I kept honking at a sleeping Tesla driver on the freeway, but she didn’t wake up
mercurynews.com
mercurynews.com
From the article: "It had its right turn indicator on, but it drifted slowly to the left, into my lane, before slowly going back into its own lane."
For this to have happened, the vehicle could not have had autosteer engaged. At most, it would have had regular traffic aware cruise control on, which would not have been monitoring for wheel input at all anyway. This strongly implies to me that the operator was at least operating the vehicle intentionally to a significant degree.
In any event, calling 911 is an appropriate response to an unresponsive driver.
Which is the case.....a lot of the time actually? At least here in UK the lane marking is frequenly so bad that my Volvo Pilot Assist disengages because it can't see the lanes anymore - and I'm like yeah, duh, I can't see them either.
Not sure if it could be coerced into automatically coming back on if the car had FSD and the signal was turned back off, though?
Its weird, as other cars at least offer an option to disable TACC.
In these conditions, human drivers will "follow the taillights" but I don't think Tesla allows for that yet. If AP can't see outlines of objects due to heavy rain/snow, it cuts out.
I'm arguing that you can't point to numbers and say "Look, AP is safer than humans, because in the optimal subset of conditions where AP is 'able' to drive, it does better than humans in all conditions, even ones where AP would refuse to engage".
Viewed in this light the statement that humans don't have the luxury to delegate is not always applicable.
But there is a large disparity between "conditions where _ALL_ drivers should stop driving and wait", and "conditions where AP will forcibly disengage, but an average human driver should have no issue carrying on with relative safety".
In general, I'm surprised at how many things it can handle well, but it does still need a hand on the wheel for the few times that it will fail.
If you have lane detection on, Teslas will steer you back into the lane, if you start drifting off, even if auto-pilot is off. (This alone is a huge safety feature).
There might be a way to trigger a scenario like this in an FSD equipped car with all FSD related features turned off, and a really careful sequence of events with the turn signal, I guess? I'd have to try it to be sure, but I think it'd actually take some work to do.
But that last part does have me thinking it might be possible. The weird slowdown that he reported at the end could be consistent with AP finally giving up on alerting the driver and trying to "make safe" by slowing aggressively and probably going crazy with audible alerts. Maybe then the driver perked up and took off the ramp?
But tbh, it all reminds me of a driver that I ran into (thankfully not literally) a while back. They were in an older car, so obviously not on ADAS... just driving that badly and probably under the influence. It happens a lot.
https://www.tesmanian.com/blogs/tesmanian-blog/tesla-autopil...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/1-dead-2-inj...
[1 German]: https://www.waz-online.de/Nachrichten/Panorama/Tesla-ueberni...
People die all the time even when stopped on the emergency lane (you should really step over the barrier to be safe).
Tesla driver did the right thing, and is a hero in my books.
It's an extraordinary situation, there are no well-proven answers here.
It is however well proven that stopping on a highway kills people, if they had caused a pile-up this would be a very different story.
Its baffling to me that you and others (downvoting) are so convinced that this was a safe action because the outcome was good this time.
Doing nothing would have resulted in a high speed accident with certainty of 1. This could have involved a head on or left wreckage on the highway. The driver took a chance on a risky intervention and it paid off.
> Beatty took bold and immediate action. He drove his Ford F-350 Super Duty utility truck in front of the Jeep and allowed it to essentially crash into the back of his vehicle so it would latch on, according to bridge officials. He then "slowly and safely" guided the Jeep across the bridge's southbound lanes and brought it to rest in a safe area, away from the flow of traffic.
edit: This was pre-divider, so a runaway vehicle on the GGB could have made quite a mess by crossing into oncoming traffic.
Autopilot won't let you signal in one direction while changing lanes in the opposite direction. The only way to do that is by driving manually.
My guess is the Tesla was under manual control and the driver was intoxicated, extremely sleep deprived, or having a medical issue.
(Yes, it’s a concern and I’ll be a danger to others as well. I feel so comfortable and sleepy on moving vehicles)
I feel like this lightened up a bit in my late 20s. In any case, I love that I now live in a city where I don't have to drive and do not own a car.
Don’t drive when you’re jet lagged — or fatigued, generally speaking.
Surely there was a shoulder for use during emergencies. Why on earth didn't you pull over and turn on your hazards?
I get active cruise control. I don't get lane assist. Doesn't everyone else's mind just perform steering pretty much without thought anyway.
I thought you could not get sleepy on a motorbike, because it is loud and you get constant airflow. Got enough road at night and I also had to stop every 2hrs and do sit-ups get some water and only then hit the road back.
It is important to take breaks.
[Edit:]
Could be a crime novel. A classical who-dun-it, but with the need to trackback the route and stuff like this and things happening in between and the data of the car being tampered with or stuff like this.
(Edit: found it, "Flying Dutchman" by Ward Moore, it's from the 50's and you can find its text online with those terms)
I don't have high-quality numbers, but a low-quality Google search tosses out that 20% of accidents are caused by a participant having a medical emergency and losing control of their vehicle (grain-of-salt: the number is from an injury law firm, so obvious incentive to bias the number).
In particular it is common for people suspect that they may be having a heart attack, try to drive to the hospital, and then lose control on the way.
This happens enough that standard advice from medical professionals for potential heart attack victims includes tips like, "Survive. Don't drive!" If you've got worrying symptoms, call 9-1-1 and NOT attempt to drive. See https://www.valleyhealthlink.com/blog/2017/february/survive-... for a random example.
That said, the average ambulance ride in California is close to $600. So people have a strong incentive to try to avoid the ambulance, no matter how bad an idea that may be.
The car called the Traveler, rolling at the stately thirty miles an hour it
always held, was coming down the road now, and the two men stood, watching. The
woman, a little behind them, watched too, her face growing whiter. No one said
anything as the old fashioned car rolled by, straight and steady down the
highway, holding the center of the lane as sharply as it always did.
There was a film of dust inside the windows, though the Traveler was clean and
shining outside. But the film did hide the white bone faces, the despairing
hands that had long ago stopped trying to break through those closed windows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchbox_Educable_Noughts_and_...
All you need is a solar powered self driving car, and perhaps a programmed routine. (If occupied, to work in the morning and home at night).
Please take care driving, said with love and maybe understanding.
Cycling in Dublin is both gorgeous and scary, what with fellow drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians. Walking is great.
The odds on killing somebody while walking are small.
This could alert drivers to be wary; there maybe/is no human driver.
I've quite often been sat at 75mph with CC engaged, start an overtake and have the car I'm passing speed up so just tuck in behind... then they slow down and I go to overtake again...
I think a purple (??) CC light, or autopilot light would help people avoid getting aggro about an algorithm.
So unless the self-driving vehicle has a routine to activate those on weird slowdown it may be very hard for the traffic coming behind to notice, further increasing the danger.
It'd be nice to have a solution to that. There are no inexpensive ones (rails handle this with corridor control... Every N miles, a signal indicates whether it's safe to proceed to the next segment. Some sections of highway have signage allowing for this; most don't).
Another slightly relevant idea is to mark intersections with a large red no-go area placed at the calculated point, where, if you were going the speed limit, if the traffic signal changed to yellow and you were in this box you could not safely pass the stop line. I hate having to guess how long a yellow light is (3 to 6 seconds is a large gap).
On busy highways, if your car breaks down and you need to slow, one of your biggest concerns should be to get out of the way asap before someone rear-ends you.
Whether you consider it a result of tailgating or not, pile-ups are a common result of unexpected action on a highway.
A traffic jam is a far less dangerous situation than an intoxicated driver.
"Steering wheel torque-based driver monitoring" is not good enough for monitoring the attention of the driver.
It is a '"poor surrogate" for driver attention'. Not my words, but the words from the NTSB [0].
[0] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/09/feds-scold-tesla-for-sl...