Hacker News Reader

Comment by gitfan86 | Hacker News Reader

"it's geofenced to certain roads, and only work under 40mph", " you should not use this in the rain"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMNnOosjrBo&ab_channel=Engad...

Breadth of operating conditions is a trade off with reliability of operation. It’s possible to do a lot of things okay, or a couple things perfectly, but not yet possible to do a lot of things perfectly.

When you remove the driver from the equation, the requirement for reliability goes up.

There’s going to come a day when Tesla is forced to make difficult decisions about their “FSD” system. They’re either going to be requiring human supervision for a long time, or they’re going to have to start pulling features.

I’m glad to see other manufacturers taking a different approach and actually start working on features good enough to qualify for SAE level 3 operation.

The big risk that Waymo/Mercedes is taking with this approach is that they do not know what blocking issues they will run into when adding new functionality to these systems.

What if driving in rain or snow is incompatible with their architecture and they have to do a major rewrite to expand into that functionality?

With the Tesla Approach they already know where the system fails and where the system isn't making any progress when trying to fix those failures. So Tesla can do major rewrites and major architecture changes much earlier in the development process.

Yeah and they certainly have a lot of data because of their approach. I just wonder how (or if) they’ll make the shift to level 3 without angering customers. Or, if they’ll choose to stay at level 2 so they can have more features.

Maybe they don't design their roadmap around arbitrary level numbers but instead around marketable features.

SAE levels are based on the features of the system… and the conditions it operates in, and the responsibility of the driver.

I said marketable features. Outside of HN's demographic, the number of people who even know what an SAE level is would round off to zero.

Which criteria of J3016 wouldn’t be marketable?

Few may know what “level 3” means, but they certainly know what “you don’t have to pay attention” means.

Right, but earlier you said:

> I just wonder how (or if) they’ll make the shift to level 3 without angering customers. Or, if they’ll choose to stay at level 2 so they can have more features.

I don't know whether it would be a meaningful business goal to "make the shift to level 3". The business goals would be more nuanced than that, since approximately zero actual customers know or care what level 3 is. And the line between "you must watch what the car is doing and be prepared to take over" and "you must be prepared to take over if the car asks you to" is going to get blurred by manufacturers (and the distinction isn't that obvious to an average user in the first place).

Level 3 is absolutely not "you don't have to pay attention". SAE defines it as "when the feature requests, you must drive". Characterising that as "you don't have to pay attention" is what makes this potentially the riskiest level.

"We killed a few people but we got a bitchin' architecture going from the start."

You should be a construction site manager in Qatar.

"It is better to play it as safe as possible safe when rolling out a technology that could save tens of thousands of lives a year"

The antivax people agree with that approach. We don't know the long term effects of the vaccine therefore we shouldn't use it.

Vaccines still had to go 3 stages of trials and vaccine side effects are immediately obvious in the vast majority of cases.

And pharma companies are far less irresponsible and far more regulated than vested and biased commenter darling Tesla.

Tesla has done something worse than this?

https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/news/20220304/sackler-fa...

The full quote:

> once we hit some traffic we go under 40 miles an hour we'll be able to engage it but there are some other caveats: you have to be on a highway, the weather has to be nice, it can't be raining, it can't be freezing, and you can't change lanes; you have to stay in your lane while drive pilot is enabled

So it also needs to be on the highway.

Restrictions that very much make sense given the usage scenario; Stop and go traffic on highways.

"Stop-and-go traffic on highways" is quite a narrow usage scenario, isn't it? At least in a lot of highway driving in UK, FR, DE, CH, I find this mostly only happens with major events or roadworks, and even then it's for a short time or distance. The rest of the time you'll be plodding along at 60 km/h, with all other traffic overtaking you, which itself adds risk.

I wonder if 40mph is a magic number that is a good tradeoff between speed and survivability (and injury-related out-of-court settlements)

Has to do with the limitations of radar. Radar will fail >40mph for stopped vehicles or detect them too late to stop. Honda and Tesla are working to remove radars and go vision only for speed control.

If you have a car with a AEB or CMBS (automatic emergency braking, crash mitigation braking system) the owners manual has a ton of fine print about it only making crashes less severe, not preventing them outright.

The detection range for radar is more than 200m, you can stop from speeds above 100mph in that distance. And the radar sensor automatically includes relative speed information on the target (doppler shift) which vision doesn't so it's easier to figure out whether something is stationary or not. So I don't believe this "vision only will fix it all" story.

I imagine there are a couple reasons that boil down at some point to kinetic energy. Stopping distance goes up pretty quickly, there's a huge difference between, say, 40mph and 60mph.

That threshold is generally considered to be 20mph. Below that speed pedestrian injuries are unlikely to be fatal.

It's what urban speed limits are in Sweden, and they average about one pedestrian death a year in the entire country.

20mph is considered to be good for survivability, but is not really good from a speed/travel perspective.

I believe OP meant maybe 40mph is a good balance between the two factors of speed (higher is better) and survivability (higher is better) from a corporate risk / insurance perspective.

Raising one of these lowers the other - so the actual threshold depends on how you value speed / convenience vs accident survivability / risk, and what you want to market your car as able to do (few consumers will see a 20mph self-drive speed limit as a viable self driving system).

20mph is within populated areas and not on a main road. In the US, the norm is 25mph, which isn't that far off.

25mph is >150% of the energy at 20mph. It's a big increase.

And not only that. In a situation where, with 20 mph, you can just come to a complete stop before the child, with 25 mph initially you'd hit it with 15 mph.

  vr = (c^2 - 1)^0.5 v1

where v1 is the original slow speed with which you'd come to a standstill just before the obstacle, and v2 = c*v1 is the faster speed, and vr the speed with which you hit the obstacle coming in with the faster speed (assuming you hit the brakes at the same spot, and constant deceleration).

Indeed, as an interesting aside it's a 3-4-5 triangle.

25^2 - 20^2 = 15^2

That comes with it’s own challenges - ie limiting speed to 20mph in the UK would realistically mean it can only be used in areas where there are schools and lots of pedestrians - ie less chance of an incident being fatal but possibly more chance of an incident.

It's limited to highways as well (hence the geofence), so they probably don't expect VRU incidents to happen much, if at all.

The reduction from 30mph to 20mph in London is political CV padding and has had no real effect on outcomes. All based on Chinese whispers. Wouldn't be surprised if your comment ended up as an original source in Islington's justification for some thing or other. It's that flimsy

Average speeds in London are below 20mph. Accelerating absurdly overweight, overpowered cars to anything over 20mph in between stops at lights is just a moral hazard.

> Accelerating absurdly overweight, overpowered cars to anything over 20mph in between stops at lights is just a moral hazard.

The level of absurdity in suggesting a moral element to driving a car at below 30mph just shows how fundamentally biased people have become about a normal part of everyday life. For whatever reason

I think you just don't know what that term means.

Absurd

If it doesn't it's because it's not enforced. It's irrefutable that vehicles moving at 20mph are less dangerous than vehicles moving at 30mph.

> If it doesn't it's because it's not enforced. It's irrefutable that vehicles moving at 20mph are less dangerous than vehicles moving at 30mph.

Then make them drive at 1mph

The effect is huge. Energy goes up quadratically, so here (4->9) you have more than doubling. Stopping distance goes up quadratically (well, due to reaction time there is a linear component in there as well, but still).

And if there is a sudden obstacle that you can just avoid hitting going 20mph initially, you'd hit it with 22 mph if you're going 30 mph initially (assuming no reaction time and constant deceleration).

I submit that that's a massive difference: hitting a child not at all or with 22 mph.

Things can be quantifiably described as "doubled" without that having any real world impact.

In my experience the people supporting these measures are adopting them not because they care about safety at all, but have another agenda.

not gonna be a lot of pedestrians on the highway, are there?

This is only on highways. Survivability is concerned only with passengers not pedestrians.

It's translated from 60 kph. Apparently, the current system is restricted to German highways. Those are limited to vehicles which can go at least as fast as 60 kph, and this might be where this number comes from. It's basically the slowest highway speed at which there is no controversy about legality. Targeting highways first makes sense from a complexity and data quality perspective.

Although driving at 60 kph on German highways seems quite risky; at that speed, most trucks will overtake you.

I doubt this reasoning. While it's true that 60 kph is the minimum for Autobahn, it's the minimum in the sense that the vehicle must be capable of that speed. There is no requirement to actually drive 60 kph or faster.

On the other side of the equation, nobody would feel comfortable cruising along at that speed, since you'd be continuously overtaken by trucks, which drive a little more than the allowed 80 kph unless it's physically impossible.

The vehicle is not capable of more than 60 km/h when used in self driving mode, so the reasoning seems quite logical. I wouldn't want to use this on the Autobahn though; everyone would be overtaking constantly which introduces additional risk, and the speed is so low that journey time would be considerably inflated.

I don't think it's magic, but:

1) Stopping distances go up as the square of speed, so 40mph has huge advantages over, say 70mph.

2) Survivability of accidents at 30-40 are way higher 70 (unless pedestrians are involved, in which case 30-40 is already too high.)

3) Radars and Lidars really can't see/classify things very well at the distances required to do comfortably stop for obstacles at highway speeds.

Yeah, look up some videos of Teslas Autopilot in the rain... it's not pretty.

If you think Teslas driven by fleeing fugitives, OJ Simpson style, can't be remotely commandeered or disabled, then I have a bridge to sell you.

Geofencing is a big part of the dystopia that the Valley crowd is getting paid a small fortune to shove down our throats.

> If you think Teslas driven [...] can't be remotely commandeered or disabled, then I have a bridge to sell you.

I wonder how this is even remotely possible, given that Teslas can easily operate fully offline (which they frequently do in areas with poor cell reception). You can just build a small faraday cage encasing the modem so that it cannot receive signal, and you are good to go.

Also, I don't think that the drivetrain subsystem and the subsystem that is connected to the internet can even interop. I know for a fact that even if the main computer (the one that is connected to the big screen) on a tesla is rebooting or shutting off, you can still operate the car like usual.

The point they're making is that this is coming and the groundwork is already being laid, both legally and technologically.

Wondering how would they prevent the faraday cage solution? I guess the OEM could disable the car if it cant phone home but surely that would lead to accidents e.g. blocking the modem while driving.

Probably just say the car won't start if it hasn't phoned home in a certain amount of time. Attempt to phone on start-up, shutdown if it can't. You don't have to rug-pull while the car is active.

I could see this being a "feature" of leased vehicles for example since you don't own it.

Tesla's should be fully functional currently, it's the self-driving that's a subscription.

> I could see this being a "feature" of leased vehicles for example since you don't own it.

that feature has existed for over a decade. Miss a payment and your engine can be remotely disabled.

> The point they're making is that this is coming and the groundwork is already being laid, both legally and technologically.

So they are basically claiming that something is a problem, even though it is something that's straight up currently physically possible (but someone who reads that statement without knowing the actual details wouldn't know that it isn't currently possible)?

Disingenuous at best. Especially given that the parent comment said none of that. They essentially mocked people who believe that it isn't possible, and when they got pointed out that it isn't actually physically possible right now, the response is "well, not right now, but look at future possibilities!".

> I wonder how this is even remotely possible, given that Teslas can easily operate fully offline

It's been possible for over a decade with regular cars. OnStar can remotely disable cars. Many cars have devices that remotely disable the engine if the driver fails to make a payment.

OJ Simpson, the man that the police forced to stop fleeing under threat of deadly violence?

Are you trying to scare people that their car may be disabled, when those same people already live in a society where police shoot and kill and pit maneuver drivers?

Wouldn't you rather have the car stop safely, instead of being pit maneuvered and flipped into a ditch?

>Are you trying to scare people that their car may be disabled, when those same people already live in a society where police shoot and kill and pit maneuver drivers?

Scare? No.

I'm just pointing out that, just as pervasive corporate surveillance is now the norm on the internet, pervasive tracking and always-on kill switches for cars will soon become the new norm. Law enforcement will paint it exactly as you have done here, with all the pearl-clutching and "think of the children"-type arguments that always accompany a new overstep/affront against civil liberties.

OJ Simpson, the man that the police forced to stop fleeing under threat of deadly violence?

That didn't happen. Police followed OJ for 50 miles and ultimately let him drive safely to his house.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/O._J._Simpson_murder_case#Br...

The LAPD had killed plenty of people who didn't comply with their orders at that point. It is completely unrealistic to think that the LAPD wouldn't have used violence against OJ, if he had tried to flee to Mexico.

The idea that this is the “valley crowd” is laughable. Most of this bs is not built in the valley, and most people in the Bay Area don’t like that kind of dystopia either.

>Most of this bs is not built in the valley, and most people in the Bay Area don’t like that kind of dystopia either.

Well, certainly it's Bay Area companies leading the charge towards said dystopia. Google and Facebook come immediately to mind as far as villains in this particular plot.

> "Geofenced"

That's the word. That's the plan. We will be geofenced, there will be a kill switch. You will not be able to go where you want, except if the government allows it.

In fact, I think Uber is the best example of geofencing we have for the long run. In the medium term, self-driving cars you still own will fill the gap.

You're making a pretty big leap there from "our experimental self-driving mode only works inside the geofence" to "the government won't let you drive where you want".

Yes, a huge leap. I can't possibly imagine that government would pass legislation that all the automakers would comply with. /s

https://www.musclecarsandtrucks.com/biden-infrastructure-bil...

"Deep within the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that was signed into law by President Joe Biden is a passage that will require automakers to begin including what can be best summarized as a “vehicle kill switch” within the operating software of new cars, which is described in the bill as “advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology”. The measure has been positioned as a safety tool to help prevent drunk driving, and by 2026 (three years after the enactment of the Act, per the text) the kill switch could be mandated on every new car sold in the United States. Then there’s the broader reaching RIDE Act, which we’ll touch on in a moment."

I'm being downvoted - but this is the reality of what will happen. Who wants that sort of monitoring when they are driving?

Is this a consumer-driven feature? Or is this more government management - leveraging technology to micro-manage every detail of our lives - only allowing good citizens travel privileges etc?

We are sleep walking into a dystopia, and I get downvoted for stating the obvious! Seriously - your government is about managing you, saying what you are and aren't allowed to do, extracting taxes, fines and licensing fees from you - its not there to help!

PS I was being downvoted, but now I'm back up... It was right what I wrote it!

Maybe some people just agree with this?

(a) Findings.--Congress finds that--

            (1) alcohol-impaired driving fatalities represent 
        approximately \1/3\ of all highway fatalities in the United 
        States each year;


            (2) in 2019, there were 10,142 alcohol-impaired driving 
        fatalities in the United States involving drivers with a blood 
        alcohol concentration level of .08 or higher, and 68 percent of 
        the crashes that resulted in those fatalities involved a driver 
        with a blood alcohol concentration level of .15 or higher;
          

  (3) the estimated economic cost for alcohol-impaired driving 
        in 2010 was $44,000,000,000;



            (4) according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, 
        advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology can 
        prevent more than 9,400 alcohol-impaired driving fatalities 
        annually; and


            (5) to ensure the prevention of alcohol-impaired driving 
        fatalities, advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention 
        technology must be standard equipment in all new passenger motor 
        vehicles.



    (b) Definitions.--In this section:
            (1) Advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention 
        technology.--The term ``advanced drunk and impaired driving 
        prevention technology'' means a system that--
                    (A) can--
                          (i) passively monitor the performance of a 
                      driver of a motor vehicle to accurately identify 
                      whether that driver may be impaired; and
                          (ii) prevent or limit motor vehicle operation 
                      if an impairment is detected;
                    (B) can--

[[Page 135 STAT. 832]]

                          (i) passively and accurately detect whether 
                      the blood alcohol concentration of a driver of a 
                      motor vehicle is equal to or greater than the 
                      blood alcohol concentration described in section 
                      163(a) of title 23, United States Code; and
                          (ii) prevent or limit motor vehicle operation 
                      if a blood alcohol concentration above the legal 
                      limit is detected; or
                    (C) is a combination of systems described in 
                subparagraphs (A) and (B).

I think its possible to make an argument for lots of things, in the name of safety. That it should be impossible to have anonymity online, etc because of child abuse, or terrorism, or some other action.

The safety argument cannot balance the fact that we also need freedom of speech and thought. We are heading into a world where the power balance is going to become so wildly asymmetrical - the government will know everything about you and will have the power to act against you instantly, automatically - it will change us. It will be dehumanising - you will have to watch your back. If you don't already.

We will have to conform to have a job, be able to travel, receive our govcoin vouchers, etc.

We are literally installing an even worse citizen score system than China, that no one would ever want, but each step of the way we are convinced by some spurious and limited 'safety' argument. This misses the whole picture.

And if you think that the government won't act against you once it has the power to do so, you are dreaming. Everyone seems to think that government is a force for good, as opposed to being the operators of the slavery system we find ourselves in. Some of us try to kid ourselves that we are free, while we hand over 40% of our income for government to service the interest on the debt that they have accrued on our behalf. I don't.

Anyway - I say what I see, no one likes my message, everyone seems blind to the points I raise, or wants to ignore them - what can I do? I hope I'm wrong.

you might be right you might be wrong - however I suspect you'll find there are many of us out here who are just not willing to let ourselves get so worked up about such a ridged view of a possible future - doubt you'll find many on HN who are ignorant to the signs - i'm certain many are concerned about the trends - that doesn't meant people necessarily disagree with your thought - we just may disagree with your outlook - myself - i'm inclined to believe I - my friends- and fine folks like you are thoughtful enough to deal with it in the moment - even if that took a civil war - i'm not inclined to believe at some point i am going to lose touch with reality - nor am i inclined to believe my government is going to turn against me without noticing - for what it's worth i don't think you need to take it so personally - lots of people are concerned - just not everyone is freaking out (yet)- maybe you can somehow make peace with that? :=)

> nor am i inclined to believe my government is going to turn against me without noticing -

Are you in the US? If so then out of curiosity, considering we have published research demonstrating that the average American has effectively zero influence on policy and the only groups with representation are extremely wealthy individuals and corporations, and we've already seen the US government engaging in the warrantless surveillance of every last American, the continued push for more extreme uses of gerrymandering and other forms of voter suppression, police executing citizens in the streets for minor infractions, the promotion of lies and misinformation encouraging citizens to get sick or seek ineffective treatments during a global pandemic, the mass incarceration of Americans at a rate far beyond any other nation on the planet, along with continuous efforts to weaken and ignore our constitutional rights, just how much longer do you think it'll be before the notice that they've turned against you arrives?

Thank you for your thoughts and concern. Let me say I am at peace with myself, I've come to terms with life, mortality. I do fear that the future will be neo-feudal, techno-slavery very shortly though, if people don't start to push back against the governance system + the corporations that run it.

I differ on a few points to you. I don't think the government has turned, I think it has always been this bad! It has always been full of parasitic middlemen that look to make a fortune off the people doing the actual work - people in government are the worst of us, while pretending, nay demanding, that they are portrayed as 'the best of us'. Anyway, I think its that we are at the end of ... something - technology + political immorality seem to be combining in a potentially unpleasant way.

Also, I think the governance approach that has been taken is very incremental - the plans are slow and stealthy - we are disclosed a bit at a time, but never so much that it causes a rebellion. We became aware of 3 letter agencies, then that they were sometimes nefarious, then that they were spying on us, then we had travel constraints, camera everywhere passes to travel, etc, etc - the direction of travel is only one way - towards technocratic governance. None of those steps on their own tripped enough alarm bells to prompt anything more than hand wringing - but if you look back over the years - say 20 years - you'd never believe where we are now. Nor how we got here. That's the power of incrementalism.

> I think its possible to make an argument for lots of things, in the name of safety.

I think the word you are looking for is `Nanny State` [1]. People's opinions on issues like this always tend to be based on political tribalism. If it's from my political party, then they are so amazing that they care about other human beings so much. If it's a political party I am opposed to, how dare they infringe on our freedom.

It's very hard to find good faith discussion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanny_state

The "right" way to fix this is by reducing car-dependency - better public transit outside of metro areas, less subsidies to gasoline, taxing car makers to cover for externalities - and not by instituting policies that can be used against law-abiding people.

Is seriously this your biggest concern about government controlling you after the news that the Supreme Court banned abortion? You don’t have any whatsoever concern about that, I bet.

You are attempting to discredit an opponent's position by charging hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving the argument. This is known as "whataboutism", and there's an article on it on wikipedia.

The Supreme Court didn’t “ban” abortion.

Police have had this ability for a long time now:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/03/disabling_car...

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/Autos/story?id=3706113&page=...

This degrades our freedoms and our privacy. Many of us are already being tracked every time we drive. All of the tracking, all of the loss of control and it's not serving us. Most people aren't even aware it's happening to them. These "features" are and will increasingly be abused and not just by the government, but by the corporations as well. Do we really want a permanent record of everywhere we drive and when? Of how fast we went? Of who we were with and what we were talking about while in the vehicle? We'd better start asking ourselves those questions now because that's where we're headed.

Right now, you can at least physically disconnect and disable the OnStar system. In the future it seems likely that kind of thing will be entirely built in and impossible or illegal to disable.

The fact is that loads of people drive drunk, drive illegally, and drive dangerously--on public roads. Police enforcement clearly doesn't work. Automated enforcement would. Why should people get to endanger others? The leading cause of death for children and teens almost every year is 'motor vehicle crashes' and it wasn't the children and teens causing those.

>Why should people get to endanger others?

This is a dangerous frame for this argument. "Get to" implies a "right," or that the action is condoned somehow. It's not. Not everything bad in the world needs to be prevented by government action. We could stop all traffic deaths today by banning cars. We could stop all forms of obesity by making everyone drink Soylent. Personal liberty prevails because, in the end, the knock-on effects of removing liberty are a case of the cure being worse than the disease, in most cases.

Automatic enforcement.... That sounds like letting the algorithms put people in jail.

Obesity isn’t putting others at risk in the same way. Cars endanger others. People make a special exception to norms for cars because it is hard to look past the convenience of them.

It’s not a stretch to say that the obesity epidemic in the US is causing limited health care resources to be redirected to a vast number of people with self-imposed health issues, leading to significant deaths and under-investment in populations with diseases that were not self-imposed.

However this is in no way is a convincing argument for government to take over control of what people stuff in their mouths.

Things can pretty much always be made safer by eliminating personal freedom. The safest human protected by the best 5-laws-safe robot overlords probably doesn’t get outside all that much.

Additional Context:

https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-402773429497

> You will not be able to go where you want, except if the government allows it.

Sounds like in your model Elon will be the one deciding where you can and cannot go.

Don't worry, at least in a Tesla the geofencing is going to be disabled in datetime.now().year + 1

Yeah, so much unlike the present, where you can go wherever you want (if the government has built a road to do so).

That's actually quite funny to me. In a dark, ironic way...

The government designed/authorised the solution - roads + cars. They decide to spend lots of money on this. They got rid of earlier public solutions - eg trams, closed train lines, etc. They could have invested more on public infrastructure - but opted for facilitating private transport.

But now they are walking this back! Around here they are decreasing roads, especially recently. We have 2 lane roads, where one lane has been closed to create cycle lanes. We have roads that have been entirely pedestrianised. All this has made traffic worse - and this is the plan. We are meant to get off the roads and ... cycle? Take the bus? There are actually no alternative viable forms of transport.

So - the government implements, then de-implements whatever solutions it likes. The public investments using money paid by the previous generation of tax payers, is actively being worked against by this generation of government!

So, no, I'm not cheering the government spend.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com