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Comment by devb | Hacker News Reader

Ok, I’ll ask. How would you describe it?

"Car slightly spooks a couple of people including the driver who safely took over and resumed driving"

"Car doesn't yield to pedestrians". For "almost hit" I would expect car to run by pedestrian in less than half a meter or for pedestrian having to react quickly to avoid car.

It makes more sense when you realize the car wasn't even supposed to be turning. Look at the nav screen. If this guy didn't take over, where exactly was the car going? I think it's very easy to speculate it wouldn't have ended well.

It looks like it re-routed down the side street at exactly that moment. You can see the projected path line shift to that street immediately before.

It doesn't look like it would have hit anyone to me (it was only partway through turning, so was facing people when it or he aborted it, but that's not the path shown on the display), but it was definitely an illegal move.

Step through the video frame by frame; you can see the car begin turning back to the left before the driver takes over. He actually stopped the left turn; the car would have recovered quicker without his actions.

Not that the driver was wrong to do what he did; we have the advantage of frame-by-frame replay. But the frame-by-frame does show that this is not what it appears at first glance.

Yes, it's weird that car decided to turn right. But I don't agree that's it's easy to speculate that it would hit the pedestrians, they were pretty far. I would think some emergency braking would take over or something. We have many thousands of tesla cars out there, lots of people are making videos about autopilot, but I don't think we have an example of a car actually hitting a pedestrian?

Two seconds of googling:

Here's one: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-pro...

Here's another: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/business/tesla-autopilot-...

Oh, another one: https://www.forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/2020/05/16/lawsuit-a...

This appears to be the first one, in 2018: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/19/uber-self...

I'd keep going but maybe you get the point.

"Car decides to turn for no reason and in the process fails to yield to pedestrians in a crosswalk."

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