Tesla’s ‘phantom braking’ problem is getting worse
theverge.com
theverge.com
I've only got autopilot, not FSD. It's very conservative. It always considers someone to be in front of you even if they've mostly moved out of your lane into the next lane, or they swerve slightly into your lane. I suspect the engineers erred on the side of being rear-ended rather than rear-ending cars in front.
Which, in this age of cheap ubiquitous dash-cams, isn't nearly as likely to be the "inconvenient waste of time but zero financial risk" deal it used to be
Edit: Since apparently this needs explaining, insurers will consider evidence and happily doll out blame to a party that does something dumb in proportion to their fault (with slight variations per differences in law from state to state). The fact that said dumbness results in the back of your car getting hit with the front of another only matters in the base case in which no other reliable information about the situation is available. In the case of a car that just stops in the roadway with no reason to do so some of the blame is likely to land on the driver thereof. Insurers are well aware that the rules of the road are built around redundant requirements so that crashes don't happen when one party can't or won't hold up their end. Infantile "but the other guy is responsible for.." arguments don't tend to hold much water with them when there's evidence (video or otherwise) that in the events that lead up to the accident your hand was no more forced than the other guy's were because both drivers are still bound by whatever the default responsibility to operate their vehicles in a safe manner is (wording varies by state).
You never know when someone might need to do a full, 100% brake slam to avoid something.
I don't know about you, but I usually look beyond the car in front and possibly the one in front of that one too in order to anticipate braking. If it's all clear ahead and the one immediately in front suddenly brakes hard, I don't think it's clear that it isn't culpable.
Before dash cams, it was very rare for the car behind to be able to show any proof otherwise, so they were usually at fault unless there were credible witnesses of the brake checking.
But no, you can't just randomly threshold brake in the middle of the highway for no reason and expect to blame the car behind for your actions (or the actions of your car).
Or am I misunderstanding you?
Chance of permanent injury or death is not negligible. e.g. get rear ended by a semi, or just suffer from whiplash that doesn't go away.
Exactly; this is why brake-checking is illegal. The person behind you has a responsibility to keep a safe distance, but you also have a responsibility to not drive like a lunatic. If the dash-cam footage shows you brake-checking somebody right before the crash, don't expect to get off scot-free by blaming the guy you were fucking with.
When this "feature" triggers you have a short window in which to do _something_ to tell the car that you are paying attention. Your options are either: accellerate or brake. If you do nothing the car may apply full brakes and bring you to a full stop, regardless what is behind you.
> Reports of “phantom braking” first surfaced last fall
This has been happening for much longer than that -- at least as early as Winter 2019, when I unintentionally brake checked a Prius after merging while going over 101 @ Rengstorf.
> When this "feature" triggers you have a short window in which to do _something_ to tell the car that you are paying attention. Your options are either: accelerate or brake. If you do nothing the car may apply full brakes and bring you to a full stop, regardless what is behind you.
Again, what is this? I have a Tesla, and I'm not aware of any feature that requires me to accelerate or brake to prevent the car from stopping itself.
Automatic Emergency Braking. You cannot turn off AEB persistently.
> I'm not aware of any feature that requires me to accelerate or brake to prevent the car from stopping itself
Before the car emergency brakes, it will warn you via "Forward Collision Warning"; the screen will show the object it thinks you're about to hit in red. You can set this to "Late" to reduce false positives -- but if you do, you'll have less time to take action yourself. So now I set it to Early.
After a FCW, you have a small amount of time to do something before the car will do something for you. The M3 manual describes AEB here:
https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-8EA7EF1...
It also explains "Automatic Emergency Braking is always enabled when you start Model 3. To disable it for your current drive, touch Controls > Autopilot > Automatic Emergency Braking."
> Phantom braking is a term used to describe when an advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) – or a self-driving system – applies the brakes for no good reason
(AEB is part of ADAS)
I believe the NHTSA is going to require Tesla retrofit radar on all vehicles to mitigate their Tesla Vision functionality deficiency.
(submitted lengthy dash cam videos and accelerometer data to the NHTSA as a complaint)
Of course no offense to OP, i've heard it referred as such by others and I know it's not literal. But it's maddening to me though that a vehicle that is still under warranty has a moniker that traditionally means end of life/support in software.
At least Tesla mostly keeps updating their older car’s software.
That said, I don't understand what you mean. 9.9/10 of new, non motorsports ICE vehicles are backed by warranty bumper to bumper for 60-100k miles. Further, the parts/labor pipeline is massive.OEM/aftermarket keep producing parts for years after the vehicle's generation stops being sold as new.
In the case of Tesla and some Boutique EVs, there is no aftermarket, and there's litigation from Tesla if you try to repair/produce aftermarket parts. "At least tesla mostly keeps updating their older car's software" is not a positive. It should be guaranteed for 60k-100k miles, and the aftermarket should be allowed to repair it.
Tesla makes their vehicles "legacy" on purpose.
Yes, that and his attitudes towards LIDAR seem like motivated reasoning / sour grapes. "LIDAR is too expensive to put in cars I'm selling today, therefore it isn't good anyway." (I can't reach the grapes, therefore they're sour and I didn't want them anyway.) Why else would he criticize LIDAR with inane arguments about LIDAR not being able to read street signs, as though anybody is suggesting LIDAR-only rather than LIDAR+Optical?
Sort of like how GM and Ford used to have actuaries work out the cost of a fuel tank that wouldn't incinerate the occupants in a crash vs legal settlement costs.
Except minus actuaries and instead just Musk figuring "Well I've gotten away with everything else, why not this as well?" and sadly being right.
From ignoring COVID health orders to flashing his dick to repeated stock manipulation to making billions in a company that stole people's money constantly "because we're not a bank", Musk hasn't faced any significant repercussions for anything immoral or illegal he's ever done.
I would imagine that multiple systems with a majority wins type of thinking would be ideal. Would probably need another system for it to be an odd number.
Your fix reminds me of this: https://xkcd.com/1172/
I also opted out of arbitration for all of my vehicles [1], for obvious reasons. I am simply attempting to make lemonade from lemons.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/8vxnz0/psa_for...
This is probably so they can have only one software build rather than supporting one with and one without RADAR. And also so that they can say the RADAR isn't needed anyway.
Did you upload video to them, or post a link from a streaming site? It would be interesting to see the analytics that a streaming site can provide to know if anyone from the gov't ever actually looks at the video vs the blind upload to a black hole.
That said, when using the lane-assist, I do prefer to keep my foot on the accelerator pedal anyway. To increase range, I try not to get into regen at all unless I actually do want to brake. I feel that the cruise control is to strict in keeping a particular speed in hilly areas, and I live and work in hilly areas. Let the vehicle speed up in the dips and slow down on the peaks, just like all the other cars (probably manually driven) are doing.
If you have the energy flow view up on the screen, you can see the power going from the motor/generator to the battery when you release the gas.
This is always an issue with underpowered ICE vehicles and cruise control, less-so with the 7 or 8 gear transmission, but still. They don't have enough power to maintain velocity, so constantly shifting, speed up, slow down...
That's... most of Canada, thanks to the snowplows. Good to know.
> Most of the paint is environmentally friendly but being water-based, it rarely lasts more than a year, especially on the province's busiest roads and highways.
> "The paint used for highway striping eventually wears down as a result of the wear and tear from vehicle traffic as well as the effects of necessary winter maintenance activities," said a spokesperson with the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure.
> The provincial government only uses oil-based paint in cold weather. The bulk of road work is completed during the summer months, so it seems unlikely many fresh painted lanes this year will survive the winter.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/disappearing-ro...
I'm not sure about the paint composition matter, but at least I can attest to the road lines in Canada being very poor. I've driven most of the Trans-Canadian Highway (all of it west of Quebec) and the line paint was virtually nonexistent for much of even this road.
The markings here seem to be some sort of dense plastic material and don't wear much.
I think those markings might be the epoxy based "golden oatmeal" this article mentions (https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/b-c-hunts-for-a-dur...) Durable but expensive.
> Meanwhile, the province does have an alternative it has been using on roads where visibility, geography and weather make for dangerous conditions, such as parts of the Coquihalla Highway. Crews grind out a line-sized trench in the pavement and pour a clumpy epoxy-plastic paint nicknamed “golden oatmeal” that bonds to the asphalt using the same material as dentures. Because it sits just below the rest of the pavement, it better withstands wear. “The problem is to do that is extremely cost prohibitive,” said Stone. “It’s very pricey.”
The problem arises with ambiguous situations like phantom breaking. Is it phantom breaking because the tree overhangs are too close to the surface of the road, the sun is shinning directly into one of the cameras or is there smudge on the camera lens? For this category of problems we're likely to see both improvements and further regressions. The ambiguity will bifurcate into clearly worse and clearly better than average human driver categories. This is the part we need patience for the technology to improve.
The clearly worse than human driver category may be an intractable set of problems and that's what we should judge viability of self-driving technology base off of.
I guess that would fit "bug" definition?
I've never seen it happen when I was following someone, I bet the software is biased to follow the vehicle in front even if one of these events happen. It happens to me when I'm headed up a hill and there is an overpass on the far side of the hill, or I'm passing a low overhead sign. I can understand why radar thinks it's about to slam into a wall, from the radar's low slung perspective I'm sure it just sees a barrier ahead. Considering Tesla's early penchant for driving right into the side of a truck, I do somewhat prefer the sudden braking.
And you're still using this car? Why exactly?
Wait, do you think that Tesla are actually obtaining all driver video and manually adjusting the model based on reports like this? I've seen a lot of fanatics with no technology background claim this, but I'm...skeptical to say the least.
And btw, they certainly have the data whether or not you report it.
I feel like a self-driving vehicle is one of those areas where nobody should have to "learn the quirks".
Boeing's planes were known for having fewer of these automated aids and thus required more skill to fly the plane, but the 747-MAX debacle threw cold water on that idea.
Not defending Tesla here, but this is exactly how I think of other drivers on the road, whether I'm driving, cycling or walking.
I wonder if future driver training will factor in spotting problems with self-driving or related functions.
Is there any reason to suggest these aren't factored into the aforementioned data?
> Don’t believe stats from Tesla.
I'm all for more transparency, but I'm certainly not going to trust a random Internet commenter either.
Stop being dangerous on the road. This isn't a game.
This is the important part. Doesn't matter what the intent was, the fact of the matter is that the people behind you nearly rear-ended you because of your car's actions. And you, as the driver, never know when you might piss off the wrong driver - brake check the wrong person and suddenly you're in trouble with someone who might not care if you say, "But my car did it, not me! Honest!".
Now you get to add a defense lawyer's trial rate...
edit: The "you" in the above being the hypothetical driver.
There are plenty of scenarios where you are still impacted by the brake checking Tesla without you being at fault.
So no, it's not the case that people trailing too closely is the problem. It's the case of the Tesla requiring, without good reason, the car behind them to brake hard to avoid the collision. This is dangerous and (usually) illegal.
I do agree there is some nuance, but it really saddens me that so many comments in this thread are supportive of a form of driving that, while very common, is unsafe for themselves and others. It's a form of normalisation of deviance and I'm sure it costs far more lives than teslas dodgy "autopilot" (even if that too should not be road legal).
People sometimes fill the gap in front of me, and if they're particularly unsafe about my induced following distance I flash my lights, flip them off, and back off. In a typical 30 mile drive in one of those metros it costs on the order of tens of seconds. People usually aren't that aggressive about filling gaps until they have something to gain, so the frequency of people causing you to slow down winds up being pretty low.
While ideally everybody would always leave enough space for hard and sudden brakes (eg in case a deer runs across a road), the reality is that driving has a lot of loose rules, and you're expected to behave rationally and similarly to the other drivers on the road. For example it's usually fine to speed a little in the left lane if most people deem it safe to do so. And there's no strict definition for "reckless driving" despite it being illegal. Driving is an intricate social dance with millions of actors, and if you are the one acting way out of line, you are liable, and hard + sudden brakes for no reason, is definitely out of line.
(That's not to say this is the best system though. An autonomous system with well defined behaviors, less ambiguity, and less social guesswork, would probably be safer. But such a system would require full participation, not just one or two tesla drivers choosing to let Elon take the wheel)
Respectfully, it's not. A safe trailing distance is defined as enough room for you to stop even if the car in front of you stops abruptly (for example, if a kid or animal runs into the street), factoring in your reaction time and the stopping distance of your vehicle. The buffer isn't for normal variations in the speed of traffic, it's for anomalies.
> the reality is that driving has a lot of loose rules, and you're expected to behave rationally and similarly to the other drivers on the road
This isn't a valid excuse for unsafe following.
> Driving is an intricate social dance with millions of actors, and if you are the one acting way out of line, you are liable
I'm not sure what sense you mean "liable" here, but it's certainly not true in the legal sense--you're liable if you violate the law, for example, by following too closely (the law doesn't seem to care whether others follow too closely or not).
> An autonomous system with well defined behaviors, less ambiguity, and less social guesswork, would probably be safer.
It doesn't require full participation, it merely requires fewer fatalities caused per 1M miles than human drivers. That's the point at which we should legalize AI, and if it becomes significantly safer, that's the point at which we should mandate AI in the general case. And then something really interesting happens--we can start to do away with those ambiguities that make AI hard because human drivers become the exception rather than the rule. Rather than informal social systems governing driving, driving becomes a formal digital protocol. Maybe rather than relying on computer vision (or computer vision alone) cars are loaded with a national database containing the right-of-way rules, speed limits, scheduled maintenance, etc and/or they use other sensors. These things in turn make AI safer (discrete signals = fewer failures due to computer vision errors). Safe and ubiquitous AI could lead to much narrower roads, freeing up more space for pedestrian traffic.
Moreover, since cars are safer, they don't need to be so heavily armored--rather, they become smaller and lighter, which further increases safety by increasing survivability in pedestrian- or cyclist-involved accidents.
Moreover, those strict protocols could make transportation more efficient (a given road increases its throughput and latency for a without increasing lanes or compromising safety) because (1) cars are smaller and lighter as previously discussed, (2) AI can travel faster with less buffer due to its increased reaction times, and (3) because AI can coordinate so you don't have inefficient traffic patterns like "4 semis driving in quadruple file" or "one reckless ass hat changing lanes frequently, abruptly, and aggressively, causing everyone to slow down".
Without human drivers, maybe taxis become cost-competitive with public transit (or better) and fewer people need to own a car (and the cars they own needn't be so large since one can easily and cheaply rent a larger car for transporting large items). And for those who do own their own car, those cars can drop them off at their destination and park farther away (no need for so much parking downtown).
This is all just a sketch of some of the possibilities, but the point is that there's a horizon (a critical mass of AI cars) that could manifest in a cascade of other significant changes.
So, yeah, maybe Driver 2 should be able to pass the brake check, but that doesn't mean it is good or safe or desirable for Driver 1 to be randomly brake checking people. Having a car that randomly brakes is like having a driver who randomly applies the brakes - you shouldn't do that, it's bad, and unsafe.
I never said that the responsibility stops with the Tesla driver. I simply said that it's wise to not put yourself in a situation where you may accidentally piss the wrong person off - this is a general sentiment that applies everywhere in life, really. You don't know if the person you're dealing with is the nicest, most understanding person in the world, or an absolute maniac who's been dealing with some heavy stuff and is one step away from losing their absolute shit. Yes, you're not responsible for someone else's emotions, but you are responsible for how you interact with them.
>Further still, since we're being pedantic about litigating responsibility, the person trailing the Tesla/etc should be leaving plenty of room such that he can comfortably react to abrupt braking (the leading driver might have a good reason for braking quickly!).
Of course. Surely you'd agree that nuance plays a large role here, though? There are often times where you'll find yourself closer to the back of a car than you'd like, despite your best efforts to maintain plenty of room (eg, someone cuts you off or moves into your lane with less distance than you'd like).
Intent doesn't matter to the person in the other car, who likely is relying on your behavior to some extend to understand traffic ahead. If your driving seems like a brake check and brings in all of the unsafe conditions associated with brake checking, then it's a brake check.
"I require every other human driver to be driving correctly so that my AI-car may drive unsafely" seems like a bad bet. I'd also imagine that, if as a human, I just slammed on my breaks for no reason on the highway, I would be found to be at fault for an accident assuming the car behind me wasn't directly tailgating me.
I suggest it's better to compare a given AI with humans in terms of fatalities caused per million miles driven. If an AI performs a little better than humans it should be legalized and if it performs dramatically better than humans, it should be mandatory.
Of course, this is where we need more data and greater transparency so we can answer these questions.
You're putting a lot of words in my mouth and assuming I'm against working on AI driving because one person might ever die. All I'm trying to point out is that it's pretty worrying to have a system that could cause a highway-speed accident because of a well-known and decently common bug. I'd be equally worried if it came up that some other decently selling model of car would randomly have the ABS system engage.
I wrote my OP here because the parent poster was casually talking about "not really break checking people" as if that's just normal behavior that's a part of R&D, instead of an AI accidentally emulating dangerous aggressive driving patterns that FSD is supposed to do away with. I'm not trying to ban FSD research or anything. I want this improved! It's just scary when people excuse dangerous behaviors by FSD systems because it's otherwise safer.
The other issue is that more data and greater transparency are both not things Tesla seems to have any interest in providing anyone, so while this may get fixed, it's not really pushing the industry forward all that much if no one other than Tesla is going to benefit. There's plenty of mentions in this thread of this sort of issue happening on other cars and adaptive cruise control systems that could benefit from an improvement for the betterment of all drivers, but instead "not breakchecking people" is going to be a unexplained feature improvement in some FSD patch probably.
You're clearly trolling here, but maybe we can reframe this into something worth discussing: does autopilot result in more or fewer deaths per 1M miles driven than the median human driver? That seems like a reasonable threshold/criteria for legalizing the technology.
Honestly, it sounds to me like this technology should be made illegal until it's fixed. "Infrequently" isn't good enough, especially if it brakes as aggressively as you say. I want self driving to succeed, but Tesla's self-driving tech is just too immature to use on public roads.
I know I personally have started to stay further from Tesla’s when possible on the road because they behave strangely. But the same applies to other cars which do this odd weaving from side to side within their lanes presumably because of poorly implemented lane keeping systems.
As to accidents rates, Autopilot shouldn’t be compared to overall driving accident rates when it’s not being used in all situations.
I'd say the question is whether we should tolerate cars with what you could call undefined behaviour. Imho we shouldn't.
If it infrequently phantom brakes (especially when there is no vehicle behind - an AV can sense that), that doesn't cause any collisions, this might be optimal behavior, given the current level of technology.
>more often brakes hard and late
>people think I'm brake-checking them
>if you're in the right lane when the two right lanes merge- it is totally unreliable
>I've been sandwiched between an 18-wheeler and the gutter
>once you learn the quirks it is extremely predictable and robust
You're taking it better than I would be
Juxtapose Tesla's Autopilot with BMW's Driving Assistant Professional (I also own a BMW X5 PHEV Hybrid). I drove from Chicago to Oklahoma and back with all the autonomous features engaged 95% of the drive and it was an incredibly relaxing experience. Lane change works and doesn't cost an extra $10K (you need FSD for a simple lane change otherwise you effectively need to disengage AP, change lanes, and reengage AP), zero phantom braking (the BMW has radar...), the eye tracking camera works great (no falling asleep at the wheel vs. Tesla's interior camera which does not even work and the steering wheel tracking can be defeated with a tennis ball), and best of all there's fully autonomous driving (no need to look at the road) if stuck in traffic on a highway and you're going less than 40MPH (i.e., bumper-to-bumper traffic where most accidents tend to happen).
The fact is that Tesla is not shipping game-changing software, and I would strongly argue that it's not even shipping out the best software in the business. It's a hyped up car with hyped up features peddled by a hype man. I would not be surprised if Tesla is not even a top 5 or 10 EV seller in 2032.
Edit: beside just your personal experience
Just recently I was driving in the right lane of a suburban road (with no assisted driving features enabled) and some trees on the curb cast a shadow over my lane and the car absolutely freaked out with collision warnings. Thankfully I was accelerating so it didn't force me to stop, but at this point I'm seriously considering going with another vehicle. Having the car scream at you as you're driving down the road is nerve wracking.
Does it use the same distance at all speeds?
I will never understand this hostile tension in US roads.
Additionally, if you interrupt a phantom brake by manually accelerating, it often won't resume speed until it has decelerated to whatever it thinks its "safe speed" was at the time of the perceived danger, even if the perceived danger is well-past. So if you were going 60mph when it got spooked by a shadow and manually compensated for the phantom braking, when you let off the accelerator the car will still slow down to ~30mph even if you're a quarter mile past the shadow.
This is all frustrating, but the most frustrating thing is that I don't even know for sure what the car's reasoning process is--why does it sometimes sporadically set the speed to 30mph below the speed limit on a busy highway? What threat is it perceiving when it phantom brakes?
> and more often brakes hard and late ... If you have the minimum distance set to 2 or 3 car lengths, you should not be complaining about late and hard braking- that's the setting you chose.
I disagree here. As a human driver, I can prefer to follow someone "closely" (pretty sure I could fit 3 or 4 cars into Tesla's "2 car lengths"), but that doesn't mean I wait until I'm that far from them before I begin decelerating. There's no reason fundamental reason Autopilot can't do the same.
> It also is annoying slow to recover back to cruise speed from a slow down.
Fully agree. I think this pisses people off behind me more than the brake checking.
> The phantom braking is annoying but infrequent
I suspect this depends on what share of your driving is on divided versus two-lane highways.
It also doesn't infrequently highlight a car in an adjacent lane (or even exiting the freeway) as the lead car and slam on the brakes.
I have follow distance set to 7 and it still slams the brakes way later than comfortable.
But honestly I hesitate to recommend it. Not because it isn't a great car, because it is, but because I'm growing more skeptical of Tesla as a whole in the past year:
- extremely delayed timelines (Roadster, Semi, Cybertruck, etc)
- focus on some robot thing
- FSD vaporware/false promises
- Elon's general immaturity
- frequent price changes
- supply chain shortages
- etc
It all adds up and I can't help but wonder if Tesla's initial market advantage is waning. I'm not sure there's another competitor that's caught up to them, but it isn't as clear cut as it was just a couple years ago.
They do. Push the microphone button and say "Bug Report."
AFAIK they automatically collect data on disengagement.
I'm sorry, but this sounds like Stockholm syndrome to me. You admit that the car you're driving behaves unpredictably if you don't know it's quirks. But it still sounds like you're defending it.
This would be intolerable for most other cars, of not outright dangerous. I'm not trying to attack you, so I'm sorry to be this direct:
Why are you still keeping this anti-feature enabled? This sounds really dangerous.
It’s really a bummer to see how many commenters are making strong statements informed by neither data nor experience. This whole thread is well below this forum’s normal level of discourse.
Radar seeing stationary objects is trivial, it sees them just like it sees any other. The trick is seeing only the stationary objects which are actually relevant; e.g. not seeing a street sign suspended above the road, or a tree next to the road, but only the stationary objects in the path of the car. The radar configuration that Tesla use[s/d] apparently has awful angular resolution, making this differentiation difficult if not impossible. But this isn't inherent to all radar technology; some radars can have good angular resolution. For instance with SAR or ISAR, you can produce high resolution 2d images. But I don't know what kind of radar systems your Leaf has.
- when on level ground approaching a steep hill, the radar might not know if the object directly in front of the car is just a continuation of the road or not
- when approaching a sharp curve in the road, is the object directly in front of the car actually in its path, or is it just on the side of the road
EVs are new still. They're hyped and covered like crazy by the media in a lot of positive ways, so why should they not get equal press coverage when there is negative news? Once EVs hit a certain mass, they won't be novel anymore, and nobody will care.
> Sadly, Subarus don't make headlines though. A Tesla does just about anything and it's local news and Facebook fodder.
Why sadly? Subaru hasn't been loudly making empty promises about self-driving capability and hasn't been aggressively pushing not-fully-cooked self-driving software onto the road.
I know you're not asking for advise but I'd recommend to have that checked, my recollection is that the manual spends far more pages listing the circumstances under which the system may fail to apply the brakes than those in which it may break when it didn't have to, so it seems odd enough for me that I'd get that checked if it happened to me.
I second the suggestion to get it checked.
The one issue I've noticed is that it sometimes hits the brakes for cars that are obviously exiting the highway because a tiny sliver of the car is still technically in the driving lane, so I've learned to keep my foot over the gas pedal to override it in that case. The amount of braking isn't scary though, it's just annoying because there's no need to slow down at all.
Is something occluding your eyesight cameras, like EZ pass?
Usually, the behavior is adaptive stuff all shuts off when the road turns to sharp or weather blocks the cameras.
I fear the update that disables my radar. (And actually I'm planning to replace the Model X this year for something other than a Tesla, because of the awful service experience.)
> Tesla did not reply to a request for comment, nor has it since 2019 when it dissolved its PR department.
E.g. use the mic and when Tesla users say ‘Tesla phantom’ it would send the flagged data to a central repository to train against.
Regardless of your feelings towards Tesla, we need someone to figure out safe self driving before the effort is halted and humanity has to wait a century before a new generation tries again (like with nuclear tech today).
That's quite the leap.
A far more reasonable statement would be 'we need someone like Ralph Nader to spearhead initiatives to regulate self driving cars to prevent the disasters we saw in automobile safety in the 1950s-1960s.'
Sure, there are fewer deaths per capita, and fewer deaths per mile traveled, but the chances of a fatality occurring at a given intersection haven't budged except in places where car-centric infra has been removed or scaled back.
Or perhaps more to the point for the autonomous vehicle discussion: that no amount of hacking on the concept (which I fully support, and think is amazing and important work!), whether prompted by regulation or not, is likely to finally end the era of petro-carnage. For that, we need to stop using our tax dollars to build cities (and other roads) that are for cars first and people last.
Telling kids to stay inside during the day seems like fear mongering, but telling them to get home before dark is probably prudent. And don't let them drink (without supervision.)
https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/Publication/8130...
I'm not a proponent of "think of the children", but I also think that urban areas in the United States are largely designed in ways that put them at substantial risk of traffic fatalities. And I think that your data don't paint the rosy picture you seem to be using them for.
> Only 18% of pedestrian deaths occur at intersections,
You can also say that about 1-in-5 deaths occur at what are supposed to be the safest places for pedestrians to cross roadways. I'd expect it to be far more remote if in fact intersections were designed for people instead of cars.
> only 21% of pedestrian deaths occur during daylight.
I'm not sure this is particularly meaningful - are we to suppose that a civilized society is one in which death can take us, arbitrarily, at night for no good reason?
> Of the 6205 pedestrians killed in 2019
To be clear: this ICD code is very literal - it means people on foot. It does not include cyclists, people in mobility devices, people entering or exiting vehicles, and many other codes which are preventable by producing less car-centric infrastructure. It also does not include deaths from causes other than "traffic", such as those that occur in parking lots.
> The pedestrian fatality rate for adults is 10x higher than that for children (0.46 for 10-14 vs 4.6 for 55-59.)
I have no problem with the idea that adult pedestrian fatalities are a good target for reduction as well, but, as I've noted above, I can't help but notice that you (the report you cite) has focused on codes which are responsible for a higher proportion of adult deaths and which ignore substantial causes of pediatric mortality from cars.
> Furthermore, about a third of pedestrians killed were drunk.
I had a feeling the victim-blaming was coming.
> but telling them to get home before dark is probably prudent
"Prudent" is to stop subsidizing lethality by building cities for cars. Then kids can enjoy the stars without a taxpayer-subsidized death lottery for petro profit.
> And don't let them drink (without supervision.)
OK, yeah. That's a good one.
Considering way more people use crosswalks than walk across the middle of the street, only 1-in-5 pedestrian deaths occurring in a crosswalk seems like a very strong signal. Ignoring such an obvious consideration screams 'motivated reasoning'.
Following the traditional road safety advice keeps kids very safe: Use the crosswalk, look both ways, be home before dark and don't get drunk. Even accounting for all the failures to follow that advice, there are still only a few hundred child pedestrian deaths a year in a country with hundreds of millions of people. Calling it an "absolute bloodbath" is just sensationalism. I think you're just trying to scare people because you have an axe to grind against car culture for other reasons.
It is impossible to find good data on this, so I don't understand why you're using a tone of certainty in this assertion. Anecdotally, I find this difficult to believe; it seems to me that the opposite is true (at least here in St. Pete, Florida).
> Following the traditional road safety advice keeps kids very safe: Use the crosswalk, look both ways, be home before dark and don't get drunk.
"Traditional"? In what tradition? My tradition is not to put cars first and make kids avoid death by dancing around them.
Streets are for people. The idea that people need to be limited to crosswalks, exercise paranoia, and avoid them after dark suggests strongly that the points I'm making are very sound.
> there are still only a few hundred child pedestrian deaths a year in a country with hundreds of millions of people.
I don't think a few hundred deaths - among a cohort extremely unlikely to die of any cause - is anything to sneeze at. And again, you are ignoring other causes of death-by-car by focusing on this one ICD code. Why?
> you have an axe to grind against car culture for other reasons.
You got me. I'm a wealthy lobbyist for big bike. I'm sorry I didn't disclose this earlier.
Bike lobby huh? Usually the anti-car position is motivated by environmentalism, or the social/economic inequalities inherent to car culture that have been baked into our public infrastructure. Those would all be much better reasons than the number of children killed by cars, but bike lobby... I guess that works too.
While it's not impossible that you're telling the truth, I just don't believe that children killed by cars is really the root of your beef against cars. Rather, I think you're cynically using a "think of the children" argument to advance some other agenda (likely some combination of environmental, social and economic.) By the data, 'think of the children' is the lamest of all the plausible motives to oppose cars.
I do not work for a bike lobby, nor do I have any direct interest in the outcomes of these policies except extending the life of my kiddo and his friends.
I have no specific axe to grind. It's just absolutely obvious to me, from extensive travel through 49 of the United States, that children face dramatic and unprovoked hostility from the infrastructure through many of their cities.
The streets feel like they are literally made for cars instead of people. If you don't get that impression, then I really wonder what makes our perspectives so different.
* Stop widening roads
* Curb extensions
* Circles
* Diverters
* Humps
* Leave more roads unimproved
* Prohibit cars from city centers entirely, as is often the case in European citieshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
If there's a Ralph Nader effect in these data, it's hard to see.
Even assuming that Tesla will review all the cases, it’ll be likely useless. They just try to throw ML at whole problem e2e, and that’s what you end up with. Solid performance for 90% of the cases, ok for 5% and absolutely bonkers for last 5%. That’s just how modern ML works, you’ll never get complete solution, and will be always chasing edge cases. That works ok for showing ads, less ok for driving deadly machines.
User2: seems like the cars without radar were really bad, but that they are finally getting it fixed.
You: he said he has a car without radar
Everyone: wtf
user's comment disagrees with the title, says phantom breaking is resolved.
You: "It's worse on radar free models"
them: "It's entirely resolved"
Every few months, while pulling out of a parking spot, my car will just SLAM on the breaks violently, sometimes when I'm in reverse and sometimes when I'm inching forward. Even at low speeds it's super unsettling.
UI - Just let me integrate 3rd party apps finally.
Deeprain - My car likes to run the wipers on a perfectly dry sunny day sometimes. To my great vexing annoyance.
Autoheadlights - Its just bad. On off, on off constantly.
Deepsleep - Car just doesn't want to wake up sometimes. Either on entry or when accessing it on my phone.
lots of overaggressive acceleration and deceleration, with all too frequent state changes.
personally i'd rather just have regular cruise and something that will drive the car competently at low speeds in heavy congestion.
Lane assistance is helpful but not as close to flawless, mostly due to poorly marked lanes.
it was apparent that it was a very simple system that did not attempt to do any estimation beyond what was immediately visible to the sensors. so if there was a change in the pitch of the road, it would immediately react as the sensors became occluded and then regained their field of view.
maybe in situations that challenging, it should complain and force manual control.
rav4 primes look like awesome vehicles by the way... if i were going to get a late model green vehicle, it would definitely be on my shortlist.
I've used it on miles of interstate in the mountains, but that's never a problem because interstates don't change pitch that rapidly (by design).
You must be using it on a very different roads than I do. I only use it on large, US interstates.
The experience has convinced me that iteration is going to get us to where we want to be given moderate timelines even if Tesla goes away, which, I wish they would because, like everything Musk is involved in, it's a dramatic shit show.
I had to laugh at this statement - imagine if I had to tell to a patient that he had to learn the quirks of his defib - so it "might" randomly just restart your heart at inopportune times but just hold on while it happens :).
On an unrelated note, just a friendly reminder that the Chevy Bolt is only $26k with 250 miles of range. How much is the most affordable phantom braking, Full-Self-Driving-driver-should-always-pay-attention, pedestrian-squishing Tesla again? Model 3 Rear-Wheel Drive: $44,990 to $46,990. Huh.
All those stupid car makers can’t keep up with so much bullshit, I mean, ground breaking innovation.
Couldn’t help but wonder if there should be a way for other drivers to report bad behavior by self-driving vehicles. I don’t see how it could be implemented or how it would work though.
It doesn't actually happen very often, the aerodynamics are quite good at diverting crud from the cameras.
(The front-facing cameras are behind the wipers, so you can at least clean those ones while driving.)
I hate this car so much. I cannot believe that VW thinks this junk technology is a good idea and I will never, ever buy a VW.
If the global priority was safety at all costs, a lot of this stuff could probably be solved with deterministic algorithms, and some mandatory changes to manual cars(Like an unsafe distance warning radar).
Ultrasound is few meters deep max.
Lidar is a clunky wart that no modern production car carries at the moment, afaik.
Until we have a national conversation about this, I suspect self-driving will be an intractable problem.
Also, until there's a SAE level 5 vehicle in existence, we're comparing different sample sets. The situations humans crash most often in are many of the same situations where current autonomous vehicles simply won't operate at all.
We may see these sample sets get even more skewed as we partially automate driving in levels 3 and 4. Because humans will have to drive in the more demanding scenarios where automated systems refuse to do so.
We are, for better or worse, somewhat comfortable with the fact that a human driven semi truck will occasionally wipe out a minivan.
It's not clear to me at all that we as a society are, or will ever be comfortable with a computer-operated semi-truck doing the same.
No amount of "Well, the number say this truck is statistically safer when driven by a computer..." will move the needle on that, IMO.
For instance: If I'm worried about killing my child in a first-party drunk driving crash, the average crash rate is irrelevant, because I can decrease the risk to zero by not drinking and driving. If I'm worried about third-party risk of a drunk driving crash, I can greatly mitigate that risk by choosing when and where I drive with my child in the car.
> No amount of "Well, the number say this truck is statistically safer when driven by a computer..." will move the needle on that
And I think the reason for that is that people subconsciously understand that the people who would be interested in (or financially capable of) purchasing an autonomous vehicle for the safety features are the same people who have lower accident rates than average.
(Also that media plays up plane crashes, but that would almost certainly be true of autonomous crashes as well.)
> the factor of control is why people are more comfortable with that failure mode, than a failure mode which may be more unpredictable.
There are situations in which control mitigates risk, and there are situations in which it doesn't. While the average crash rate is relevant to public health, it's really irrelevant to someone who is dead.
I hate to be a pessimist, but I'm not sure "national conversations" are all that useful in the U.S.
Consider the "national conversation" leading up to Obamacare. NPR (at least) reported on the known pros/cons of various national healthcare systems around the world. AFAIK some of them were simply better than what we had, regardless of whether one looked at them through a conservative or liberal lens. And yet we still ended up with a system that was only marginally better IMHO.
Whether it's better or worse for the country is a complicated question that I don't have an answer to, and no one does. Because it's a nuanced answer, if you're being serious about quantifying "better". Unfortunately most people, across both political factions in the US, would rather adhere to their ideologies than think critically about things in this era.
There's a whole host of things that we've 'worked out' on a national level. Schools, National Parks, Interstate Highway Systems, Fire Departments. All these things either didn't exist, or took hugely different forms only a couple generations ago, and now they are almost entirely accepted in their present form. We just don't think much about it now because this stuff is so accepted, even though at one point it was a whole big complicated thing that needed to get worked out and agreed on.
If you want to impose self-driving on everybody, it should be at least as good as the best drivers. It would be a grave injustice to force it on the best drivers if it can't match their performance.
As for the bar to pass for simply allowing, not mandating, self driving: I think they should first exceed the skill of a student driver. If they can't then they don't belong on the road without supervision, just like a student driver.
I would gladly have self-driving imposed on me if it were also imposed on drunks, teenagers, and the elderly. Sounds like a great trade-off.
For example, look at any car also sold under a hybrid trim model, the hybrid almost always has lower rates of injury. For an identical chassis.
Or, consider the brands that have good crash test rating, but target subprime buyers.... in comparison to brands that have similar crash performance but target higher incomes and/or higher credit profiles. Nissan and Kia vehicles often have good crash test ratings, but they consistently have bad real-world crash data.
https://www.iihs.org/ratings/insurance-losses-by-make-and-mo...
My thesis is that as a society we've accepted that humans make mistakes and will kill people on the road. I suspect that society will be much less willing to accept that sort of thinking when it's an AI-driven vehicle making the mistakes, no matter how much better at driving it is. I suspect we will always want, or need someone (as opposed to some thing) to blame when the worst happens.
A future in which self-driving cars kill 3,000 people per year in the U.S. sounds unimaginably grotesque to most people, even though that's less than a tenth of the number of people killed by human-driven cars.
When a self driving car makes a mistake, every other vehicle on the road running that software/hardware is implicated as well. Imagine having to decide if all humans should have their license suspended until root cause analysis can be completed every single time a human is involved in a car crash. That is the problem we will need to grapple with when it comes to self driving cars.
So yes, it would require a standards-based solution - and that's where government involvement is essential.
Government can certainly assist in this, but industry is usually better at coming up with better standards which the government can then deploy
On top of that, this won’t eliminate any of the real edge cases - humans and other cars will still violate these rules and drive or walk across these roads, at which point the AV will still need to know how to handle this novelty.
These are the main reasons AV companies don’t consider approaches like this.
I'm thinking more like expanding priority bus-lanes (if you have visited regions outside the US these are common) and ensuring there are markers that are abundantly clear for everyone and more usable for self-driving vehicles.
There are already robotaxis on the road right now.
If you watch the many selfdriving videos online, it is clear the current state is worse than a drunken teenager on their first week with a license.
Tesla topics seem worse than political topics on HN for triggering blind rage
> Tesla has drawn scrutiny from safety advocates and regulators for its willingness to allow its customers to test what is essentially an unfinished version of a software product that Musk has long promised will lead to fully autonomous vehicles on the road.
Now here's a similar recent scenario with 'blockchain'.
Suppose an unfinished 'beta' blockchain with multi-billions at stake going down or gets hacked and the price falls, is the excuse 'it's beta software', 'sorry you lost your savings'? Hence if many users of FSD beta are putting their lives at risk or getting themselves killed over faulty safety-critical software, is the excuse also going to be 'It's beta software'? 'Sorry you lost your life, you knew the risks!'
It really sounds like a way to push all blame on to the driver rather than the developer, despite little to no protections to the users and screams more tighter regulations to rid of that public 'beta' responsibility with software that has an incredible amount of risks.