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Comment by brk | Hacker News Reader

We just did a 1,500 mile round-trip journey to visit family. Because of the Tesla stuff, I was casually aware of roadside emergency vehicles moreso than usual. We passed 28 police/fire/emergency vehicles that were next to our travel lane.

I saw a number of Tesla vehicles on the road as well, each passing these same emergency vehicles, but not always in the same lane.

By this point, there must be 1M+ incidents of Tesla vehicles passing roadside emergency vehicles in an adjacent lane.

12 crashes is 12 crashes too many, statistically speaking, but it's also a tiny tiny percentage of the total number of cases.

IMO, it is good that there is federal investigation into this. My main concern is that is seems our government agencies at large are not very good when it comes to properly understanding anything technology related, or making relevant decisions/rulings/etc. on these kinds of things.

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>I saw a number of Tesla vehicles on the road as well, each passing these same emergency vehicles, but not always in the same lane.

How do you know all of them were on autopilot?

>12 crashes is 12 crashes too many, statistically speaking, but it's also a tiny tiny percentage of the total number of cases.

It's also 12 more than any normal attentive human has gotten into, and an average attentive human driver is the absolute floor for self-driving on public roads unless Tesla is going to go to the lengths GM has to ensure the person behind the wheel is remaining attentive.

>IMO, it is good that there is federal investigation into this. My main concern is that is seems our government agencies at large are not very good when it comes to properly understanding anything technology related, or making relevant decisions/rulings/etc. on these kinds of things.

I think they're good at understanding if Tesla loses complete public confidence in self driving that is a net-loss for humanity and technology, as well as a prime source of political shitstorm when people ask why something wasn't done sooner.

>It's also 12 more than any normal attentive human has gotten into

Can you clarify this please? Are you asserting that prior to the 12 Tesla incidents, there weren't any crashes into stationary emergency vehicles?

No, he's asserting that a normal attentive driver won't crash into a stationary emergency vehicle under remotely normal weather/road conditions. And, personally, I'm not going to trust a system that isn't as good as a normal attentive driver.

Does it have to better than an attentive driver or the average driver? I figure if the Tesla has less crashes per mile than the average driver than that's a success?

Even if the accidents a Tesla does get into are ones that a normal attentive driver wouldn't get into, if it avoids just as many accidents that a normal attentive driver would get into isn't that enough?

Well, I'm an attentive driver, so I wouldn't use anything that drives worse than me.

A lot of people probably feel the same.

The average driver thinks that they are a better driver than the average driver right?

While that is true, there are also people who don't drink and drive, don't text while driving, don't drive while overly fatigued, etc. So it's reasonable for those people to not want to use a system that's only as good as an "average" driver.

> So it's reasonable for those people to not want to use a system that's only as good as an "average" driver.

But... no one is forcing anyone to use this system. They elect to. Thus this is the wrong question, but rather if drivers should be given the option to use the system.

If anything it might be reasonable to infer that poor drivers are more likely to use this system, so the standard could plausibly be below that of an average driver while still improving overall safety.

I hate to put it this way, but I think it'll be easier to get people to use autopilot (that performs better than your average driver) than it will be to get people to get gud at driving. You're an attentive driver right? You've probably noticed people lane changing without looking, causing or almost causing collisions. Or jockeying for position fruitlessly. Or being drunk or getting sleepy. Or getting aggro. Back when I was driving a lot I would have been grateful for anything that meant I wouldn't have to drive around people like that. I dunno where I'm going with this exactly, I suppose we've had similar experiences and it makes me a little surprised that you'd be against automated systems bringing the skill floor up.

Thanks, I'm not sure how I missed that.

>I'm not going to trust a system that isn't as good as a normal attentive driver.

As I understand it, we're not expected to trust the current incarnation of Tesla Autopilot. We're supposed to be ready to intervene in case it screws up.

I'd be interested to know how long the drivers of the 12 Teslas in these accidents had to intervene but didn't (how long was it obvious Autopilot had screwed up before the impact).

My problem with this is that we have little proof that people are any good at this sort of task (i.e. monitoring something without intervening for really long stretches of time).

So if data show that people keep failing at it we have to take a look and decide that it's not a good system, not that the people are at fault.

Even more than that, we actual have multiple studies demonstrating that people are actively bad at this sort of task.

The challenge, which no one has a good answer for, is that if you do a "good" job of automating something, people will zone out. It's just how we're wired.

I would even assert that normal inattentive driver won't crash in stationary emergency vehicle... Or if they do they should permanently have their right to drive removed. I would consider giving attention to flashing lights minimum standard.

Approximately 12 percent of all interstate highway deaths result from shoulder accidents. This means that an estimated 600 people a year are killed—and thousands more are injured—while making emergency stops off the highway.

It’s not just autopilot.

>How do you know all of them were on autopilot?

I don't, but statistically speaking, some of them likely were.

Tesla has shipped about 1.6M units globally, with most of those in the US. Let conservatively estimate half of those stayed in the US, and half of that half have used autopilot frequently enough for a high degree of opportunity of these kinds of crashes. That is still 250,000 vehicles. 12 of those being involved in crashes is a pretty low number, and we also do not know how many scenarios they avoided that a human might have missed.

> It's also 12 more than any normal attentive human has gotten into

What is your definition of "normal attentive human"? There are tons of studies showing how humans suck at long-term tasks that are repetitive or non-engaging (like highway driving). People get distracted all the time while driving and cause accidents. Sure an "attentive" human would not run into a police vehicle, but there are not enough of those on the road most days.

> It’s also 12 than any normal attentive human has gotten into

Are you comparing a fleet of cars driving millions of miles to the performance of one ostensibly good driver? Ok, I guess we’ll need perfect systems, see you after the heat death of the universe.

I get this argument in abstract, but I don't think it's fair when we're talking about obviously unsafe behaviour that literally no human driver should ever do, except in cases of like, extreme medical distress.

It's about the unknown unknowns. If you have Teslas slamming into stopped emergency vehicles with their lights on, and you don't know why, what else don't we know about their ability to perceive and reason about the world that they're navigating in?

The failure modes of a new driving system are going to be distributed differently than the old system. This is exactly the same flawed argument as "we should ban all human drivers because in the situation where they get drunk they have lots of accidents and self-driving cars don't have that problem".

That said, I suspect there is some systematic issue with Tesla's system and flashing lights, and I bet they are working like demons to identify and fix it already.

which unfortunately also makes them less predictable for other drivers and thus harder to account for/react to in time

Humans should never do it, but I'd be surprised if it happened less than once a week.

Really? Not steering into a stopped, highly visible emergency vehicle with its lights on?

Humans do a lot of dumb, irresponsible things on the road, but this is not one of them.

It shouldn't even be a question, seriously?

This cop[1] tells a lady not to stand between the vehicles because she will get killed if his patrol car gets hit, and seconds later it happens and he says "just like that".

>this is not one of them.

Yes[2], this[3] is[4] one[5] of[6] them[7].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZDIwaRWCl0

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97D3llj0KSQ

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pV5FrWTATDY

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loex5U9zD0s

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khz9hlpvhko

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyaa6zEHZ2Q

[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piT4lZBGU4w

This is the reality of the situation and, frankly, should be a top-level comment. I don't really have a horse in this overall race but IMO your factual perspective is spot-on -- this has happened, plenty of times, by actual humans.

Just like anything else, it may not be common (or it may be 'uncommon') but, to say that it never happens, is plainly, clearly and objectively false.

Nope, he is simply saying that a human of sound state of mind does not have these accidents.

The authorities are simply viewing Tesla's credibility as undermined. They ask themselves, if it can't do this, how can it get anything right, or there must be many more flaws.

The humans do not like to pass over control to machines unless the machines do it clearly better.

And in this case, the authority does not want to have their credibility shot by looking away from the Tesla issue, it cannot be pushed under the metaphorical carpet anymore, there is a bulge under the carpet visible to anyone who wants to see.

There's never going to be a perfect comparison when the same AI can drive every car in the fleet at the same time, whereas one human brain can drive at most one car at a time.

Yeah but the issue is at hand is specifically 12 cars. You can put 12 humans in cars and watch them brake before hitting emergency vehicles. If they’re claiming AI is better than humans then it’s important to understand why these 12 are so bad.

I'm sorry but the general computer called your brain is not like the purposebuilt computer of Autopilot. 12 is too many for a computer who's only job is to literally look at the road and drive.

The NHTSA has been very unclear about how many of these were on autopilot vs cruise control.

The standard should probably be “better than human”, not “perfect”.

Maneuvering around congested streets I agree is a judgement call that humans and computers can get wrong. Not hitting stationary objects doesn't take a supercomputer to solve it.

Unless it does.

> IMO, it is good that there is federal investigation into this

> seems our government agencies at large are not very good when it comes to properly understanding anything technology related, or making relevant decisions/rulings/etc. on these kinds of things.

Not sure how you think it's good then.

> By this point, there must be 1M+ incidents of Tesla vehicles passing roadside emergency vehicles in an adjacent lane.

> 12 crashes is 12 crashes too many, statistically speaking, but it's also a tiny tiny percentage of the total number of cases.

That perspective is little more than spin. Most serious flaws are like that.

Any failure that isn't a "tiny tiny percentage of the total number of cases" is pretty serious. If it was even a small percentage (say 0.01%), Tesla autopilot would be banned from the road, and maybe Elon Musk would go to jail (or at least Tesla would probably get bankrupted) for releasing such a hazardous product.

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