Tesla Autopilot system was on during fatal California crash, more safety concern

I am assuming a simple modern lidar and software package with a field of view limited to "What can the car hit if it keeps going straight" and connected to the AEB would be a pretty fool-proof way of stopping this but that might be too much cost for too limited an application.

For example, this would explain why Autopark sucks and hasn't improved in years.

I just looked up the subaru system. In the emergency braking case, they clearly claim that their system acts only if the driver has failed to brake. That means, for example, that it will brake much more abruptly than a human would, since it is waiting for the last moment before braking. Their lane following technology behaves similarly. Tellingly, it is called "eyesight", suggesting it is merely an extra pair of eyes, rather than "autopilot", which suggests that it can drive on its own.

Also the street sweeper incident [1], the overturned truck incident [2] ...

There's a pattern here.

[1] https://youtu.be/fc0yYJ8-Dyo

[2] https://youtu.be/X3hrKnv0dPQ

On top of that, they have to discard all of the radar data from objects moving at zero speed, because otherwise they’d be swamped out by the return from the road itself. So, the car has a literal blind spot for stationary objects in its path on the highway, unless it can recognize the object as a car with its cameras.

It's no surprise that the makes with the most sales and most vehicles registered and almost certainly most miles driven also have the most fatal collisions.

I bet DeLorean has zero fatal collissions for most of the last ten years. Doesn't make it a good or safe car, just means the founder got caught (set up?) on drug charges and the company collapsed and there's not too many on the road.

2020 fatal crashes:

    #1 – Ford        21,262 

    #2 – Chevrolet   20,435   

    #3 – Toyota      12,918 

    #4 – Honda       10,969  

    #5 – Dodge        7,983

    #6 – Nissan       7,956 

    #7 – GMC          4,533

    #8 – Jeep         4,138

    #9 – Hyundai      3,766   

    #10 – Kia         2,834

    ...

    #41 – Tesla          62

    #1 – General Motors                2,886,904

    #2 – Ford Motor Co                 2,406,188

    #3 – Toyota Motors                 2,383,304

    #4 – FCA US (Fiat, Chrysler, etc)  2,203,663

    #5 – American Honda                1,608,170

    #6 – Nissan-Mitsubishi             1,466,727

    #7 – Hyundai-Kia                   1,325,342

    ...

    #13 - Tesla                          192,250

[1] https://carsalesbase.com/us-car-sales-analysis-2019-brands/

The one thing I could see insurances worry about is correlated risk. Imagine if an accidental push installs a bad development version of the autopilot on all cars instead of the 2 test vehicles with extra sensors, causing a much higher crash rate. Add a broken auto-update mechanism preventing a rollback, and it could take a day to mitigate and a week to fully stop the crashes, and during that time a lot of cars could crash. As long as it's no worse than the crashes resulting from e.g. a day with severe weather, it'll probably be fine, but if it significantly exceeds that, insuring self-driving cars could become too unpredictable, and thus too risky for insurance companies.

Not having sensors that see trees without reducing comfort is a choice.

If the car can’t drive safely in a situation, it needs to require a driver.

Running into stationary objects has a pretty adverse effect on comfort.

To sell a higher level autonomous system, which today is only available in very limited trials e.g. Waymo, you have to collect massive amounts of safety data and submit to each state for approval.

Now, back to Tesla - NHTSA is definitely watching them with interest, and if the data show that Tesla’s marketing is inducing people to not pay attention and have accidents, they will take action.

Fucking cloudflare.