Tesla driver dies after his Model 3 stops on highway, gets hit by two other
businessinsider.com
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The allure of having a car that drives itself is to relax the mind from paying attention to the road, handling 99% of the situations correctly through the software. But the 1% that require human input are made much more dangerous because the driver not only needs to handle the situation, they need to instantly catch up and familiarize themselves with the situation they've found themselves in. What was the car trying to do? Why is it suddenly stopping? What do my blind spots look like? Is there anybody behind me? Was anybody in the process of passing me?
Unfortunately the time it takes to refamiliarize with the situation could exceed the total time budget to respond.
It's similar to not paying attention to the road and being in the passenger seat when a junior driver is driving instead. But there are 2 exceptions:
- Most people increase the attention they pay to the road when a learner is behind the wheel. Preparing to respond and offer guidance to correct.
- Self-driving software is a lot more indeterministic than a new driver. And software updates can easily change the behavior in non trivial ways. As if the driving student had Multiple Personality Disorder, one day being over cautious in certain situation and other days over-confident. Though I contend that MPD is actually more predictable than an opaque algorithm, as there are other human clues about the behavior mode of the moment that could help guide the response of the trainer.
I could even envision the plausible deniability/marketing bullshit behind “self driving”, but to go out of your way and declare FULL self driving, and not get smacked for false advertising is beyond me.
Would people get operated by an AI doctor that is better then the medicine students and the drunk doctors but only when a good doctor is paying attention and intervenes in case the AI shits itself?
As long as any "self-driving" car operates only under human supervision it's not relevant to compare that system taken independently to the human. Compare the FSD alone with the human alone and then we have stats. Everything else is candy for people with more money than sense.
We already went through this with airlines and decided to require pilots fly a certain number of hours without the automation, so when automation fails they are able to control the aircraft with some confidence.
As it is self driving cars are a luxury item for experienced drivers but I fear a future where a plurality of people panic when control is handed over to them once the computer determines the situation is too risky to continue on autopilot.
Some great backstory on automation in airlines is 99% Invisible's "Children of the Magenta":
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magen...
If we are going to hold car drivers to the same training and restrictions that pilots are held to we will have far fewer drivers and much safer drivers. But it seems very unrealistic to think that will happen in a democracy. Realistically it seems that technology is the most realistic way to reduce deaths.
Kicking the elderly off the road, throwing the book at the one guy who gets caught doing NYC-DC and back in a day and onerous regulations on equipment is fundamentally a waste of resources chasing a long tail and is going to do nearly nothing to actually affect things relative to the expense. Most of the problems are caused by people doing things they knew were risky and stupid at the time and did them anyway, breaking rules in an irresponsible manner, distractions, intoxication, etc.
Being applicable to a broad cross section of the actual problem is why low hanging fruit type stuff like AEB has such a big impact.
But yes, I also think we are much too liberal in handing out licenses and the roads could be twice as safe by removing the bottom 5% of drivers. At least require a portion of the driving test on expressways, as it is you do a written test that you know what the signs mean and you drive around the block proving you know the gas from the brake. Unfortunately because you can’t get around most places in America without a car, we consider it an inalienable right to drive.
Cars aren't the solution to all problems.
There's also the separate recognition that no matter Musk's bombast on Twitter, Tesla's FSD stack is _nowhere near 99%_ correct handling. It's still absolutely regularly confused by bike lanes, only recently resolved roundabouts, and I could go on. But bottom line, not 99%. I'd be thinking closer to 60-75%, at best.
I have this with a Hyundai Palisade with L2.
I still have to watch the road. I still need to identify emergency situations and navigation. I still need to _assess_ many things - just like I would without any support. However, I don't need to take action on everything. This is mentally and physically freeing. On well marked highways, in particular, it means I can just cruise along without much worry.
The problem with Tesla is they set the expectation that you don't have to pay attention. They've set an expectation that the car is capable of _assessing_ every situation when it's clearly not. They further re-enforce this with the car's UI and behaviors such that drivers get lulled into not paying attention.
To me, it almost sounds like Tesla would have better UX and safety if they reframed the capabilities of the self-driving to make it clear that the driver still needs to be assessing.
How did they do that ? The materials that new Tesla owners receive are specifying that the driver needs to pay attention in all circumstances.
From the https://www.tesla.com/support/autopilot page:
> Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Capability are intended for use with a fully attentive driver, who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any moment. While these features are designed to become more capable over time, the currently enabled features do not make the vehicle autonomous.
Can you please provide an example of material that owners actually receive that states as much? It's safe to assume that we can't expect everyone to read a support page on a website, just like how it's safe to assume that most people don't read the owner's manual when they buy a new ICE vehicle.
>How did they do that?
It's in how they promote it publicly. It's in how Musk constantly says it's "a year away". It's in the fucking name - "autopilot" has certain connotations within society writ large that Tesla can't just handwave away with legalese.
I hope that people that pay these sums are responsible adults that don't go out there putting everyone in danger because "autopilot" is right there in the name, and of course it's a totally different thing than when the word is used for airplanes.
That's marketing for ya.
> Active Supervision; Responsibility. Full Self-Driving capability features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous.[...]
[1] https://www.tesla.com/legal/additional-resources#full-self-d...
By going out of their way to call something FULL self driving that is, by their own admission in your quoted text, not full self driving.
I totally understand your point, and I also agree with it, but I also can understand the point of view of someone as ambitious and driven as Musk that saw an idea, and then committed to it by choosing a name that reflects what they intend it to become, not what it's capable of doing at the moment.
You can see this very pattern if you watch Shawn Murray's first interviews about No Man's Sky. He shows the game as being capable of doing all these wonderful things that were proven to be bullshit when it was first released, yet over the years the game was built almost into the state that he first wanted it as. Was that an intentional way of cheating people, or was it just an ambitious person telling you about what they see at the end of road for their project? In my opinion it's the later, but people that bought into the hype at launch day, I bet they felt pretty angry.
So my advice (and apologies if it sounds patronizing), if anyone is in the market for buying a product which sounds too good to be true, maybe research the fine print and the owner's manual before putting your life and others' in danger by trusting the marketing team's selection of a name.
* Tesla has had multiple events highlight the "full self-driving capabilities".
* Their marketing indicates "full" self-driving while tucking the nuance away (for the owners manual).
* Their UI is specifically designed to highlight all of the things a Tesla is identifying. From what I've seen, it really doesn't indicate what a Tesla is confused by.
* Their driver engagement check systems clearly allow drives to be distracted and not paying attention.
* They've had multiple situations where accidents with stationary objects have occurred. This indicates a pattern of drivers believing these vehicles are more capable than they are.
-Driver stopped himself due to medical reason (driver was 74).
-Car's power-train issue caused it to stop. Less likely in dual-motor configuration. Even less likely to happen suddenly.
-Autopilot was on and driver fell asleep - Autopilot is programmed to come to a stop if driver input is not detected.
Because it's Tesla there's great deal of attention given to Autopilot but in this circumstance, where car stopped completely, driver most likely have been unable to make the car go (for medical or technical reasons).
Hopefully it slows gently, signals a lane shift, and parks on the shoulder with hazards on, rather than slamming on brakes in the middle of the highway with cars close behind.
Tesla brakes gradually and turns on hazard lights: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBIKikBmdN8
As common sense suggests, a sleeping driver does not cause a Tesla to slam on its brakes in the middle of high-speed traffic. That is not the cause of this accident.
That's exactly what happened based on this article, assuming we agree that "slam on the break" means an abrupt stop.
"At first, the Independence Police Department speculated that a mechanical issue caused the Tesla to lose power, but officials are now saying they are unsure what made the vehicle stop unexpectedly [...]
Last month, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched a preliminary investigation into Tesla after hundreds of owners reported that their vehicles would sometimes unexpectedly slam on the brakes for no apparent reason. According to the agency, these incidents, known as "phantom braking," sometimes happened at highway speeds.
Sudden braking occurred when owners had switched on cruise control or Autopilot, a system that automatically brakes, steers, and accelerates to aid with highway driving. NHTSA is investigating the phenomenon in Model Y and Model 3 vehicles from the 2021 and 2022 model years. Owners of 2019 and 2020 vehicles have also complained to NHTSA about phantom braking."
Given that earlier reports suspected loss of power - stopping could not have been abrupt. We don't even know if the car was on Autopilot, but we do know that driver was 74 years old, with higher chance for medical emergency.
It's funny to see the pro and anti Tesla crowd arrive at truth through verbal combat, at least.
I'm guessing the first car crashed into the rear of the Model 3, causing the Model 3 to spin out into another lane. Then a second car crashed into the Model 3 (probably side impact?) as it was now very dangerously exposed to oncoming traffic in the other lane. If the driver could have steered the vehicle during the emergency braking to the shoulder of the highway they'd likely still be alive. Unfortunately if the highway was heavily congested and this driver was sandwiched between vehicles on either side, there is probably nothing additional the driver could have done to improve the situation.
From the linked Facebook post there is the following comment:
My husband unfortunately was one of the drivers that struck the Tesla. He said the car in front of him almost hit the car so they swerved barely missing him and then there was the Tesla right there . He absolutely could not of stopped in time. It's a very traumatic situation. My husband is now dealing with survivors guilt and is taking it extremely hard. We are so very sorry this happened....I have no doubt that the gentleman that lost his life was loved by many and God help us all to find some strength to deal with the grief.
If the car loses power entirely then it gives you a few seconds warning in which you may or may not be able to cross to the shoulder before the car coasts to a stop. In this scenario the braking is not "hard", but obviously there is no real way to recover and you'll need to get towed.
I have not experienced any scenario where the car does not respond to steering or acceleration commands when it was physically able to do so.
One should therefore always have the hands on the wheel and feet by the pedals and be ready to drive.
To clarify, this only applies if the car doesn't think you're about to exit the lane. It will momentarily fight you, and it will take more than a slight nudge to override it.
So if something appears in your path, the right course of action is to accelerate into it?
within a second or so is great but not if you have 1/4 second time to respond.
> If the person behind you has adequate following distance it shouldn't be a problem.
Nice assumption.
> If the car loses power entirely then it gives you a few seconds warning in which you may or may not be able to cross to the shoulder before the car coasts to a stop.
may or may not indeed.
Not into it, but around it – if possible, of course. It's something you learn in motorcycle school, for example.
The idea is that a motorcycle is harder to maneuver while under hard braking, so you have a better chance of avoiding the obstacle or falling by going around it.
>> If the person behind you has adequate following distance it shouldn't be a problem.
> Nice assumption.
Of course. This also feeds into the above. As in, not only do you have to stop, but also to make sure that the person following you will stop without hitting you.
>> ...the braking that happens is "hard" but no more hard than you would do yourself if something suddenly appeared in your drive path...
parent post was just giving a comparison to the deceleration-snap experienced during phantom braking, and saying in the event of a phantom brake, you can cancel the event by tapping the gas (battery?) pedal
You mis-parsed what I said here. My sentence was probably too long. Let me try using shorter ones. Say you are driving. Suddenly a squirrel appears on the road 50m away. You apply brakes "hard" to avoid hitting it. This amount of braking is what the car does. You can still press the accelerator. The accelerator works as expected, cancelling the software's braking.
> if you have 1/4 second time to respond.
Under what circumstances would you have this short amount of time? IMO only if somebody is following you too closely. Again, remove the software from the equation and insert the aforementioned squirrel. You brake hard for it. The person behind rear-ends you because they were following too closely. Who is at fault?
> Nice assumption
Thank you
This is not a criticism of the driver, because everyone does it, but one of my pet peeves is hardly anyone follows at a safe distance. Most of the time you can’t even if you want to because someone will merge in front of you with that much space.
This annoys me so much. It creates a game theory situation where everybody has to drive like an asshole in order to avoid being cut off by assholes.
If you drive in south or east Asia, you will see what naturally happens when the number of vehicles on the path greatly exceed the capacity of the path traveling at a certain speed. You can basically model it as fluid dynamics at a certain point in places like Mumbai and Bangkok.
I hear this a lot from people who practice this sort of driving, but don't the simulations suggest that the opposite is true, traffic actually improves when drivers are more aggressive?
An example would be moving left into a "this would be an impolite move in any other context" sized cap between two cars to in order to let someone merge and then getting right back out of the lane.
This CGP video covers some of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHzzSao6ypE
I keep a long distance, and I drive fast. Germany, so fast means actually fast. My large safety margin means I have to keep braking because slower cars move past me and into my safety margin. Then, once the original blockage in front of me is cleared, I have to pass all those slower idiots who just overtook me again.
If driving wasn’t such a rare occurrence (usually 3-4 times a year) for me, I’d probably stop keeping a large safety distance like every other asshole.
Granted, race car drivers who think distance is measured in centimeters are even worse.
If people sat down with the numbers and realized how little that slight slowing down in the moment someone moves in front of them impacts their trip time, how little it matters to the original trip time that someone passed them, the roads would be a lot safer, less stressful, and faster overall.
I would argue that the people driving at distances closer to the car in front of them are reducing congestion by increasing the throughput of the road. Obviously this is mitigated by decreased throughput due to increased probability of collisions.
But if EVERYONE drove such that they could fully stop if the car in front do them fully stopped, you would have a public uproar over how much backed up traffic there was.
There road is basically constantly in flux and politicians could enforce minimum driving distances very easily with cameras and drive down collisions, but it would be massively unpopular and they would get voted out immediately. I presume that is why we already do not have speed cameras in the US.
It would be trivial to fine everyone breaking the speed limits. Or even driving too close to each other. For a tolled road, you can get go back however many years you want and retroactively fine people for going past the speed limit based on toll time stamps. But I figure the lack of this happening means the public wants to make this risk vs convenience trade off.
And imo, I’d rather be going slow because “we’re going the follow distance” than going slow because “someone went too fast in an unsafe condition and crashed (or worse)”. In the face of sheer car volume, we’re all going slow(er, though note that we’re usually still getting there faster than a horse would have) pretty much no matter what, might as well be safe while doing it.
I do not think this is a realistic model of the way roads work due to rush hours and sudden increases in demand. The ideal rules are great for when demand ebbs and flows gradually, but things change when everyone wants to be on the road between 8AM and 8:30AM. Then, you can have all the protocols you want, but the system has reached max capacity and there is no avoiding that other than dealing with the consequences (congestion -> stop and go traffic -> gridlock) and of course a collision or two.
I am not saying this justifies driving like a maniac and cutting people off. I simply expect people to act a certain way over the boundary conditions of a situation are approached, and I will not expect it to be the same as how they act when we are not pushing the limits.
I can’t imagine that the downstream effects of maintaining a safe following distance and permitting people to merge would cause anywhere near the inconvenience of these daily, destructive events.
You can also drive further back such that you can slow down if the car in front slams on their brake and comes to a complete stop. This is the distance I am referring to which would be politically unpalatable to enforce.
I agree that people weaving in and out and tailgating and cutting people off are doing more harm than justified, but it all starts getting murky once the road hits capacity limits and people start trying to figure out the best way to optimize their travel times. Eventually, with enough congestion, the situation will deteriorate from stop and go traffic to crawling traffic to downtown Manahattan to Delhi and so on.
that actually happens sooner when everyone is crawling up each other's asses.
once you get that first compression wave due to tailgaters slamming on their brakes then you've started the traffic jam.
- Construction
- Accidents
- Directly counter to your point: people driving like assholes and cutting others off or forcing others to take abrupt maneuvers that then cascade through the tightly packed traffic
Slow speeds and ample space do not cause congestion, changes in the flow of traffic do, and usually those are caused by people following too close and making sudden maneuvers. If enough space is given and the flow of traffic is not disrupted you could go as fast as you want with as many cars as you want and not experience congestion.
It's the mentality you're espousing here that I find so fascinating about road travel. There appears to be such dissonance that one will justify speeding or tailing or road rage in all kinds of ways.
I am not justifying road rage or tailgating. I am explaining that it is inevitable once the road gets close to carrying capacity, which can only be increased in the immediate term by driving faster and/or decreasing the distance of gaps between cars.
I suppose there are different characteristics in different types of congestion. Stop and go congestion is usually caused by disruptions to the flow of traffic, while slower than usual congestion is indeed caused by over-capacity as you indicate. Just moving slower would be all such times would experience if not for people tailing and cutting others off, leading to the stopping part.
My overarching point is something like this video:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Suugn-p5C1M
There simply is not a way to avoid the consequences of being near or above a road’s capacity. Of course, I recommend everyone to play it safe and stay far enough back to avoid any liability of being too close to the car in front. But the reality is we make lots of calculations and choices in driving and at various times, we choose farther distances and other times nearer distances (even though we know it is riskier) and these collective decisions will propagate down through the whole road.
Right, changes to the flow of traffic.
> There simply is not a way to avoid the consequences of being near or above a road’s capacity.
I agree, that is a valid bullet point. But that is certainly not the only cause of congestion, and driving aggressively in congestion and attempting to justify it by keeping the roads clearer doesn't hold a lot of water I don't think.
But I see you're saying you're not advocating unsafe driving so that's good, and I take your greater point, thanks for expounding on it.
This isn't true. The greater the following distance, the more time a driver has to respond. More time to respond means fewer and gentler inputs. In turn, this reduces propagation to following vehicles, and as a result traffic moves faster. It's the difference between turbulent and laminar flow.
> I figure the lack of this happening means the public wants to make this risk vs convenience trade off.
Joe Public has never sat down to think this through, nor is he qualified to do so.
> In turn, this reduces propagation to following vehicles, and as a result traffic moves faster. It's the difference between turbulent and laminar flow.
And in turn, this decreases the rate at which vehicles enter the highway, which backs up onto the streets that lead to the highway.
In Atlanta, people will tailgate in spite of a wide open lane to the left and the driver in front going the speed of the road. I’m not going to tailgate the person in front of me just because the person behind me is tailgating.
If someone merges close in front of me, I reduce my speed by 5 mph or so for as long as I need, probably usually around 10-20 seconds, until there's an adequate gap again. Often someone will pull into that gap within a few mins, and I do the same thing. Overall it reduces my average speed by an imperceptible amount. It might add up to a couple minutes over a several hour journey, but I take that as worth it for being less likely to rear end someone.
Additionally, it really only happens in dense traffic when in the outside lane to exit the highway. When you're in the fastest moving lane and keeping up with traffic, few drivers are going to over/undertake you just to get into the gap. More typically they'll overtake the car in front of you too so it's not a problem.
Admittedly most of my driving is in UK and NW Europe rather than the US. US drivers seem a lot more suicidal and US highways tend to be less predictable by design.
I'd never seen this before. I found that I couldn't really use it, because the distance you could set for it to follow the car in front of you was too close for my taste. I found you could decrease the distance by quite a bit, but I wasn't able to increase it to what I wanted.
On the spectrum between charging people for involuntary manslaughter for cases like this and saying "there's nothing they could have done" we are very far on the latter part of the spectrum.
We have seemingly decided it's perfectly fine to drive in a way that puts others at risk of death or serious injury. It's to the point that if you call someone out on it, like the other commenter did, you're the one in the wrong. Yet they were just calling out a person for putting other people's lives at risk. We should be condemning driving like this, just like we condemn many other activities that put other's lives at risk.
One of the site guidelines is to interpret a comment in the best possible way, so I am choosing to interpret it as the latter.
Maintaining situational awareness of these areas and adjusting your behavior to coax other traffic to behave in a way that is best/easiest/safest/whatever-ist for everyone is a prerequisite to being a "good" driver IMO.
It is a valid criticism of the driver and not everyone does it. It is a major problem that so many people treat safe following distances as great places to cut someone off to save .05 seconds on their commute while risking the lives of others.
Somebody (not necessarily the husband) was driving too close to the car in front. You should have enough time to see the car stopping and stop yourself. A 2 second gap at 60mph is 178 feet. A second to react and that still gives you 88 feet to slow down in before you even get to the point where the Tesla started to slow, reducing the impact speed to far lower -- not enough that should kill anyone.
Friend of mine was on the middle lane on the motorway when somebody switched on to his lane and braked hard.
He crashed against but wasn't deemed at fault by insurance.
Not saying that this is what happened, btw.
The "safe distance" is only "safe" if all the traffic is moving at least.
I don't understand the scare quotes around safe distance here. Maintaining safe distance (and the implied safe speed and open eyes) absolutely would help in these situations.
I can see how that is hard to react to.
I wasn’t sure how hard though, so I did a thought experiment.
Say there is 50m between each car, and they’re all driving 25m/s. First car starts braking at 5ms. After one second the distance between 1 and 2 is 45m. After two seconds, 35m. After 3s, 20m, and the car is evading. After 4s, car 2 is passing by 1, whom is now moving at only 5m/s. Car 1 is finally revealed to car 3, who now has a maximum of two seconds to do something before it crosses the 50m gap.
And that’s assuming an adequate gap. They were likely closer.
Safe following distance isn't predicated on defying physics, it means assume the car in front might stop dead for any reason - hitting an unseen obstacle, swerving to reveal an obstacle, sudden mechanical failure, animal collision, whatever. The distance you need to react and stop is around 100 metres at 70mph. Therefore, that's the distance you should keep from the car in front.
As a bonus, it gives any tailgaters more time to notice you're slowing down too. Hopefully this means you're less likely to get pancaked between two cars.
No, it's based on assuming the car in front might brake at standard non-physics-defying rates at any time. The 'safe' following distances that are advised don't allow for encountering stationary objects. That's why they're called following distances, as in, you're following another vehicle that obeys the laws of physics.
Maybe there truly wasn't enough time to completely avoid a crash. But there should have been enough time to avoid a serious (deadly) crash.
Imagine you're following - at a safe distance - a vehicle. The driver of the vehicle you're following doesn't notice that the car ahead of them is emergency braking. They notice at the last second and swerve around it to avoid a collision.
You are then face to face with a nearly-stationary object which was concealed from you by the vehicle ahead of you.
From your perspective, it fell from the sky. If you don't swerve, a collision is unavoidable.
I can't speak for the USA, but in the UK, if someone swerves and you rear end a stationary object, you are at fault. Indeed if you rear end another vehicle, you are nearly always at fault (unless e.g. they pulled in front of you then immediately slammed the brakes).
For stopping distances, this is what we are taught in the UK (rule 126): https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-highway-code/general-rules-t...
Stopping distance at 70mph is about 100m and "The safe rule is never to get closer than the overall stopping distance". This is a minimum - in adverse conditions the distance should be even greater.
This means when you see the stationary object, you're about 100m away, which is adequate time to stop IF you're paying attention and your car is well maintained (we have annual MOTs to ensure this).
This assertion about following distance feels purely theoretical for busy freeways.
A lot of experienced drivers here claim it's impossible too, but there's a good way to know that it's not: on your driving test, you'll fail for following too closely, so most people manage to keep an adequate stopping distance for the test. Following closely is usually a habit picked up when someone becomes a more confident driver.
The real reason is probably people don't want to take the tiny average speed hit or find it unfair that they keep letting people in.
The driver of the third car claims there was nothing he could do. That's baloney, as the car that was EVEN CLOSER to the stopped Tesla was able to react. Fact is, he was following too close and/or not paying attention, and crashed.
Should have recognised something odd (a broken down car) within 1.5 seconds, leaving 1.5 seconds to slow down.
Applying brakes from 60mph would mean you'd still be traveling over 40mph when you hit the back of the car.
Thus you need to give more than 2 seconds if you can't see beyond the car in front
Drivers need to think of every vehicle as being in a moving block[1] signalling system with each block being ~290m long (actual vehicle in the middle of this block) in wet conditions at 110kmh-1[2] and ~230m long in dry conditions at 110kmh-1[2]. No vehicle should ever enter another vehicles moving block. Obviously the type of vehicle, tires, road surface material, etc can reduce (or extend) those required block lengths, but you generally have to assume worst case scenario because how are you to know whether another vehicle has bald tires or is operated by a person who is fatigued or distracted and taking much longer to respond than they should.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_block
[2] https://www.qld.gov.au/transport/safety/road-safety/driving-...
Yes - a slight nudge on the pedals or steering wheel will deactivate autopilot and let you drive like normal.
Why doesn't the lane detection deactivate when you indicate?
This is how my friend lost all 4 wheels on his car. Following too close to react to stuff that the vehicle in front of him could. Hit the raised island for a slip lane when someone swerved out of the right turn lane at the last minute.
It was surreal and an example of such stupid, anti-user design.
I spoke with the “IT” person who set up this policy and they explained that I should have left my computer on to patch overnight. So basically it was ok that I, and my audience, suffered because I forgot to do something I didn’t even know was necessary.
In my case no one died, but I hope Tesla doesn’t apply the same logic to patching.
Corporate IT is inherently anti-user in my experience. They only care about their policies and not enabling you to get your job done.
This is a 2 way street, there is a reason they still always ask if it's been rebooted. They can tell it can't and they are being lied to.
>They only care about their policies and not enabling you to get your job done.
Simply not true, it's almost always the first concern. Judging by your tone you are not considering they have a job to do as well, and it's relies on your assistance, or you get a forced activity like that.
As someone who did help-desk in the past, corporate IT is not anti-user, but pro-efficiency, though the outcomes may be indistinguishable.
IT is typically under-resourced[1], and has to deal with too many users with too many requests, and prima donna users - more of them than you'd imagine - demand personalized white-glove service (but don't want support to offer that to others because it ought to expedite service to them)
Scripting patches to only run at off hours or prompting to patch at the end of the day is not rocket science. Perhaps they are overworked. Perhaps they are stupid. Perhaps they are just jerks.
Having non-idiotic patch policies isn’t asking for “white-glove service” and responding to user complaints when my process breaks a user process is something we get paid to do.
Comically stupid IT processes lead to more user requests. So “doing it right” is actually easier than doing it stupid and having people complain.
My cohabitants not being able to play games when they like isn’t a huge discomfort, but does make me wish more games would run on Linux or Mac (where this never happens).
Windows simply isn't a good choice for anything but a toy system or a specialized one to be used rarely (eg for gaming)
Our Windows is set up to patch overnight, which means wake up at some random time then just sit there consuming power. That doesn’t fly with me so I unplug the power so it doesn’t do that…
It seems smarter just to download the patch in a background process, then prompt to patch at the end of the day.
A “hey, please leave your laptop on instead of logging out and we’ll shut down when we’re done” would be well received.
This is exactly it, IMO.
Whether you like AP or not largely comes down to how your driving style compares to the computer's. If you are a defensive driver, you won't really care for the kinds of obviously dumb situations AP will happily drive you into. Eventually it reacts, but it takes a lot longer for the sensors to notice what a human brain can easily predict is about to occur.
I found AP to be an interesting toy, but it never made driving more relaxing for me, because I had to be more aware, not less, of everything around me.
EU seem to have more stringent regulations - for example, to ensure that AI maneuvers will be less unexpected EU regulations put a hard rate limit on steering angle. Trouble with regulating at such level is that in some cases (curved roads, hazard avoidance) it makes the car less safe.
Overall, Level 2 systems, like Autopilot, are not autonomous and their performance depends in large part on drivers judgement. I think regulations need to focus on human - AI interface requirements a bit more.
If a Tesla “saved” a driver 5 times in 20K miles, my first question is always going to be “how many collisions did they have in the prior 20K miles in their other car?”
Consider that there is a range of drivers, from "good" to "bad". If most drivers go decades with zero collisions, that's great, and it probably puts me closer to the "bad" end of the spectrum. By your own admission drivers like me should explore avenues to reduce our risk. Why is Tesla software not a valid avenue?
If you're a "good" driver, you don't need it, and that's fine, you can get some other car or drive with autopilot off or whatever. But for us "bad" drivers, the software makes us safer (both personal risk and to others on the road) so why not use it? What other avenues would you suggest exploring?
Does this count crashes that occur after autopilot disengages?
The data is not transparent, they publish what they want. How many times drivers intervened? Does Tesla or the fans consider those as a +1 for human and a -1 for the AI in the stats? Nope.
https://mobile.twitter.com/Tweetermeyer/status/1488673180403...
http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/quality-control-...
https://jalopnik.com/feds-cant-say-why-they-claim-teslas-aut...
it's so they can upsell FSD with the highest margin using the cheapest hardware (they're not even good cameras, 1280×960 resolution because they want to push pixels directly into their neural net, and dynamic range is poor, I will never understand how they didn't spring for infrared night vision, cadillacs had it 20 years ago)
The same vision-based system is used for AEB in Teslas. Subarus use a vision-based system for AEB but don’t seem to experience phantom braking.
I think you could reasonably conclude that autopilot aside, a vehicle can safely use a vision-based system for AEB without phantom braking being a huge issue.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/02/teslas-radar-less-cars-...
> 74-year-old Terry L. Siegel
Every few years there are reports of a (usually foreign) car manufacturer having problems where the car "just accelerates on its own". But what's strange is that it only affects people over 65. Almost like above a certain age, people occasionally mistake the brake and gas pedals and don't react to the mistake quickly enough.
I think it's worth waiting for the full report on this accident before loudly proclaiming that this is Tesla's fault. It may be, but it also may not be.
Nope. I'm sticking to trains whenever possible, thank you very much.
Edit: Numbers
In the US
> Over the last 10 years, passenger vehicle death rate per 100,000,000 passenger miles was over 9 times higher than for buses, 17 times higher than for passenger trains, and 1,606 times higher than for scheduled airlines
That sounded rather high for trains (dunno what the US is doing wrong), so I checked some other country.
In the UK:
> Over the last 10 years, passenger vehicle death rate per billion passenger kilometers was over 5 times higher than for buses, 1100 times higher than for scheduled airliners, and an infinity higher than for passenger trains (no deaths were reported).
Deaths/billion passenger-km Car 1.1 Van 0.4 Water 0.4 Bus or coach 0.2 Air 0.01 Rail* 0
In general of the already almost negligible death rate, it seems that rail deaths are mostly people at rail crossings, and maintenance personnel, not passengers.
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...
If the headline instead emphasised that the driver of this vehicle was seventy-four years old, we might assume it was a different criticism entirely.
The willingness of so-called intelligent beings to needlessly risk their lives (and the lives of those around them) for no gain whatsoever is truly astounding.
Road capacity is a function of number of lanes, the velocity of the vehicles traveling in those lanes, and the density of the vehicles traveling in those lanes. If you reduce the latter, you reduce road capacity.
Theoretically, everyone would be safer if they drove far enough back from the front of the car to come to be able to come to a full stop. Practically, the political uproar of enforcing this would be untenable, but I would be entertained to see the forthcoming overpopulation vs pave over all the land with roads vs mass transit vs variable rate tolling conversations that ensue.
> Road capacity is a function of number of lanes, the velocity of the vehicles traveling in those lanes, and the density of the vehicles traveling in those lanes. If you reduce the latter, you reduce road capacity.
And yet study after study shows that increasing the number of traffic lanes only worsens congestion.
If you have 10 cars wanting to use a stretch of road capable of carrying 10 cars at 8AM at speed X with the safest distance gaps, and you add 10 more cars, then there will be some combination of congestion behind this stretch of road, the distance gaps getting smaller, or cars driving faster now that there are 20 cars.
If you add a lane so that 20 cars can travel at the safest driving distance gaps at 8AM at speed X, but this then causes 10 more cars to come on the road because they see the possibility of using a road that is maybe just under maximum capacity, then you now have 30 cars on a 20 capacity road, and once again you end up with previous situation as 20 cars on a 10 car capacity road.
Obviously these things are impossible to exactly predict and constantly in flux and so engineers and politicians and drivers are all crudely estimating the shifts of supply and demand curves, and the overestimating and underestimating will cause congestion, or complaints of excess road, etc.
I should add this my near daily experience driving to my office in a rural area at 5am when there is just me and a random car behind me. With 2 miles or more of empty road behind him.
I anticipated this response, hence I tried to pre empt it by making my first qualifier that I am not talking about tailgating 2cm from the car in front.
> If people drove such that they had enough stopping distance to come to a full stop on highway at 65+mph,
This qualifying statement was supposed to convey that the theoretical safest distance to travel behind someone at 65mph, 75mph, or more is so big that I would not expect it to be followed anytime other than the dead of night.
You can actually avoid a collision at moderate speed by simply giving your brain time to react to events happening in front of you. And, even if you do hit something, doing so at a moderately low speed may not turn out so bad?
I can think of quite a few chokepoints in the US (Manhattan/SF-San Jose/LA/Seattle/Austin) where no matter what you do, the crush of cars will be too much for the roads that exist.
In these cases though, I think public transit is the only real solution, but that is a different topic.
Absolutely correct. It is then your responsibility to put a safe stopping distance between yourself and _that_ car.
You are in a death machine surrounded by other death machines. Sometimes you have to choose the less convinent option.
It's completely different to drive behind a vehicle going at 100 km/h on a empty, well maintained (yeah, 3rd world where I live has this variable too), straight, ascending, dry road; vs behind a sinuous route downhill on a mountain, with less lanes, under some weather condition, etc.
If a car in front of me SLAMS the breaks in the first scenario, I'm certainly not responsible for not being 3km away from him. In the second? Totally different.
"Safe stopping distance" is not a fixed number. And I doubt any car can properly calculate that because there's just too much context to be accounted for.
At least 2-3 seconds, minimum. Did you not take any driver's ed classes?
>Enough to react to the vehicle in front of you slamming the breaks at what speed?
Time, not speed. It will take the average person around 1.5 seconds to react, and a car at least a second to break. Time is not hard regardless of distance, you can see when somebody in front of you passes literally anything, a sign, a tree, a rock, a road market, whatever, then just count. FFS.
>If a car in front of me SLAMS the breaks in the first scenario, I'm certainly not responsible for not being 3km away from him
Not responsible for being 3000m away? Sure. ABSOLUTELY RESPONSIBLE for not being 50-80m way? Yes. Both legally and morally. Maintaining at least 2-3 seconds of distance just isn't a big fucking ask. And yes that's just as true if it's an "empty, well maintained" road, well why the fuck are you tailgating in that case? Shit happens. Animals suddenly leap across the road, a pothole has opened up, someone has collapsed in weird places etc. I literally was walking with a friend along an empty straight road in a rural area a few weeks ago and they suddenly just blacked out while walking and collapsed directly into the road. Scared the crap out of me. They'd had a pulmonary embolism not too long ago and their lung function was badly affected and while they're trying to build back up sometimes they just... black out. And if you're in a car you won't see someone lying down until you're fairly close. Low probability event? Absolutely. But over hundreds of millions of people it happens.
People sometimes need to stop as fast as possible. It is in every single way your job not to rear end them if they do. Period.
GP is right, though, it is highly context dependent. If you are following another car and paying attention, then two seconds is enough if they slam on the brakes. There is an implicit assumption that two cars have roughly equivalent braking ability.
But what if they do some sort of assisted stop? Bridge abutment. Head-on collision. Or what if there is a stopped car in front of the car in front of you, and the car in front of you swerves out of the way leaving you bearing down on an unexpectedly stopped car in the lane? 3 seconds won't be enough.
I still remember vividly many years ago coming around a high speed sweeping corner behind another car, at a perfectly reasonable stopping distance, and then they jerked the wheel into the oncoming lane and suddenly I was facing the back of a stopped car. That was exciting. I did not hit the car, but it was close, very close. The only way to avoid that is a stopping distance much greater than 2-3 seconds.
People don't operate like that. Sometimes, if you keep that distance all the times like you're saying you'll end up putting yourself and other people in danger, just because you're the only one thinking like that. I've had my fair share of furious truck drivers cutting me at high speeds in terrible situations at night, while our baby is crying in the backseat, his mother is exhausted and we can't find a single spot to stop and breathe before progressing. It has happened during the day on empty roads too. I've been in danger for acting like that while everyone else doesn't expect me to. Just like the safe-break assistant in this situation.
If people truely cannot calculate this, we shouldn't have cars.
Personally I know my car quite well and its stopping distance in most conditions. I always operate it further than the stopping distance. If I couldn't, I wouldn't drive. It's not worth the risk for myself or anyone else.
However if you don't know the basics of knife safety (you shouldn't throw them, they're sharp, etc), maybe you shouldn't operate one.
It's totally reasonable. It's not hard to maintain a safe following distance. Sudden braking isn't the only reason to do so, and insurance claims aren't the only motivating factor. You drive defensively so as to reduce the likelihood of death and destruction while making life easier for other drivers.
So if a car swerves into your lane 10 meters in front of you, then slams on the brakes, you're at fault because it should have been so easy to maintain a safe following distance? (This isn't hypothetical, I've had this exact scenario happen multiple times -- on/off ramps seem to bring out the worst in some drivers).
Whether or not it's reasonable is immaterial. If you constantly consider the possibility of the cars around you to do something unexpected, then you're more likely to avoid death and destruction. As well as prevent the death and destruction of the people around you. It's called defensive driving.
Maybe it's unfair, or too much to ask, or just too difficult. But it's reality.
I'm rooting for self driving cars because I believe that, theoretically, they'll do a much better job than people. In the long run.
However, today, you have to pay attention or you might die. And even if you pay attention you still might die.
My dad told me a story about a coworker he had who was in a car accident. He was sitting at a long line in the highway at a tollbooth. It was foggy. My dad's coworker was watching the fog behind him like a hawk because he didn't feel safe just sitting completely stopped in the highway. A semi-truck appeared out of the fog moving at high speed. My dad's coworker cranked his steering wheel and tried to accelerate off to the side of the road but got rear ended by the truck. He was lucky. Because he was already headed away, this car got bumped out into a field. His car was destroyed and he got a bunch of injuries, but he lived. The people in front of him in the line were not lucky. A bunch of them died.
It's not fair or reasonable. But being constantly considering possibilities saved this guy's life. The other people are dead.
Neither would seem to apply to an automated system that randomly stomps on the brakes. I would think a system like that might affect fault on the civil, rather than criminal, side, however. For example, it would seem a bit mad for the insurance companies not to blame the vehicle whose screwy brakes caused a multi-car accident.
So, how frequently has this type of failure occurred? How often does that type of failure result in a fatality?
The analog here is that polls suggest parents believe the probability of a child abduction is higher now than 50 years ago, though the data show the opposite. The difference? The discussion on cable news when the event occurs. Availability bias is powerful. The car industry is likely to incur the same phenomenon.
But it doesn’t happen, so we don’t.
I could be wrong, but I think the interest of this article is that this type of accident never occurs with other cars, thus the newsworthiness.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/02/nhtsa-to-investigate-ho...
The Hacker News audience has an extreme hatred of tesla. I think its mostly political personally. Musk disagrees with a couple of the left's untouchable rich elites and all of a sudden you get a million submissions every time a tesla is involved in an accident.
Compared to Tesla where there’s like half a million cars and at least one fatality.
Of course, this could be user error (eg, fall asleep, wake up, slam on brakes) so I don’t think blame can be assigned, but I don’t think Tesla gets an inappropriate amount of news coverage here.
Seriously? https://www.motorbiscuit.com/thousands-honda-cr-v-models-str...
It's all about clickbaiting Tesla in headlines for eyeballs. And HN loves it.
Also, we don't know yet if the Tesla crash is due to the auto braking, do we?
"Last month, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched a preliminary investigation into Tesla after hundreds of owners reported that their vehicles would sometimes unexpectedly slam on the brakes for no apparent reason."
That's an interesting way to frame it. Surely the cars travelling behind the car in question are the ones who caused it, by travelling without leaving a safe stopping distance?
If you're alert you can override it pretty quickly by hitting acceleration. The problem is when using driving assists you get a false sense of security, you put too much trust in the system, relax, pay less attention - unfortunately this can be fatal.
If the latter... Then Tesla is in a tricky situation with camera-only Autopilot.
With the low dynamic range of the cameras, if you make the software ignore big white (overexposed) rectangles, the car drives straight ahead into white trucks. If you make it recognize big white rectangles normally as obstacles, then the car sees overexposed bridge/tunnel exits as obstacles and gets rear-ended.
It's probably triggering Automatic Emergency Braking.
That is a useful feature in cities. I personally heard of one instance of a car stopping automatically for a kid that just jumped on the road...
Cars stop on highways for a variety of reasons. Cars fail, things obstruct the road and cars need to stop, drivers fall asleep or suffer medical incidents. Ideally stopping in the middle of the road shouldn't cause you to be killed by someone else who is either tailgating you or not paying attention to a car stopped in the middle of the road up ahead.
A pedestrian was struck and killed by a car on the street 1/3rd of a mile from my home; I have to cross this street if I want to walk to the train station. This happens on this corner roughly on an 18 month frequency.
I don't know if it's a case of nobody wants to work on the boring things because there is no incentive or a disincentive to. But I'm sick of basic features not working well.
Recently I drove a friends new Volkswagen with similar driver assist / self-driving features as the Tesla. It was unnerving. The car wanted to drive itself, until the lane makers suddenly disappeared on a remote icy road at night. After about 5 seconds I noticed the car had silently (except for a small icon on the dash) decided it couldn't stay in the non-existent lane anymore. I was actually behind the wheel of a car going 60mph with no one paying attention behind the wheel. It freaked me out.
"the Tesla he was driving stopped" - assumes all Teslas are self-driving all the time. There is nothing yet pointing to a software issue instead of human error, or a medical emergency since the driver was 75 years old.
nearly 40,000 people a year die in traffic every year in the US alone [0]. They're all tragedies, but I don't see why if it's a Tesla it gets so much more media coverage.
[0] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...
"Last month, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched a preliminary investigation into Tesla after hundreds of owners reported that their vehicles would sometimes unexpectedly slam on the brakes for no apparent reason."
Similar thing happened to my model3 early on (late 2019) and I had a furious but futile conversation with service centre about how dangerous my situation was. They stonewaled me after “kernel panic, dont know why”.
The car had it’s own “blue screen of death” in the first lane, after a turn, on central expressway right next to their Santa Clara service center. ( https://goo.gl/maps/sPVNDNJZaR9zQ66c9)
Luckily there is signal right there so people were slowing down naturally but man the car turning into a brick and not even emergency blinkers (parking lights) working was shitty experience!
I’m fuming that someone paid a price for tesla’s similar failure.
Edit: I was on “auto pilot”
Cars stop for all sorts of reasons, hence why there are laws for leaving these distances.
What I think will ultimately happen instead is we’ll adapt the roads to allow self-driving by dumber computers. For example, a self-driving lane on highways where there are sensors on the road to help the cars, and where all the cars in the lane must be self-driving and in communication with each other to do things like maintain stopping distance.
"Last month, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched a preliminary investigation into Tesla after hundreds of owners reported that their vehicles would sometimes unexpectedly slam on the brakes for no apparent reason. According to the agency, these incidents, known as "phantom braking," sometimes happened at highway speeds."
Edit: Assuming this was software diver assist issue
Also I wonder how many of these incidents are buried under NDAs.