Comment by Robotbeat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Robotbeat | Hacker News Reader

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I actually disagree. (And before you respond, please read my post because it’s not a trivial point.)

The fact that an huge formal investigation happened with just a single casualty is proof that it may actually be superior for safety in the long-term (when combined with feedback from regulators and government investigators). One death in conventional vehicles is irrelevant. But because of the high profile of Tesla’s technology, it garners a bunch of attention from the public and therefore regulators. This is PRECISELY the dynamic that led to the ridiculously safe airline record. The safer it is, the more that rare deaths will be investigated and the causes sussed out and fixed by industry and regulators together.

Perhaps industry/Tesla/whoever hates the regulators and investigations. But I think they are precisely what will cause self driving to become ever safer, and eventually become as safe as industry/Tesla claims, safer than human drivers while also being cheap and ubiquitous. Just like airline travel today. A remarkable combination of safety and affordability.

This might be the only way to ever do it. I don’t think the airline industry could’ve ever gotten to current levels of safety by testing everything on closed airfields and over empty land for hundreds of millions of flight hours before they had sufficient statistics to be equal to today.

It can’t happen without regulators and enforcement, either.

Then why not flip the scheme. Instead of have the human as backup to the machine, make the machine backup the human. Let the human do all the driving and have the robot jump in whenever the human makes a mistake. Telemetry can then record all the situations where the human and the machine disagreed. That should provide all the necessary data, with the benefit of the robot perhaps preventing many accidents.

Of course this is impossible in the real world. Nobody is going to buy a car that will randomly make its own decisions, that will pull the wheel from your hands ever time it thinks you are making an illegal lane change. Want safety? How about a Tesla that is electronically incapable of speeding. Good luck selling that one.

>Let the human do all the driving and have the robot jump in whenever the human makes a mistake.

I really don't think that would give many data points, because all of the instances would be when a human fell asleep or wasn't paying attention.

> * Let the human do all the driving and have the robot jump in whenever the human makes a mistake.*

Because when the human disagrees with the machine, the machine is usually the one making a mistake. It might prevent accidents, but it would also cause them, and you lose predictability in the process (you have to model the human and the machine).

I don't know how anyone can look at the types of accidents Tesla is having and conclude that it should override the human driver.

>Let the human do all the driving and have the robot jump in whenever the human makes a mistake.

Nothing more annoying then a car that thinks i don't know how to drive (warning beeps etc.).

Nobody is going to buy a car that will randomly make its own decisions, that will pull the wheel from your hands ever time it thinks you are making an illegal lane change.

That's almost exactly what my Honda does. Illegal (no signal) lane change results in a steering wheel shaker (and optional audio alert). And the car, when sensing an abrupt swerve which is interpreted as the vehicle leaving the roadway, attempts to correct that via steering and brake inputs.

But, I agree with your more general point - the human still needs to be primary. My Honda doesn't allow me to remove my hands from the steering wheel for more than a second or two. Tesla should be doing the same, as no current "autopilot" system is truly automatic.

Tesla’s system also requires driving’s to have their hands on the steering wheel and occasionally provide torque input.

Interesting, I assumed it didn't, given the prevalence of stories about driver watching movies on their phones. I guess they just leave one hand lightly on the wheel, but are still able to be ~100% disengaged from driving the car.

> Illegal (no signal) lane change results in a steering wheel shaker (and optional audio alert).

To be clear, tying the warning to the signal isn't about preventing unsignaled lane changes, it's gauging driver intent (i.e. is he asleep and drifting or just trying to change lanes). It's just gravy that it will train bad drivers to use their signals properly.

Correct. It's not (primarily) a training thing, but used to ensure the driver is driving and not sleeping/watching movies/whatever.

Is a lane change without signal always illegal? I know that it almost certainly make you liable for any resulting accident, but I'm not sure that it is universally illegal.

I have no idea, but the point wasn't so much that the lane change is illegal, but that lack of signal is used to indicate lack of driver attention. I shouldn't have used "illegal" in my original post.

This is technically true in Ontario (TIL).

> 142 (1) The driver or operator of a vehicle upon a highway before turning (...) from one lane for traffic to another lane for traffic (...) shall first see that the movement can be made in safety, and if the operation of any other vehicle may be affected by the movement shall give a signal plainly visible to the driver or operator of the other vehicle of the intention to make the movement. R.S.O. 1990, c. H.8, s. 142 (1).

That said there's zero cost to doing so regardless of whether other drivers are affected.

https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90h08#BK243

That's the sort of law I remember. It is considered a failure to communicate your intention rather than a violation per se in every circumstance.

It could be one of those "if a tree falls in the forest" scenarios. If a cop is near enough to see you not signal, he could easily argue that he himself might have been affected by the turn or lane change.

> Is a lane change without signal always illegal? I know that it almost certainly make you liable for any resulting accident

Usually, it makes you liable because it is illegal. CA law for instance reqires signalling 100ft before a lane change or turn.

Yes, failure to signal is a traffic violation. At least everywhere I've lived/traveled in the US. It's also a rather convenient excuse for police to "randomly" pull you over (I've been pulled over by Chicago PD for not signaling for a lane change, despite actually having done so).

> That's almost exactly what my Honda does. Illegal (no signal) lane change results in a steering wheel shaker (and optional audio alert). And the car, when sensing an abrupt swerve which is interpreted as the vehicle leaving the roadway, attempts to correct that via steering and brake inputs.

By the way, this is fucking terrifying when you first encounter it in a rental car on a dark road with poor lane markings while just trying to get to your hotel after a five hour flight.

I didn't encounter an obvious wheel shaker, but this psychotic car was just yanking the wheel in different directions as I was trying to merge onto a highway.

Must be what a malfunctioning MCAS felt like in a 737 MAX, but thankfully without the hundreds of pounds of hydraulic force.

Just to add, I have a 2021 Honda, and disabling this functionality is a 1-button-press toggle on the dash to the left of the steering wheel. Not mandatory.

I think that’s the approach many car manufacturers have been on for decades.

As a simple example, ABS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-lock_braking_system) only interferes with what the driver does when an error occurs.

More related to self-driving, there’s various variants of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lane_departure_warning_system that do take control of the car.

And it is far from “incapable of speeding”, but BMW, Audi and Mercedes-Benz “voluntarily” and sort-of limit the speed of their cars to 250km/hour (https://www.autoevolution.com/news/gentlemens-agreement-not-...)

> Want safety? How about a Tesla that is electronically incapable of speeding.

That would be unsafe in many situations. If the flow of traffic is substantially above the speed limit--which it often is--being unable to match it increases the risk of accident. This is known as the Solomon curve [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_curve

Ok. Electronically incapable of driving more than 10% faster than other traffic.

How do you know which traffic is "the other traffic"? So basically - there's no top limit.

> Subsequent research suggests significant biases in the Solomon study, which may cast doubt on its findings

With the logic presented in the theoretical foundation section, it seems that the safer move would actually be slow down and match the speed of all the trucks and other large vehicles... which won't happen.

Matching speed sounds great, except there are always people willing to go faster and faster. In my state they raised the speed limit from 70 to 75, it just means more people are going 85-90. How is that safer?

To address your last paragraph, everyone going 85-90 is less safe than everyone going 70-75, you are correct.

However, you individually going 70-75 when everyone else is going 85-90 is less safe than you going 85-90 like everyone else in the exact same situation.

>there are always people willing to go faster and faster

That’s why no one says “go as fast as the fastest vehicle you see”, it is “go with the general speed of traffic”. That’s an exercise for human judgement to figure that one out, which is why imo it isn’t a smart idea to have the car automatically lock you out of overriding the speed limit.

> However, you individually going 70-75 when everyone else is going 85-90 is less safe than you going 85-90 like everyone else in the exact same situation.

And yet the roads are full of vehicles literally incapable of going 85. Many trucks cannot do more than 69mph.

People are going faster because they felt it's safer, not because of the speed limit. You can design roads that cause humans to slow down and be more careful.

Or you can just set the speed limit appropriately, in accordance with sound engineering principles. A radical notion, I guess.

A self driving car obviously needs to be aware of other cars on the road. I don't see any reason why the car couldn't observe other cars, see what speed they are going at, and refuse to go faster than the rest. A car that refuses to do 120mph when all the other cars are doing 60mph in a 50mph zone should be trivial.

(Trivial if the self driving tech works at all....)

You're getting downvoted for this comment apparently, but I'm still of the firm belief that we will never see full autonomous driving without some sort of P2P network among cars/infrastructure.

There's just too much shit that can't be "seen" with a camera/sensor in conjested traffic. Having a swarm of vehicles all gathering/sharing data is one of the only true ways forward IMO.

On most or all roads below 100km/h autopilot won’t allow speeding, and therefore I drive at the limit, which I know I would not have done if I controlled it. It also stays in the lane better than I do, keeps distance better, and more. Sometimes it’s wonky when the street lines are unclear. It’s not perfect but a better driver than I am in 80% of cases.

My insurance company gives a lower rate if you buy the full autopilot option, and that to me indicates they agree it drives better than I, or other humans, do.

On most or all roads below 100km/h autopilot won’t allow speeding, and therefore I drive at the limit, which I know I would not have done if I controlled it

If following the speed limit makes cars safer, another way to achieve that without autopilot is to just have all cars limit their speed to the speed limit.

Sometimes it’s wonky when the street lines are unclear. It’s not perfect but a better driver than I am in 80% of cases

The problem is in those 20% of cases where you'd lulled into boredom by autopilot as you concentrate on designing your next project in your head, then suddenly autopilot says "I lost track of where the road is, here you do it!" and you have to quickly gain context and figure out what the right thing to do is.

Some autopilot systems use eye tracking to make sure that the driver is at least looking at the road, but that doesn't guarantee that he's paying attention. But at least that's harder to defeat than Tesla's "nudge the steering wheel once in a while" method.

> just have all cars limit their speed to the speed limit.

The devil is in the details... GPS may not provide sufficient resolution. Construction zones. School zones with variable hours. Tunnels. Adverse road conditions. Changes to the underlying roads. Different classes of vehicles. Etc.

By the time you account for all the mapping and/or perception, you could've just improved the autonomous driving and eliminated the biggest source of humans driving: The human.

But you can still impose a max speed limit based on available data to cover most normal driving conditions but it's still on the driver to drive slower if appropriate. And that could be implemented today, not a decade from now when autonomous driving is trustable.

The parent post said that autopilot won't let him go over the speed limit and implies that makes him safer. My point is that you don't need full autopilot for that.

So this is not a technical problem at all, but a political one. As the past year has shown, people won't put up with any convenience or restriction, even if it could save lives (not even if it could save thousands of lives)

The single system you're describing, with all of its complexity, is a subset of what is required for autonomous vehicles. We will continue to have road construction, tunnels, and weather long past the last human driver. Improving the system here simply improves the system here -- you cannot forsake this work by saying "oh the autonomous system will solve it" -- this is part of the autonomous system.

Just add all those to the map system. It could be made incredibly accurate, if construction companies are able to actually submit their work zones and "geofence" them off on the map.

GPS is extremely accurate honestly. My garmen adjusts itself the very instant I cross over a speed limit sign to a new speed, somehow. Maybe they have good metadata, but its all public anyway under some department of transportation domain and probably not hard to mine with the price of compute these days. Even just setting a top speed in residential areas of like 35mph would be good and save a lot of lives that are lost when pedestrians meet cars traveling at 50mph. A freeway presents a good opportunity to add sensors to the limited on and off ramps for the car to detect that its on a freeway. Many freeways already have some sort of sensor based system for charging fees.

What would be even easier than all of that, though, is just installing speeding cameras and mailing tickets.

During the 3 years I’ve owned it there are 2 places where lines are wonky and I know to take over.

I have not yet struggled to stay alert when it drives me, and it has driven better than I would have - so it certainly is an improvement over me driving 100% of the time. It does not have road rage and it does not enjoy the feeling of speeding, like I do when I drive, nor does it feel like driving is a competition, like I must admit I do when I am hungry, stressed, or tired.

> just have all cars limit their speed to the speed limit

No way I’d buy a car that does not accelerate when I hit the pedal. Would you buy a machine that is not your servant?

> Would you buy a machine that is not your servant?

I mean... that's an odd thing for someone to say who has bought a vehicle with over-the-air firmware updates.

Very true! And I’m typing this on an iPhone…

I wish I could hack but car, but also wouldn’t trust others if they did

I keep saying the same thing actually whenever people say that manual driving will be outlawed. Like, no, it won't be - because the computers will still save you in most cases either way, autopilot enabled or not.

>>How about a Tesla that is electronically incapable of speeding. Good luck selling that one.

From 2022 all cars sold in the EU have to have an electronic limiter that keeps you to the posted speed limit(by cutting power if you are already going faster) - the regulation does allow the system to be temporarily disabled however.

Your summary is incorrect. The ETSC recommends that Intelligent Speed Assistance should be able to be overridden.[1] It's supposed to not accelerate as much if you're exceeding the speed limit, and if you override by pressing the accelerator harder, it should show some warning messages and make an annoying sound. It's stupid, but it doesn't actually limit the speed of your car.

I think it's a silly law and I'm very glad I don't live in a place that requires such annoyances, but it's not as bad as you're claiming.

1. https://etsc.eu/briefing-intelligent-speed-assistance-isa/

I hired a new car with Intelligent Speed Assistance this summer, though it was set (and I left it) just to "ping" rather than do any limiting. I drove it to a fairly unusual place, though still in Europe and with standard European signs. It did not have a GPS map of the area.

It could reliably recognize the speed limit signs (red circle), but it never recognized the similar grey-slash end-of-limit signs. It also didn't recognize the start-of-town or end-of-town signs, so it didn't do anything about the limits they implied.

I would certainly have had to disable it, had it been reducing the acceleration in the way that document describes.

> Of course this is impossible in the real world. Nobody is going to buy a car that will randomly make its own decisions, that will pull the wheel from your hands ever time it thinks you are making an illegal lane change.

Yeah, add to that the unreliability of Tesla's system means that it cannot pull the wheel from the driver, because it's not unusual for it to want to do something dangerous and need to be stopped. You don't want it to "fix" a mistake by driving someone into the median divider.

> How about a Tesla that is electronically incapable of speeding. Good luck selling that one.

Instead they did the exact opposite with the plaid mode model S, lol. It kind of works against their claims that they prioritize safety when their hottest new car - fully intended for public roads - has as its main selling point the ability to accelerate from 60-120 mph faster than any other car.

What? Cars with collision detection systems already exist, and they can handle both side on and head on collision avoidance when a human is driving.

People literally are buying cars that “make their own decisions”. Importantly though, these systems only activate in the case of an imminent collision IF the corrective measure won’t cause another collision.

> that will pull the wheel …

Yah, of course no one is going to buy a care that does what you describe because what you describe is insane and inherently unsafe. Unless a collision is imminent, nothing happens.

This line of thinking is flawed because it assumes a smooth surface over the safety space, where if you make incremental improvements you will head towards some maxima of safety. e.g. : the wing fell off; investigate; find that you can't use brittle aluminum; tell aircraft manf. to use a more ductile alloy. Self driving technology isn't like that -- you can't just file a bug "don't mistake a human for a plastic bag", fix that bug and move on to the next one. No number of incremental fixes will make self driving that works as any reasonable human would expect it to work.

This argument is flawed, because when regulators investigate a Tesla crash, Waymo doesn't care the slightest. The technologies (emphasis on having skeuomorphic cameras vs a lidar), approaches (emphasis on generating as many situations as possible in simulated worlds and carefully transitioning to the business case vs testing as early in the real world with background data captation) and results are so different between the actors in this specific industry that one's flaws being fixed or improved won't necessarily translate into others benefitting from it.

Conversely, when Waymo iterates and improves their own safety ratios by a significant amount, that evidently does not result in Tesla's improving in return.

well when regulators investigate Boing, Airbus probably doesn't care either.

Until it leads to something systemic, that then regulator mandates for all vehicles

Boeing and Airbus operate largely in the same direction with similar technical solutions to somilar problems.

Not the case at all between lidars and cameras.

Ignoring other issues.

Asking someone to pay attention when they are not doing anything is unrealistic. I would be constantly bored / distracted. My wife would instantly fall asleep. Etc etc.

I largely agree with you, but I just wish regulators would start by only allowing these assist programs for people that are already known to be poor drivers. The elderly and convicted drunk drivers, for example. That way we could have the best of both worlds.

Incentivizing drunk driving seems dangerous.

Requiring people to buy a special car/system to be able to drive doesn't seem like an incentive - it seems similar to the interlock system we currently require drunk drivers to purchase to be able to drive.

If anything a driver monitoring system seems even better than the interlock system, for example you couldn't have your kids/friends blow for you to bypass it.

I disagree. I would not put people who shoved poor judgment in situation, where they can further hurt other or themselves it. People like that are more likely not to pay attention and do other irresponsible things.

Go with safest drivers first.

Teslas Autopilot system is almost 10X safer than the average human driver already based on the latest 2021 Q1 numbers.

https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/VehicleSafetyReport

That impressive claim narrows to approximately the noise floor if you compare to comparable drivers in comparable cars.

> In the 1st quarter, we registered one accident for every 4.19 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 2.05 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot and without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 978 thousand miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 484,000 miles.

I think the comparison should be Tesla with/without AI, not Tesla/not-Tesla; so roughly either x2 or x4 depending on what the other active safety features do.

It’s not nothing, but it’s much less than the current sales pitch — and the current sales pitch is itself the problem here, for many legislators.

> we registered one accident for every 4.19 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 2.05 million miles driven

This still isn't the correct comparison. Major selection bias with comparing miles with autopilot engaged to miles without it engaged, since autopilot cannot be engaged in all situations.

A better test would be to compare accidents in Tesla vehicles with the autopilot feature enabled (engaged or not) to accidents in Tesla vehicles with the autopilot feature disabled.

Even then, there's selection: people who do a lot of highway driving are more likely to opt for Autopilot than those who mostly drive in the city.

As was stated elsewhere, most accidents happen in city driving where autopilot cannot be activated so the with/without AI is meaningless. We need to figure out when the AI could have been activated but wasn't, if you do that then you are correct.

On the contrary to your overall point: The fatal crash rate per miles driven is almost 2 times higher in rural areas than urban areas. Urban areas may have more accidents, but the speeds are likely lower (fender benders).

https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/urban...

"..most accidents happen in city driving where autopilot cannot be activated so the with."

Yes it can. The only time it can't be activated is if there is no clearly marked center line.

Tesla's vehicles are almost 10X safer than the average vehicle. Whether their autopilot system is contributing positively or negatively to that safety record is unclear.

The real test of this would be: of all Tesla vehicles, are the ones with autopilot enabled statistically safer or less safe than the ones without autopilot enabled?

...according to Tesla, based on the data nobody else can see?

No, it’s not. I guess we’re doomed to see this at-best-misleading-but-really-just-straight-up-lying analysis every time there’s an article about this.

Makes me laugh, especially with the “geeks are immune to marketing” trope that floats around here equally as regularly.

Tesla's safety report lacks data and is extremely misleading.

1. Autopilot only works on (or intended to work on) highways. But they are comparing their highway record to all accident records including city driving, where accident rate is far higher than highway driving.

2. They're also comparing with every vehicle in the United States including millions of older vehicles. Modern vehicles are built for higher safety and have a ton of active safety features (emergency braking, collision prevention etc). Older vehicles are much more prone to accidents and that skews the numbers.

The reality is Teslas are no safer than any other vehicles in its class ($40k+). Their safety report is purely marketing spin.

They also include miles driven by previous versions of their software in the “safe miles driven” tally. There’s no guarantee any improvement would not have resulted in more accidents. They should reset the counter on every release.

> The reality is Teslas are no safer than any other vehicles in its class ($40k+).

Would another way of saying this be that they are as safe as other vehicles in that class? And that therefore Autopilot is not more unsafe than driving those other cars?

I would probably agree, but I also think it’s a case of “need more data”.

We should really compare Autopilot with its competitors like GM’s Super Cruise or Ford’s Blue Cruise, both of which offer more capabilities than Autopilot. That will show if Tesla’s driver assist system is more or less safe than their competitors product.

What capabilities does GM or Ford have that Tesla doesn't? Neither GM nor Ford have rolled out automatic lane changing. Teslas have been doing that since 2019.

The reason GM's Super Cruise got a higher rating by Consumer Reports was because CR didn't even test the capabilities that only Tesla had (such as automatic lane change and taking offramps/onramps). Also, the majority of the evaluation criteria weren't about capabilities. eg: "unresponsive driver", "clear when safe to use", and "keeping the driver engaged".[1]

1. https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/cadillac-super-cr...

Do you know many vehicles $40K+ that don't have BLIS and rear/front cross traffic alerts? While a radar-based blind sport alert (one that warns if a car behind is moving too fast to safely merge) is probably irrelevant for the city driving, the cross traffic is extremely useful when pulling out of driveway obstructed by parked cars, I personally have seen several accidents just on my street that could have been prevented with cross traffic detection. I think the expensive models (S/X) still have the front radar so they may have the front alert but I don't think any model ever had the rear radar for the rear cross traffic alert.

Tesla's driving is skewed, hugely. There are plenty of situations where AP is turned off that are less safe in general.

AP has the luxury of being able to be turned off in less than ideal conditions. Human drivers can't do that.

It's the reason why only Tesla touts these numbers. They're inaccurate and misleading.

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