Tesla to recall vehicles that may disobey stop signs
reuters.com
reuters.com
How can Tesla claim self driving if the car can’t read a sign that says - speed limit 25 mph during school hours, and properly adjust? Humans just look around to determine if school is likely in session by the number of cars in the parking lot during normal school hours, or they know the school calendar.
How does a self driving car make that determination? Query the school district website for the school, identifying their bell schedule and tacking on a buffer ahead and behind? Assume a school schedule that’s M-F? What if it’s a religious school that operates Sun-Thursday? Now the car has to determine which religious sects obey which calendar? Is it different in each country?
Just another example of a massive hurdle self driving cars have……
And another recall that should be issued.
Where I live, police can and will ticket you for speeding during those times. Regardless of if there's students around or if school is even in session or not.
In my local area the signs say either "during school hours", "while children are present" or they say nothing at all and you just have to know what hours and days the lower speed limit is enforced.
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/what-does-when-ch...
> On a school day when school children are present and so close thereto that a potential hazard exists because of the close proximity of the motorized traffic
this lawyer https://www.jolietlaw.com/will-county-attorneys/understandin.... claims that means the limit is not in effect when kids are inside
Can be times of day, "when flashing", or "when children are present". Time of day isn't great because of irregular after school activities, events, delayed starts because of snow, etc.
https://www.dot.ny.gov/about-nysdot/faq/posting-speed-limit-...
On my daily commute, there's two overhead flashing yellow lights. Previously, my Model Y would begin to brake and then speed back up, thinking it's a normal traffic light (prior to FSD). With FSD, it's at least smart enough to know not to brake; but it certainly doesn't read the speed limit from the sign, as it normally would.
Depends on the locale. A lot of places just say "Speed Limit is X When Children Present", or "Speed Limit is Y when Lights [on the sign] are Flashing".
No, it absolutely isn't.
The reason why the speed limit drops to 25 mph during certain times around schools is because that is when children and adolescents are traveling to or from the campus grounds. It makes sense that you would want the speed limit reduced during a period of increased chaos. But it doesn't make the same sense to keep that reduction when the school is out of session, or when classes are taking place and the attendees are almost entirely contained within the campus.
And, in real terms, no one likes dropping down to 25 mph on a road that is normally 45 mph at all times. Like it or not, most drivers are not as anti-car as the folks on HN and they absolutely will complain to the city about the low speed limit or just ignore it. At which point, they will go back to conditional 25 mph limits.
The road outside my school when I was young was a 30 but too narrow and bendy for people to drive that fast. When I was older at a larger school in a bigger town it was also a 30 I think with no speed limit changes through the day. The school was on the edge of the town and as you left the urban area it became a little wider and a 40. Outside my place of work in a big city, I’m not even sure what the speed limit is but it would certainly be unwise to attempt more than 20, but that doesn’t matter because the road is for accessing local buildings not crossing the city.
I (or my parents) didn’t choose this arrangement because of some car hatred, that’s just the way it happened to be.
One question is what happens if you reverse the status quo bias. suppose there’s a 25mph street outside a school and 3 proposals:
1. Do nothing
2. Build a fast 55mph bypass road for the traffic that wants to go from roughly one side of the school to roughly the other
3. Widen the street next to the school and increase its speed to 55mph, but only outside of school hours. Keep the turnings for the school and other buildings on the street.
Perhaps there’s some yawning cultural gap between us but option 3 seems pretty terrible to me as it looks like it does little to help the traffic or the school. But maybe it would be the only feasible thing to do and building a new road wouldn’t be an option. When I look at my schools I described above, the first went for option 2 (well the bypass was more for the slow narrow bendy streets than the school) long before I attended the school, and the second went for option 1.
Also there shouldn't be a fast road right next to a school. It's insane that such a thing exists.
I don’t want to make a more general argument about changing things to be easier for self driving cars. Merely that higher speeds should be for roads between places rather than the kind of streets used to access ordinary buildings like schools.
Autopilot and self driving are two distinct things.
"Will the FSD computer make my car fully autonomous?
Not yet. All Tesla cars require active driver supervision and are not autonomous. "
If there are crossing guards or whatever I'm sure I will stop however, not sure a Tesla will.
Self driving will always be dangerous unless overall traffic infrastructure is updated.
Can you imagine a train where the 100% of the onus of auto-baking falls on the train itself, without zero input from sensors and towers outside the train?
Logical extrapolation of that point left as an exercise for the reader.
In the case of Tesla massively failing to drive safely in a school area: If you cannot operate safely, don't allow autopilot to engage at all.
I don't see how people can propose this kind of thing with a straight face, when we live in a world where we can't even afford to replace the paint on the road when it gets worn away.
Yeah, sure, governments everywhere will be lining up to pay billions of dollars for putting up and maintaining new infrastructure to provide us with some low ROI shiny toys. And I have a bridge on a blockchain to sell you.
Well, actually more deaths would mean smaller healthcare expenditure. The dead can't get sick anymore.
I'm not hugely familiar with trains, but as I understand it, trains in the general case have a much worse braking distance to visibility ratios than cars do.
Roads are generally designed to be safely navigable in good conditions when their occupants are obeying the speed limit, without external sensors. Rail lines are designed to be safely navigable only with the aid of external sensors. That's why trains can take blind corners at speed.
I prefer to have the computers work for people, rather than the other way around.
I assumed computer vision had been solved and they had reliable enough detection of cars, so you could just plop a few cameras in the intersection to detect waiting cars and start the transition when safe.
Nope! Instead, large numbers of intersections are dug up and electromagnets are installed to detect cars. These are very sensitive (but can miss cyclists) and super-simple; a microcontroller can reliably detect a car as a pulse on a line.
https://www.tesla.com/support/full-self-driving-computer
Tesla attempts to bury the lead by saying drivers shouldn't use these features without being "fully attentive" but uses names like "Full Self-Driving" all over their marketing material.
https://nypost.com/2019/05/10/elon-musk-weighs-in-on-porn-fi...
[1] https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-hardware...
No, it's more simple: Tesla has been lying to you. Musk has been claiming full self driving "next year" for nine years:
https://jalopnik.com/elon-musk-promises-full-self-driving-ne...
Five years ago Tesla claimed that all cars being produced had the "hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver".
That was lie too:
https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...
In many European countries, the system is restricted to a much more traditional lane assist and does not follow tight bends like this. I have a Model 3 with the standard fit "Autopilot" (not FSD) in US and have tried same model in the UK.
If you follow Bjorn Nyland on YouTube (popular electric car YouTuber), he also recently discovered how much more advanced "Autopilot" is on the American cars when he drove a US import in Thailand and compared to his previous Norwegian Tesla, despite feature being labelled the same.
This all makes having any kind of reasonable discussion on the internet about it really, really hard.
If it happened a couple of years ago you’re not talking about FSD.
I’ve used AP heavily in highway construction zones, and at night with bad visibility, and in inclement weather, and in combinations of the above. AP does better than I can manually do at picking the correct set of road marks to follow, even in cases where the construction has left partial incorrect marks underneath / conflicting_with the right ones.
AP has a ton of other issues of varying levels of severity, but if you’re asking “can I trust it in a construction zone”, I’d say yes based on my usage.
Not really though, you could just assume there are kids and do 15mph. Not everything is a hard to solve machine learning challenge.
Humans are flawed but human drivers are way safer than the human detractors would have you think.
Not every human driver has the same risk, but every self driving car will. (Or it will be based on which car you are in rather than how safe you are.) In other words, relatively safe human drivers could actually see their risk levels go up in a self driving car, even it if it statistically safer than all human drivers.
https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1478802681141645322
Just a reminder at how awful Tesla cars "self driving" cars are at actually stopping.
Please do NOT rely upon autopilot, fsd, or any other "Tesla-tech". They're incapable of seeing objects like small children in time.
This was a test done at CES on January 6th, 2022.
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In contrast, the people who setup the demo were showing a more advanced self-driving car who could actually stop when the child suddenly runs out onto the street.
This isn't limited to "Tesla-tech". The same rules apply to ALL technology.
If our local cops did this, I'd just make an online post about it so everybody knew the cops were doing it and then it would stop.
My experience (based on a few tickets and observing many cops) is that they don't really care unless you're about 10+ MPH over the limit and also doing unsafe things. That's not to say they don't snag people just driving 5MPH over the limit, but it's not a core activity unless the department is using tickets as a revenue source or trying to make some sort of weird point.
Or the officer is racist. I know we’re veering into very off topic discussion here but your experience and resulting list does miss a key component for an experience often described as “driving while black”. 1mph over the speed limit would absolutely see you get pulled over.
I just looked into the details. In my state, CA, 1-15mph over the limit is specially treated, with one point that eventually gets cleared.
I'm amused because (as I mentioned) I live in a school zone and I just drove home at about 5mph, because the streets were so croweded that anything faster would have been impossible. A cop could not have parked in any location near my house because every spot was taken, and all sightlines were blocked by SUVs or buses.
Either you have a very unusual constabulary, or this is wildly optimistic.
The scenario under discussion is a case where the police are within their rights. A simple blog post would never force any change in most municipalities, much less immediately.
>My experience...
Will of course be much different from someone who lives in a different locale or is a different ethnicity and/or social class than you.
>If our local cops did this, I'd just make an online post about it so everybody knew the cops were doing it and then it would stop.
Yeah, ok.
I've met a lot of people with inflated egos but believing you can dictate local law enforcement policy with your internet posts is on a whole nother level.
Our city manager reads patch, reddit and other things for our town and occasionally engages with the community around policy. This is absolutely something where if you wrote a careful post on reddit saying "Hey, are our cops doing the right thing stopping people going 1mph near a school instead of stopping <whatever>"? There would be an argument, a few people would say 1mph is 1mph over the law, but really, the outcome would be that the ticket appeal would be approved and the cops in my town would be told not to do that.
Pointing out to somebody who says "in my experience" that others would have a different experience is pointless. I know that. If cops are giving people tickets for ethnicity (or even deadheads driving through georgia, which used to happen) that's an entirely different problem from pointless enforcement.
On a busy road with lots of pedestrians crossing, I naturally want to go much slower than I would on the same road if there were no other pedestrians or traffic. "School zones" just codify that into law - when you expect lots of kids to be crossing a road, the speed limit of the road should be lower.
The issue, for me at least, is the ambiguity. When is the school zone in effect? This creates a cognitive load. The road was clearly meant for 45 mph travel, because that is the normal speed limit. So if I let my "autopilot" brain take over, I will probably go over the 25 mph school zone limit.
It's a special case. So when I see a school zone, I unconditionally set the cruise control to be the school zone speed limit. This frees my brain from any congitive load about whether school is in session. It also guarantees that I am not influenced by the guy tailgating me.
The ability to set the speed of your car exactly, without monitoring, is really useful.
EDIT: Fixed "ppl" to "people".
Edit: Yes, ppl bugs me and there is no rational reason why. Emphasis on 'pet peeve'.
Or maybe they were texting and using FSD ;)
Also, if you text and drive I sincerely hope you hit a tree or something else solid that doesn't hurt the road traffic and pedestrians around you - alleged FSD or no, we don't have level 5 fully-autonomous cars yet and so not paying attention to the road is just as bad as drunk or drug driving.
The FSD part was a joke. :)
Such as, for example, by not calling it "autopilot" or "full self driving"?
Tesla Marketing: 2016
When in actuality, Tesla will reliably crash into pedestrians and stationary firetrucks. To the point where people at other companies are confident to make live-demos of this at electronic shows.
---------
Calling it "autopilot" or "fsd" isn't the problem. The problem is that Tesla actively lies about its capabilities to the public and its customers. It doesn't matter "how" they lie or exactly what weasel words they use. The issue is that they're liars.
We can tell them to change their name or change their marketing strategy. But as long as they're liars, they'll just find a new set of weasel words to continue their lies.
For reference, this same marketing video is still up on Tesla's site[1].
[1] https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-hardware...
In fact, autopilot in aviation contexts is regularly used when human pilots are worse, such as landing at airports that regularly experience fog & low visibility conditions. As in, autopilot is the fallback for humans, not the other way around.
Heck, aviation autopilot is now available for use in emergency landings ( https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/garmin-autoland-wins-202... ).
Compared to Tesla autopilot, these are seemingly two vastly unrelated situations.
It's entirely deceptive.
Meanwhile, in most US states, an adult can walk into a DMV, demonstrate the ability to turn on the vehicle and do a 3-point/k turn, and walk out with a license.
[0] https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a32329549/georgia-no-drive...
If I bought something that says it can drive itself, then I expect I do not need to pay attention to the road because it can drive itself. Just like if my friend can drive themselves and I am a passenger, I can trust them to handle paying attention to the road.
To go out of your way and call something "full" self driving only indicates that I should have zero qualms about trusting that I do not need to pay attention to the road.
One of the anecdotes in the Jalopnik article mentions that the vehicle is a Town Car, which is significant because those are rear wheel drive and handle very differently from most cars on the road in slick conditions. I would certainly expect more issues with older RWD cars and trucks because they tend to fishtail and spin if the rear wheels are given power without traction.
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/wild-when-wet/ [2] https://jalopnik.com/lets-debunk-the-idea-that-its-not-safe-...
Where does Tesla provide a list of such limitations for it's customers, I am sure it would be extensively documented given that lives are at stake ?
Or should I find out those limitations myself, potentially killing a few children in the process?
One specific place is first sentence of the FSD Beta welcome email:
"Full Self-Driving is in limited early access Beta and must be used with additional caution. It may do the wrong thing at the worst time, so you must always keep your hands on the wheel and pay extra attention to the road. Do not become complacent."
That's been my experience with it. Right now, the beta doesn't reduce my workload, it increases it. When I want to "just drive", I turn the beta off.
That said, Tesla can and should do more. They need to better frame the capabilities of the system, staring with the silly marketing names.
So, basically, I need to somehow predict that FSD will do the wrong thing and react myself, _before_ the worst time, because the worst time is when it's already too late.
Or, in other words, whereas any other car manufacturer has fallbacks for when the driver is not doing what they're supposed to, Tesla treats the driver as the fallback instead. I just don't understand what is this magic that is supposed to allow the driver to predict incorrect AI behavior.
Don't confuse prediction and anticipation. Prediction requires that you know what's going to happen. Anticipation is getting ready for something that might happen. Anticipation is a normal part of defensive driving every day, not prediction.
Let's go back to defensive driving 101: defensive driving allows mistakes to be made. It allows bad things to occur and still recover from them safely. Bad things happen because of mistakes are made by humans in the car, humans outside of the car and also by the computer in the car. The change here is that you the computer is being given much more latitude to make mistakes. It does NOT grant the computer the ability to remove defensive margins from driving.
If you drive (regardless of FSD) with no defensive driving margins, you immediately enter "too late" territory whenever a mistake is made.
If I have to be on the wheel and ready to react at any point in time, then I'd rather be the one driving and that's it.
I think regular "old" adaptive cruise control and lane assist are vastly superior to this. I am on the wheel and in charge for 99.9% of the time, as I should be regardless of FSD, and the technology saves me in the 0.1% when I am not.
FSD will never be FSD without a complete redesign of infrastructure, which will not happen in our lifetime.
They should just rename it to something boring like "camera-assisted cruise control" and remove the beta label so everyone can use it.
FSD is aiming for something a bit higher.
Tesla puts all the info you need in the owners manual, just like every other manufacturer with automated systems on their cars.
https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-8EA7EF1...
There are dozens of warnings throughout the manual explaining limitations and cautions around using the systems.
Every other car I've owned with the same or similar systems has the same warnings littered throughout the manual.
Kids are stupid and unpredictable and AI/ML can't work out all the insane ways kids can put themselves in harms way. No autopilot or FSD can . Peolple should not rely upon them.
I have to say that FSD is so confused, you might as well call it 'Fools Self Driving' at this point.
Oh dear.
[0] https://twitter.com/jordanteslatech/status/14184133078625853...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_Missile_Early_Warnin...
The night example looks to be specifically stacked against autopilot. Tesla vision is notoriously bad at detecting stationary objects and it needs a lot of light to function well. Lidar/Radar are significantly better than cameras detecting straight ahead obstacles in low light conditions. I would really like to hear Tesla to defend their decision to not use them.
In any case, this testing is great because it lets us know when the autopilot requires extra supervision.
EDIT: Luminar's car is on the other lane, and there's also a balloon-child in the Luminar's lane. You can see Luminar's car clearly stop in the head-to-head test.
There's also the "advanced" test, where the kid moves out from behind an obstacle here. Luminar's tech does well:
https://twitter.com/PatrickMoorhead/status/14787645152609116...
> I would expect Tesla to also stop if a child was running across the movement path in broad daylight.
Nope.
https://jalopnik.com/this-clip-of-a-tesla-model-3-failing-an...
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-09-03/tesla-was-...
This "tech" can't even see a firetruck in broad daylight. Why do you think it can see a child?
This isn't a one-off freak accident either. "crashing into stopped emergency vehicles with flashing lights in broad daylight" is common enough that NHTSA has opened up an investigation into this rather specific effect: https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2021/INOA-PE21020-1893.PDF
- 2018: https://youtu.be/_1MHGUC_BzQ
- 2021: https://youtu.be/XfqabC_akV0
Is the car reacting to what it's seeing? Probably not, but I'm not sure if adding a lidar fixes that.
In perfect conditions, on a sunny day.
I'm in Sweden, and the sun shining directly into your eyes from barely above the horizon while the road is wet/covered with snow and reflects that sun at you is a regular occurence during winter months. I odubt Tesla's camera will be able to see anything.
Tesla is trapped between a rock and a hard place. Their "phantom braking" events are causing a lot of dismay to their drivers (https://electrek.co/2021/11/15/tesla-serious-phantom-braking...). But if they reduce phantom-braking, they increase the chance of hitting that child on the road.
I'm sure Elon was blaming Radar for phantom braking in the April / May time period. We can give a few months for the cars to update to the newest version as well.
But by November 2021, RADAR was no longer a relevant excuse. I think you may be mistaken about when Elon said what and when. You gotta keep the dates in mind.
I also never said a date about when Elon said those things in my comment, but now understand what you mean about post-vision. But the FSD Beta and Autopilot codebases are so different I am not sure I’d compare them for phantom braking (though recent FSD Beta appears to have way less of this occurrence).
But maybe I’m biased. We have two Teslas, one with, and one without a radar. We’ve seen much more phantom braking with my radar equipped model 3. Anecdotally, I find it happening less in the Y. Also, I didn’t click the article originally as Fred is a click diva and generally disliked by the Tesla community for his questionable reporting. Electrek is an EV fan blog, not much else.
WashPo reports a huge spike of federal complaints from Tesla owners starting in Oct 2021, well into the Vision-only Tesla technology
These are some pretty respectable sources. Federal complaints are public.
> “We primarily drove the car on two-lane highways, which is where the issues would show themselves consistently,” he said in an email. “Although my 2017 Model X has phantom braked before, it is very rare, the vision-based system released May 2021 is night and day. We were seeing this behavior every day.”
So we have Electrek, Washington Post, and the official NHTSA Federal registry in agreement over these phantom braking events spiking in October / November timeframe of 2021. I don't think this is an issue you can brush off with anecdotal evidence or anti-website kind of logic.
The accusations could be valid or totally baseless, investigations are opened regardless and specifically to find out validity.
Read the listed report. All 11 accidents were confirmed to be:
1. Tesla vehicles
2. Confirmed to be on autopilot / full self driving.
3. Against a stopped emergency vehicle with flashing lights or road flares.
These facts are not in dispute. The accusations aren't "baseless", the only question remaining is "how widespread" is this phenomenon.
These 11 accidents have resulted in 1-fatality and 11 injuries.
--------
We are _WAY_ past "validity" of the claims. We're at "lets set up demos at CES to market ourselves using Tesla as a comparison point", because Tesla is provably that unreliable at stopping in these conditions.
Obviously his stated motivation and actual motivation need not be the same.
That's one take - the other take is that they have been selling cars claiming that they are capable of full FSD because they are going to sell it without Lidar, and have been selling FSD as a $5k bolt on, so swapping to Lidar at this point would be a PR nightmare even if it was a better solution....
That's the cynical view though... (Although I also wouldn't be the one to tell the people that have spent lots of money on Autopilot that they have bought total vaporware - or be the CFO that announces they are back-fitting Lidar cameras). Once you are all-in on 'lidar is shit' it makes it hard to reverse the trend, despite rapidly falling costs.
It can be done, if there's good cause. Just partner with your lidar oem of choice, get them to do a white paper about how the latest point increase version of hardware or firmware is "revolutionary!" and then claim that your earlier criticisms of lidar have been fully addressed by the groundbreaking new lidar tech.
Traditional old school LIDAR units with spinning scan heads are why quite a few self driving cars have the odd bumps and protrusions on them. It's very easy to see someone who wants to make a "cool car" looking at these protrusions, deciding "lidar is shit" and doing everything possible to avoid it. There are some good engineering reasons to avoid traditional lidar units. Meanwhile solid state LIDAR tech has only been on the market for a few years and is still quite expensive compared to traditional LIDAR models, but its definitely superior for a lot of places people want to be able to use LIDAR or where LIDAR would be an excellent competitor to other technology currently in use such as 3D depth mapping and Time of Flight cameras. I briefly looked into some of this stuff when considering work on an "art game" using VR and various 3D scanning technologies in order to make a "fake" Augmented Reality experience as part of constructing the deliberate aesthetic choices of the project.
Solid state LIDAR will definitely be pushed forward by market demand for wider fields of view, lower costs, and smaller module size. All of which will eventually lead to a situation where it will be stupid not to augment the self driving technology due to the massive benefits with zero downsides.
1.) When solid state LIDAR is ready, re-brand it something like SSL technology (Solid State LIDAR) and put it on new high end Teslas.
2.) Wait for all 'camera only' enabled Teslas with FSD beta to age out of service and upsell the owners on a heavily discounted FSD subscription for their brand new Teslas with SSL.
I would argue so is the real world.
A driver killed a pedestrian because she wasn't paying attention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hthyTh_fopo
As in most accidents of this nature, there is a chain of mistakes. It's bad practice to ignore some mistakes simply because we can also point to other failures in the chain of events.
Uber's system was set in a way that "non identified object in my way" didn't trigger an immediate slow down, but instead a "sleep it off for a second and check again". It saw the impact coming, and instead of notifying the driver it decided to wait a full second first, because it was programmed to do so. Which any programmer can recognize as the "turn it off and on again" idiom that tells us their system was misidentifying lots of things.
What the driver did or did not do once notified doesn't change that. That car would have killed someone, somewhere, sometime, because it was programmed to not avoid it.
> Anyone relying on LIDAR is doomed. Doomed. Expensive sensors that are unnecessary. It’s like having a whole bunch of expensive appendices... you’ll see.
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/24/18512580/elon-musk-tesla-...
I would be willing to bet that production efficiencies will be found that will eventually drive that cost down significantly.
LIDAR certainly is the low hanging fruit when it comes to the firmer question though (i.e. what is there in my path right now).
You might be thinking of radar, which Tesla is also no longer putting in their cars.
IR lidar would be pretty useful in rain and fog, I'd think. But I'd rather have all three -- lidar, radar, and visual. Hell, throw in ultrasonic sonar too. That's what Kalman filters are for. Maybe then the system will notice that it's about to ram a fire truck.
Some potential improvements are relatively trivial, even without getting into the hardcore linear algebra. If the camera doesn't see an obstacle but both radar and lidar do, that's an opportunity to fail relatively safely (potential false braking) rather than failing in a way that causes horrific crashes.
Bottom line: if you can't do sensor fusion, you literally have no business working on leading-edge AI/ML applications.
Plus using the same cameras would help prevent the issues with sensor fusion of the radar described by Tesla due to the low resolution of the radar.
I know the b-pillar cameras exist, but I don't think their FOV covers the entire forward view, and I don't think they have the same resolution as the main forward cameras (partly due to wide FOV).
I'd love to hear why I'm wrong though.
Because Tesla have demonstrated that it's unnecessary. The depth information they are getting from the forward-facing camera is exceptional. Their vision stack now produces depth information that is dramatically superior to that from a forward-facing radar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6bOwQdCJrc&t=556s
(It's also worth noting that depth information can be validated when the vehicle is in motion, because a camera in motion has the ability to see the scene from multiple angles, just like a binocular configuration. This is how Tesla trains the neural networks to determine depth from the camera data.)
Personally I wish Tesla would spend a couple of months cleaning up their current beta stack and deploying it specifically for AEB. But I don’t know if that’s even feasible without affecting the legacy stack.
In fact, we already have things with remote human pilots.
So increasing the field of view with a single camera should intuitively work as long as the brains of the operation was up to the task.
Sure! Here's a Tesla using its exceptional cameras to decide to drive into a couple of trucks. For some strange reason the wretched human at the wheel disagreed with the faultless Tesla:
RADAR is more low fidelity though, blocky, slow and doesn't do changes in direction or dimension very well. RADAR isn't as good as humans at depth. Only benefit of RADAR is it works well in weather/night and near range as it is slower to bounce back than lasers. I assume the manholes and bridges that confuse RADAR are due to the low fidelty / blocky feedback.
LiDAR is very high fidelity and probably more precise than the pixels. LiDAR is better than humans at depth and at distance. LiDAR isn't as good at weather, neither is computer vision. Great for 30m-200m. Precise depth, dimension, direction and size of object in motion or stationary.
See the image at the top of this page and overview on it. [1]
> High-end LiDAR sensors can identify the details of a few centimeters at more than 100 meters. For example, Waymo's LiDAR system not only detects pedestrians but it can also tell which direction they’re facing. Thus, the autonomous vehicle can accurately predict where the pedestrian will walk. The high-level of accuracy also allows it to see details such as a cyclist waving to let you pass, two football fields away while driving at full speed with incredible accuracy.
[1] https://qtxasset.com/cdn-cgi/image/w=850,h=478,f=auto,fit=cr...
[2] https://www.fierceelectronics.com/components/lidar-vs-radar
https://mobile.twitter.com/sendmcjak/status/1412607475879137...
And the tweet thread you linked confirms it's a ML depth map:
> Well, the cars actually have a depth perceiving net inside indeed.
My speculation was that a binocular system might be less prone to error than the current net.
I'm just wondering if using cameras that are close to each other, but use different focal lengths, doesn't give the same results.
It seems to me that this is how modern phones are doing background removal: The lenses are very close to each other, very unlike the human eye. But they have different focal lengths, so depth can be estimated based on the diff between the images caused by the different focal lengths.
Also, wouldn't turning a multitude of views into a 3D map require a neural net anyway?
Whether the images differ because of different focal lengths or because of different positions seems to be essentially the same training task. In both cases, the model needs to learn "This difference in those two images means this depth".
I think with the human eye, we do the same thing. That's why some optical illusions work that confuse your perception of which objects are in front and which are in the back.
And those illusions work even though humans actually have an advantage over cheap fixed-focus cameras, in that focusing the lens on the object itself gives an indication of the object's distance. Much like you could use a DSL as a measuring device by focusing on the object and then checking the distance markers on the lens' focus ring. Tesla doesn't have that advantage. They have to compare two "flat" images.
I can see why it might seem that way intuitively, but different focal lengths won't give any additional information about depth, just the potential for more detail. If no other parameters change, an increase in focal length is effectively the same as just cropping in from a wider FOV. Other things like depth of field will only change if e.g. the distance between the subject and camera are changed as well.
The additional depth information provided by binocular vision comes from parallax [0].
> Also, wouldn't turning a multitude of views into a 3D map require a neural net anyway?
Not necessarily, you can just use geometry [1]. Stereo vision algorithms have been around since the 80s or earlier [2]. That said, machine learning also works and is probably much faster. Either way the results should in theory be superior to monocular depth perception through ML, since additional information is being provided.
> It seems to me that this is how modern phones are doing background removal: The lenses are very close to each other, very unlike the human eye. But they have different focal lengths, so depth can be estimated based on the diff between the images caused by the different focal lengths.
Like I said, there isn't any difference when changing focal length other than 'zooming'. There's no further depth information to get, except for a tiny parallax difference I suppose.
Emulation of background blur can certainly be done with just one camera through ML, and I assume this is the standard way of doing things although implementations probably vary. Some phones also use time-of-flight sensors, and Google uses a specialised kind of AF photosite to assist their single sensor -- again, taking advantage of parallax [3]. Unfortunately I don't think the Tesla sensors have any such PDAF pixels.
This is also why portrait modes often get small things wrong, and don't blur certain objects (e.g. hair) properly. Obviously such mistakes are acceptable in a phone camera, less so in an autonomous car.
> And those illusions work even though humans actually have an advantage over cheap fixed-focus cameras, in that focusing the lens on the object itself gives an indication of the object's distance
If you're referring to differences in depth of field when comparing a near vs far focus plane, yeah that information certainly can be used to aid depth perception. Panasonic does this with their DFD (depth-from-defocus) system [4]. As you say though, not practical for Tesla cameras.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binocular_disparity [1] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.36... [2] https://www.ri.cmu.edu/pub_files/pub3/lucas_bruce_d_1981_2/l... [3] https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/10/portrait-mode-on-pixel-2-a... [4] https://www.dpreview.com/articles/0171197083/coming-into-foc...
This is also why some people will optimize each eye for different focal length when getting laser eye surgery. When your lens is too stiff from age, it won't provide any additional depth perception but will give you more detail at different distances.
I'm still wondering. As a photographer, you learn that you always want to use a focal length of 50mm+ for portraits. Otherwise, the face will look distorted. And even a non-photographer can often intuitively tell a professional photo from an iPhone selfie. The wider angle of the iPhone selfie lens changes the geometry of the face. It is very subtle. But if you took both images and overlayed them, you see that there are differences.
But, of course, I'm overlooking something here. Because if you take the same portrait at 50mm and with, say, 20mm, it's not just the focal length of the camera that differs. What also differs is the position of each camera. The 50mm camera will be positioned further away from the subject, whereas the 20mm camera has to be positioned much closer to achieve the same "shot".
So while there are differences in the geometry of the picture, these are there not because of the difference in the lenses being used, but because of the difference in the camera-subject distance.
So now I'm wondering, too, why Tesla decided against stereo vision.
It does seem, though, that they are getting that depth information through other means:
Tesla 3D point cloud: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKtCD7F0Ih4
Tesla 3D depth perception: https://twitter.com/sendmcjak/status/1412607475879137280?s=6...
Tesla 3D scene reconstruction: https://twitter.com/tesla/status/1120815737654767616
Perhaps it helps that the vehicle moves? That is, after all, very close to having the same scene photographed by cameras positioned at different distances. Only that Tesla uses the same camera, but has it moving.
Also, among the front-facing cameras, the two outermost are at least a few centimeters apart. I haven't measured it, but it looks like a distance not unlike between a human's eyes [0]. Maybe that's already enough?
[0] https://www.notateslaapp.com/images/news/2022/camera-housing...
Yep, totally.
> Perhaps it helps that the vehicle moves? That is, after all, very close to having the same scene photographed by cameras positioned at different distances.
I think you're right, they must be taking advantage of this to get the kind of results they are getting. That point cloud footage is impressive, it's hard to imagine getting that kind of detail and accuracy just from individual 2d stills.
Maybe this also gives some insight into the situations where the system seems to struggle. When moving forward in a straight line, objects in the peripheral will shift noticeably in relative size, position and orientation within the frame, whereas objects directly in front will only change in size, not position or orientation. You can see this effect just by moving your head back and forth.
So it might be that the net has less information to go on when considering objects stationary directly in or slightly adjacent to the vehicles path -- which seems to be one of the scenarios where it makes mistakes in the real world, e.g. with stationary emergency vehicles. I'm just speculating here though.
> Also, among the front-facing cameras, the two outermost are at least a few centimeters apart. I haven't measured it, but it looks like a distance not unlike between a human's eyes [0]. Maybe that's already enough?
Maybe. The distance between the cameras is pretty small from memory, less than in human eyes I would say. It would also only work over a smaller section of the forward view due to the difference in focal length between the cams. I can't help but think that if they really wanted to take advantage of binocular vision, they would have used more optimal hardware. So I guess that implies that the engineers are confident that what they have should be sufficient, one way or another.
Andrej Karpathy talks some about it in this (it's quite long, but the whole thing is quite interesting):
To be fair, it's not a computer performance benchmark being gamed here. If nightime is problematic, autopilot shouldn't be running at night. Because if I'm a pedestrian then the odds are stacked against me with any physical encounter with a vehicle. Fairness in the scenario setup shouldn't really be part of the conversation unless it goes beyond the claims if the manufacturer, i.e., if Tesla had said "autopilot does not function in these conditions and should not be used at those times" and then "nightime" was one of those conditions listed. If Tesla hasn't said that a scenario is outside the scope of AutoPilot then the scenario is an appropriate test & comparison point.
I'd go further and say add "and set the software not to engage this feature at nighttime". Simple disclaimers are not enough when lives are at stake.
I don't think so. If the autopilot can't be used at night, I - who live in Norway - just can't use it during the winter as there isn't enough light. I don't even live above the arctic circle and am lucky enough to get 4-5 hours of (somewhat dimmed) daylight during the darkest times.
If it doesn't do night, it is simply a gimmick to lure you into paying for a promise of a car.
I was told this for months.
Few years later Driving down a road that had endless cars parked along sides. So no visibility of yards.
A small ball came from behind a parked car and bounced in front of me. All I heard was my moms voice. Instantly slammed on brakes.
Sure enough a kid ran out in front of me chasing the ball.
Car stopped inches from kid. He never even noticed me. Even a moments hesitation and that kid would have been dead.
I was going a little below speed limit too, which clearly helped.
Kid has a t-shirt.
Don't tailgate, people. You never know when the car in front of you is going to slam on the brakes because a ball, small child, or plastic bag jumps out in front of it.
Also, Tesla requires you pay attention still - which is relying on it, but they tell you NOT to rely on it 100%, so in this demo the driver is at fault for not watching ahead of them and breaking. So your claim that they're awful at stopping is pretty disconnected.
I won’t argue there aren’t some inherent benefits of even basic driver aids, but if you pay have to pay 100% attention 100% of the time, the tech loses it’s lustre. This is a problem largely of Tesla’s own making IMO — their marketing and Elon’s public statements paint a much, much rosier picture and people buy into it.
--------------
This entire marketing scheme that Luminar did only works because they 100% trust that the Tesla will run into that balloon child on a regular basis (!!!!). This is literally a live demonstration in a major convention center full of a live audience.
I don't have any idea how seeded or unfair Luminar's test is in favor of Luminar's hardware. I don't even trust that Luminar's hardware works (I don't know if they're faking their tech either).
But what I do trust, is for that Tesla to plow into that balloon over-and-over again on a reliable basis.
That's how far away Tesla is from "full self driving", or whatever the heck they want to call it.
Luminar doesn't appear to have access to Tesla's under-development technology beta which is, as YouTube videos of FSD beta clearly shows, markedly superior to the technology currently deployed in most Tesla cars. I can't say whether the FSD beta would reliably stop for balloon-children, but from the warts-and-all videos being posted on YouTube, it seems highly likely that it would.
What?
The "test", as far as I'm concerned, is whether or not Tesla will kill children on our streets. And given this test, it proves that Tesla's emergency braking capabilities are awful.
I don't care about Luminar tech at all, frankly. If Luminar becomes available to buy one day, maybe I'll care then.
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At the _ROOT_ of this discussion is a poster who openly admits to using "Autopilot" in school-zones. Given that Tesla will _NOT_ stop for balloon-children until its way too late (the braking action was _AFTER_ the balloon-child was smacked), I have to immediately reprimand the original poster. This is a critical safety issue that people must understand, "Autopilot" and "FSD" are NOT ready to be used in school zones, or other locations where children might run out into the streets randomly.
This has nothing to do with tech-companies swinging their tech around at a show. This has everything to do with stopping the next child from getting smacked by an ignorant driver.
Let me be clear: I'm not saying that Tesla's current release version of AEB is anywhere near good enough. Clearly there is substantial room for improvement. If I had any influence over Tesla's priorities, I would make them package up the subset of FSD Beta necessary to perform AEB and get that deployed to the entire fleet as a matter of urgency.
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As for whether a driver chooses to use any L1 or L2 driver assistance features in an inappropriate context, that is always the responsibility of the licensed driver. Engaging these systems is always a manual task performed by the driver. They are not on by default.
If there is a legitimate concern here, perhaps the correct response is to institute a blanket ban on the use of any assistance technologies (e.g. adaptive cruise, lane centring) while in school zones.
https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/performance-of-pedestrian-c...
There should be a much stronger involvement from cities / states legislating a ban on any kind of self-driving in these areas. (self-braking -- sure!) It will have to wait for a child to die, unfortunately.
I'd like to see a self-lane-keeping lane on interstates with a 120 mph speed limit and concrete barriers. If we can have "Zero emissions" cars incentivized with access to HOV lanes, why not cars that can do a good job at lane-keeping and merge-scheduling in areas where there are exactly zero other distractions?
Yeah, the .1% can be really ambiguous and dangerous.
Even then. The US has a pretty high tolerance for that.
We as a society should be realistic about the advantages and limitations of self driving technology. On a highway with well marked lanes and no construction, pedestrians, etc, self driving is awesome. That is the use case that should be optimized and encouraged by states. Everything else should realistically be banned.
You can't be serious. Human are notoriously bad in situations where nothing happens 99.9% of the time but requires quick reaction 0.1% of the time.
Meanwhile, humans are checking Instagram and Pornhub while driving around.
Just wiggle the mouse when you're in a construction zone, so the computer's processing speeds up. Just like on the desktop!
That's a big ask, and is a huge superset of AGI.
It would seem entirely possible that large amounts of highway driving can be handled by self-driving cars with slightly lower rates of accidents (tired and drunk people kill a lot of people!)
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a37886786/general-motors-u...
This seems to be exactly what I mean. They admit that their system can't handle the 5% of edge cases, and market it appropriately. This is not a full self driving car.
This seems like one of the scenarios (multiple but limited in number) explicitly listed in traffic laws which might be scarce in randomly sampled driving data, however, is trivial to artificially manufacture in as large quantities as you need. Go to a local movie producer for their supply of uniform costumes and other varied clothing and the actors/extras to play the role of a traffic cop, and you can get quite a lot of training data in a single week on a budget that's trivial compared to most other self-driving car experiments.
So, it's always 25mph in that zone. Changing it based on "school hours" is a bad idea anyways.
https://www.google.com/maps/@-37.9293496,145.0051951,3a,59y,...
https://www.google.com/maps/@-33.7710688,151.0985503,3a,75y,...
As the usual speed limit is quite a bit higher at 70km/h, driving at 40km/h (25mph) outside these times would make you, at best, a rather annoying obstacle to surrounding traffic.
Driving behind a driver not keeping up with traffic and breaking erratically is a traffic hazard (happened to me a few days ago with a human driver).
If your car can't, then the car needs to be fixed or it's "self-driving" functionality entirely disabled. Changing speed limit laws to compensate for these limitations is entirely the wrong direction.
The problem generalises - it's also unacceptable for FSD not to keep up with traffic on a freeway or randomly throw in the brakes to avoid spurious hazards for the same reasons.
But yet, Tesla, the "not-dinosaur", screws this up completely?
Oof.
AND, if you have adaptive cruise, it will absolutely recognize the discrepancy between your speed and school zones, and will decelerate the car to that speed.
Isn't the correct answer today that humans should override in these situations?
Frankly, as a human I also find "during restricted hours" signs frustrating. How do I know which hours those are?
Did you try to google for it? Did you look up the actual laws where you are?
It isn't hard to find the answer. If you're in California, then Vehicle Code 22352 defines it. The same will be true for every other place in the world.
But it's also possible it's something that puzzled me pre-Internet, and I never bothered to look up post-Internet. There are plenty of those as well.
What difference does that make? If it is, you get a fine. Just like any other road rule.
If the sign didn’t state hours and it wasn’t clear it was a restricted time, maybe you could make a case.
As a human being, you weigh the risks and make a choice. Which has the worse outcome — getting to your destination 18 seconds later, or killing a child?
To be fair, those systems were just best-effort. I'm pretty sure Teslas can handle far harder sign situations than those.
The problem is the edge case and while Telsa may fair better, the older assistant systems did explicitly warn you that it was best effort.
For example, the cruise control on my 2021 Mazda 3 doesn't enforce school zone speed limits (or any speed limits), although it recognises them and will flash on the HUD if you're exceeding the limit. Since it's not enforced, I can just ignore it if it has misidentified a speed sign.
Although, school zone signs around my area actually include a bit of genius design: they are hinged in the middle [1], so during school holidays, the signs are covered up by closing the hinge.
Finally, at least in suburban areas in Australia, a school zone covers a couple hundred metres at most. So even if you or your car gets it wrong, driving 20km/h under the speed limit is a very temporary inconvenience for drivers behind you (unlike, for example, driving 20km/h under the speed limit for 50 kilometres on a single-lane highway).
[1] https://www.canberratimes.com.au/images/transform/v1/crop/fr...
If you want/need to drive faster in the school zone, you simply step on the accelerator and deactivate self-driving. You can turn it on again when through the school zone.
> Warning
> Do not rely on Traffic-Aware Cruise Control or Speed Assist to determine an accurate or appropriate cruising speed. It is the driver's responsibility to cruise at a safe speed based on road conditions and applicable speed limits.
Maybe we have different definitions of FSD and being safer than a human but to me that includes obeying the speed limits and stop signs
https://electrek.co/2022/01/31/elon-musk-tesla-full-self-dri...
I've been rear ended twice, and I've seen 4 rear endings happen. Nobody was hurt in any of these accidents, but it was definitely a pain in the ass for everyone involved.
Seems insane to me that you can patent reading a speed limit sign, since reading signs is what signs are for and is necessary to obey the law, but there we go… “with a computer” seems sufficient grounds to make something patentable.
After lawsuit, signs are blacked out in their vision.
Then people will install modded bionic eyes firmware downloaded from Ukranian websites[1]. The future will be like Cyberpunk 2077, except the hacks are just to bypass paywall DRM.
[1] https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/john-deere-tractor-hacks-...
I don't understand how that could possibly stand up as a patent. It shouldn't pass the obviousness test. Reading a sign is a super obvious thing to do. But you would still have to spend millions fighting it in court. Which is insane.
Good luck little car.
Probably shouldn't anyway. It's not unusual for civilians at the site of some unexpected hazard to warn traffic.
Like some other commenters pointed out, ad-hoc situations like police directing traffic and one-direction-at-a-time utility work are a much bigger concern.
We have an economy run by a corpus of idiot shareholders who neither use the product nor are affected by the product, and are free to crash its value at will, and will crash it when earnings doesn't "beat" expectations, so the company is forced to prioritize the entirely wrong things.
If a company wants to "accelerate the transition to clean energy", quarterly earnings is NOT the thing to be prioritizing. Earnings are important for business sustainability, but on much longer cycles than quarterly.
Tesla leads the world in terms of self-driving fatalities. It's not even close; the total deaths involving self-driving vehicles from every other automaker in the world combined is less than 1/10th the number of Tesla self-driving fatalities.
Note that I include autopilot in the meaning of "self-driving" here because Tesla does in its marketing.
Yeah, there are idiots misusing autopilot but there are about a couple more orders of magnitude more people who die due to drowsy driving a car without driver assistance features.
[Sorry in advance]
Having the ability to reason about what you see can be helpful but it's not necessary.
Whatever the most developed version of the Tesla FSD software is, it already recognizes that people (children) can hide behind objects.
If you look at the way the FSD development is made you'd notice that they changed from coding to designing AI around a particular task. This is something they started doing quite recently.
Inferring speed limits from sign data is one problem but you could extend this to classify driving conditions based on image data from all cameras. Trying to detect a reasonable speed limit based on that, forgoing sign detection entirely. Sure, the car can get it wrong but if you err on the side of caution (which you do) the car will pick the slowest option based on conditions and you won't care because you aren't driving anyway.
As horrible as this may sound, ultimate, the system will prove itself when it is involved in fewer accidents and at that point it is a benefit to all. If this doesn't happen then Tesla is wrong but it sure looks to me like they are moving along this path nicely.
Driving a car is a simple problem. At least compared to something like general intelligence. You only need to know if it is safe to drive in a particular direction and sure this is a complex problem as you go into the details but it isn't general intelligence hard. We don't even know what intelligence is but we do have something that is looking a lot like cars that can drive themselves.
I'm a believer.
Otherwise Tesla has been great for my portfolio and the couple years of zipping around were great.
I instead have a different criteria. If somebody could show that their self-driving car can drive 250 million miles without a person (pedestrian, driver, or passenger) across a fleet and range of conditions, then that's good enough for me (currently, people drive 100 million miles before somebody gets killed).
I figure 2.5X more safe than the average human would lead to an enormous savings in lives and one might even make the argument, at that point, that there was a moral imperative to disallow people driving!
(BTW I live next to an elementary school and people drive past exceeding the posted limit all the time. I struggle to move my car safely through all the distractions. The one thing that helps the most is the radar which hits the breaks if it thinks I'm gonna back into a person or car.)
when people make these safety stat comparisons nowadays seems to be often ignored under how much more ambiguous conditions humans still drive safely.
Tbh I'm not even sure if self-driving as it is covers 65% of the American population. Has anyone ever tried to use a self-driving car on a rural American road?
I see your point about the larger driving population, but self driving will roll out in wealthy countries with new car models first, and I think solving the problem there will predate a large solution, for many different reasons.
All my comments about self driving are basically limited to urban and semi-urban wealthy countries since those are the groups subsidizing the research now.
I'd love to see FSD handle this... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umBS-HEUImM
However, I was just driving in my neighborhood in northern CA and saw conditions very much like that (I live next to a school and I was driving right when school let out).
My 20 year old Civic will allow me to drive 70mph in a 20. Why shouldn't it? It's my car.
I've seen many signs that say 25 mph when children are present. That becomes an interesting judgment call: if children are walking down the street or on the sidewalk, it's clearly triggered. But what if children are playing in a fenced in part of the school? How would a computer know that those kids are not able to easily climb over the fence, and are therefore not 'present' quite in the same way as if they were on the sidewalk?
I've talked about this with my lawyer friends (I am a lawyer also), and we've never been able to figure out exactly what this phrase means. Surely it isn't meant to be interpreted literally, as this would imply that the lower speed only applies when multiple children (not a single child) are present.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=173803621968999...
Indeed, here in Michigan most of these signs have hours that they apply, sometimes it's like 7:00 am-4:00pm, other times they split it into a morning and afternoon session...
That doesn't seem to comport with how people actually drive when students are in school but not visible. It also seems questionable to require people to know whether kids are in a school at any given time. You can be fairly sure they're there Mon-Fri during most non-summer weeks of the year, but there are also kids at the school after school for many hours, practicing sports/drama/science bowl.
I'm pretty sure I'd get honked at if I drove 25 MPH past a school in a 35 MPH zone at 5p on a weekday, if there were no kids around.
Seems like an absurd reading of that language to me.
> How does a self driving car make that determination?
How does a human driver make that determination? They don't. Those signs don't work, they never have and never will, and they certainly won't in the age of autonomy. Frankly if you *did* want to come up with a solution to this problem, I'd bet on it working better as a data management problem (i.e. do exactly what you said and then geocode the results for the car to interpret) than as a signage problem (i.e. trust people to honor rules that they'll never understand).
[1] https://www.canberratimes.com.au/images/transform/v1/crop/fr...
Just another example of a massive hurdle self driving cars have……
This isn't just a problem for self-driving cars, school zone laws are ambiguous, even for human drivers... and the rules can differ by locality. This is a problem that states and localities need to figure out.
https://mynorthwest.com/1543253/washington-driving-school-zo... https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/education/more-school-zo... https://patch.com/missouri/fenton-highridge/school-zone-spee...
So let's focus on achieving the end goal and updating whatever law that is necessary along the way rather than taking the existing laws as gospel.
Here it could be signaling to the car where the school or construction zone is so in addition to it lowering its speed it should also bias its perception of kids or construction workers more towards false positive than false negative.
If the worst happens and a child runs out, even though I may have a slower reaction speed than the fancy car, I was already going slower and in the back of my mind I was prepared.
I don't see if a car can do that kind of reasoning.
Another example I can think of, at traffic lights with a pedestrian crossing, my driving instructor taught me to look out for the lit up "Wait" text, if it's on, I can slow down and preempt that it might change before I pass.
This is my thoughts as well, that the promises of AV may have grossly underestimated the problem space. Solving the problem of perception does not equate to solving the problems of driving.
My dad (when gowing up) was pulled over for a cop for doing a california stop in Colorado. The police officer let us off, because we had california plates.
When I got my Tesla, it was immediately evident that _no one_ travels the speed limit. They travel 5-10mph over it on anything other then a local road. or they drive way under it.
This is the problem with our mental model - FSD/Autopilot has to co-exist with human drivers - and human drivers don't follow the law. FSD/Autopilot has to exist in a world where roads do not follow standards, lines are not marked, deer jump in front of cars, people do California stops (it's called that for a reason), cars have accidents.
Computers, today, change none of that.
I'm confused. A "California Stop" isn't even legal in California.
I commented as I have a concern that an uneducated reader may walk away with the idea that it's legal in that state. It most certainly is not.
Apparently, though, Idaho does have some provision for bicyclists and rolling through stop signs. So, there you go - an "Idaho Stop" is a thing for any potential bicyclists in Idaho.
As does Oregon. I would guess there are others, too.
I'm informed that these are actually legal as long as you don't disrespect the police by doing it in front of them. It's the same way that going slightly over the speed limit on freeways is legal as long as you don't insult the police by passing them.
Going over the speed limit is not legal, but no officer will pull you over at +1, unless you piss them off for some other reason, like by being black in a white community, for example. Racial biases aside, this is actually a really good thing. If every law was enforced perfectly today, everyone would be arrested, fined, or jailed tomorrow.
I think the parent knows that, and was being a bit tongue-in-cheek ;)
Usually when I have cruise control set to exactly 75 and I'm in the right lane, I'm very often passed by people who are probably doing 80 to 82 mph.
AFAICT, the reason is that there's a big jump in the median fine if you're going >15mph over the speed limit vs <= 15mph over. Economically-speaking, it's not worth the police officer's time to pull somebody over who's "merely" 10 over, because somebody going 16+ over will appear in a few more minutes of waiting.
Interestingly, the state website says the official "maximum" fine bump occurs at 11+ mph over. I suspect they wait for 15mph to rule out the plausible cover stories "I was only going that fast to overtake the other car" or "new here, I didn't realize the incline was so sharply downhill with nobody in front of me".
You probably wouldn't get pulled over for going 80-82 in Washington (i.e. they people passing you probably have their cruise controls set for 80), but it might be less enjoyable of a drive. You have to pay more frequent, closer attention, because you're overtaking people more frequently.
Ironically, California dives deep into "low fines for speeds under 15 over". the under-15-over fine base is a meager $35! For 16-25, it jumps to $70, which is still paltry.
It's more like $300-800 depending on how much you are over the limit. There's a bunch of extra fees they toss in.
Googling it doesn't bring up any kind of official source, but several websites for law firms that corroborate that range.
You and I have a very different view of what makes something legal.
Here in Georgia I've heard people call it a "Texas Turn Off" when someone dives for the exit from the center lane of the highway.
There is no reason why a driver should be capable of driving the car 130 km/h in an 80 km/h zone.
But for a while there we all drove at around the same speed, within about 10% of the posted limit, and it was fucking glorious. It was so much less stressful: very little passing of one another, fewer idjits weaving in and out, left turns off the highway less of a guessing game, fewer accidents … it was just fantastic when most everyone did the same speed.
Of course now we’re worse off than ever, because without cameras the cops essentially gave up enforcing speed limits and now there’s an over 50% difference in speed between the slower and faster vehicles.
How many meters are done on a track each year, compared to public roads? I'd wager most people have never even set foot on a track. Cases like that should have absolutely no bearing on policy making.
And emergency is always used as am excuse as well to not limit car use or rebuild streets. If anything, getting rid of traffic means that it's now easier for them to get to where they are going. Same for disabled people. It's always people shouting "you can't ban cars here, think of the disabled", when the truth is that getting rid of most of the cars and building better infrastructure would make their day easier.
However, I really do like your last point, the easiest way to solve is just remove the cars from as much of the equation and introduce transit that follows rules (trains, busses -higher compliance with road rules perhaps) and let humans navigate the last meter themselves
This makes more sense as an objection in a vacuum than it does in the reality where the alternative is that speeding is a big problem within cities. We don't have to solve every edge case. We just need the edge cases to be less of an issue than speeding already is. And that's a much easier bar.
Asking, "what if we do this?" is fine, but one should also always consider, "what if we don't?"
It's so manifestly wrong that it shouldn't even be technically possible. There's no good reason to manufacture a car that responds so stupidly to such a dangerous and irresponsible input.
And when the day finally comes that the conditions are just right so that a driver dies attempting to flee an avalanche because this tech prevented them from escaping at speed, we will put a lone checkmark in the "lives lost to this technology" column that's adjacent to a "lives saved" file 10 miles long.
If I could be permitted just a little bit of levity: https://twitter.com/dril/status/464802196060917762?lang=en
There's a story out there by Cory Doctorow about self driving cars. Car Wars - https://craphound.com/news/2016/11/23/car-wars-a-dystopian-s...
Its no longer accessible on the site... but you can find it on wayback. https://web.archive.org/web/20190225032830/https://this.deak... (though the formatting in the twitter feed like section is a bit weird)
The part that is most applicable to this begins at "But it was more complicated than just biased data".
Like trying to ban the sale of combustion engines without having a robust charging infrastructure. Or making parking in a downtown area a nightmare without improving the public transit infrastructure.
Or in this case, trying to implement maximum speeds in cars when the technology (GPS? Accurate speed limit maps? Extra sensors on cars and roads?) isn't good enough or isn't there.
It absolutely should have a bearing as you are essentially arguing that those cases you should be illegal & banned. You can't ban something and then argue that "well, not many people were doing it anyway, so we can ignore it even though we're banning it."
Your policy impacts it, therefore your policy must account for it. Even if that account is to decide that the impact is justified, you are making significant changes to things outside of your stated & claimed goal.
> And emergency is always used as am excuse as well to not limit car use or rebuild streets.
I did no such thing?
All I said is there needs to be an 'off' switch, just like there is for traction control in the majority of vehicles today. The overwhelming majority of people leave it enabled (as that's the default), and the world is better. Rules don't need to be black & white to have broad societal improvements.
> It's always people shouting "you can't ban cars here, think of the disabled", when the truth is that getting rid of most of the cars and building better infrastructure would make their day easier.
Except you were arguing that cars should be banned for uses outside of being on the road as part of normal traffic. As in, your "rule" wasn't improving your hypothetical excuse situation here. It was instead making it the only legal usage of a vehicle, to compete with mass transit.
So, sure, we should talk about edge cases and people who implement this technology should work on them, but even if they didn't, the tech would still be a good idea given fairly pedestrian calculations of the relevant tradeoffs.
And even if we accept your premise that the edge cases are a big deal, the solution presents itself quite readily: let there be an override with serious consequences for frivolously engaging it. Simple.
Even then I'd probably still vote against whichever politician decided it was a good idea.
It's almost equivalent to saying that we should replace all metal knives in kitchens with plastic knives. "There is no reason why a person should be able to use a metal knife to hurt someone else."
Some of the problems with your idea : 1) A lot of places don't have speed signs - then should we allow people to drive 130 in 80 zone? 2) Outdated / incorrect signs - not every place on the planet has properly maintained roads. 3) AI mistake - if an AI mistake leads a car to read 50 kmph as 30 kmph, what then? Should the driver suffer? 4) Emergencies - have you ever been in one? Imagine if your car led to someone's death because you didn't trust people with their own car 5) Empty roads - if you have an empty road in front of you, you can go 110-120 in 80 zone. This practice is followed at every single place on the planet. etc. etc.
You know the worst part about your idea? It's so insane that it actually will be implemented in the next 5-10 years. That's the part I hate the most. Bad ideas are not a problem, but actually implementing them is.
All it takes is 1 exec in Tesla who thinks like you or who has had a loved one die by overspeeding.
Any opposition to your idea can be crushed by saying "do you want people to die by overspeeding"?
We won't ban alcohol, but we want to ban overspeeding. The irony!
The knife is not going to stop you from pointing it at someone. If we want car to force people to not overspeed, perhaps we should replace metal knives to plastic ones to prevent people attacking other people with it.
My entire point is that the responsibility to drive safely should be on the driver. The car should not force anything.
Also, you should read the rest of my answer to see why I think it's a really bad idea.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/195325/murder-victims-in...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-traffic-deaths-jump-105-...
2) a sign isn't outdated, it's by definition the limit
3) so what? No one gets hurt by someone driving a bit slower for a short stretch.
4) if you care so much about emergencies, shouldn't you be for this policy? Tens of thousands die each year in traffic accidents, isn't that worth solving vs some obscure edge case that might perhaps sometime cost someone their life??
5) no, follow the speed limit. You're the kind of driver that makes this kind of law necessary. It doesn't matter that the road ahead is empty, if you misjudge the next turn and kill someone. What a crazy, selfish and entitled attitude you have.
> All it takes is 1 exec in Tesla who thinks like you or who has had a loved one die by overspeeding.
Your lack if empathy is astonishing. This happens all the time, and is why it should be implemented.
I’m from Colorado and drivers there are much tamer than the Bay Area - and rightly so! Traffic conditions in SF/peninsula (where I live now) are way more hectic & dense than Colorado. It’s almost weird to expect uniformity across all regions
You need to design the road to the speed you want, not the other way around like it mostly happens in some countries. That solves quite a lot of problems.
It is amazing to me how angry and insane people driving on the roads can be.
I don't want to have a constant battle with every other driver on the road, I want to set cruise control, stay in my lane, and turn off on my exit when I need to. Doing this almost always triggers a tail-gaiting session and a driver becoming enraged at me ( I am not in the passing lane, for the record ).
99% of the pain in driving is other drivers deciding to just be assholes and not let me merge onto a highway for no apparent reason. Perception of "me in front me go fast" maybe?
Driving today, it is pathetic. We are all locked into our little cages and make each other miserable for no benefit.
I'm completely fed-up. There should be a system where I can send dash-cam footage for review and get a ticket mailed to their house. Don't defund the police: direct them at the asshole-fucking-drivers making everyone's life miserable while they play speed racer on the freeway.
Or the fast/left most lane I hope. I cruise control in middle lanes and still have people tailgate like there isn't one or two open lanes to the left of me
It also causes other traffic to resort to high speed passing on the right and left simultaneously because they are aggravated with the moving blockade.
So I have no sympathy for people who cruise control unnecessarily in the middle lane. I wish the cops would write them tickets mercilessly until they stop. Traffic on the freeway flows smoothest (and safest!) when there is a comfortable difference in speed between the lanes, predictably from slowest to fastest as you go farther left.
If it were a four or five lane freeway it would be less egregious. But what it does to I-5 when it's only three lanes is really terrible.
I also haven't noticed the middle lane blockage problem that much. It's very easy to merge when people are traveling a constant speed in a predictable lane.
I can see where your problem is coming from though. Don't feel like you're talking to a brick wall though it's the nature of the forum it looks like a bunch of people all asked the same question around the same time (I didn't see the others when I hit reply) so you're actually responding to 3 different people, not one person who keeps being unable to follow.
In the situation you’re describing, if it’s a 3-lane highway and you’re in the fastest lane you need to plan and prepare properly to start transitioning well before you want to exit. If one or two cars at constant speed are preventing you from transitioning in time, the failure is on you.
Having a constant safe speed in the middle lane sounds ideal.
Slower traffic keep right is a thing. You are not entitled to stay in the passing lanes just because you are going at least the speed limit. My issue is that it really mucks up the capacity of the freeway and increases the suffering for everyone using it.
> you need to plan and prepare properly to start transitioning well before you want to exit
I think I didn't make myself clear. It doesn't matter how early you plan, whether 10 seconds or 10 minutes. You will just have to put your signal on and take a spot, even if it puts you much too close to the guy in front with someone much too close to your bumper. Because the cruise controllers drive like a train, and don't care to leave any reasonable gap between them.
Really, the reason traffic sucks in so many places is because people think laws like 'slower traffic keep right' are there to infringe on their rights, when really it's because traffic engineers have studied how traffic flows and made regulations to encourage it to be safe and as little congested as possible.
I'll just go ahead and link you to a drivers ed page since apparently you need to learn how the roads actually work: https://driversed.com/driving-information/driving-techniques...
> You will just have to put your signal on and take a spot, even if it puts you much too close to the guy in front
It’s physically impossible to be forced to be too close to the car in front. Keep a safe distance, slowing down slightly if you need to.
>You will just have to put your signal on and take a spot, even if it puts you much too close to the guy in front with someone much too close to your bumper
This description makes me think you're talking about stop and go traffic, or at least where the entire highway is mostly saturated. At that point I hardly think any one particular lane is going faster/slower than the rest but that could be wrong. In this case though, I don't use cruise control because I mentally switch over to the mode of "gas and brake the least possible" to even the flow of traffic and not contribute to brake snakes.
edit: oh i see in some other comments you're talking about 3 lane i-5, I have only been on mostly 2 lane sections of i-5 where it's just trucks on the right and people waiting in a line to pass said trucks on the left... but three lanes I haven't had any issues
If I were to stay in the right lane I’d be stuck going 5-10 under because of all the semis & constantly having to dodge merging traffic. If I stayed in the left lane I’d piss off everyone who wants to go 20 over. This seems to be how most people drive, and it achieves your graduated-speed-difference standard: the right lane is for semis & getting on and off, the middle lane is for most traffic traveling at a comfortable speed, and the left lane is for passing.
What would you propose I do differently?
If it were one car, it would be a minor annoyance, at worst. But this style of driving is really popular, so it's a steady line of cars cruising the middle lane in a line. It divides the freeway into two one lane roads, bottlenecking traffic and making it difficult for people who are in the left lane to get to the right in order to take their exit.
It may be that the dynamics are different in your area. Between Portland and Salem, Oregon, the exits are several miles apart so there's not much merging traffic.
> What would you propose I do differently?
In my experience the best freeway experience is when people pass only on the left, and there is enough of a speed differential between lanes that when you need to change lanes you can always find a spot you fit in. It gets aggravating when traffic is pacing, especially at high speeds, because it makes it a lot tougher to make comfortable lane movements. It's worse when the left lane is filled with cruisers, because they always bunch up and follow each other with a 1-second separation, making lane switching hard (and when you turn your signal on, at least half of them will just speed up to make sure the gap is even tighter).
I'm not going to tell you how I think you should drive. There are a lot of factors that are not necessarily the same between where I drive and where you drive. But I can tell you that the dynamics on this section of I-5 up here are just awful. It's a well known local phenomenon, everyone I've ever ridden with through that section of I-5 comments on how terrible the traffic gets with passing on the right, left, and locked up down the center.
The problem with staying in the right lane for any period of time is all the semi traffic. It is in my experience very rare for the right lane to be going at or above the speed limit; realistically, if I stay in the middle lane I am always passing people in the right lane. I will of course get over if the right lane is clear and traffic behind me wants to pass, but this doesn't happen often. I do get passed on the right occasionally, but only by aggressive drivers who use the 5-second gaps between semis to weave across the road -- not by the normal flow of right lane traffic.
I share your frustration with the difficulty of changing lanes, especially in congestion. However, I would argue this is more of an issue with people following too close than using the wrong lanes -- if the right lane was a solid wall of cars, you wouldn't be able to get in there either. In any case, I usually don't have too much trouble if I give myself a few miles before my exit to get over -- though sometimes that can require forcing my way into an annoyingly small gap.
That all being said, I do agree that there are a few spots where the lane arrangements can become really dangerous, especially during congestion. For instance: the first few miles of I-205 northbound near Tualatin/West Linn, the weird bridge in Oregon City and just about anywhere on or near OR-217.
So how the fuck am I supposed to drive to please you? Does everyone need to drive at a reasonable pace, in their proper lane? Or do they need to drive 10 miles over the speed limit trying to go as fast as possible and pass the person in front of you?Oh, should we also have a fucking neural uplink into your brain to make sure you don't have to waste prescious time signaling to get into the lane everyone is SUPPOSED to drive in for long distances?
There is going to be unpleasantness driving. Sometimes car go slow. Try not to shit your pants when you can't swerve into whatever lane you need to be in.
You don’t need to try that hard. It isn’t that much effort. Just accept the fact that going +5-10mph will hardly save 5-10 mins on a 100 mile drive but going near speed limit (+ 2 to 5 mph) will result in everyone having a safe and easy drive.
People trying “hard” to drive safe are the most dangerous on roads as they think they are constantly changing lanes and going around others for safety reasons but actually result in more danger and annoyance for everyone else.
1. The functionality must be enabled within the FSD Beta Profile settings; and
2. The vehicle must be approaching an all-way stop intersection; and
3. The vehicle must be traveling below 5.6mph; and
4. No relevant moving cars are detected near the intersection; and
5. No relevant pedestrians or bicyclists are detected near the intersection; and
6. There is sufficient visibility for the vehicle while approaching the intersection; and
7. All roads entering the intersection have a speed limit of 30 mph or less.
If all the above conditions are met, only then will the vehicle travel through the all-way-stop intersection at a speed from 0.1 mph up to 5.6 mph without first coming to a complete stop. If any of the above conditions are not met, the functionality will not activate and the vehicle will come to a complete stop
2-3mph I think is more reasonable for rolling through.
Does this dataset actually exist anywhere? I would bet that at best it might be able to be inaccurately inferred from other data.
Regardless, if we as a society decide to build self-driving cars, should we really be optimizing for the financial well-being of the driver (via tickets) over the physical wellbeing of the humans in the society (who are hit by FSD cars that roll stop signs in areas with less traffic enforcement).
If you roll through at 5.6mph while I am jogging into the intersection from your side, I will often be hidden by your A pillar the entire time right up until you hit me. And a 5.6mph point-blank hit to a pedestrian can be serious.
(edit: I have avoided these hits so far by watching people's eyes. If I can't see them see me, I stop regardless of right of way. This usually gives them a nice scare as they're rolling into the intersection and glance out their side window to see a person standing right there 'out of nowhere'. Not sure how I'll tell with FSD.)
In theory, FSD shouldn't have blind spots like an A pillar for human drivers.
But I agree with your point.
Runners (and the much loved sidewalk cyclists) are much farther from the road than a walking pedestrian. The drivers are NOT seeing you coming.
This is called a "Constant Bearing / Decreasing Range" collision.
I don't know about you, but I would prefer not to be hit head on by an adult on a bike traveling 28mph!
On the other hand, an actually stopped car could definitionally not hit someone.
The semi truck won’t actually “hit” you. Not in a way where you’re imparted with it’s full kinetic energy.
I'm actually not sure. The initial impact would hurt more with the bike, suggesting that perhaps momentum or something else proportional to velocity (not v^2) is a good heuristic there.
But if I tripped after impact, the bike would do no further damage to me and the semi would be ~1s away from killing me.
They ignore rampant theft and violence and are busting people on empty cross roads in middle of nowhere for not coming to a full and complete stop.
I continue to support policing, but I wish they wouldn't get sucked into this type of work where they basically make even normal people hate them.
It's wild they even put this into a NHTSA filing, not to mention rolling it out in the first place.
Can't have it both ways. The statistical evidence is clear: the average US driver is tremendously unsafe, untrained, unobservant and unskilled despite their country being built around driving everywhere. Their remonstrations on all the rule breaking they can perform safely stems purely from ignorance of their own inabilities.
You sound like the kind of person to not signal when you change lanes because you think there's plenty of room.
The point is also much more about creating a habit in which this kind of behaviour is just done, regardless of the state of the traffic on the road. The law says you must stop for a stop sign, stop signs are placed in places in which sudden traffic participants could enter your field of vision at a time in which it is too late to react properly.
Also, people get fined for ignoring stop signs, even if no one is present. Driving education in the netherlands is quite strict and so are punishments for drivers. For instance, the driver of a car is always at fault for an accident with a "weak" traffic participant (foot/bike traffic), even if technically they werent at fault. (there is process to fight this in court if you assume ill intent/fraud is at play, although it is rarely used).
the reasoning being that the driver of a car has had a drivers education and can thus act responsible while driving a hunk of metal down the road at lethal speeds.
This is also normal in the US, despite what a few commenters on HN may have you believe. Hell, if anything, regular people out and about at 4am are better about following the basic laws, because you stand out a lot more when you flout them, and in the wee hours of the night the proportion of drunk drivers is far higher and so cops are looking for it.
i don’t mean to overgeneralize. i expect there is at least some small correlation between density and how much you break at a four-way stop, and i’m curious what the other correlates are and how dominant full-stops are.
And a cop will fine you if she sees you do it.
I agree with the concept, because it makes for clear rules. Rules, which shouldn't be up for interpretation by any old driver.
In fact, the most annoying thing is that they will stop for too long despite the lack of cross-traffic or pedestrians traversing the intersection (in any direction).
The laws say to stop, LEO say to stop, etc. I can't think of a defence to not stop beyond "No one else does it."
Still we often get this wrong and somebody gets hurt.
A computer is not cursed with our human impatience so why program it in? But more importantly the computer has none of the general intelligence and situational awareness that a dim human has, and they won’t for a long time.
If self-driving cars were widely rolled out already, any large manufacturer could probably completely break traffic nationwide by rolling out an update that makes the cars actually follow every law and speed limit. (Just like work-to-rule can be as effective as a strike.)
I'm not sure I agree completely with this reasoning, but it was an interesting perspective.
You wouldn't get that banking up with everybody following the limit.
That was regarding suburban road planning though, not sure if the same applies to freeways and other major arteries.
Wish they would have looked at data with the feature enabled versus disabled (more rear end collisions possibly)?
As an aside, I assume this is 2.5 m/s converted to mph.
You say: "We added AI to our product" I hear: "We added a bunch more IF statements to our codebase"
I know everyone on HN get's outraged by these decisions with FSD (and regulators do too). One thing I think this exposes is actually human driving. This is in fact common - the system is reflecting things back to us.
I was on road up higher and the number of people on their phones is mind boggling. THey will literally sit at a green because they are so checked out, they will be texting while merging. It's madness.
Personally I think almost all stop signs should be replaced with roundabouts as it better represents how people want to drive and allows for rolling stops but that’s just me
But four-way stop signs absolutely should not be a thing. Anywhere a 4-way stop exists should certainly be a roundabout.
The only problem is that roundabouts in the USA are exceedingly rare in most of the country. There would need to be a massive education campaign for them to work for most people. There are an alarming number of Americans that think that the people already on the roundabout have to yield for the people coming on.
The problem that I see is just insufficient respect for traffic laws. I'm not sure what to do about it, aside from more police presence.
There's no concept of "right of way" on Australian roads. There's only "duty to yield". It might seem like a subtle concept/difference, but when it comes time to stand up in court/ be pulled over/ avoid an accident, it frames things better.
Too many in the US are "it's my road, asshole, I got the right of way".
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/adaptive-behavior/20...
If self-driving vehicles are simply going to operate like facsimiles of human driving behavior their benefits are greatly diminished.
As others have pointed out, this may force us to contend with the laws first since it's clear local enforcement and laws are not aligned.
When a majority of driving is autonomous, laws will likely evolve slightly. If/when all driving is autonomous, then things get really interesting: short following distance, peer-to-peer intersections without stops, etc.
EDIT: Not really sure why I am getting downvoted for this, you can search google and get maybe hundreds if not thousands of results about truck/bus drivers and heart attacks/strokes causing deadly crashes, but they get maybe 1% of the media attention of an FSD video rolling through a stop sign https://fox4kc.com/news/family-says-driver-of-tractor-traile...
there was no AEB alert so there was not an unanticipated vehicle detected...
it is a right turn onto a 2 lane road, where the right lane is protected by parked cars.
the tesla pulls into the PROTECTED lane to see around the parked cars.
you are assuming that it would have then decided to pull into traffic, but that belief is pretty unfounded. When FSD cannot see well enough to decide that a turn is safe, it will literally sit there for minutes. Yes, i am quite certain it would have done that in the protected parking lane.
I'm not assuming anything - what I told you happened is literally how the driver -- who likes Tesla and has has owned 3 others before this one -- reported it.
"If I didn’t slam the brakes, we would’ve been taken out by the UPS truck."
But sure, go off about how certain you are when there's video evidence proving you wrong...
Anyone familiar with driving in Los Angeles knows that when it's safe to do so (e.g., when there is no cross traffic on a turn), a rolling stop is extremely common. So common that it is plausible that people behind you might honk if you insist on doing a full stop and then cautiously proceed. Especially during rush-hour.
By the same token, most people in Los Angeles drive 5 to 10 MPH over the posted speed limits. Driving at the posted speed limit will cause other drivers to hate you.
And I've driven in LA plenty of times. It might be the norm for LA drivers, sure, but I would also argue that that whole region could use at least a bit more patience when on the road.
The speed limit differential gets into a bit more of a grey area, though, in regards to laws that require you to maintain a speed that's in line "with the flow of traffic". It's similar in Atlanta; posted speed limit might be 55, but you're likely going to be going at least 70 in the slow lane in order to maintain the flow.
Granted, I usually drive pretty fast and am aware of my tendency to be impatient behind the wheel, but it seems, anecdotally at least, like LA is worse than many other areas in that regard. The first 20 minutes driving around after I leave LAX are usually spent thinking, "I'm crazy, but these people put me to goddamn shame and I need to adapt quickly," lol.
All of this is the direct result of little enforcement for traffic rules. I've never seen someone pulled over ever in California unless there's been an accident. I've never seen a cop with a radar gun. I've actually seen the LAPD speed past me and hang out in the left lane with no lights on, because that's just how the standard of driving is in LA apparently. You try that in the midwest and you will be pulled over for going to fast, for going to slow, for having a 10 foot tall stack of scrap metal in your truck, for spending to much time in the left lane, and for failing to signal. The highways feel truly lawless in California.
Being honked at takes cycles to triage what’s happening; in itself that lowers safety.
This works until you do it to a driver who has had a really bad day and demonstrates that the walk sign isn't a force field.
Yes, he'll probably go to jail for vehicular manslaughter, but that doesn't help you.
And that constant neck pain, limited mobility and/or arthritis that creep their way into your neck as you get old as a result would be so worth it.
I can say confidently that I've never looked at any other driver doing this and thought anything but, "Jesus Christ, calm the fuck down." I've been that guy doing the honking as well, and I'm fully aware that nobody arounds me gives a shit and they just find me annoying. Hell, half the time most of them don't even know what happened; they just look over and see some overly-angry dude screaming at someone.
>... especially if they have some passenger.
Did you really embarrass them in front of the passenger, or yourself? What if the transgression you're honking at was a genuine mistake with a reason that actually makes sense? I've been the passenger in situations like this before and have found myself thinking, "Yeah, oops, but I don't totally fault my driver or the other driver for this and the chud doing the honking needs to chill out because clearly they don't understand the driver's perspective."
It's almost always immediately obvious what the transgression is if you're paying the slightest bit of attention.
Even the people who are on their phones at a light and have to regain situational awareness from square one do a pretty good job figuring it out.
Sometimes a "bit" of safety isn't worth the tradeoff in throughput. But that also assumes it's safer to stop completely. It's very possible that smoother traffic flow is safer. Or maybe there's more risk that you get rear-ended than is caused by a rolling stop.
Let's say you have a stop sign in your neighborhood that "everyone" rolling-stops through. Sure, great, let's look into changing that stop into maybe a yield, or a roundabout, or whathaveyou that safely allows for the flow that that street necessitates. But in the meantime? Stop at the stop sign! Yeah, sure, we can make the argument that the rolling stop is now "predictable" to everyone in the neighborhood, but what happens when you get an out-of-towner in front of you on your morning commute and you slack off on watching for them to stop, resulting in you rear-ending them?
Improving the flow of traffic is great, but ignoring rules for the sake of flow adds additional layers of unpredictability that ultimately result in roads that are less safe for drivers/pedestrians, at least IMO.
Anyone who drives in LA during rush hour knows that it is never safe to do a rolling stop, because during rush hour there is going to be cross traffic and you need to check that there is cross-traffic at the intersection before turning.
I've witnessed a lot of accidents where some moron thought that saving 3 seconds was more important than safety, and rolled right in front a car that had the right-of-way, or into a pedestrian in the crosswalk that the driver hadn't seen.
I'm not sure that modeling human behavior is the right way to design a self driving car.
There's no benefit to the computer swerving in and out of the lane like a drunk driver, or taking an intentionally inefficient route like a crooked taxi driver, or other pure-downside criminality.
In theory, the car should be paying attention in all directions at the same time and won't get into an accident, but car sensors are not infallible, especially when detecting pedestrians, moreso if they are partially obscured by foliage, newspaper stands, etc.
Automated cars should stop 100% of the time at intersections where they are required to do so. When the stop signs are changed to "Self-driving yield" signs, then the cars can do a rolling stop.
So my point wasn't that cars should act like drunk drivers, but that modeling human behaviors is not the right mindset for self-driving cars.
Easy to retrofit a 4-way intersection into a roundabout.
Looks to me like the US is still on the highish side for deaths per vehicle-mile compared to the EU and Canada, although not that high by worldwide standards.
Tesla also has an option to override the speed limit, you want to remove that too?
The law actually does have a fairly strong correlation with safety — this is the basis of the claims that something over 90% of collisions are due to driver error – but there is a growing recognition that it’s not enough, and design changes to streets and cars are needed to reduce the number of times where obedience to the law is the only thing protecting someone else.
Yes. The Alternative is to encode “break the law” in software and that makes for a very bad option. Stick to the law, computer.
0: the chill setting doesn't roll stop signs https://twitter.com/cooperlund/status/1488549356873695232?s=...
Certainly. Why should cruise control be set to above speed limit? Adaptive cruise control should reduce speed to remain within legal boundaries.
Maybe you'd be perfectly happy with "if you don't want the cruise control to make mistakes, just never use it, because gosh darn it, that's better than allowing people to set the adaptive cruise control five miles an hour over the speed limit like they've been able to do with non-adaptive cruise control since it was a thing." I would not, and I would argue I am not the one taking an unreasonable stance.
I live in New York and there is one such roadway I drive often. Palisades Interstate Parkway. The speed limit is 55 and there are no trucks allowed, but if you are driving 55 on this road you are in danger. You will get run off the road by everyone else traveling at a minimum of 65-70 with many of them 80+.
There may come a day where humans are completely out of the equation, but until that time I believe self driving cars are safer if they drive more like human drivers. That means keeping up with traffic and other human quirks.
I'm a very calm driver and regularly drive at or sometimes below the speed limit if visibility or other factors don't allow higher speeds. People do slow down and I never felt in danger - granted, this is usually at around 40 km/h instead of the limit of 50 km/h, but I can't imagine people are so careless they'd "run you off the road" if you weren't speeding.
Yes. If you're driving significantly above or below the speed of traffic, you're likely to cause an accident. https://qz.com/969885/almost-every-speed-limit-is-too-low/
Maybe not literally crash into you, but that is certainly possible. People will swerve around you, ride your bumper, flash their high beams at you, honk, pull in front of you and hit the brakes, and other dangerous road rage type behavior. It is absolutely unsafe to drive the speed limit.
In general the safest thing to do is just to keep up with traffic.
>A self-perpetuating force that forces everyone to be too fast.
If it were actually too fast, most people wouldn't travel that speed. Have you ever noticed that traffic speed ebbs and flows with the road conditions or time of day? People will drive the speed they feel safe driving, and for most drivers it's (typically) much faster than the posted speed limit. And if the conditions are poor, it's much slower.
This isn't really true: what usually happens is that they either go with a default or they do a study and set the limits at the 85th percentile. For a separated highway, that works fairly well but it often has bad results for mixed spaces: the people commuting through a neighborhood, for example, are trying to go as fast as possible but the people who live there are more concerned about safety, the impacts of those decisions on how they use their space (I grew up hearing that “nobody walks in California” which really meant “nobody wants to walk 3 miles further to use the few signaled crosswalks”), etc. A big problem here are the outliers: most of the risk comes from the top of the speed distribution — even if half of the drivers scrupulously follow the speed limit, the speeders are the ones who will influence people's safety perception of the road.
I think for highways and other limited access roads they're often concerned with minimizing complaints much like the commentary we're seeing up and down these comments so they slap a small number on the sign knowing full well that traffic will ignore it and call it job well done.
I don't think the one being unsafe in this scenario is the one driving the speed limit!
I know nothing about your driving, but I find (anecdotally) that drivers who drive significantly slower than traffic are also ones who never look in their rear view mirrors.
Some laws are stupid. Some are unjust. Some are racist.
Discretion is valuable, probably even essential, for society.
Those people are called bad drivers.
This is a terrible line of reasoning.
If Tesla ever releases their vaporware humanoid bot would you expect them to program it to rape women in cultures where women rape is part of the culture?
Programming a several ton machine to disregard laws and potentially kill many pedestrians without warning isn't really comparable to programming a machine to rape -- it's unfathomable worse.
I've worked in factories and the idea that a car company can release a machine onto the streets that wouldn't be allowed anywhere near a factory floor is flabbergasting.
If a company tried to release a product that had this safety profile in a factory setting the governments and unions would be all over them.
The fact that some jackass yokel or senile old lady routinely roll through stop signs daily doesn't justify Tesla releasing a product that does the same.
I think the same is probably true of cars/trucks in general.
Tesla has willfully chosen to violate traffic laws resulting in numerous deaths. Where is the accountability?
I really wish we could divorce all the self-driving/big brother electronic stuff from electric cars, and make available a dumb electric car.
These cars need to be taken off the roads until they can safely drive unattended.
There is no factual basis for this claim. Cruise control and adaptive cruise control have been in use for a long time, require this type of attention, and are safe to use.
You're not wrong per se, but there is significantly more nuance with self-driving technologies than you're suggesting.
A more famous example in the self-driving car world is the Pittsburgh left [0], where in Pittsburgh a driver turning left will often get conventional precedence over vehicles going through the intersection despite there being no explicit left turn light. This move is technically illegal, but when the self-driving cars didn't do this it drove traffic to a halt regularly and held up every intersection where the self-driving car was turning left. Eventually this had to be added to the software.
Examples like these are why self-driving technologies are so hard to get 100% right, driving is a mix of intuition and rules. A significant amount of driving is doing what other drivers expect you to do. If the cars don't behave like human drivers expect, it often causes more problems than doing what the car is "supposed" to do.
That said, as a pedestrian who has frequently almost been hit by people rolling stop signs, I'm with the NHTSA here...
Indeed! The hardest part of switching to driverless cars overall is that driverless vehicles have to exist on the road for some number of years surrounded by ones driven by primates, with primate reflexes and a variety of ad-hoc behaviors.
If every car on the road were to go driverless at midnight tonight, would the number of accidents and death and disability plummet compared to yesterday's stats?
Intuition and rules and rule breaking.
I remember back in Driver's Ed I was alarmed to discover that through sloppy definitions Colorado legislators had managed to make it illegal to take a right turn within 150ft of a stop sign (or similar, I forget the details). Of course, in reality nobody follows the sloppily defined portion of the rule, nobody enforces the sloppily defined rule, and it isn't a problem -- but the gap between rules and realities is substantial, self-driving cars are going to tease apart this gap, and spiders will come crawling out.
The other unquestioned assumption is that this is even a serious time savings. In my experience, the average driver _massively_ overestimates how much time aggressive driving actually saves them. In most cases, all it means is that they're spending more time at the next backup — I've had people weaving around me for literally hours on the interstate without appearing to notice that they were doing a LOT more work failing to improve their relative position at all, and in the city I routinely see the same driver “passing” me on every block.
Then, of course, if we're talking about lost time, how many years of quality life do people lose because they're deterred from healthier transportation options? It would take rather an awful lot of stop signs to cancel out the savings from even 5% of people switching from driving to bicycling, walking, or transit.
> The real question is why anyone bothers stopping at all if all directions are clear.
Because the most common excuse for hitting someone is “I didn't see them” or “They jumped in front of me!” (which in the vast majority of cases really means that the driver's attention was directed somewhere else). It's not like traffic engineers don't know yield signs exist: they use them because they're intentionally trying to prevent drivers from staying at a high speed due to the risk to pedestrians and cross traffic. Most people who live in neighborhoods which are popular with commuters have to spend years begging to get a stop sign, often requiring a serious collision to force the local DOT to act.
You can't make the presupposition that a rolling 'stop' is always more dangerous than a full stop, either.
Actually, you can. Drivers who roll through a stop are far more likely not to notice pedestrians, bicyclists, or often even other drivers. They’re also unpredictable since everyone else has to figure out what they’re doing and react accordingly. I see the chaos on a daily basis where everyone else has to adjust their timing – and the selfish driver almost inevitably ends up no more than one car length ahead at the next back-up.
In contrast, a legal stop is easy to understand - it works just like you learned in driver’s Ed and since you can’t read another driver’s mind, you have to plan on stopping anyway.
So enjoy your opinion, I'll keep working to make sure your opinion has the least influence possible.
if you are driving under 70 mph on the 101 at 6:00am , you are endangering yourself and those around you.
Now the contradiction is so painful, they'll have to address it. Either a) update the rules to reflect actual practice, or b) admit to "yes, your self-driving car has to obey traffic laws we don't enforce on humans".
I get why the law is enforced here. But I think cars doing full stops are more dangerous than cars doing rolling stops.
so "“Tesla Removes oxymoron from Assertive Driving Profile”. Tesla added oxymoron to make the car behave more human like. NHTSA said no, so Tesla removed the feature."
* TIL: rolling stop
Fully rule-following will create unsafe situations merely because humans expect a certain amount of rule breaking. The person "at-fault" will be he human, but politically that will be tough when humans are mad at machine for "acting weird by following the rules." I fear that our inherent contradictions for rule-following in the road will make it impossible for ML, both to understand how to behave, and to behave predictably to humans.
This is why I'm much more bullish on self-driving-similar vehicles, which look and behave differently, like how buses and trolleys behave differently in the road and we have different expectations from them.
I wonder whether other countries might fare better? Although the regulations will be really fragmented, and few countries can come close to the US as a market for new cars.
The short answer is yes, the US has significantly higher death rates than europe (at least double last i checked), however, i think it's difficult to place that on their "driving behavior." I would speculate that much of it has to do with post-automobile city development. Having been on the road in many countries in europe, i can assure you that i've seen wildly unsafe driving in places like the UK and Italy, in contrast to germany/sweden/netherlands where i saw very safe driving. I presume the drastically lower fatality rates have much more to do with the road-widths and awkward intersections that prevent speed.
I would need a ton of data to accept that "culture" is to blame for road deaths in a country, given the fact that most people treat driving as a background activity, while they are listening to music/podcasts/news/etc. I presume the vast majority of safety is done automatically by removing unsafe road designs that favor throughput, speed, and traffic reduction over forced safe usage of vehicles.
There are aggressive drivers all over, at probably similar rates, but I feel like weaving across lanes, talking on phones while driving, etc is much more of a US thing. Also drunk driving, at least in certain states.
I guess I attribute this to a) low standards in driving exams, b) poorly designed laws (eg turning right on red), c) lax law enforcement and compliance (eg accepting drunk driving), d) misdirected law enforcement (eg aimed at maximising fines through entrapment, rather than actually improving safety). I don’t know to what extent I’m right about any of those, though.
So, I do think there’s a qualitative difference between the US and UK and “culture” is part of it (vs purely road layouts).
But I definitely agree that other countries do it even better -- we should look to them for lessons, and look for ways to diversify transport beyond cars.
Edit to add: to put a bit of colo(u)r on this: often in the UK, I find driving stressful because the lanes are so narrow, both on highways and in country roads. Then in eg Texas, you usually get lovely wide lanes, so driving should feel a lot safer; and I do feel like my own driving is easier, but it feels more dangerous overall because there are so many awful drivers around me! I don’t believe it’s a speed thing (plenty of people barrel down narrow UK roads at high speeds), it’s a driver attentiveness thing.
Does that fit with your model?
The most dangerous roads aren't the ones with the highest speeds: https://uk.motor1.com/news/415257/most-dangerous-road-types-...
The most dangerous roads are the ones where people aren't predictable. Every time you pass hidden driveway, every time someone is crossing on-coming traffic, every time someone changes lanes, every time someone crosses a crosswalk, society rolls the dice, and there is some level of randomness of uncertainty could cause a collision. The more you roll those dice, and the higher speeds involved, the more injuries and deaths you'll cause. It will happen even if all the drivers are driving reasonably. This is why controlled-access highways are surprisingly safe despite their high speeds.
Road design is everything in this model. "Stroad" type roads, that feature people regularly entering and crossing the road, and random, and generally unpredictable intervals are notorious for their dangers. Semi-rural roads, with regular blind driveways, and little-to-no room for error narrowness, and the other type of extremely dangerous road, because the speed and narrowness lead to the same high levels of injury and death.
Both of these types of road are not dangerous because of bad driving, they are inherently dangerous, but, i agree, bad driving makes them worse. I contend that the design, however, is integral to the danger of the road. This is the only reason you can have roads, like interstate highways, with the most deadly conditions (extreme speeds, large speed deltas during traffic, near-constant rule breaking) and yet the roads are some of the least dangerous that we have.
I always wonder how this plays out on a granular level. Some folks have to be thinking / asking if this is a good idea or not.
In high school there was only a handful of things I learned that were actually useful, outside of social experiences. One of them was a teacher who taught business and law classes. In a business class he shared with us, first saying he could probably get fired for telling us this, but that if we had good ideas, new we had a good idea for a business, then instead of going to university and getting $40,000+ into debt over 4 years - get a job and/or apprenticeship and work on your idea. At the end of that 4 years he suggested you'd be in a much better position than those who went into higher education; of course it depends on what someone's goals are. In law class he gave an example: in some states in the US there are very long stretches of road where you won't see anyone for awhile, and sometimes there are traffic lights on a straight road - with no intersection. He put forward to the question of what do you do if that traffic light is red when you come up to it? There's zero vehicles near you in either direction, there's no intersection to worry about cross-traffic, and so do you stop and wait for the light to go green, or do you go again even though it's red? I think every reasonable person would answer that they would go. E.g. A rolling stop in some circumstances isn't dangerous for anyone; and I also see police doing it all the time.
Of course AI deciding when to do it when it may not yet be accounting for the whole or an adequate enough of environment does add questions, and because it's not critical to self-driving, I believe it's a good idea to not allow it until that conversation can be thoroughly hashed out, as well as the technology much more thoroughly tested and evolved.
Edit: Lazy people downvote - find something better to do with your time, or some other form of entertainment.
Simple, binding, easy to follow rules are important when the cost of mistakes is death or significant damage
There is nuance. Pilots are the final authority when it comes to the safety of the craft, and you're in the clear if your actions were justified. With self driving cars, we're discussing where the boundaries are and when the vehicle's decision can take precedence over coarse legal code (as occurs with human drivers every day).
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/91.3 (14 CFR § 91.3 - Responsibility and authority of the pilot in command.)
(private pilot who has deviated from ATC commands in GA aircraft and had to fill out a written report over a cup of coffee)
That's the only justification we have here for making rolling stops.
That's why rolling stop laws don't always end up with you getting a ticket. I was pulled over a year or two after first getting my license for executing a rolling stop. The cop reminded me what I'd done, recognized that I was a dumb kid and a relatively new driver, told me to cross my heart and promise I'd never do it again, and let me go. Enforcement is circumstantial and nobody's going to follow that rule if they're not aware that they could get in trouble for it.
>In law class he gave an email: in some states in the US there are very long stretches of road where you won't see anyone for awhile, and sometimes there are traffic lights on a straight road - with no intersection. He put forward to the question of what do you do if that traffic light is red when you come up to it? There's zero vehicles near you in either direction, there's no intersection to worry about cross-traffic, and so do you stop and wait for the light to go green, or do you go again even though it's red? I think every reasonable person would answer that they would go. E.g. A rolling stop in some circumstances isn't dangerous for anyone; and I also see police doing it all the time.
Many such stop lights exist because they provide a safe space to cross the road for pedestrians. In fact there are a few such lights near me in long stretches of road, among woods, that allow people walking through trails in the woods to cross the road. I stop at those lights every single time. Why? Because I don't know if someone has crossed yet. Could be that it's a family trying to cross the street, and they had to go back to the trail to corral a kid that wandered the other way and they'll be crossing the street in a second. Or, it could be a group of people - some of them have crossed, others are shortly behind and will be coming out in a second.
The point is that, often, I don't know what is or isn't there. And unless I know, I'm going to stop.
>Edit: Lazy people downvote - find something better to do with your time, or some other form of entertainment.
Happy now?
Morale has improved, the beatings can stop.
You're right, and it's the same with jaywalking - it's usually only enforced or a fine or charge laid if the action causes a collision or harm.
In the example I gave there wasn't pedestrian crossing as part of the example, and in it you also stop at the light first. In your scenario it sounds like there are blind spots too, whereas I guess I left out some language, like the road was in a desert with full visibility everywhere. Of course, you need to always fully stop or be rolling slowly enough, say if you're making a right-hand turn at a red light [where legal], so that you can stop quickly enough if you see past the blind spot that traffic is coming.
I'd guess that's a speed deterrent. Long stretches of flat, open road with nothing around to crash into are very inviting for people looking to race. Get going fast enough and you risk losing control of your vehicle and crashing into other people, say an oncoming car. Those red lights, assuming I'm understanding your scenario correctly, encourage people to maintain a safer pace of travel.
>Of course, you need to always fully stop or be rolling slowly enough, say if you're making a right-hand turn at a red light...
... no. There is no "or be rolling slowly enough". Stop.
Sure, or perhaps it makes people who maybe zoned out give them an opportunity to see how fast they're going - and slow down, and they get an opportunity to see if they slowed down fast enough to stop at the red light - before reaching the next red light which maybe is in a little town up ahead a bit, so if they didn't stop in time for the first red light then they've kind of been notified to be more careful next time. But the exercise was to ask: if it's 100% safe to go at a red light [once you've stopped at it], with zero potential for anyone getting hurt, do you go through the red light, or do you wait until it turns green?
It makes for quite the interesting psychological test seeing how different people answer, similar I suppose to the whole train track scenario - where your train is going to crash - and you have a few options; Will Smith in iRobot has related trauma as well, the robot's AI determined to save him - an adult - over the young girl, even though he was trying to command the robot to save the little girl.
> ... no. There is no "or be rolling slowly enough". Stop.
If you're at a stop sign or red traffic light, and if it's legal in your jurisdiction to turn right on, you have to start rolling forward - and are allowed to even if there's a blindspot and can't see any traffic coming yet [the road could be clear or not] - so if you're going slowly enough and there's no traffic then you continue, if you all of a sudden can see past the blindspot and there's enough time to safely go then you continue, if there isn't enough time to pull out then you stop.
Stop and wait. Keep those good habits a part of your second nature.
>If you're at a stop sign or red traffic light, and if it's legal in your jurisdiction to turn right on, you have to start rolling forward - and are allowed to even if there's a blindspot and can't see any traffic coming yet [the road could be clear or not...
This is true, but you are missing one very important caveat; you pull up to the stop sign, THEN YOU STOP, and then you slowly inch forward to see past the blind spot and continue on per the rest of your comment.
If you must know, I downvoted you because you whines about downvotes. Sure, I'm lazy, but at least I don't cry about internet points.
Maybe brainstorm as to what the actual implications of the dopamine hit/easy reward to downvote/suppress content is vs. simply having an upvote mechanism, and then share your thoughts and I'd be happy to get into a conversation with you. It doesn't sound like you've spent the time to actually extrapolate to the full consequences of the downvote mechanism.
Your response here though is one prime example as to why downvotes for most content types shouldn't exist. That you spent the tiny effort to click downvote to react to what you perceived as my "whining" - that that was a strong enough trigger or annoyance for you emotionally says more about your emotional regulation than the content of what I said, likewise by actually commenting you outed yourself or rather shared your actual qualitative reaction/response - so now there's an opportunity for a conversation, to broaden or enhance your understand or perhaps get educated by seeing things more from my perspective.
Don't you think having a qualitative response vs. a single quantitative digit changing to suppress content in an algorithm is more valuable to you, to society?
P.S. Upvoted you for commenting. Now maybe your comment won't be at the bottom, interesting how the "worst" or less valuable or lowest quality [qualitative] comments naturally make their way to the bottom - without requiring the downvote mechanism, isn't it?
P.P.S It'd be neat if HN/dang would offer a parallel view of posts, and then in the actual thread view, have 2 columns of comments - one not influenced by downvotes, and the other as the status quo - so people can start to experience and contrast; because AFAIK downvotes/upvotes aren't available in the API, so a third-party can't develop this? I'd certainly develop this system if HN's API could facilitate it.
I think the law as-is is already ambiguous enough (due to its complex nature) that our society waste huge amount of energy and resources arguing about its meanings. Anything that can be "rigidly" defined (and therefore enforced) with little downside* is a win in my book, purely from a practical perspective.
* Just like in this particular case (rolling stop), the "downside" of enforcing full stop compared to a subjective "safe rolling stop" is close to none.
And about the spirit of the law, to me it's pretty simple: if an illegal practice works better in this regard than the "legal" alternative, sure, we should seriously consider if we need to punish people doing so.
But in most of cases people bringing this in, both practices are perfectly aligning with the spirit of the law. Paired with the practicality argument above, there isn't much point to allow rolling stop as it doesn't make the road "safer" than full-stop.
Also, as someone coming from a country that doesn't have stop sign, people are spoiled and don't know how genius this idea is.
In an ideal world where everyone follows traffic law and pay full attention to the road all the time, stop sign isn't really needed. However, people are not machine. The whole points of stop sign is to force these distracted drivers to pay attention at intersections, even if only out of fear of getting a ticket. This kind of "foolproof" safety technique is not as excessive as it may look like at the first glance. Therefore, I'd argue having people full stopping is exactly the spirit of stop sign.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ljzj9Msli5o
You can get away with it a hundred times, or a thousand times, but eventually you'll be tired and do it and clobber a pedestrian you didn't see because "you were tired" (so its not your fault, even though it 100% is).
Stop thinking the way you do and stop being one of the 88% of American drivers who think they're above average. Follow the goddamn rules because you're not 99.99% perfect and its the .01% that is going to hurt someone else.
And "I see the police doing it all the time" clearly isn't the right moral barometer, if you haven't been paying attention.
You're making assumptions too, it seems, of what scenarios I believe it's safe for rolling stops to occur - or what state a person will be in when they're doing it. For example, I don't drive when I'm very tired, and whether I am tired at all or not, if weather conditions or if traffic conditions
Maybe we shouldn't allow airplanes to been flown anymore because "you can get away with it a hundred times, or a thousand times, but eventually you'll" crash?
I wonder if you're convoluting different rules, like your assumptions, and not differentiating that different rules are more serious than others - giving the same weight to less serious rules than those that are more serious. E.g. Speeding through a red light during rush hour is different than a pedestrian jaywalking - yet both are illegal.
And before someone comes in to say a jaywalker can't do the same damage as a vehicle, here's my personal story: I was riding my bicycle, going a normal speed, vehicles parked along the side as they were allowed to - and the perfect scenario for a collision occurred: a tall, strong man walked out into the street - looking the opposite direction first - from behind a box van with no windows, and stepped right into my path with no time for me to put my breaks on. I crashed into him - he didn't actually move - and I had whiplash, my jaw slammed shut, I bite the right side tip of my tongue 80% off in a deep cut, and multiple teeth were split and chipped; him and his girlfriend didn't stay around, they actually laughed about it as they walked away, and I was in shock - and in pain - and so I didn't realize I should have called the police.
> I think every reasonable person would answer that they would [run the red light in the middle of nowhere].
I tend not to do it. Not because I have some overinflated worship of the letter of the law, but simply because it doesn't matter to me. If I'm in a hurry, I'll probably blow through it, but by default, probably not.
Edit: I also agree that you're being downvoted simply because people disagree with you or your style. It's something I'm getting somewhat tired of on HN. I think they need some concrete guidance on what's acceptable to downvote and try to keep it as much to "rules violations" as possible, because it's increasingly being used as a disagreement flag lately, in my observation, which is just unhealthy.
At least when I grew up in Australia, part of the road laws was a statement, very close to this effect:
"You are required to drive at the maximum speed that is 1) within the speed limit, 2) is appropriate for the conditions, and 3) within your ability to control the vehicle".
And that was the rationale for ticketing 'too slow' drivers. Within those constraints, there was no reason for you to go more slowly, and posed unnecessary risk to those who were within those criteria.
Ideally the traffic laws should be updated to be more realistic.
I'm not a "nuisance" for not going faster and breaking the speed limit. Everyone else is the "nuisance" and I vote for stronger enforcement where possible.
Too many people seem to believe that the only thing that matters is the road in front of them, they don't consider the side roads at all. The city is talking about narrowing the lanes on the main street to reduce speed and add bike lanes, and it can't happen soon enough.
So if you are being passed like crazy and going the speed limit, the speed limit is set incorrectly, and you are, in fact, the nuisance.
They are absolutely, for breaking the law, the nuisance in these situations. The number of people breaking the law does not change what the law is or, even necessarily, what the law should be.
It's a bad law that endangers people and should be changed. Going an unsafe speed is another law, and its entirely possible that there is no speed that does not violate one of those laws. The law is a relic of when cars were less safe, and the same safety can be achieved with much higher speeds.
Deliberately going the speed limit when it results in other drivers constantly passing you increases the danger to to everyone else around you significantly.
Please give this some thought.
Ideally, the German model would be enforced. Slower traffic keeps right, left lanes are for overtaking. And many places are unrestricted, meaning there's no speed limit. The system works quite well, and the flow of traffic is _vastly_ more predictable, and feels a lot safer than the US interstate system.
Can you substantiate that assertion somehow? People drive the speed that they feel safe with, but that is not necessarily true. It may be safe most of the time, but change due to external circumstances. It’s safe most of the time to drive 50km/h in a residential zone, except that one time when a child jumps out from behind a car.
There is also the issue of meatspace. Maybe your modern car can exceed the speed limit of the road surface and safely handle itself. Meanwhile, we still have our biology to deal with, which has not hardened itself to survive an impact at a high speed with a car. Only after millions of years of pedestrian deaths will that evolution be possible. When you find yourself driving 45-50mph on a road signed for 35mph, just know that if a pedestrian were to step out and appear in front of you, you are virtually guaranteed to kill them at this speed, and if you respected the signage, they have a better chance of surviving this impact.
> When you find yourself driving 45-50mph on a road signed for 35mph, just know that if a pedestrian
Change the road to be a 35mph road. It'll be cheaper too.
I suggest that this will in practice feel like you are being "passed like crazy".
FTFY.
Erring towards 100% cautious at all times isn't always better, it needs to be a balance between controlling the risk of accidents with the costs: time taken for individual drivers, general congestion of roads, even things like fuel consumption.
Risks vary according to weather conditions, traffic levels, times of day, etc etc. A prescriptive approach (e.g. always drive at X speed) isn't usually optimal.
are you joking? The risk of driving is injuries and death, primarily born by those _not_ in a car. How somebody weighs this with speeding or rolling stops, or any other form of acting like a careless driver is beyond me.
Most importantly, safe driving is good form. Speeding is trashy.
There are some states where it was found illegal to have someone slow down too fast, i.e. you can't have a 70 mph zone followed by a 30 mph zone. That would in fact constitute a speed trap of kinds, since no one can safely slow down 50 mph in an instant. The practical effect of this is 3 or 4 series of signs spaced exactly 100 ft or so, each one lowering the speed limit no more than 15 mph. It's the equivalent of a 'braking zone' on a race track, but on the street.
In some countries, it's not clear if you don't read the local language(Morocco, i'm looking at you!), but if the inverted red triangle exist, just do full stop.
Who cares how much carbon it saves when people get horrific injuries from it? If you want to save the planet, build intersections designed for rolling like roundabouts, crosswalks with signaling, and yield signs.
There are loads of stop signs at intersections where pedestrians would rarely if ever cross, maybe it would be possible to differentiate those intersections from crosswalks.
"Roundabout vs. 4-way stop, which one is superior?" - Interesting Engineering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brkrYdlMCsg
In the longer term - I suspect we will develop two different sets of laws as we understand what things robots do well and what things they do not. For example: I suspect that robots might be allowed to drive slightly faster on highways because they are better at maintaining the proper following distance, but always drive at the lowest speed limit for roads with variable conditions because they struggle to evaluate the environment.
Perhaps a better example is stop lines at intersections; sometimes stop lines are so poorly painted that you cannot see any oncoming traffic unless you pull forward another 5-6 feet. The letter of the law says you still must completely stop at the stop line, pull forward and completely stop again, then continue. Does anybody actually do that?
Because you're operating heavy machinery that regularly kills people.
----------
>The comment you are replying to said nothing about the law.
>> Why bother?
>Because you're operating heavy machinery that regularly kills people.
The context of the quote by globular-toast is from this paragraph:
>When driving I follow the spirit of the law, not necessarily the letter. If I'm approaching a stop sign and I can see clearly there are no other vehicles, bikes, people, etc, I slow down to very near a stop, but not a full stop. Why bother? The spirit of the law is to make sure I'm correctly yielding to other vehicles.
There's no doubt there was reference to law.
One of those things will get better as technology advances and more R&D is done on it, the other thing will not and hasn't for a very long time. Unless I misunderstood your comment and you are actually referring to some form of transhumanity?
Which, last I checked for the state of WA, is also illegal. Just because there isn’t a cop ticketing every rolling stop at the intersection next to the elementary school by my house doesn’t make it “kind of okay because a lot of people do it”. It just means the municipality sucks at enforcement.
It makes no sense when all you have to do is not use self driving.
If the speed limit is 60 mph, but everybody is going 75 mph, then the safest speed for you as an individual is going to be 75 mph. Otherwise, you're a rolling road block, likely to get rear-ended, forcing tons of cars to change lanes to get around you.
When it's 35 vs. 40 it's a lot safer to sit at the speed limit.
And in a 25 zone there's not really a flow of traffic to worry about.
On surface streets, speed limits are usually quite reasonable. In all the streets I drive regularly, I think the limits are good, except for one stretch where it has two lanes in each direction, and so I often want to go 45 mph, but the limit is 35, likely because there are some houses that directly face the street.
It's highways that often have unreasonably slow speed limits, at least here in Oregon.
I state the above entirely on its own merits, not as a judgment of "should I or should I not travel at speed X on this road".
(The joke here is that OR’s speed limit on highways is typically 10mph below that of other PNW states, even in the “least populated county in the U. S.)
If you increase the speed limit by 10mph, humans will just adjust up too.
I do agree that interstate speed laws need to be updated. The most dangerous spot I drive on an interstate is crossing a state line that drops from 70mph to 55mph. The slower zone is so dangerous because some people are then going 55mph and some still want to go 80mph.
I don't see how self driving can be anything other than the most perfect letter of the law driver though.
...much safer than human-driven cars, because they never tire and they never break traffic rules and thus never cause accidents
and
...supposed to bend and break traffic rules like humans quite often do in order to be efficient drivers
How should that be possible? Ah yeah, by having self-driving cars which are so extremely intelligent that they don't just follow the legal rules, but some idealistic set of rules deviating from the written laws that no human has ever been able to write down concisely, let alone bring into algorithmic form, but that is at the same time 100% safe and very efficient at allowing a maximum number of vehicles to reach their individual destinations in the shortest time possible.
Anyone not convinced that L5 self-driving cars are impossible without first developing a strong AGI way above human intelligence levels should have a really good solution for this obvious contradiction.
Computers cannot "think" at any speed.
This isn't surprising either. The process of making laws is political and politics are clearly not an ideal way to decide on a perfect and exhaustive and precisely detailed set of rules for anything. The laws do not constitute an algorithm for driving. They are necessarily simplified. And yes, a self driving car is going to need a set of driving rules that are much more detailed than anything humans have written down before.
I hate this so much. Selective enforcement only serves to enable overzealous enforcement against unpopular and disenfranchised groups.
One does one small thing wrong and they can then tack a large handful of other charges that would never otherwise be enforced. It's disgusting.
Make the rules things that should actually be rules. Enforce them as written. The end.
Absolutely not, at least in the context of speed limits. Where I live, most of the speed limits are at least 15mph lower than they should be (why is a 6 lane road 30mph???), so you get:
* people who follow the speed limit exactly: 30mph
* people who follow the speed limit the road was designed for: 45mph
* people who see the limit as a "limit:" 25mph
It's a mess. Roads need to be designed to the desired speed limit. Don't make a 6-lane straight road 30mph; people unfamiliar with the area will assume the speed limit's 50% higher than it is, and people from the area will feel like they're going incredibly slow.
In short, it should be uncomfortable to go >= 20mph over by design if you want people to follow your speed limits.
The fact that you start your post about how an AI can make such a determination with the words "it's not complicated" discredits you.
The assertion that a significant difference exists is not complicated and is easy to prove.
Not really. You can fail to see a pedestrian and cripple them and you won't see a whole lot of consequences for your "accident" (negligence).
Breaking rules on a case-by-case basis is also how the normalization of deviance occurs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ljzj9Msli5o
If you break rules when you think you don't need to follow them you'll find that you're not 99.9% perfect and you will inevitably cause a crash.
If you follow the rules all the time you won't make that error.
The reason why computers should ultimately replace human drivers is precisely because we're dangerously incompetent and overconfident and shouldn't be breaking any rules.
Their legal department works studiously to handwave away every marketing statement.
"The driver is only in the seat for legal purposes. The car is driving itself." - "You are entirely responsible for driving the vehicle."
"Use Summon to bring your car to you while dealing with a fussy child." - "Pay attention to vehicle at all times."
1) they have to be simple enough to fit in an AVERAGE DRIVER's head (it is a miracle to me that highways in cities are as functional and low-error as they are yes I know the death statistics on driving)
2) the law makers know the laws will be bent, so they set a baseline of VERY VERY SAFE and hope that most people only bend the law to VERY SAFE or at worst MOSTLY SAFE.
It seems weird given how "bad" self-driving algs are right now, but with a detailed database of locations and context, I absolutely believe the "rolling stop" logic in the car would be safer and more effective than a human observing complete stops.
I definitely do not agree with Tesla's vision-only no-location-context algorithm approach. Such a thing is a baseline, but if you know the location to where you are going, then route-specific data should be downloaded that has been optimized with multiple specific AI computation passes.
That's how humans work: we are slow and dumb when we are driving in unfamiliar locations and routes, but for our commute routes we know where potholes are, cracks in the road, which lane to be in, dangerous sidestreets and intersections and congestion points, etc.
So I disagree that L5 is impossible. Well, it depends on "way above human intelligence". I think what you are trying to say is you need a supersapient intellect with IQ 195.
But AIs can be "dumb" but have access to a far larger memory space and database and respond to a far wider bandwidth of sensor information. The AI programs may not be solving Fermat's Last Theorem in the margin of a book, but they can be smarter in the sense that it's like having a million gnomes watching at once.
I'd say even "normal human intelligence" would suffice for at least getting L5 to work (maybe not with perfect safety and efficiency, but working at all). But you cannot remove the need for actual "intelligence" from the equation, and that's the problem: our AIs are not "intelligent" at all. They are idiot savants, and driving a car isn't exactly a problem where you need savant-like capabilities. It is a very general, broad-range problem, which is much more applicable for the broad mental capabilities of even the not-so-smart part of humanity.
Case in point: there are human savants in areas like playing chess or Go or recognizing text in many different spoken languages, but there are no human savants in the area of driving cars on public roads.
Or possibly they just know that real world driving involves so many context-dependent decisions that trying to cover it all with laws is about as reasonable as making a self driving car.
I think it's the nerds that are delusional.
No, because they never tire and almost never break traffic rules in dangerous ways, and thus cause accidents much less frequently than humans. Realistically, this means that instead of following the speed limit they'd follow speed limit + X, instead of keeping the prescribed distance they'd keep whatever distance human drivers typically maintain (while still keeping enough distance to react and stop), and it also means rolling through 4-way stops when they have sufficient confidence that it is safe to do so.
Just like you will find people complain about taking their manual shift away when none of the US drivers ever knew what they are even missing.
If I'm responsible, then I can choose to have the car break the law on my behalf, and accept the consequences.
<button>DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?</button>
Personally I'd like a Foghat option:
<button>Slow ride, take it easy.</button>
It can be a real pleasure to enjoy a buttery-smooth ride, and robots will excel at it. And of course manufacturers will optimize for it since it demonstrates confidence and safety. OTOH, you know what can also be fun? Having a Tesla kick your butt with almost 1 G.
There should be a reasonably-smooth default setting, a "show me your skills" super-smooth setting, a "sporty" setting, and "madman". The latter would probably cost extra due to the extra wear and tear, and I'm sure I'd pay for it, at least once, for the experience.
But yes, it's technically "illegal", just like a rolling stop. Which prods the question of why one is subject to regulatory oversight and the other is not.
Because one is a safety issue when done, and one is a safety issue when not done. Not obeying the speed limit is (mostly) safe when matching the traffic around you. Not stopping fully at a stop sign is unsafe since it can lead to accidents regardless of what everyone else around you does.
Or to flip it around... obeying the speed limit but not matching the traffic around you is generally unsafe. While obeying the stop sign and stopping fully is always safe.
Same with rolling stop in fsd, it's even more clearly a decision by the car which would naturally fall under self driving regulation while decisions by the driver naturally wouldn't. I.e. this isn't a "perform rolling stops" button the driver pressed to force the decision.
The law is at complete odds with normal human behavior, and we've been ignoring the contradiction for, what, decades?
The most interesting possible outcome of widespread self-driving vehicles is reconciling the legal fictions on the books with reality as code is unambiguously breaking the laws that aren't based in any semblance of reality.
And there are definitely cases when it's preferable to closely cut a yellow light than risk a collision if you're being tailgated and don't have much faith in the person behind you stopping if you do.
At best, the law codifies best practices for the typical case.
At worst it's a tool used to selectively target some people over others. See, for example, the concept of "driving while Black".
If a law leaves "appropriate circumstances" to the discretion of the public then it is effectively useless. If you get hit by a driver who refused to stop at a stop sign, you're most certainly not going to think that rolling stops are fine.
Indeed! :)
No, we've been using the contradictions as pretexts for otherwise illegal traffic stops.
Are you in California by chance?
Because I rarely see that behavior in Washington state. Dead of night empty roadway people will come to a full stop at a stop sign.
> It's safe when done in appropriate circumstances, yet it's illegal.
You mean like when a driver thinks they don't see anyone else around? While driving a car with giant A pillars that block a large % of the street and sidewalk from view?
Just, like, always stop at stop signs. It isn't that hard.
Most stop signs I encounter in my commute and trips into town could be safely converted into roundabouts while still keeping neighborhood driving speeds low, but since this is the USA, nobody understands how to use roundabouts, so we sit there like idiots stopping every 300 feet of travel.
But you know what? Everyone stops at it Even though it is stupid, and there is almost no chance of cross traffic, people stop at it.
(It is on 116th ave in Bridal Trails, anyone local reading this knows the stop sign I'm talking about!)
So yes, some very stupid stop signs exist.
The neighborhood I live in now has a compromise stop signs every block going east/west, but no stop signs going north/south. It works out well enough!
Indeed, roundabouts would solve a lot of these problems.
One private gated community around here just uses giant speed bumps. Another, somewhat jarring, solution to the problem!
Is it a place where the cops sit to get some easy tickets? That might explain it.
People are just following the law.
So people don't have to walk multiple blocks just to cross the street. :)
Accordingly I treat all intersections as potential crosswalks because people often cross at them!
I hate people who reflexively come to a full stop at stop signs!
And some stop signs, I just completely ignore. Drive right thru as if there was no stop sign at all.
I have eye-balls so I don't have to stop at stop-signs.
Your anecdotal evidence also contradicts mine, so we have a stalemate here.
I don't really understand the A-pillar comment either. Not going to apply this broadly because you're just a single person, but navigating your blind spots is something you learn to do in other countries at least.
> The law is at complete odds with normal human behavior
> that aren't based in any semblance of reality.
Dunno how true it is, but way back when, when I was in driving school, the instructor said the reason for coming to a complete stop was in order to accurately gauge the speed of cross/oncoming traffic, which is not nearly as accurate if you are in motion, in order to know if you can pull out/turn safely.
This is indeed normal human behaviour, but we've also seen a dramatic increase in drivers killing people with their cars.
If we were to force all autonomous drive systems to always perform full stops and always obey the speed limit, the human drivers mixed among them will lose their minds.
At least so far, NHTSA has not said that Tesla and others need to ensure that in autonomous drive modes, the speed limit may not be exceeded.
Cars can be programmed to never speed, double-park, or roll through stops (I'm aghast that Tesla even tried this). Loads of drivers seem to think this kind of shit is just fine and normal, and desperately need to be taken off the road.
Self-driving car skeptics seem to think that the barrier is "being good at driving." I think the barrier is "being better at driving than most people." That's a low bar.
For every few hundred cars going 65-80 on a 55mph stretch of interstate highway there's maybe a couple going the speed limit. Who is contributing the most danger to the roadway on a per-capita or per vehicle basis?
> That's a low bar.
You only think that because you mentally bucket people who casually violate the letter of the law when they deem it safe to do so and who's judgement on such matters is roughly in line with everyone else's into the "bad driver" category.
The bar is not actually that low.
Roll through a stop sign during rush hour? in most places you're fine.
Roll through a stop sign late at night when bars close? Maybe you'll get pulled over for it and a sobriety check.
The laws are rooted in safe ideals, but are applied on a whim based on police bias.
Personally I think self-driving cars should err on the side safe ideals (even if they're slightly less practical), and the laws should be applied to human drivers in a more uniform manner.
I've had some bad run-ins with police myself (pulled over and searched for having a mirror ornament, pulled over for doing 5 over the limit, etc)... and follow every asinine road rule because of it.
This one seems so obviously avoidable that I’m baffled as to why they let it happen.
Whereas, a rolling stop, that's not legal (as far as I know) anywhere.
EDIT: I am incorrect with the above statement. I apparently live in one of 4 states where you can exceed the speed limit by up to 10mph while passing.
For sure in Colorado it's not legal to exceed the speed limit to pass. But it is illegal to drive below the speed limit while in the passing lane on a highway with a speed limit 65 mph or higher. There's exceptions for safety and congestion, but otherwise the left lane is considered a passing lane. If you're not passing, you're not supposed to be in that lane.
Of course these are the laws, not the practice, which is what I think GP was trying to say.
Of all of the places I've been Chicago was probably the worst at speeding, especially in the dead of night when the roads are "too" open. Recently they got a bit stricter with the speed cameras though https://www.illinoispolicy.org/chicagos-speed-cameras-ticket...
I would strongly discourage you from trying that line of argument with the cops when you're pulled over for speeding. I'm certain that a court of law with decent standards does not interpret speeding "at least a little" as anything except a binary.
A thing is not legal just because law enforcement lets you get away with it, but I don't think this is a good example. It's silly to have this conversation without at least acknowledging the way driver behavior expands into "grey areas" and gaps in enforcement, and I don't think it's trivially obvious that "self driving" cars should rigidly follow the letter of the law even if that means they'll be the only cars on the road doing so.
And again, I don't think the car should speed by default, but a car going 2-3mph over the posted limit should be acceptable rather than an error state because the world is not black and white.
If you can determine in real-time whether the maneuver your about to perform or the speed you're going is safe then why even have speed limits? The speed limit for highways is still 65 whether it's a a bone dry, pitch dark, pouring rain, or completely iced over. "Any speed under 65" can't possibly be a safe speed for all these conditions while allowing for the highest safe speeds possible in ideal, or even average, conditions. And this doesn't even being to take into account the huge vehicle variance and tire ware. The safe operating speeds for a top-heavy Honda Fit with narrow tires vs a low-to-the-ground wide-tired Corvette are going to be wildly different.
And then you have to deal with other drivers. If traffic is going 75 you're gonna have a hell of a time merging capped at 65. And in an ideal world nobody would pass on the right making it possible to get off the highway without increasing speed but real life hits hard.
For the same reason driving below average speed is dangerous. If you drive 10km/h slower than everyone else you are a problem, even if everyone else is driving at or slightly above the speed limit (very common in Germany).
Illegal is binary for most driving laws (especially 'do what this sign says' rules), but some things fall into an ambiguous category of illegal-but-rarely-enforced. The problem is that computers don't do well with ambiguous rules. I strongly suspect that when most cars are using FSD the rule of being allow to drive a little over the speed limit will be removed, and cars will have to stick to the limits. Hopefully the limits will be raised.
It also engages only when approaching an empty intersection. Any obstacles/pedestrians or moving vehicles cause a full stop. To be perfectly honest: I turned it on when I saw it, but haven't seen it actually do it yet. And at this point I guess I never will.
I mean, speeding is equally illegal and inarguably more dangerous. Yet no one is upset that the car lets you speed.
"Full Self Driving" is the name of the vehicle option that you can purchase or license, which includes a bunch of different features (light/sign recognition, autonomous navigation on highways, lane changes, stuff like that).
Or have enough social media clout (in the appropriately Tesla-positive direction).
Emphasis mine; this apparently wasn't the default behavior. Though, it may not have been clear to users opting-in exactly what "assertive mode" changes about the system's behavior.
It happens in all three modes Chill, Average and Assertive to different degree.
Since they wrote it the way they did, I would guess there is some regulatory document that causes this to be classified a a "recall" for legal purposes. But it's incorrect to substitute legal language for common English language when there is a conflict between the two, except in legal contexts. That rule goes for technical language in general.
Is this practice more common in British English? I feel that it seems to appear more often in writing by British people, but that's anecdotal and could be incorrect.
Not entirely unlike the rest of the mainstream media, I would suppose.
That can be anything from "these airbags might not open when they're supposed to", like the Takeda problem, or "if water splashed just right on the bottom of the open door, you would have water next to electrical wires which could maybe start a fire" (an issue my car had a few years ago).
Tesla met with the NHTSA and agreed to issue a recall. How is it possibly bad journalism to call it what it is?
As for semantic arguments, obviously the current colloquial usage of the term "recall" means to call for products in use to be removed from use and potentially for remediation. However, the usage of the term in the article is the precise, legal, technical usage of the term meaning what I stated above. This usage and definition by NHTSA predates the colloquial definition and was thus not confusing at the time it was defined, and is both precise and has been precisely used by NHTSA for duration of its usage of the term so their usage of the term has not materially changed in the interim. Therefore, it is both technically, semantically, and culturally correct to use the term "recall" in this specific instance even though the colloquial usage of the term has changed underneath them. This is in contrast with Tesla's usage of the term Autopilot which does correspond with your concerns as it was coined after the colloquial usage had already shifted, and limited effort was made to precisely define and inform potential stakeholders of any differences in terminology with respect to the colloquial usage.
[1] https://www-odi.nhtsa.dot.gov/recalls/recallproblems.cfm
I don't think that's right, because countries could "recall" ambassadors, or parliament could be "recalled." Essentially, "recall" means "to bring back." If you aren't bringing something back, it isn't a recall. I don't have time to do the etymological research, so this could be wrong, but it isn't likely. (IIRC I used to be able to access the Oxford English Dictionary for free online, but I'm finding that now I can't.)
That was back in December 2020 So I the 'chill/average/assertive' setting changes how it works, but it is true that Tesla intentionally allowed the cars to roll through a stop sign[2].
0: https://i.judge.sh/LtHmP/5deuksuc_L.png
1: https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1336467057366487040?...
2: https://twitter.com/cooperlund/status/1488549356873695232
You are also required to have your lights on when you are driving. It notably increases visibility even during the day.
I came back to the US really wishing those policies would go into effect nationwide.
Having said that a lot of roads in my area are already built around 4 way stops and it's not easy to undo that, but new construction in my area of suburbia US has adopted the roundabout.
And there is a driver problem, majority of American almost never have any experience driving on roundabouts. I seen some would simply cut off the roundabout traffic and proceed on their way without yielding.
https://www.google.com/maps/@56.5903811,-3.3375594,3a,75y,21...
The data shows that roundabouts are safer and even improve traffic flow. But they're also a nightmare to install after the fact, which is why it is so uncommon. All we can do is stop making the same mistakes going forward.
Same thing with burying power lines: Far cheaper to do with new construction, substantially more reliable and better able to withstand natural disasters, but we aren't. Society is just bad at planning for tomorrow if it costs us a little today at every level.
- If you have one 'entrance' to the roundabout which is partially busy, say at rush hour, it becomes near impossible to enter the roundabout from a different direction. With a normal roundabout many more cars can be on the roundabout at once and a natural flow, even from less used entrances, just happened. This does not work on a mini roundabout.
- Where they have replaced a T junction, people often ignore it causing (near) accidents when going "straight on" when they don't have right of way.
They are definitely not a one size fits all solution.
I suppose "recall" may also be a legal term, but it doesn't seem to fit well in this case.
I have the FSD beta on my Model X, and opted in to assertive not knowing that it enabled rolling stops. I enabled "assertive" in hopes of making the car less timid about unprotected turns.
Its frustrating that I paid $3000 for this 4+ years ago, and waited 4 years for the feature, and was made to drive overly gently (no hard cornering or braking) in order to get a good "safety score" for quite a while before I could even try it. The $3000 would have been much better off had I invested it in Tesla stock.
If this is where they are after 4 years, I don't hold out much hope.
We have solid infrastructure so can’t speak to the potholes complaint. A few months back FSD beta started acknowledging speed bumps and taking them slowly so I’d imagine potholes are in the works.
I tweeted at Elon about the potholes.. let's hope something improves.
They include:
- Driving too close to parked cars for comfort on un-laned side streets when there is no oncoming traffic. I personally like to leave enough room to avoid somebody opening their door into me, if I have the room.
- Leaving way too much space in front of the car at stoplights. This is a problem when it leads to blocking the entrance to left turn lanes, etc.
- Totally blowing through stop signs in parking lots.
- Freaking out and making me take over on a mildly tricky interstate interchange where 2 lanes narrow to one.
And I'm sure there are a million others that I'm forgetting about.
Are things really "progressing just fine" if the car is repeatedly putting itself into dangerous situations?
Edit: I suppose that one could make the argument that we didn't even have this kind of tech on the roads ten years ago, and sure, that's progress in one sense. But I wouldn't call it "just fine" by a long shot, nor would I dismiss these concerns as whininess.
It'd be ~$40,000 >.<
Could be worse. If the people who put a $50,000 down payment on a Roadster 2.0 the day they announced them had bought $TSLA instead, they would have enough money now to pay cash for TWO Roadsters and have enough money left over to add a Model S Plaid.
Tom Scott made a good complementary video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYeeTvitvFU
It's already fixed just last month: https://www.hants.gov.uk/News/25012022Ipleycrossroadsopening and https://www.advertiserandtimes.co.uk/news/new-forest-acciden...
Direct sun glare can be an issue though. I have yet to see how Tesla plans to solve this, although having five different forward facing cameras surely helps.
My most Luddite view is that AV are not worth it right now. Maybe in 10 years, but I see too many idiots on the freeway sleeping or playing video games in Teslas while in the driver seat. If you're too busy to command a vehicle that can kill you and those around you, Uber to work or take the train. I don't trust the roadways to be a massive experiment in how close a corporation can cut it on self-driving tech with some acceptable margin of death. Sure, human drivers are probably worse in normal circumstances. But I'd happily outlaw AV in any peculiar circumstance till 99.9999% of the kinks are worked out away from other drivers who haven't opted into the grand experiment of robots on the road.
If most people adopted that unsafe unlawful behaviour but which help reduce congestion, what are you suppose to do as a car maker if respecting the law will make other users road-rage against your client using your self-driving system?
Please drive your car. You owe this to everyone else on the road.
It is my belief that this will always be true.
From yesterday:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ESJH1NLMLs
"... as we look at this accident history what we find is that in 68% of these accidents, automation dependency plays a significant part ..."
"... automation dependent pilots allowed their airplanes to get much closer to the edge of the envelope than they should have ..."
The car still needed to be fixed. The car was faulty.
I am also an FSD beta user, and I have my car set to standard assertiveness and it does not roll through stops.
And, one last comment on the vision of the car - it’s a whole different beast with the new fsd beta code. The highway autopilot code is not safe on the streets and until you see the fsd beta code at work, it’s easy to think that it will perform poorly on local roads. Yes, it can do stupid things and cause anaccident, but not in the way the autopilot code will. It’s different.
I liked this feature, damnit.
Karpathy has commented about the neural nets gradually replacing the traditional code. See his presentation[2] around 18:45.
[1] https://saneryee-studio.medium.com/deep-understanding-tesla-...
Why anyone in their right mind would willingly use this stuff in a risk-intensive life/death scenario like driving on public roads remains beyond me.
(Yes I lose points every time I criticize Tesla online but I will keep doing it until someone makes it make sense or the company finally goes out of business for continuing this type of irresponsible behavior.)
0: https://twitter.com/cooperlund/status/1488549356873695232?s=...
If all self-driving or driving assisted cars were limited to exactly the speed limit and following the letter of laws that no human follows, they will never achieve mass adoption.
FWIW, cruise control has always let you set any reasonable speed. Doesn't quite seem right to hold a car to a different standard just because it's advanced enough to sometimes know the actual speed limit.
They really need to add some explicit controls over this like navigate on autopilot has. I've had to disengage so many times due to it making really dumb moves that could be fixed with just asking me first. I know thats against their end goal but their models just are not there yet.
1) We'll not see true FSD in any car for, maybe, another 10-20 years.
2) Those who bought Tesla FSD should ask for a refund.
3) Musk will be forced to release FSD-lite, which will be advanced lane assist.
4) Until said 10-20 years have passed, you will always be required to monitor FSD.
This is my point. I actually enjoy driving. It would drive me nuts to become the supervisor of my car. And that's the eventual end result of FSD.
You shall become the supervisor of your car. Don't forget to schedule some one-to-one performance reviews, and a performance plan.
Personally I think the removal of the rolling stop behavior is a minor tragedy.
Given that, the last thing you want is a bunch of accidents delaying the mass-adoption of this tech. So, the fact that they shipped this is mind-boggling. I wonder who made the call on this.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/31/22910462/tesla-karaoke-mi...
No wonder it is eligible for the nickname of 'Fools Self Driving'.
Any FSD System that drives on the freeway and follows the speed limit is doomed to failure. Likewise, as evidenced by the crazy amount of "right on red" fines in cities, humans don't come to a full 3-second stop.
"Drive like a human" seems a reasonable goal for now.
Kinda cheeky, but I bet a lot of people would love automated driving features that change behavior around police.
_Recall_ makes it sound very different from what will actually happen.
Far, far better to have clearly delineated major and minor roads at intersections. You yield when going from minor to major - no confusion, less temptation to “jump the queue” (although some drivers will still try).
The main downside is that it can take a long time to get onto the main road safely when it’s busy. But traffic lights fix that.
Full stops, when no cross traffic is present, waste time and energy.
“But those cars don’t claim self driving.”
Neither does Tesla. The capability is still under development.
There is still value in lane assist on motorways and cruise control, but we have that anyway.
The difference is all other car manufacturers haven't been selling FSD and robotaxis as "right around the corner" for the last few years. I understand the development problems and overambitious deadlines ... but if you took away the ebullient narrative and put just the facts on paper, I wouldn't be able to distinguish what's gone one from fraud.
Meantime, dramatic headlines will be dramatic.
the “recall” is an OTA software update
Please see this: https://www.nhtsa.gov/staticfiles/rulemaking/pdf/Recalls-FAQ...
>A recall is issued when a manufacturer or NHTSA determines that a vehicle, equipment, car seat, or tire creates an unreasonable safety risk or fails to meet minimum safety standards. Manufacturers are required to fix the problem by repairing it, replacing it, offering a refund, or in rare cases repurchasing the vehicle.
>A recall is issued when a manufacturer or NHTSA determines that a vehicle, equipment, car seat, or tire creates an unreasonable safety risk or fails to meet minimum safety standards. Manufacturers are required to fix the problem by repairing it, replacing it, offering a refund, or in rare cases repurchasing the vehicle.
So basically, regardless of whether the fix is a software or hardware update, any issue a car has that "creates an unreasonable safety risk or fails to meet minimum safety standards" falls underneath the "recall" banner. I can see the benefit here; a recall generally gets a certain level of publicity that a "software update" might otherwise not. It might not be a bad idea for people crossing at stop signs to think, "Hmm, Tesla approaching, let's exercise just a bit more caution", until this is resolved.
[1]https://www.nhtsa.gov/staticfiles/rulemaking/pdf/Recalls-FAQ...
I was perplexed by the wording as well. Apparently software updates can be labeled recalls now? Did someone inform Microsoft, maybe this would help Windows 11 adoption.
https://twitter.com/jlrhart/status/1486407516338761734/photo...
>https://twitter.com/jlrhart/status/1486407516338761734/photo...
Sure, linking to a tweet obfuscates the facts a little bit but surely someone was bound to Google the name eventually...
https://wtop.com/dc/2021/09/girl-struck-and-killed-in-northe...
"Police said the van came to a complete stop and proceeded through a stop sign when Hart was unable to stop her bicycle and entered the intersection into the path of the moving vehicle.”
The accident you cite has pretty much nothing to do with the debate here since the stop wasn't actually rolled.
The numbers of drivers driving through reds (at least here in coastal San Diego) has noticeably increased over the past two years, previously people would hit the gas if the lights turned yellow, now they are hitting the gas if they see yellow (and crossing through the intersection on red). Accident statistics seem to back that up https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/29/us/red-light-deaths-trnd/inde...
Making traffic rules less strict seems like a recipe for more accidents and deaths.
There must be some fascinating cost/benefit analysis here looking at the waste that comes from breaking and starting again vs. a small chance of causing an accident.
Think about all the cool ways you could alter urban design or traffic law with self driving vehicle data.
In the end, it comes down to personal responsibility. Apparently the people in Germany drive more responsibly than everywhere else?
"Tesla said as of Jan. 27 it was not aware of any warranty claims, crashes, injuries or fatalities related to the recall." It is good for automatic cars to behave similar to humans for safety and social acceptance.
Strangely, Tesla exported this rolling stop behavior everywhere, despite it being illegal in many (maybe most) states.
It’s strange that this was allowed to get so far. This violation should have been obvious.
If you're ok with a car just slowing down and yielding to traffic if necessary, why not use a "Yield" sign instead of a "Stop" sign?
We have "yield" signs for entry onto highways and roundabouts, for example, where the goal is to keep traffic moving.
Or better yet, turn 4-way stops into roundabouts.
California rolling stops are illegal.We can use the national average fine or use the GPS to match it to the proper jurisdiction. I don't care which.
https://www.thetrafficticketattorneys.com/blog/7-things-you-...
https://www.sidmartinbio.org/what-is-the-fine-for-a-californ...
https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/defense/vehicle-code/22450/
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
No, they certainly do not. I live in California and I've gotten a ticket for doing this.
This seems to be an example of Tesla “pushing the boundaries” in a way that puts their customers at risk. I’m all for small-l libertarianism, but they could spend effort where it actually mattered instead of this childish petulance.
False. I present to you California Vehicle Code #22450:
>The driver of any vehicle approaching a stop sign at the entrance to, or within, an intersection shall stop at a limit line, if marked, otherwise before entering the crosswalk on the near side of the intersection.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
It is NOT legal to do a rolling stop in California. Like everywhere else in the nation, you must (legally speaking) come to a complete stop at sign/light. Failure to do so will result in a ticket (if you're caught).