side of the road, or even the surface of the road itself.
Radar just doesn't provide the directional information necessary to handle obstacle detection safely.
Aren't vehicle logs a thing? What if there was a bug which mistakenly turned it on in the original car? What if there was a software update sometime between the crash and the investigation which changed the behavior? The article even says that the investigators recovered the damaged "black box", but a month later we have no details about it?
Edit: changed year to month /facepalm
Also, the accident was less than two months ago, not two years. It's likely they're still recovering and analyzing data.
- The gross generalization saying that it couldn't have been enabled because they failed to enable it I their specific situation.
- The gross extrapolation of saying that the driver must have been in the seat when it happened because the driver was in the seat when the car started.
I mean, how useless is that of an investigation. Where is the log analysis, witness reports, and camera images of points closer to the crash site.
I feel very disappointed in the NTSB.
oh and i’m sure all these brake failures in china have nothing to do with it
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/23/tesla-in-china-pressure-moun...
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/amp36189237/tesla-model-s-...