The First Step Toward Protecting Everyone Else from Teslas | Hacker News Reader

The First Step Toward Protecting Everyone Else from Teslas

slate.com

41 pointsRickJWagner44 comments

11 accidents that involved hitting first responders sounds high, but without a comparative for the number of first responders we'd expect to have been hit for the same number of miles driven it's a totally useless datum.

It’s not totally useless, it’s less useful.

I don’t think the measure is per miles driven as not all miles are comparable. I think it needs to be a mixture of miles, number of trips, number of drivers, complexity of trips. And I do want to see a baseline of how frequently cars crash into stationary emergency vehicles as I expect it is very low (what with the flashing lights and road flares and everything).

It's useless in the sense that by itself it sounds scary, but might actually represent a significant achievement in terms of performance compared to the baseline. Or not. In either way though it is being implicitly compared and so is useless for making an explicit connection.

As mentioned by another commenter, this article reads like a hit piece. It assumes that the only open question would be how to harm Tesla. Yes, accidents have to be investigated, and if anything, one can discuss whether the advertisement of Tesla is deceptive. While in several stages, before activating autopilot, the driver is clearly told, that this is not autonomous driving, most of these accidents happened because people did not pay attention. In some cases they even actively defeated the devices to recognize an active driver at the wheel.

What makes the investigation at this point of time a bit difficult is the fact, that Tesla is already switching away from the technology involved in those accidents. They are all related to radar-equipped Teslas. But radar is very bad at detecting static obstacles. Its main purpose is for tracking other moving objects. With non-moving objects, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to pick them out against the background. Radar has not a high enough resolution.

Recently, Tesla cars are shipped without radar and the Autopilot now uses pure optical recognition, based on the new software developed for the planned full self driving mode. This should be way better at recognizing obstacles on a fundamental basis. Also, a in-cabin camera is supposedly watching for driver attention. I hope the investigations also consider the changes to the system already done.

Most of the article is not about Tesla at all. It instead expresses the hope that an investigation of a potential safety risk for people outside the car might indicate some sort of positive trend where regulators might continue to show interest in such people doing forward.

At the time of my post, I could find no other references to the main thrust of the article...

It uses a lot of times the word "Tesla" for an article that is not about Tesla. If it were about autonomous cars in general, it would have been a great start to phrase the headline differently.

Articles like this that read more like hit piece are hard to finish. The language used seems gleeful at the investigation and possible sanctions.

It's now very fashionable to hate Elon Musk. I knew this would happen back when it was fashionable to worship him and compare him to a comic book superhero. It's the natural progression, like a cultural version of the film The Wicker Man.

Elon doesn't seem to behave like a normal person and economic cause and effect doesn't seem to work with him. I admire him for thinking completely out of the box and for single handedly taking on the entire car industry. This article seems to unfairly and gleefully demonize tesla, while substantial issues exist with almost every other car manufacturer.

Yeah that whole article just seemed like a weird opinion piece.

I had to laugh at this part.... yes things will just suddenly change because Biden had a bad bicycle accident one time.

>Advocates have had high hopes that President Biden—a cyclist who has endured a personal and horrific experience with a car crash—would revitalize the federal government’s commitment to road safety, especially with the aggressively multimodal Pete Buttigieg at the helm of the Department of Transportation, of which NHTSA is a part. So far Buttigieg has said all the right things, but his department hasn’t offered significant new protections to vulnerable road users.

Edit: apparently it's referring to a crash that doesn't even involve cyclists. Which makes the whole reference even more off topic.

Biden has at least twice publicly stated or suggested that the driver of the truck that struck his wife's vehicle, killing her and the couple's daughter, had been drinking, even though the driver was not charged with drunken driving (or any other infraction suggesting fault on his part).

What's False

No definitive evidence exists to prove or rule out whether the other driver had been drinking, and belief that drinking had contributed to the crash was reportedly prevalent among the local community and not something Biden simply made up on his own.

[...]

Based on evidence and witness accounts, it appeared that Neilia Biden had pulled into the truck driver’s right of way at an intersection with a two-way stop, and the tractor-trailer driver was unable to stop in time to avoid striking her vehicle:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/biden-lie-wife-killed-drun...

No, the article is referring to Biden’s first wife and 1-year old daughter dying in a car crash in 1972.

Ok who cares? That's even less relatable to the article since the entire thing is about hitting walkers and cyclists and how big vehicles are at fault for this. Also vehicle safety was far worse in the 70s.

What a stupid reference. Biden had a crash half a century ago, he'll totally change laws that he hasn't cared about for 40+ years in office....

I find it totally bizarre that people think someone who's a lifelong politician like this is just suddenly going to do everything they've always wanted and make their lives way better.

> numerous videos of people playing cards or moving to the back seat while Autopilot is engaged—which Tesla warns against, but does not block

Would it make sense for Tesla to turn off self driving for idiots who are posting these videos to social media? I’m sure they can easily correlate the posters to drivers in an automated way just based on the time and location of videos posted, since they know every trip and mile driven by all their drivers.

Or maybe Tesla should not be allow to call it 'Autopilot' tm with small writing stating that Autopilot is not an autopilot.

If I sell 'super seatbelts' with small print stating that during a car crash you should hang on to the seat by the power of your own muscles because super seatbelts protect only against fender benders and tears in high speed car crashes. I will be in prison the moment authorities hear about my product.

People are morons, and you cannot expect them to know small caveats of all tech. "Its called Autopilot so it auto pilots my tesla duh."

> Or maybe Tesla should not be allow to call it 'Autopilot' tm with small writing stating that Autopilot is not an autopilot.

I see this complaint frequently, and I find it confusing. The feature is clearly named after the 'autopilot' found on airliners, a system which is designed to do things like maintain heading, manage airspeed, and avoid collisions. Airliner autopilot should not be relied upon for every step of a flight without human oversight, but clearly an airliner with autopilot is safer than one without. And if a pilot engaged autopilot and stretched out for a nap, we wouldn't blame autopilot for any resulting catastrophe.

So, how is Tesla's autopilot meaningfully different from that? They don't call it 'self-driving', 'autonomous', or 'driverless', they've named it after a very similar existing technology.

Tesla deserves a lot of criticism, but this specific complaint strikes me as misplaced.

> So, how is Tesla's autopilot meaningfully different from that?

Simple.

The user of the tesla autopilot is a car driver that is 'qualified' to drive a car. Driving licence doesnt entail knowledge of how to use tesla's 'autopilot'

You are literately equating a car driver to an air-plane pilot!

A pilot that need to be specifically train for a given model of a plane, and its autopilot. A pilot that is fully aware of the scope of the planes autopilot functionality, also pilot cannot 'go for a nap' when autopilot is engaged.

On top of that, the threat model of potential obstacles in the sky is far simpler. On an airliner you have a heading and speed for every tracked aircraft in your vicinity and the buffer zones are far greater, even accounting for relative increase in speed. It is much more difficult to predict and quickly respond to edge case obstacles and erratic agent behavior on the road.

Perhaps there would be an analogy here if there was something like a centralized control center for autonomous vehicles (rife with opportunities for system-wide hacks and corporate/gov't abuse) or if vehicles were networked and shared travel vector and size data.

Well, I agree with much of what you say, but all I was trying to say is this: If 'autopilot' is a misleading name for Tesla's advanced driver assist system, then isn't it also misleading for airliners to use that term? To me, the two systems appear to be very similar in what they can do.

the only thing both have in common is the spelling

If you're not interested in having a rational discussion about it, you can just say so.

I would like to point out that you are pushing square through circular hole insisting you are doing it right.

Tesla's Autopilot and plane autopilot are different technology requiring different level of training and skill to operate.

Equating both due to name and extrapolating that common person should know better when driving their tesla is slippery-slope towards victim blaming.

Just accept you were wrong.

> slippery-slope towards victim blaming

You forgot to add "straw man cognitive dissonance Dunning–Kruger" to your little fallacy salad.

Hmmm. I see you are out to embarrass yourself even more.

Do go one share your thoughts.

Tesla lost the right to call it Autopilot in Germany. So even courts agree that it is confusing.

It's scary to think you pay however many thousand of dollars for a feature, only to have the company you paid take it away from you because they don't like how you're using it.

Why do people think this is okay?

It's a subscription to a service, not a natural human right.

But in any case, even if it was fully paid for, those idiots do not have the right to put others at risk through their reckless irresponsibility.

I love how society's been duped into believing that having a company take away something you've paid potentially tens of thousands of dollars for without any form of compensation is perfectly okay and has nothing wrong with it.

Government sanctioned corporatocracy, here we come!

As I pointed out, thats actually not the situation here at all. However, that idiot in that car playing pranks while driving alongside me and my children is not really Tesla's problem in the grand scheme of things. It's my problem, and Tesla is helping me with it by banning the stupid git. IMHO there's a reasonable argument they should be required to do so by law.

I thought I read that they do that already when they can. They don’t go out there scouring the internet but they do cut it off for TOS violations when reported.

If only we had this same kind of rigor in our drivers tests. I routine encounter people seemingly asking for death by their driving patterns.

There are offenses on the statutes such as dangerous/reckless driving. But my perception is these aren't enforced in the USA. Heck where I live the cops don't stop vehicles with missing headlights and brake lights.

History suggests few will care about this and little will be done. Every year cars kill tens of thousands and main many more, and we don’t care because as a society we like driving and consider those deaths to be an acceptable side effect. The concern over self-driving is merely another round in a game that has been played for a long time: the novelty of a new kind of danger alerts and concerns people, and the industry spends vast sums to cast the concerned as luddites and the danger as minimal and fixable.

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/180956

The solution that seems most fair to Tesla, all other manufacturers, and road users seems to me to be mandated driver monitoring for all driver assist systems.

Regardless of your feelings on the abilities of Autopilot, driver monitoring could go a long way to prevent the predictable abuse of the system which seems to be prevalent with a certain cohort of Tesla posters on social media.

The problems associated with the marketing of “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving” are a different problem entirely.

I'd rather have everyone drive a Tesla than everyone a 2-ton SUV. Not to say there aren't flaws with the Tesla autopilot, but being surrounded by oversized death machines driven by disinterested sociopaths is way more dangerous.

The weight distribution might be safer in a Tesla, but the model Y is over 2 tons.

People don’t realize how much cars weigh. A mid-size SUV is around 5000 lbs.

Activating Telsa bots !!!!.

and tesla's on autopilot are ~9x safer than human drivers (humans get into a car crash every 500,000 miles, teslas on autopilot every 4,500,500 miles) source https://cleantechnica.com/2020/08/01/tesla-autopilot-acciden...

Tesla compares themselves against all vehicles on the street, including motorcycles, and on all kinds of road where Autopilot would not even work. It's incredibly misleading and pure marketing.

Isn't the goal rite now to have fsd work on any road that's in the tesla gps system (probably based off of whatever google maps gets its info from?)

why wouldn't they compare themselves against all vehicles on the street? they contribute to the miles driven by people statistic

are you against implementing autopilot/fsd/driver assist?

I think it's great, removing the need for people to have to react to split second events when a computer can make a much quicker and calculated decision

Other manufacturers have been integrating collision avoidance and breaking assistants for years, even before Autopilot has been a thing. Tesla is not special.

but they're the first to have autopilot at what it is now. I drive one, it's freaking amazing and does a way better job at driving than a person ever could

woah, downvotes for providing statistics ...

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