Tesla owner arrested after riding in the back seat while it was on autopilot
news.sky.com
news.sky.com
It turns out that Param Sharma has a long history of committing crimes for attention. He sold a stolen iPhone back in 2014 in order to get attention on Instagram:
https://www.news18.com/news/buzz/instagrams-richest-and-most...
If its just a steering wheel check then all he needs to do is put his foot on the wheel, which looks like what he did.
If it had a weight sensor in seat then he would also need a heavy enough weight.
If there is also an attention tracking camera then that has to be fooled as well.
No system is perfect it also doesn't mean more couldn't be done, the more friction you add the less people will do it, especially just casual offenders who just jump in the back seat and use a foot to try it out.
How much should be done is an open debate, I am just trying to find out what a Tesla currently does.
- The jokesters that manipulate the vehicle with a foot or something. There are very few of these in general, as there really isn't a benefit to the operator.
- The sleepers - These seem to be happening too often with Teslas. It seems like face/head tracking could fix it.
- The movie watchers - These can trivially defeat both the eye tracking style approaches and the possibly a camera based approach as well.
- The unfocused, tired, or otherwise slightly distracted. This is by far the biggest group.
To maximize safety, these things need to focus on shaping behavior, not on stopping determined and willfully dangerous adversaries.
It seems based on other actual answers to my question there is only a steering wheel check.
Are you proposing there should be no checks and it's purely the drivers responsibility therefore my question should not be answered directly instead this should be a debate about risk management?
Please clarify how the GP answered my question and what I missed.
Can I get a clear response instead of argumentative rambling?
https://www.google.com/maps/@61.2297735,-149.7217745,3a,83.7...
Cars are dangerous and almost by definition can be used maliciously to terrifying effect, and we just accept that. You don't expect your Civic to protect the world against you running them over, why demand it from another manufacturer?
EDIT: But then again, its a Volvo :-P (It's not like they are considered a "hip" manufacturer)
Most cars it's never been a worry because the vehicle would crash immediately when someone moved to the back seat, so if someone attempted this they had a death wish anyway.
Now, we are in a transition phase where cars aren't fully self driving but they have features they take some control over which gives people a false sense of confidence, and Tesla is the worst offender here.
If there is a feature that reliably prevents a Civic from striking a person, you can bet it should be included on every new vehicle. Look at rear view cameras - rarely seen 10 years ago and they are now required by law on new cars in the US because they have proven to greatly enhance the safety of pedestrians.
The legislation hasn't caught up with the tech here - it will soon enough.
Which is sort of the point I think you're missing: the driver nag doesn't seem to enhance safety much at all. In fact I don't think we have a single known accident (now that everyone seems to be backing off from assumptions about that Texas crash) where someone defeated a Tesla driver nag and got into a crash a human driver would have prevented.
Everyone should agree that we should demand proven safety features be implemented broadly.
The problem is that people seem to be arguing the converse: that because Tesla has this feature, it must mean that autopilot is UNsafe. And that just doesn't seem to be the case.
From https://owners.honda.com/vehicles/information/2021/Civic-Sed...
The system starts monitoring the roadway ahead when your vehicle speed is about 3 mph (5 km/h) and there is a vehicle in front of you.
The CMBSTM activates when:
The speed difference between your vehicle and a vehicle or pedestrian detected in front of you becomes about 3 mph (5 km/h) and over with a chance of a collision.
Your vehicle speed is about 62 mph (100 km/h) or less and the system determines there is a chance of a collision with:
- Vehicles detected in front of you that are stationary, oncoming, or traveling in your same direction.
- A pedestrian who is detected in front of you.
Your vehicle speed is above 62 mph (100 km/h), and the system determines there is a chance of a collision with a vehicle detected in front of you traveling in your same direction.
I'm not sure what else Tesla could do without having too many false-positives.
1: https://www.amazon.com/seat-belt-buckle-alarm-stopper/s?k=se...
So he does this stupid and dangerous thing and and for reasons he somehow doesn't get arrested the first time. So what to do? Try it again.
ADDED: And oh. Then goes on to state publicly and in print that he's going to keep doing it. It does look as if he can get his licenses suspended for all of 30 days. The funny (not ha-ha) thing is that it also looks like he could be thrown in jail longer for disobeying the police officer (6 months) than the actual crime (90 days).
Not the sharpest tool in the shed. Attention-seeking on Instagram may not be the worst thing at the moment but it's still a pox.
Disobeying the police officer is an actual crime, and clearly (in law) the more significant one.
I suspect - but cannot prove - that he might have something to do with a stock manipulation scheme, targeting companies with high public profiles. If you read the article, he has a rich father. This is intriguing enough to justify further investigation.
EDIT: apparently this is happening now https://www.thefocus.news/celebrity/param-sharma-parents/
> He believes his Model 3 can drive itself, and does not understand why he had to spend a night in jail.
>He said he started riding in the back seat of autonomously driving Tesla vehicles in 2018 and has gone about 40,000 miles without being in the driver's seat.
They should, at the minimum, suspend his drivers license. He is recklessly putting others at risk.
"I started drinking and driving and I've done 40,000 miles!" would have most people want him in jail for longer than a night.
If I were Tesla I'd suggest it to the court as an appropriate "punishment" so it was clear it was at the court's orders.
But on reflection I think its the wrong move. Its not the drivers first time doing this and there are already have laws in place for this sort of thing, Basically driving license revocation. (I understand that DUI drivers can be required to equip a breathalyzer as a condition to retain their licence, does this option get offered to repeat offenders?)
Revoking auto drive wouldn't prevent the driver from selling the car and getting another Tesla if they REALLY wanted the feature back (It appears the person in question comes from a wealthy family).
I don't feel that the loss of the feature would be much of a deterant and it penalises any other driver of the car who would use the feature correctly (which might even be the cars next owner).
Semi-autonomous vehicles are a new thing, maybe it should require new training.
I also think that Tesla's marketing is misleading: https://www.tesla.com/autopilot
In general, a "learner's permit", "license", and "license for driving commercial vehicles" is a pretty common tiered system that I think is common.
Until we get better city design and layout, we won't be able to make driver licenses stricter.
i can't imagine wanting to do that on purpose. uggggh.
https://dig.abclocal.go.com/ktrk/PICS/MAY2021/051021-ktrk-nt...
Some findings:
- The driver did start off in the driver's seat
- The NTSB tested in the location with another car, and Autosteer would not engage, but that Traffic Aware Cruise Control would
Discussed here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27112010
HN original discussion about the crash: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26852399
People need to be aware of this kind of circular logic, which was applied in the Texas crash debates too: the fact that there are still safety controls in place on a new feature that isn't quite ready for full autonomy doesn't constitute evidence that the feature is unsafe. That require an entirely different kind of evidence.
And frankly... while everyone keeps circling around the same minutiae about the driver nag... Teslas on autopilot aren't actually crashing. In fact it's been quite a long time now since we've seen a juicy autopilot failure.
That's how I evaluate my own driving, I think of things much less severe than collisions as incidents.
Thankfully in this case cars actually crash a lot, so we have good proxy data anyway. And... again, Tesla seems to be doing pretty well. People are desperate for bad news about autopilot, to the extent that we all blew up a story about (what turns out to have been) a routine human driver crash in Texas two weeks ago based on a quote from one fire marshall. But the reality is that the system appears to be doing pretty well.
Like it or not, we measure safety in vehicle travel by measuring accidents. Those are objectively identifiable and there are extensive bureaucracies both public and private designed to track them.
And quite frankly, Teslas on autopilot look pretty damn good.
He is comically arrogant. Not someone I'd like to hangout with, but an interesting (although dangerous) character for sure.
[1] https://www.ktvu.com/news/man-arrested-for-riding-in-back-of...
https://www.ktvu.com/news/back-seat-tesla-rider-pulls-same-s...
thus what's so weird?
12k down with a 6 year loan would be something like $900 a month. Expensive, but well within the reach of plenty of 25 year olds (especially in industries that frequent HN.)
Let's say they're only taking home $100k of that after taxes. That means you have $8000 to spend on your life.
They might spend spend $3000 per month on rent (which gets you a pretty decent apartment anywhere and an amazing one in lots of places.)
Let's say they put $2000 of that into savings.
That leaves them with $3000 to spend each month.
$900 a month on a car payment isn't such a big deal at that point.
As a software engineer in Dallas, TX with similar experience to a new grad, $150k was a staggering number to see. Around this time in my life I was lucky to make $60k. At senior I made, maybe, $110k. Cost of living doesn't even begin to approach $100k between the two places. The reality of which makes me sad.
"aside from rent"
What if instead of renting something, you were living with parents and deciding to buy Tesla first?
I'm not saying this is rational
There is little evidence either way as of yet, but I do think there's enough for the SEC to take a look.
Citation needed.
Maybe it's related to the thing that's confusing me. I thought I had learned that this shouldn't be possible; that Tesla vehicles won't 'autopilot' without a person in the driver's seat. This story and those claims can't both be simultaneously true unless this case involved some defeat device to allow autopilot without a driver.
The claim that autopilot can't operate without someone in the drivers seat was a key point made by Tesla advocates (including the media ones) attempting to debunk the narrative around a recent crash that killed two people while they were supposedly in the back seat.
it tries to detect a person, but that's relatively easily tricked.
If so that is inexcusable.
I would not want it to immediately disengage auto steer just because a wriggled in my seat though.
I do think Tesla could do better but I see no reason why they should be censured for failing to prevent deliberate attempts to circumvent the checks. That would mean that they would have to engage in an arms race against ever more inventive people trying to defeat the system.
> He believes his Model 3 can drive itself, and does not understand why he had to spend a night in jail.
This sounds like the technology version of your typical anti-vaxxer's reasoning. "I believe, therefore it's true".