New video of Tesla crash demonstrates the problem of semi-automated driving
theautopian.com
theautopian.com
This is just a possible reason, and I'm definitely not suggesting that this is what did happen.
This is Google maps saying "go right" in the middle of a tunnel: https://goo.gl/maps/G89cyQT2APUQuu6g6 ( the two roundabouts are connected by a tunnel )
PS: If you use street view you will see how it was 3 years ago, before the construction of the tunnel
They probably already have a heatmap of driver interventions, which could be a starting point. The data might be usable for training a generalized confidence map.
The precedent is there, prior EAP did this. One interstate I frequent; it would do the interstate merge on ramp/junction fine going north; but heading south (with a 270 degree right turn) it would beep loudly and force a driver takeover.
because of shadows that confused it
because of concern about cars crossing the intersection ahead where there is only the need to gently slow
because of a car crossing an intersection ahead that has already crossed!
because of a steep bridge that confused it
we can’t use cruise control in the car basically, we decided it is too dangerous at worst and jarring at least
because there is so much hype around Tesla people get the impression their software is “hardcore” but a lot of it is absolute garbage.
My 6 year old car uses radar for adaptive cruise control and has only tried to (arguably) improperly stop or slow when someone crept over the line into the lane I was driving in. I have no issue turning it on and leaving it for hours at a time.
After all, a Tesla is a pretty good substitute for a horse !
Intuitively when a car suddenly slows down it feels like the right response is to press on the accelerator: however in my experience this puts you in an unstable regime where you are “fighting” with the car. That is, autopilot continues to try to stop but temporarily accepts your override, but only as long as you maintain consistent pressure on the accelerator. Unfortunately if you even briefly let up on the accelerator, the car proceeds to violently slam on the brakes again. This can lead to a feedback loop where the car’s rapid acceleration/deceleration pattern makes it difficult to maintain consistent pressure on the pedal, and so the experience is like being in a rodeo. Worse, there’s no obvious way “out” of this cycle except to take your foot off the accelerator and let the car (briefly) win.
Counterintuitively, the “correct” way to deal with phantom braking is to avoid the accelerator entirely and instead dive right for the brake pedal: this instantly disengages cruise control. But this is not an intuitive response, you have to learn it the hard way.
I’ve also developed a reaction to reach for the stalk with my other hand and disable it at the same time so I’m no longer fighting it.
(Then learn when/where/why the car thinks it should be behaving that way, drive it past those zones, and re-engage autopilot. Smooth ride!)
This and your following description sound a lot like analyses of the two 737 crashes caused by MCAS.
It is absurd that Tesla is allowed to sell cars that have this problem. Why isn't the NTSB (or whoever) insisting this is fixed and/or removing these cars from the road? They're unsafe. (I had a Tesla; glad I don't now)
Should Teslas autopilot get confused because of this that would be really bad.
That seems undesirable, since it would lead to rear-ending, in situations like this.
Most of the time FSD just wrecks the Tesla itself or injures the driver of the Tesla (i.e. running into trees/dividers, running into much heavier freight trucks).
It will be interesting if Tesla comes in to provide monetary support for proving the legal case that Tesla FSD is not at fault or the Tesla driver (and his insurance) will be left to fend for themselves.
In the short term I could see Tesla not supporting the driver and absolving themselves via fine line/TOS, etc.
But the long term effects of not legally supporting any driver with Tesla FSD accidents will be that new customers won't trust this $10000 upsell product offering that's highly profitable for Tesla.
I could also see 3rd party (non-Tesla) insurance companies refusing to sell coverage to Tesla FSD drivers.
It could also make Tesla 1st party insurance also untrustworthy to customers and could become a huge liability for Tesla.
It seems like it will be a great litmus test to see if Tesla has the guts to step up for its own product.
[1] First video shows a potential unsafe lane change https://theintercept.com/2023/01/10/tesla-crash-footage-auto...
In a pileup like this it's basically never the fault of the front car, unless maybe if they are purposely causing the accident for insurance fraud or something. Maybe the driver will get cited for failing to maintain the minimum speed, but legally this isn't much different than if someone backed into the Tesla while it was parked in a parking garage.
The grey area will require some defense and it will be interesting to see if the Tesla driver is left high and dry by Tesla.
That video looks like a combined lane change and brake check on the part of the Tesla.
* and disappointed
It does not absolve the other person from responsibility for not following the required safety protocol. The car in front of them might have had to brake for a perfectly legitimate reason.
I mean, suppose that the other driver was driving while drunk. They might have arrived to their destination safely without the asshole in front, but that's not an excuse against a DUI ticket.
In the actual case with Tesla, the driver of the car that was in front of the pile-up was not at fault IMO. But there were a bunch more cars behind, and at least some of those slammed into each other because they didn't maintain proper distance, according to the police.
If there is an obstruction ahead, the safest scenario is to change to an empty lane ('empty' including safety distance) or brake in your lane to avoid hitting it. If you have some other problem you should probably brake slowly and change lanes to the outer edge of the road whenever there are safe gaps.
I would probably be off the gas or braking based on movement of the car in the other lane as part of driving defensively, though i don't think there is any 'obligation' for me to do so.
The behavior of the Tesla would also strike me as rather odd (assuming a right hand drive country unless there is a off-ramp coming up on the left) as it appears to be pulling over to the wrong side of the road.
This seems to be 100% the fault of Tesla for selling unsafe equipment. Some amount of blame for the Tesla driver. 0% blame for the car that got cut off and hit the Tesla. And 100% blame for every car behind that crashed into the car in front of them.
Simply, drivers don't use their common sense, and just their normal daily driving routine is already endangering to people around.
Maintaining a safe configuration of cars on the road is the collective job of everyone who is driving on it; and conversely, it takes just one person to ruin it for everybody who is doing the right thing. So it really needs to be a part of the culture of driving for that to work. And we don't have that in US, unfortunately (though, to be fair, there are far worse places to drive in).
But damn, I really have little sympathy for all the inattentive drivers not being able to stop in time for the pileup (and hope damages have to be payed accordingly). Maybe, Tesla FSD does not make the streets more dangerous than they already are, after all.
Nonsense.
He wouldn't be at fault for slowing down (after checking his eyesight).
Lane change is what makes Tesla at fault here, not unreasonable slowing down.
These are all realistic sudden stop issues that our laws mostly accommodate.
In fact the worst thing to do is to stop suddenly.
Even if a wheel falls off, you do not slam on the brakes unless you want to lose even more control.
If the differential fails catastrophically, it applies more braking force than the brakes do, so you'll have brief period of being airborne and then at least 1 rear wheel will sheer off (seen it).
If the driveshaft or trailing arms fail the wrong way, they result in a steel shaft digging into the roadway at a downward angle in front of the wheels and the driveshaft will stop the differential as above, until it sheers off.
That's not necessarily true. I've been in a car where the rear wheel parted ways with the car and passed us. For a few seconds we wondered where that wheel came from until realizing it was from our car. The car was balanced just fine on three wheels, there was plenty time to lift off the gas and make way to the breakdown lane safely.
Even if it's a more heavily loaded wheel (e.g. front wheel on front engine front wheel drive car), it'll slide on the brake disc or the disk cover (whichever is lower, varies by car). A good amount of sparking but you'll have enough steerage to pull over.
I rear-ended a woman who did that to me. When she cut in front of me in my lane there was not nearly enough distance between us for me to fully stop when she then suddenly braked.
I'm not sure what I really was even supposed to even do in a situation like that — I suppose as soon as she cut over I should have just assumed the worst was coming and hit my brakes right away?
For the multiple cars crash, if not clear cut, without video recording, all the insurances pool themselves together and consider the drivers as not responsible. Nobody cannot tell if you stopped, got hit in the back and then the front or the opposite.
I admittedly find it a little bit confusing how many people here assign complete blame to exactly one participant.
The question is if in this case the action can be considered as deliberate. The "software" did it, is it deliberate? Is it considered as a failure of the car like the breaking of mechanical part?
This is new and the justice will have to figure it out and I am very happy not to have to figure it out.
I'd say there is only one car which did a clearly illegal action (sudden lane change followed by brake checking), so the guilt is 100% on them.
It's also true that the car behind probably could've been more assertive in braking harder to avoid reaching the Tesla (I wish there was a dashcam to see it from a better angle). But they didn't do anything illegal per se.
Also, that second car driver might've been worried of braking too hard to avoid getting themselves rear ended, which is a legitimate concern when having to break hard in traffic. Of course in the end they got rear ended anyway, but couldn't have known that prior to it happening.
This was the Tesla braking as hard as possible to a complete stop. The following driver reacted quickly and had they not been paying attention the accident would have been much much worse.
Basically if you hit a car from behind, it’s your fault, every time.
Incorrect. If you brake check someone (what the Tesla did), the front car is at fault.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
Quebec woman who stopped for ducks, causing fatal crash, loses appeal
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/emma-czornobaj-loses...
It was also an unsafe lane change which caused the pile up, not just the braking.
Right, same as what the Tesla did, suddenly stopping on a highway (being in a tunnel makes it worse, as there's no runoff room to the sides).
Because typically the car in the front stopped or slowed for a reason that does not violate any rules or responsibilities. But when they have neglected to follow rules, or uphold responsibilities, then they can share fault.
Generally speaking, drivers in the US have a legal responsibility to pay attention to what is going on and operate their vehicle with care.
Considering that the police report evidence includes the FAQ page from Tesla for the question “Do I need to pay attention while using autopilot?”, I think it’s clear what direction they’re going here.
At that point humans will theoretically be the weakest link, and anyone driving "manually" will be a liability because they will lack the information and reflexes to deal with whatever is happening around them in a timely manner.
The second car had left a more than adequate stopping distance. The Tesla changed lanes close in front of it and then immediately braked as hard as possible, deliberately. The driver of the Tesla should lose their driving licence.
The drivers following the second car weren't leaving enough distance or paying enough attention.
Ha ha ha. London, UK?
People even put CCTV cameras inside their homes. What on earth?
For example, this lists the top ten most surveilled cities. Nine are in China. Number three is London.
https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/articles/2020-08-14/the-t...
The guy that wrote it wanted a suitably shock-horror piece so he went to the main street of a shitty part of London, counted every CCTV camera he could see everywhere including ones inside all the betting shops, off-licences, pawn shops, cheque cashing places, and so on - all lovely totally-not-dodgy businesses I'm sure - and then multiplied up by the total amount of roads in the UK.
If the figures were accurate then every single-track road that's basically just a cow path with tarmac sprayed over it would have a CCTV camera every four car lengths, which is clearly not the case.
From the police report:
> V-1 made an unsafe lane change (21658(a) California Vehicle Code) and was slowing to a stop directly into V-2's path of travel. This caused the front of V-2 to collide into the rear of V-1 (4.0.1. #1). P-2 did not have enough time to perceive and react to V-1's lane change.
V-1 = The Tesla
> P-4 observed V-3 stopping and applied V-4's brakes. V-3 came to a stop to the rear of V-2. P-5 observed V-4 stopping and applied V-5's brakes. As V4 slowed down, P-4 steered V4 towards the #2 lane. Due to P-5's unsafe speed for stopped traffic ahead (22350 California Vehicle Code), P-S failed to safely stop behind V-4 and V-3. The front of V-5 collided into the rear of V-4 (A.O.L #2). V-4 moved into the #2 lane without colliding into any other vehicles. V-5 came to a stop in the #1 lane after colliding into the rear of V-3 (A.O.L #3).
and it goes on from there...
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23569059-9335-2022-0...
I know someone who had to suddenly brake due to a pedestrian jumping onto the road. So, for a very good reason in that case. Nonetheless, it was a sudden stop, so their insurance had to pay for the repairs to both of the two following cars which rear ended each other.
Brake checking (what the Tesla did) does definitely make the front car the guilty party. It's usually done for insurance fraud, here presumably done just by AI gone mad. But same result and same guilt.
Imagine there is an 'autopilot' gun, you buy it, and it comes with the contract that says you take full responsibility got the gun.
Then it shoots me and kills me before you have a chance to react.
The prosecutor will go after the manufacturer. If manufacturer wrote code that kills me, you and any contract you signed is not even relevant.
You cannot contract away criminal responsibility. Otherwise I could contract away all my responsebilities to a random homeless guy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_of_Lawful_Commerc...
The transition is completely smooth and the driver doesn't have to know or care at all, so it's not surprising that they were mistaken. But it's relevant here because people are trying to blame this on FSD. On FSD cars the freeway Autopilot is still the exact same Autopilot that non-FSD cars have (with the "Navigate on Autopilot" feature which is more than four years old now). They plan to replace freeway Autopilot with FSD later this year, but it hasn't happened yet.
But after the 10th (or maybe 100th) scenario where Tesla FSD is at fault but Tesla scapegoats responsibility onto the driver who is branded by Tesla's legal team as a dumb/irresponsible/clueless/reckless driver it starts making less sense.
That driver is likely to have been a highly loyal Tesla fan/customer/evangelist/believer who paid $10,000 for FSD sight unseen. Long term the evangelists might no longer evangelize and may in fact (correctly or incorrectly) spread the message to the general public that FSD is useless/unfinished feature - leading to long term damage to the Tesla brand.
Whoa now, I didn't say that at all! I'm just talking about FSD vs. Autopilot here. It's entirely possible that Autopilot is at fault! I am curious to see what the investigation will uncover. My point is simply that this situation has nothing to do with FSD. It could have happened four years ago as easily as yesterday, and anyone trying to tie this to recent developments in FSD is being misleading.
The tesla demands you pay attention and drive but penalizes you by disengaging if you so much as try to take a slightly different line around a curve. Meanwhile the Honda just bides it’s time until you let go and seamlessly takes control keeping you in the middle of the lane.
> In the short term I could see Tesla not supporting the driver and absolving themselves via fine line/TOS, etc.
> But the long term effects of not legally supporting any driver with Tesla FSD accidents will be that new customers won't trust this $10000 upsell product offering that's highly profitable for Tesla.
Tesla publicly disparages people who died relying on their products, and refuses to cooperate with the NTSB. I'd expect nothing less in this case. Somehow that hasn't been a big factor in sales.
It seems the take rate of FSD for new Tesla purchases is not as high as it used to be - perhaps due to the increase in price and other Autopilot-FSD bundling/unbundling aspects - but also perhaps due to negative press from the accidents thus far. [1] Definitely something to watch as/if the accident incidents accumulate.
[1] https://twitter.com/troyteslike/status/1586356451639189504?
This is completely false. Tesla is legally required, and complies every time, to release crash data to the NTSB. This data includes whether or not self driving was enabled.
> Tesla publicly disparages people
Tesla refutes that self driving is enabled when people lie about it. I am sure there is an incident or two of someone being sassy about calling out these lies but there is no trend of "disparagement"
> This is completely false.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-won-apos-t-formally-140...
>> Tesla publicly disparages people
> Tesla refutes that self driving is enabled when people lie about it. I am sure there is an incident or two of someone being sassy about calling out these lies but there is no trend of "disparagement"
Does any other car company have a habit of responding in public like this?
https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-last-week%E2%80%99s-accide...
Given the deceased is not able to share their side of the story, I don't feel like it's appropriate to air this in public like this. Keep in mind that while they are saying the hands were not detected on the wheel, they can't say if hands were or were not on the wheel and there were many contemperaneous reports of poor sensing. This should really just be in the accident report, not aired by Tesla, regardless of fault. Maybe that's not disparagement, but again, do other automakers push this kind of narrative or is it only Tesla? What did Toyota say during the unintended accelleration issues a decade ago? As I recall, mostly they were blaming floormats, not drivers?
You are completely misrepresenting what's happening here by saying Tesla is refusing to cooperate. NTSB is trying to pressure a gag order on Tesla that would prevent Tesla from disclosing information around a car accident to the public. NTSB deciding this is a mandatory part of the agreement is their choice. They could have chosen to go forward without this requirement - they didn't. Tesla still provided all the information they had on the situation, and still continued to provide assistance to the NTSB in their investigation. Just not as a "formal party". This is the NTSB making demands while also asking for help that Tesla isn't obligated to provide unless they want.
You're also misrepresenting the Toyota situation. Toyota actively denied fault for most of this situation, and was fined $1.2 billion for deceptive statements around it. They frequently referred to "pedal misapplication"
Like this one - if driver would stop sudden breaking and moved forward, cars behind him could have still crashed.
That’s the thing about testing on the public roads - there are many ways you can affect other users.
Even at 40 miles per hour your speed is 58 feet per second (or, at 60kmh you speed is 16 meters per second).
So it's either "the driver had sufficient warning" or "the lane change from Tesla was dangerous". As you don't expect cars that are dangerously changing to suddenly slow down.
The average driver’s reaction time is 0.2 to 0.3 seconds. This is before the driver’s foot moves.
Then there is approx 1 second before the brakes take effect (foot movement, applying the force, brakes responding)
So 1.5 second before the car starts breaking.
There is a rule of “be at least 2 seconds behind the car in front” which gives a safe distance to handle any emergency braking.
Of course everything depends on driver’s and car’s conditions.
However you count, if Tesla did a dangerous lane change and started braking, how is this the fault if the driver behind?
1. Fault in an accident can be spread across every party that was involved, and no matter how negligent one part was, that has no influence over how negligent every other party also potentially was.
2. A driver is typically responsible for being aware of all potential hazards on the road, not just the ones immediately ahead in the same lane. For instance a car that has started indicating to move into their lane from another lane (as this Tesla did ~7 seconds before the collision), and a car in their lane that is coming to a stop (this Tesla had completed the lane change pretty much 3 seconds before the collision).
Obviously the Tesla is really pushing the limits of what would be considered a safe gap, and coming to a stop in that location without a proper reason is obviously negligently dangerous. But the negligence of both parties contributed to this accident, regardless of who was most at fault.
At 60 mph it will take many meters and seconds to deaccelerate, assuming the driver can take exactly the correct action:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=time+to+brake+at+70+met...
Estimate here is about 4 seconds, under perfect conditions. 5 seconds is more than reasonable, considering you also need to realize the other driver is acting erroneously.
That seems pretty clear. 5 total seconds is really reasonable. 5 seconds before you start is silly.
You seem to have your terminology confused. Reaction time doesn’t even necessarily have anything to do with driving. I suggest a quick web search next time before assigning people remedial physics.
No, reaction time means the time from noticing the need to brake to the time brake pressue is getting applied.
Who is at fault for you crashing into the back of me?
The fact that the trailing driver is USUALLY found at fault it is just philosophical razors applied to situations without enough evidences. Generalizing that into "trailing drivers are always at fault" is disingenuous, partisan and malicious.
Taking into account reaction times, it takes approximately 5-6 seconds to bring a car going 60mph to a complete stop[2][3] The accident was completely unavoidable for the car that rearends the Tesla because the Tesla made an extremely dangerous maneuver
[1] https://theintercept.com/2023/01/10/tesla-crash-footage-auto... [2] https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/vehicle_stopping_distance_and_ti... [3] https://www.edmunds.com/driving-tips/keep-your-braking-dista...
Most drivers gain an instinct to passing slower/stopped objects on the left, and a natural aversion to passing them on the right.
The Tesla pulled over and stopped in the far left lane. No “space” was left to pass it.
I don't think it is. I've never felt so unsafe in traffic as driving on highways in california. People keep an order of magnitude too little distance to the car in front. That density of cars would make any european highway slow down to a crawl but there they just practically touch eachother while driving 60kmph while doing crazy lane shifts left and right.
Brake testing (suddenly braking hard for no reason, what the Tesla did here) has always been a cause for the leading car to be the guilty party when they get rear ended.
In times prior to dashcams, it was difficult to prove the car ahead did brake to cause the accident, so the rule of thumb was the rear car is probably guilty. But if there was a way to show the lead car did brake, they're guilty.
Nowadays with dashcams, it's a lot easier to prove, so brake testers don't get away with it as much.
Autopilot has killed multiple motorcyclists, and is suspected in many other cases, totaling 19 fatalities. This isn't the first, our regulatory bodies are just incredibly slow at this.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/08/tesla-faces-new-probes-...
https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/27/23280461/tesla-autopilot-...
I would love to see manslaughter charges for more accidents. If I do a whoopsie and stab someone in my home, I'm not going to get off with a "oh my god I'm so sorry! I was tired and it was foggy." People driving should be extended the same courtesy.
Same with normal bikes, by the way: cycling on the same road with fast-driving cars should not be an actual phenomenon. I cycle to work every day, and love it, but would never do it if there wasn't a separate bike lane.
Something like a CBR300F is about half the emissions of a hybrid and a grom can get lower, but plenty of motorbikes are actually worse than a compact car and getting close to SUV territory.
Still more aerodynamic and fuel efficient than someone riding a full-blown SUV to work solo.
> but plenty of motorbikes are actually worse than a compact car and getting close to SUV territory.
Not everyone drives a Kawasaki Ninja H2 R with 310 hp or whatever the top record is these days. Per German ADAC, the average motorcycle consumes 2-3 liters/100km [1], whereas the average car is at 7-8 liters/100km [2].
[1] https://www.adac.de/verkehr/tanken-kraftstoff-antrieb/tipps-...
[2] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/daten/verkehr/kraftstoffe
Part of the reason is that it's so fun to go fast with them.
For one, more strictly enforce technical fitness and some form of age requirements. An awful lot of people don't care much about the roadworthiness of their vehicle, and many don't care about technological advances like anti brake-lock systems in newer models as well.
The other major contributor to motorcycle (or bicycle) accidents is road conditions like potholes, dirt and especially oil contamination, bumpiness in roads... a car doesn't care much (unless it's one of those super-flat sports vehicles), but a cyclist can easily lose control.
On a scooter not, but on a Harley or Honda Gold Wing? People make trips across Europe on these beasts.
For what it's worth, I've never driven a motorcycle and probably never will, for danger.
I don’t think “everyone should be allowed to use the road safely” is a statement anyone disagrees with, but the laws of physics make this very difficult to implement in any practical way. Pretty sure that even in Europe, cycling and motorcycling are far more dangerous than driving.
Electric cars are the only viable, general purpose solve for climate change as it pertains to personal transit. We aren’t going to get everyone to start (motor)cycling or taking public transit over the coming decades, but EVs are a drop-in replacement for most personal transit use cases.
Oh, of course we can practically implement road safety for everyone:
- limit inner-city speeds outside of major influx roads to 30 km/h
- build dedicated bicycle and bus lanes in cities
- build dedicated pedestrian lanes (not an issue in urban Europe, a bit of an issue in rural areas though)
- enforce speeding and distance-keeping regulations
- make sure the quality of the roads and pedestrian ways is acceptable (i.e. no potholes, even surface) to minimize accident risk
- keep heavy haul traffic on highways wherever possible, prevent toll evasion
- build out public transport to reduce the amount of individual traffic
- provide elderly citizens with taxi vouchers or other forms that ensure their mobility without having them drive themselves
- get old vehicles outside of historical preservation interests off the road to increase the amount of cars with up-to-date safety features
- enforce regular technical check-ups (Germany, for example, requires one every two years) so that vehicles in dangerous condition get taken off the road and owners of vehicles in barely-roadworthy condition also get the hint
Countries that prioritise safe infrastructure for bicyclists like the Netherlands fare significantly better in road accident statistics [1] over countries that just say "fuck it, cars first" like the US.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
And yes, motorcycles transport two people at the most - but for real, look outside a window and count how many car drives are made by single-occupants. In the UK, for example, it's 60% [1].
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/314733/single-occupant-c...
On the other hand the reason for most car accidents is bad road design, especially designs that encourage high speeds.
If the way you operate a motor vehicle causes a death, you should be charged. If there were a meaningful risk of jail time for bad driving (including driving tired, speeding, driving recklessly, etc), people would either drive less, or would drive more carefully.
/pedant
Motorcycles _and_ pedestrians equally take an unfair share of the mortality associated with vehicles. Which hints at a broader infrastructure and design problem, that makes it very much seem like "automated" cars are thrown into this mess without any design changes with the hope that they will also obscure the underlying error.
Aside from that, even my 650cc motorcycle got 52mpg most days. Yes, absurd power to weight ratio, but also absurd fuel efficiency and reduced lane occupancy. Very green.
We build shit transportation infrastructure, force everybody to drive, don't build enough housing (forcing longer commutes), and then people like you complain that cars aren't given enough leeway?
I think if you endanger someone’s life with anything, be it a car, motorcycle, knife, gun, hands; you should always get the same sentence
The crazy part is that whether or not you knew the person you ran over in your car can factor heavily into charges and sentencing.
Knowing the person leads one to question whether or not there was motive.
That's a tradeoff society made.
But I'm all in favor of practicing more careful driving, and banning the shit of these incomplete automated driving mechanism!
I was thinking today about the Southwest disaster, not only for customers but for the company’s reputation. But I know a great way to win it back: cash. Promise it won’t happen again, but if it does, offer best in industry cash compensation. Prove that your company gives a shit. I will be very disappointed if they expect time alone to heal this.
Interestingly, the article is careful to say that the driver "claims" it was on FSDbeta.
More to this story.
Auto Lane Change
To initiate an automated lane change, you must first enable Auto Lane Changes through the Autopilot Controls menu within the Settings tab. Then when the car is in Autosteer, a driver must engage the turn signal in the direction that they would like to move. In some markets depending on local regulations, lane change confirmation can be turned off by accessing Controls > Autopilot > Customize Navigate on Autopilot and toggle ‘Lane Change Confirmation’ off.
If the end user said they were driving on FSD, it likely means they are enrolled in the FSD beta and were using autopilot - in the car there is no distinction between autopilot and FSD. They are the same thing in the car if the FSD beta is enabled.
Technically it does have cruise control, but I've never worked out what kind of road conditions it would be useful for and until I replace a 25-year-old dry-rotted vacuum hose under the bonnet it's not going to control a damn thing.
If the person operating the vehicle doesn't need to be aware of the difference, then the general public shouldn't need to either when analyzing an accident.
It seems baffling to me that we could imagine a scenario where it's less important for the driver of a vehicle to be aware of the difference, than it is for the public when reacting to a news article.
I don't think you get to have your cake and eat it. Either there is no relevant distinction, in which case the "well actually" response that "it's not FSD" seems unnecessary, or the distinction is important, in which case it seems problematic that drivers would be confused about it.
I guess I just didn't take that away from this article at all.
It seemed like a more general complaint about Level 2 automation using this instance of a crash with FSD/Autopilot as an example. The distinction seems, to me, relatively irrelevant to the main point of the article. A key paragraph for me was this one:
> While, yes, Tesla’s system was the particular one that appears to have failed here, and yes, the system is deceptively named in a way that encourages this idiotic behavior, this is not a problem unique to Tesla. It’s not a technical problem. You can’t program your way out of the problem with Level 2; in fact, the better the Level 2 system seems to be, the worse the problem gets. That problem is that human beings are simply no good at monitoring systems that do most of the work of a task and remaining ready to take over that task with minimal to no warning.
So, I guess I don't see the point in distinguishing between FSD/Autopilot when the thesis of the article isn't specific to Tesla, but rather applies to Level 2 systems across all cars.
That's the trouble with this semi-automated mode. It re-creates a known problem in aircraft automation. And without the training pilots receive.
We've entered the age of 'blind trust in technology'. We can hardly get out of bed without it.
In Tesla's case, the failure is that they are testing a new way of doing things without properly saying it, Muskito is pushing for "it works" while it actually is only being in the early stages.
This is a failure to society, like the 737 Max and should be judged accordingly.
Then it comes innovation. Which necessarily starts with limited cases. And we use to launch business and products as soon as we can. Hence, with the minimum acceptable cases. This is fine as long as failures cause minor reparable degradations instead of catastrophic unsurvivable cases.
And still, we need systems designed with every layer having the feature of graceful degradations. That enables us to perform as Woody and Buzz Lightyear said: "Falling with style"
It's all about social acceptance, and hardly about safety at all.
I do use it, but less than I did the old system: I just do not find it relaxing because I cannot really grasp intuitively when I need to override it. On standard cruise control, it was obvious to me when I needed to take over. Therefore I am more rather than less vigilant than I was with the old system.
I don't want to be too hard on the Golf: it has other safety features I really like, such as lane assist and automatic breaking. But I am not a fan of the adaptive control, and I think the article help me understand why: its a level 2 problem!
Takes a moment to moment mental load off so you can focus on the other cars around you better.
If the cars ahead of me are slowing down significantly I disengage and go manual until I have a better idea what’s going on.
My car can supposedly stop completely that way. I’ve never tried that, as it gets very slow (relative to highway) it’s willing to get way closer to the vehicle in front me than I am. I trust it (in theory). But it’s not worth testing.
Really the train isn’t viable in most of the US. And then you have no car at the end, probably in a city with bad public transit unless you want to take taxis/Ubers or have friends/family drive you around.
So for long hauls, it tends to be a car or a plane. And that decision is heavily influenced by distance.
And then you've still got to manage ground transportation from wherever the train station is to wherever you want to go.
It's great if you're a container though.
This means that cruise control goes from being something that relieves stress on you to something that causes additional stress.
Both have a very simple there/not their car silhouette to let you know if it detects the car in front of you. Just below that they also have some sort of colored to tell you how close the car is (good, clothes, to close). Last is a silhouette of your car. All three in a simple stack.
It’s an excellent design, perfectly glanceable. I did rent a car once that showed you how many feet away the car in front of you was. It was kind of interesting but I found it completely useless.
Realistically when the car in front of you starts getting close enough that the indicator changes, the car is already slowly slowing down. If it turns red, your car is slowing down faster.
You really don’t need any of the numbers, and they would likely take longer for a person to process than the simple visual imagery does.
I haven’t had an issue of not understanding what the car is/is going to do. The only real prop I’ve experienced is some cars are willing to accelerate/decelerate much faster than I want them to, largely for comfort reasons.
Although now that I think about it, I was using the Subaru ACC, so the dash has a visible indicator if it's tracking a car and maintaining speed relative to that. Perhaps yours doesn't have that?
To make matters worse, every single car salesman I've encountered has the feeling that doing everything to the extreme is the best way to sell cars. Which means that is is totally, completely believable that the OP with his Golf had the salesman set it to a minimum follow distance and then not explain that they did this or how to change it!
this, so much
> how you were really able to use cruise to follow another car at all before?
not op, but you probably just don't, you disengage, cuss out loud and follow them manually until they come to a decision to stop hogging the lane.
PS that's also why I hate the newer-style blocked-off HOV lanes here in sfbay, which seem to be a total trap and a magnet for idiots who drive 30 miles below the speed limit.
Note that all of the research I'm aware of is US based, and I have no idea whether it generalizes to other cultures.
1: http://www.slug-lines.com/slugging/about_slugging.asp
2: Houston's Katy Freeway went from HOV-3 to HOT-2 (and from 1 lane to 2) and seems to have gutted its slugging culture. People weren't willing to get into a strangers car anonymously by themselves (or have a single stranger in their car), it looks like 3 people, all strangers, is culturally different from 2. Also, HOT lanes seem to weaken slugging, even in DC where it was most strongly entrenched, the switch to HOT lanes seems to have weakened the culture, because people say 'I'll just pay today' rather than pick someone up. So it can spontaneously form, and when it does can be quite powerful, but is very fragile.
Even a 1 mph differential in speed is a car length change in following distance every 10 seconds. A 1/2 mph difference is 3 car lengths of change every minute. That seems like enough that would be annoying, but it obviously wasn’t when two cars are following each other both on cruise control.
I still don’t have a fully satisfactory explanation for something that I can easily observe (that it’s usually not annoying).
And if you get too far behind him you might bump up the speed a notch.
And if somebody gets in the gap it's even better because they are going to eventually overtake him just like they overtook you and overtaking one car at a time might be safer than two cars at once.
If someone wants to pass me and then sit up the other guy's arse, fine. I guarantee I'll be ten seconds behind them at the next road junction, or not much more. I don't think people realise that the relationship between road speed and journey time isn't linear - doing 90mph won't get you there appreciably faster than doing 60mph unless you're on a very long perfectly straight road with no junctions to turn off at.
I personally use my ACC as an extra set of eyes. I set it and still manually adjust my speed using the +spd and -spd buttons on my steering wheel. If the car ahead changes speed and I somehow fail to notice it, my car will give me one more chance by automatically slowing down a bit. But every time that happens I treat it as an "oops" like airplane pilots do when GPWS (ground proximity warning system) alerts fire. It's great that automation averted the problem, but it became a problem due to the pilot's error.
It doesn't help with the trailer that you're towing failing to stop as fast as you do, trying to run into you, and trying to turn to the side when it can't.
The solution to the latter problem is to be aware that you have the trailer, and to not brake faster than it can handle. The fact that the trailer makes it harder for you to avoid an accident is exactly why many jurisdictions put extra restrictions on cars towing trailers (for example in CA they aren't supposed to go over 55 mph - even on the freeway).
I've seen pickups with too little weight on the rear axle lock up the wheels and get pushed around by the trailer especially when the trailer braking is adjusted too light, but with the advent of ABS, that's not nearly as common.
The problem here isn't the ACC braking (even though many car markers will tell you not to use it while towing), it's trailer setup.
I heavily use adaptive cruise control and I've never had any issues with it, though I'm always ready to take over in case anything complicated starts happening. It's a nice feature because it saves a lot of energy when the driving is very easy, and then you just drive normally otherwise.
Most ships don't sink, but we still have lifeboats. Most jet engines don't fail, but we still train pilots to land without them.
Its edgecases that kill.
Did the manufacturer think about this and include a warning? If not, how should the user know?
The standard move is to put this in the user manual.
Especially for something as complex as towing, reading the manual should be mandatory.
I would think the manual likely said not to use it while towing. I’m not sure why one would be afraid of it when used correctly because it didn’t handle something it wasn’t designed to well.
That said, I have the almost opposite take! The adaptive CC wasn’t perfect, but it had a perfect failure mode all but one time: it just stopped working at all when its sensors got fudged in any way.
The one exception was a near pileup when drivers ahead of me came to a sudden stop in the middle of an urban ramp soup that’s always high risk. Even then it did the right thing: it screamed (beeped) at me to brake, because I needed to control that and it had no safe way of doing it for me.
I’m similarly more vigilant with assisted CC, but I’m more inclined to use it because it makes me more vigilant. I almost never used a plain CC without it because it’s too easy to get lazy at the wheel and make mistakes. Constantly checking on the known-limited computer kept me alert but let me rest my legs for ~10k miles over a month and a half.
And it saved my ass on a sudden ice patch in Nevada, which was the other time it didn’t work exactly as expected. I don’t drive with a computer in control, I only delegate to it for menial tasks like predictable speed adjustment. But I’m grateful I had the computer to help me regain traction coming around an icy bend when the alternative was me and my pup and everything we had in tow were going to roll off a mountainside.
Older "dumb" cruise control you had to be ready for the brake at all times — there was no need to second guess the system.
When I get to the inevitable slowdowns, my car just slows without me having to think much about it unless it’s a sudden one.
I also have a Golf with standard cruise and I can’t stand using it since most drivers around me can’t maintain a constant speed, so I am always adjusting it or canceling it.
That seems bad!
With ACC I can decrease the amount of foot shuffling and just rest my foot next to the brake pedal in case something happens up front. My car model comes with emergency braking that can be toggled off but it worked perfectly one time a driver slowed down unexpectedly (alerted me first, then braked).
Ta-da! 1 pedal driving :-)
In slightly heavy traffic conditions on the highway it was unpleasant/confusing.
On the other hand, I found the dumbest 'cruise control' mode on T3 downright dangerous, you always had to have foot on the gas to be ready to override it. They just took something that was solved a long time ago and made it worse, I really do not get it.
Vigilance is hard to moderate when you start automating too much.
Also FTA quoting Tesla (https://images-stag.jazelc.com/uploads/theautopian-m2en/repo...):
> It does not turn a Tesla into a self-driving car
Is it self driving or not?
Seemingly Tesla is copying this, with "Self-driving" doesn't actually mean the car will drive by itself, but that the driver can drive "less" compared to before.
Deceptive marketing at best, fatal at worst.
Oh and it's not self driving.
If the Tesla was at the back or the middle I think it's highly likely it would have outperformed the other drivers and stopped faster or kept a safe distance.
A series of problems lead to this accident, FSD Beta gets 5% of the blame here for stopping on the highway, which isn't an exclusive feature to Tesla - cars stop on roads all the time.
What this demonstrates is 7/8 or 8/8 drivers here were driving unsafely.
I think this is the the most important point of the article and largely ignored here in the comments who seem to focus mostly on who was to blame for this specific accident.
We know the strengths and weaknesses of both humans and tech at this point in time. Humans are overall better decision makers but aren't 100% focused 100% of the time. Tech gets confused a lot but is never tired or inattentive. So if your goal is safety you let the humans drive but take over in emergency situations when the human is not reacting. Which is what most car manufacturers do right now. Letting the tech drive and expecting the human to provide perfect reaction time every time the tech fails is playing on the weaknesses of both. This is focusing on cool marketing at the expense of safety.
This isn't even uncommon. Almost every Honda sold for a while has been a L2 system that will take over in certain ways if the car believes a crash is imminent, such as a car suddenly breaking.
> but would be less sexy
It's so less sexy people don't know that millions of vehicles are sold this way...
I do not understand why the company has not already been sued into oblivion for an obvious lie that has killed people.
Tunnels and underpasses are the worst. They are a pain in the ass, because shadows mess with all the edge detection and motion models and anything else visual. Humans compensate by thinking "I'm in a tunnel: things are weird." But without a reasoning model that can take context into account, the computer is stuck.
In the video from behind, you can see the shadow ahead of the car on the floor of the tunnel that it carefully stops just before it would hit. A person would notice that EVERY OTHER car had driven straight through the thing it thought was an obstacle, but that is also context this car isn't going to take into account.
I worked on autonomous vehicles (in vision) at Daimler in 1991. During one of our test sessions, on drying pavement, the vehicle abruptly slammed on the brakes and refused to proceed past a point where the vision system could see a symmetric about a centerline set of horizontal edges on the pavement. It tightly fit our (hand-coded, being 1991) model for a car ahead. We had to revert to manual control and drive back to our staging area and wait for the track (set of runways and taxiways at a disused airbase) to finish drying.
Obviously, the state of the art has significantly improved since then, but some fundamental risk of misinterpretations could easily remain.
This wasn’t going straight on a highway stopping in the same lane the driver was already in.
I can understand how the conditions probably made it worse.
The Tesla car switching and abruptly stopping was a big problem, and I can understand that first car having trouble, but for cars behind the first one they should ideally all be keeping a distance ready for suddenly hitting the brakes in an emergency. I find at least in Australia a decent number of drivers do not keep an adequate distance from the car in front for emergency braking.
[1]: https://assets.highwaysengland.co.uk/stay+safe+stay+back/HE_...
Pedantic analysis of DMV regulations is absolutely essential. Clearly any dolt practicing defensive driving would anticipate the self driving car cutting him off and hard braking.
Stories like this make people think that full self driving is actually a car the drives itself fully. The car is safer than any human and by critically thinking about this we are preventing sales and essentially killing people, since Tesla has fewer deaths per mile travelled.
Not sure if you are being serious. How can you tell whether a car is driving autonomously? Expect it from any Tesla?
I haven't consciously ever seen a car driving itself. And I like to think of myself being pretty defensive as a driver. I'm not even sure if the feature is available in Australia.
But if there was a video of a Tesla doing anything, the fandom of Tesla is such that defenders would appear.
If you think following the most basic driving safety rule is 'pedantic', please don't drive.
> Clearly any dolt practicing defensive driving would anticipate the self driving car cutting him off and hard braking.
The Tesla was 100% at fault, nothing can be done when you get cut off like that. But that's not the case for every single car behind them that failed to stop in time.
> Stories like this make people think that full self driving is actually a car the drives itself fully.
In my opinion Tesla has been criminally misleading with their avertising. The level of gaslighting they've been able to get away with is unbelievable.
It's also not just some arbitrary rule, it's a fundamental principle based on the rules of physics.
But, in any case, it is your obligation to leave as much space as it takes for you to stop your car before it hits the car in front, taking in consideration the speed of both vehicles before braking and the condition of the road. The rule of thumb is there for you as a baseline; blindly following it does not automatically mean that you're in the right if an accident results.
Or pull over and let them pass, as people often use tailgating to attempt to indicate the car in front is too slow.
Edit: (tailgating = follow too closely)
The tunnel is not curved. it's straight.
TL;DR - Sometimes the 3 second following distance is just not enough even if someone is paying attention because they can only see the car in front of them.
Yep... the usual advice locally is 5 to 7 seconds gap for freeways and similar, before accounting for weather and other conditions. Of course, that assumes you can leave a gap without some bastard deciding to sneak in and occupy it.
Unfortunately, this. It sucks to keep a larger gap, have some idiot sneak in, and now you have to brake to maintain the distance again, repeat. FWIW, I am very careful to maintain distance just for situations like the one in this post.
That's the thing, though - if you were already at the distance limit, and the car in front of you starts slowing down, you have to also start slowing down right away to maintain said limit. If you do not, then it's already "not enough distance" by definition at that point, and you're the one responsible for that.
Absolutely agreed. What I meant to highlight is, the reaction time can make a huge difference in situations like this.
I’d even wager if that pickup hadn’t swerved and everyone just slowed down it wouldn’t have piled up
Side tangent, I love watching car crash videos. Really interesting to see how the system breaks down and people make mistakes. I spend hours on YouTube sometimes :)
Your and my YouTube feed algorithms....
They kind of creep me out when it is a crash that was not avoidable. But, boy, most of the crashes have me talking to the computer display, "What are you thinking? You have no stopping distance at all, I know exactly what's coming up in about 3 seconds!"
It's worth anticipating this by watching the other lanes and what drivers are doing. If you can see a slow down happening in an adjacent lane then you might reasonably expect at least one of the drivers approaching to pull over in front of you.
Completely autonomous self-driving cars (without any steering wheel, so even incapacitated or clueless people may 'drive' (like drunk or in labour or children)) indeed seem like a good solution. (Except we need less individual traffic for env reasons.) Unfortunately, the problem is very hard, technologically, and the current interim solutions will stay for a while.
[1] In fact, this is so unlike FSD's behavior that I still think it's more likely that it will turn out not to have been in use at all. The only evidence at hand is one sentence in a police report that the police themselves state was unvalidated. How easy would it be to blame the car as an excuse?
In any case, I am not taking an anti-self-driving stance by any means - we'll get there eventually. Tesla is leading the way and taking all of the negative press.
Maybe you could agree to settle on: FSD works pretty well, seems not to be unsafe vs. human drivers, but isn't finished, and is improving rapidly? Might have saved us all some time.
Not that FSD Autopilot is what it's marketed as, but this is the responsibility of the driver and not the car.
Since fighting for release of this video and publishing the story, Ken Klippenstein has been censored on Twitter through shadow bans and inability to find his profile through search.
While automatic cars doing random things is certainly problematic, clearly the cause of the crash here isn't the tesla, it is other cars not respecting minimum safety distances and not able to stop when there is a traffic jam ahead.
The Tesla autopilot failure is really bad, for sure, but those human drivers should be banned for life. There’s no excuse for ramming into a traffic jam because you weren’t paying attention.
Edit: occurs to me that possibly I’m being overly harsh here. Is there something about the dynamics of traffic that puts the cars three or four slots back at greater risk when somebody unexpectedly stops? I would assume that the immediately following car is at the greatest risk, but after that everybody is at successively less risk as they should all be slowing and should all see each others’ brake lights.
It's a different situation when someone is slamming on their brakes from highway speed with nothing ahead of them.
1. It's the fault of the driver behind, for not leaving space
2. It's impossible to leave space, because cars will move in if there is a large gap
3. Why is this a problem?
"To keep a smooth traffic flow, some highways also have minimum speed limits. If you drive slower than the minimum speed you can halt the traffic flow and create a dangerous condition. Even if there is no minimum speed limit, those driving too slow can be as dangerous as those who drive too fast."
https://dmv.ny.gov/about-dmv/chapter-8-defensive-driving#yre...
The first driver has some reaction time needed so he’ll start breaking after the Tesla starts breaking. Which means, assuming they were at the same speed initially, that the 1st car will have to break a bit harder than the Tesla.
Then the second car will be in the same situation, it will have to break a bit harder than then first. 5 cars later, you are at the hardest possible breaking power, as it’s ultimately limited by adherence.
So, if there’s not a larger gap in the thread of cars somewhere to allow for breaking less hard than the car in front, it’s more or less inevitable.
To mitigate it, each driver needs to look 2 or 3 cars ahead, not just at the car in front. Everybody should do that but it's understandable if they don't (and it might be hard to see clearly, especially in a dark tunnel).
People often forget about the most important traffic rule: it is not allowed to cause an unsafe situation.
But you would need to prove that incorrect automatic breaking is intentional, which has not been proven in any court I know of.
You are putting other people into an emergency situation which is endangering everyone around you.
It's not that simple. If it was it would be legal to break check someone and it would be that persons fault for crashing in to you.
The driver's account, as quoted here, doesn't even make sense. In the first sentence it says he was driving along in lane 1, the car slowed, and he "felt an impact."
The next part is contradictory, citing a different lane (2), a different cruising speed, and then a lane change... and no impact. WTH?
The cause of the crash is the Tesla. You are not allowed to stop on bridges, in tunnels and several other places. The crashes starting with the Nth car and not the 1st is normal. Reaction time of the first car eats into the reaction of the second and so on until there's no more time to stop. Understand that cars further back do not see the car in front of them applying the brakes and slowing down, they are seeing a car moving at normal speed instantly crashing. Minimum safety distance is not as big as reaction time plus stopping to zero, that would be huge.
edit: to make it clear, we are debating whether the Tesla is at fault, not whether the other could have avoided it. Creating a dangerous situation still puts you at fault, you can not be allowed to do so at any time on the grounds that everybody else should avoid you.
Creating a dangerous situation is not acceptable on the grounds that other drivers should be able to avoid it.
Drivers are indeed expected to always be prepared for sudden stops even at the highest speeds.
If a human driver did it deliberately as the Tesla did (since it was designed to pull over and stop) then I would consider it a criminal level traffic violation on the part of the stopping car.
It was deemed to be be 100% my fault. Here, if you run into the back of the car in front, it is always your fault. No exceptions.
It makes sense: you should always leave enough room to stop, so I couldn't really complain. But, if everybody did that on that particular busy roundabout, it would result in gridlock.
I drive for several years, and can say my brain relies heavily on this sort of predictable stuff like "that car has free intersection in front of it, it will move forward".
If you think like a good citizen, yes.
In a country north of UK the law was once the same. People with worn down cars would find the perfect opportunity to slam their brakes, intentionally get hit from behind and claim insurance.
If it had been a large deer, of course he should have stopped, at that point it's the safety of the people inside the car.
In law for insurance purposes it needs to be clear cut, person behind is almost always at fault. But that doesn't mean they are the cause of the accident in all cases. There is nuance to these things, and part of that is that braking for a rabbit, or using Level 2 automation, is increasing the chance of an accident happing on the road.
If the way you drive increases the risk of someone driving into the back of you, even if they haven't left enough space, you are at fault in my mind.
If the possibility exists that a driver in front of you may stop suddenly why not always leave a minimum amount of space for a safe stop considering there is virtually no downside to doing so?
Being a safe driver is being aware that other people, including the people behind you, may not be leaving enough space. Suddenly stopping for a rabbit, from a speed of 50mph, is f-ing stupid and massively increasing the risk of a serious accident on the road.
Using a Level 2 automation that can randomly stop for no reason is not safe driving, you are increasing the chances that someone who is too close drives into the back of you.
Just because someone else is driving unsafely doesn't absolve you of the responsibility of being aware of that and not driving safely yourself.
The reasoning doesn't make sense because it is applied retroactively. The parent poster doesn't want to take responsibility for their unsafe driving practice and tries to place the blame on the other driver.
Cars suddenly stopping in front of you isn't some unpredictable rare event. You are told this as part of the licensing procedure, and this is the reason minimum safety distance exists. The solution is obvious and known to any licensed driver. As such, it is unreasonable and unacceptable, to not follow the minimum safety distance.
For example, pedestrians crossing a bike path. Because a lot of people clearly don’t walk often they will just walk out without looking. People aware of their surroundings will look both ways. As soon as you see someone do that you can pass close to them without spooking them because you know they’re aware.
My point here is a ton of this comes down to acting predictably. Even a simple act like looking at someone will alleviate a ton of uncertainty.
The barriers to fully autonomous self-driving are huge and not necessarily technical. Acting predictably, being able to explain actions, drivers driving differently because another vehicle is automated and cultural differences.
Intentionally stopping inside a tunnel is a pretty clear cut case of dangerous driving over here.
I still suspect it would be classed as dangerous driving as there wasn't a need to stop and they did find a safe place to stop.
If it did suddenly brake though and it was the car, that seems like something Tesla should be liable for. The time taken for any driver, when a car starts automatically braking, to assess the situation and override isn't going to be enough to avoid the dangerous situation.
The car does stop pretty suddenly.
My driving school teacher used to say: always remember that the car ahead of you could suddenly stop at any time for a reason that you might not know.
The car ended up half it's length.
Yes, you should remember that vehicles can suddenly stop. This means keeping a safe distance from the vehicle in front of you, and looking beyond that vehicle to anticipate what is going to happen. However, a vehicle illegally throwing itself in front of you and doing basically an emergency stop because it just feels like it is not something a reasonable driver is expected to predict.
If you look at the video, you can see that the first vehicle is almost at a full stop when it hits the Tesla - its driver performed as expected. The second vehicle comes to a full stop before hitting the first one, so that's also going quite well. The third vehicle (a rather large truck) doesn't brake but instead swerves into the other lane, almost hitting another car. This dooms vehicle number four, which suddenly finds itself mere feet away from a stopped vehicle. Five through seven are tailgating and never see it coming for the same reason. Number eight is able to stop in time.
The speed limit here is 50mph. Assuming they were driving the speed limit, the typical stopping distance would be 174 feet. I can assure you, nobody keeps a distance of 174 feet between them and the car in front.
Can you provide an example of someone getting a life sentence because of an accident caused due to braking? That doesn't sound right.
[1]:https://www.sentencingcouncil.org.uk/offences/crown-court/it...
Conversely if you need to stop suddenly, e.g. something has crossed the road in front of you (or you think it has), you don't worry about the vehicles behind, you just stop.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2023/01/11/an-8-c...
The second video here clearly shows it crashing into the Tesla:
https://theintercept.com/2023/01/10/tesla-crash-footage-auto...
> While automatic cars doing random things is certainly problematic, clearly the cause of the crash here isn't the tesla
The Tesla changed lanes, moving in front of the second vehicle, and immediately applied the brakes. That is 100% the Tesla's fault.
Try to park on the highway and claim the people who crash are at fault and see how it plays in a court of law
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?webmap=96ec...
I'm not saying the US could pull off a Singapore, but there's no excuse for San Francisco, or LA, or any other large city to have done so.
Yes the hyperloop is just a rebranded vacuum train/atmospheric railway... Patented in 1799 in London... Yup... Let that sink in.
I should also add that if you want to move around the west region of Tokyo, you're better off using a bus because there are no trains there that lets you move north or south. The Tobu Tojo Line, Seibu Ikebukuro Line, and the JR Chuo Line all move in the east/west direction.
Thanks for cutting through the meandering, pseudo-intellectual cruft with an answer than makes too much sense.
If you had a train you could drive your car onto it would be more equivalent.
Also train lines have far less coverage than highways.
Just look to Europe for what a large swath of the US could have if it invested in train infrastructure.
Train good, car bad.
If I had a working time machine, plus a magic want to make people do what I want, that might be a good argument. I don't have either, though. The world (or at least country) we live in didn't do that, and the mid-20th century was quite a while ago. Now what? Even if funding for rail magically cranked up today, we won't have ride-able lines for a decade, at best. Meanwhile, I've got places to go tomorrow, and rail isn't a realistic option.
> Just look to Europe for what a large swath of the US could have if it invested in train infrastructure.
Out in my part of the country, we don't have anything like Europe's population density. Your "could have had" would be very uneconomical out here.
> Train good, car bad.
Spare us the thought-terminating cliches, especially when they're wrong. Your post isn't convincing, but this parting shot doesn't make it any better. It just makes you sound like you're a propagandist.
That means I have fixed times, there is no flexibility if I wish to leave earlier or need to stay longer. If I do, I lose the initial charge plus a new 3 times more expensive ticket.
Ticket prices also varies depending on time, which means I have to leave really early and come back 13.5 hours later. And I'm exhausted.
1 out of 8 trains are cancelled or have severe delays, passengers are often rude or are being annoying in someway that makes it difficult to relax.
Trains are not the blessing you think they are.
Edit: Forgot to mention that I am lucky to live 10min away from the station. If I would live where I would like, it would mean 30-40min.
Where I live the national railway carrier lets you refund or exchange your tickets and seat reservations freely up until 15 minutes before the departure time, most ticket types are valid for a day (so you don’t have to buy one for a specific connection) and the prices are, I believe, more or less fixed. The delays are inevitable I guess in most larger networks.
I don’t take the train that often, but my experience is generally pretty good, especially as I’m starting to hate driving.
They could be a lot better in a lot of ways. In Europe there is still a huge investment in car infrastructure. And while land use wasnt as bad as in the US its still far from optimal.
I do dislike the selling of these specific tickets. I much prefer a system where you can just take the train.
When I used the ICE in Germany I would never get a reservation, just a general ticket. So if I missed one it didnt matter.
Not in heavy traffic.
An autonomous car can travel on both normal roads, and in an autonomous lane. Roads are everywhere -- there's a road leading up to most people's place of residence.
Trains rely on tracks which are not as common as roads. Trains are also not owned by individuals. Most people do not have a train station outside of their house.
A train can move more tonnage (see people) per unit of energy (kWhr/gallon of diesel/etc.) Than almost any other mode of transportation (gosh darn sailboats and barges being so efficient!) .
So why have 100's of electric motors and separate batteries to move people, when you can skip the batteries and have an electrified third rail and just an engine or two running a train for those hundreds of people.
Guess where the two passenger lines that come even vaguely to profitability are?
The population of the US is very coastal, which doesn’t map well to a hub and spoke system like rail. Contrast with Western Europe where A -> Paris/Berlin -> B is probably reasonably close to a straight line.
I'm all for the US pouring money into rail, but the fact is that we're _very_ bad at big infrastructure projects right now. That's not to say that we can't get better though.
You need to think about it on two metrics;
(1) density of transport; how many people per unit volume
(2) power to # of passengers.
On both counts trains are vastly superior to almost all other modes of transit other than boat.
Planes aren't either, what's your point? That people who need to go somewhere should be priced out of using _public_ infrastructure and require a personal investment currently in the tens of thousands for the cheapest autonomous cars?
> Most people do not have a train station outside of their house.
People have feet or a wheelchair, bicycles are a thing, trams and buses exist have you ever even been outside of suburbia?
Also, who implied that railways need to be privately owned?
> Planes aren't either, what's your point?
My point is that the comment I replied to implied that trains can replace cars. Trains cannot replace cars because they are a form of public transportation, which cannot easily replace cars.
> That people who need to go somewhere should be priced out
This is quite the leap. My comment did not argue the merits of either, merely that trains would not be a very good replacement for autonomous vehicle lanes.
> have you ever even been outside of suburbia?
This isn't useful to your argument. Why are you resorting to a personal attack?
> so they would not be a very good replacement for autonomous driving lanes.
Railways world-wide: 1,400,000 kilometres.
> Why are you resorting to a personal attack?
Are you seriously considering my putting out there that your personal experiences might influence your arguments to the point of not being credible a personal attack?
If it weren't because of price, I'm sure everybody would prefer flying private.
Flying commercial is pretty much as awful as it gets.
Oh, OK, the only reason we shouldn't move the 10,000 daily passengers between LAX and SFO in 10,000 planes a day is because of the price.
/s
But parent's comment was aimed at the one lane for self driving cars comment.
So I don’t see how you comment could apply to it. Yes we have roads leading up to almost everyone’s house. But in the case of a dedicated self driving lane proposal it would be as impractical As giving everyone a railway track leading to their home.
> Trains are not owned by individuals.
Exactly. So instead of building infrastructure to improve moving a few people at a time, improving infrastructure that helps move a few hundred at a time seems like a better investment.
Public transport is great, but you aren't going to convince others to support it by pretending it doesn't have any drawbacks compared to private transport.
Lanes for busses and vans? Yes. SDVs? Maybe in several decades, and they should still only be for HOVs only.
Lanes are really expensive, it's unreasobable to have an autonomous-only lane, so a shared lane is base. I propose that vehicles in autonomous node be restricted to the slow(est) lane, where it's safer to come to a sudden stop, and the driver, manufacturer and insurer have to contend with the probability of being flattened by an 18-wheeler.
0. We also reward high-occupancy for reducing traffic, and no-/low-emission vehicles for reducing pollution, both results have clear public benefits.
Let’s wait to get more info as to what the driver was doing and if they were incapacitated.
The FSD beta is pretty aggressive on making sure the driver is paying attention via both steering sensors, the in-cabin camera and the touch screen.
If that is its best then FSD has no business being on the road.
It was erratic and didn't give clear intent to other cars what it was trying to do.
I'm not defending Tesla's FSD, which I think is inferior for Tesla's reluctance to use LIDAR in addition to cameras. Current car AIs are imperfect, they need as much info as they can if we expect them to drive safer than humans.
Which is erratic and reckless.
If it was an emergency situation it should have put on hazard lights, waited until all surrounding cars passed, then changed lanes and very slowly decelerated until it stopped.
All while aggressively alerting the driver what is happening.
Thats not to excuse anyone, but it may have been a contributing factor.
It put on its hazards and gradually slowed to a stop. Noting fast or abrupt. Easy for any driver paying attention to recognize and be ready for.
It was nothing like what happened in this video.
Personally I doubt this was the car trying to stop safely due to driver inattention. Seems more likely an AutoPilot/FSD bug or the phantom braking all the way to a stop at the worst time.
Or terrible driving by the driver if they had been in full control and are lying about FSD.
We were going past a bicyclist in their lane appropriately. I had auto pilot engaged. As we passed the cyclist, they moved over towards us slightly, but never left the bike lane.
The car suddenly went into a full stop, which was a pretty quick stop.
I can understand the car may have thought the cyclist was going to go in front of the car, but the scenario wasn’t one in which a human wouldn’t have slammed the brakes. My wife commented that we’re lucky there weren’t cars. Whine is because they might not have reacted as quickly.
To me, this shows the potential danger of these safety systems false positives. Not that I wouldn’t continue to use the systems because I believe overall these systems make me safer than without them.
But as always, the danger isn’t the car I’m in, it’s the one driven by another driver who’s not paying attention.
If the sole problem was that the driver wasn't paying attention, the least it could have done would have been to put on the hazards and very slowly come to a stop. It would have been even better if it simply continued until there was a safe shoulder to stop on. The chance of having an accident by stopping on the bridge is much higher than just driving on autopilot to the end of the bridge and then pulling over.
If the problem is that this would create a moral hazard where drivers stopped holding onto the steering wheel when on bridges with no shoulder, the car could play loud obnoxious noises inside the car when this happened.
I was watching the video and the whole time I kept thinking that if I saw my car slowing down for no reason (and my Autopilot not FSD) has slowed down "ghosted" before I would have immediately taken control. Why didn't the driver do that?
> the car could play loud obnoxious noises inside the car when this happened.
I'll be interested to hear about what happened there but I know if you don't toggle the wheel or take action when on Autopilot the car will flash blue and beep at you to take control and if you keep doing it it'll disengage Autopilot until you stop and park the car.
I haven't used "FSD" much at all so I'm not 100% familiar with it but there seems like a host of problems here and the software powering "FSD" is but one of those. It saddens me though that people aren't asking the best question here which is why are we driving everywhere in the first place?
Interesting because a computer was involved we are incensed. "No business being on the road"... but the millions of other car crashes "oh yeah, well humans make mistakes!"
Tesla's claims of being "safer than human drivers" is as much a testament to their technology as it is to how poor human drivers are.
You can see them get out of the vehicle and walk around a bit in the video[0], so I guess they were not incapacitated - see around the 46s mark in the video. The driver also claimed they were using FSD at the time the car performed the maneuver.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/108kpgo/footag...
The driver was on I-80. Unless this is a Tesla employee, Tesla FSD is not enabled on interstate highways at this time; when you're on a major no-stops no-traffic-light highway, it defaults to Autosteer+TACC, with his subscription likely only enabling the auto-lane-change feature. All this means is that the likely culprits are either TACC stopping on its own as if there was a car there, or the AEB system performing an emergency stop to avoid hitting a (phantom) person or car; but based on the footage, it looks like a TACC failure since it doesn't look like an emergency stop you'd see in IIHS videos[0].
Navigate on autopilot can change lanes on the highway and follow highway exits without user intervention.
IMO when someone says they're using "FSD" they mean they're subscribed/paid for FSD, have the FSD beta turned on, and are letting the car drive itself (whether that's FSD on city streets, or navigate on autopilot on the highway.)
Small nit but this isn't true. FSD will show the newer, much more detailed preview. When switching to highway mode it will revert to the old, plane grey lines preview.
A turn signal does not give you the right to the lane. You have to look, there has to be enough room.
There were not 11-13 car lengths between the car in the left lane and the Tesla when it brake checked them.
Generalizing about Americans is tiresome, by the way. It makes you look petty and ignorant. Which might be true, but on the off chance you didn't intend to come across that way...
But ultimately the behaviour of the Tesla FSD system is what caused the chain of accidents.
They weren't following the Tesla. And a reasonable safe distance does not usually account for the guy in front of you doing an assisted stop. That is far enough outside reasonable expectations.
A distance where a sudden stop results in a collision is not a reasonable safe distance.
So the first car to hit it may have had a very safe distance between it in the next car, but the Tesla cut that significantly with its sudden maneuver.
I can't tell if the people making these comments about the drivers behind the Tesla being responsible are such defensive drivers that they never leave less than 6 seconds in front of them, or they're tailgaters themselves, or just being mendacious.
There might be a "laffer curve" where increasing the follow distance of other cars and limiting overcorrections would increase capacity, rather than decrease it, at the current level.
If we're getting regular "phantom jams", we're probably following too closely.
Additionally, there's a lot to be said about vehicles not acting like they have human drivers. This Tesla basically acted like a psychopath.
I have one car with regular cruise control and one with adaptive cruise. I am more relaxed with the standard one because I get the signals I need visually to know if I need to pass the car in front or not. I can't tell if my other car is going to drop from 80mph to 60mph all of a sudden until it's basically happened. Better autopilot could help, but then would I end up in this situation?
3 seconds is a very long time? Also: 3 seconds of turn signal is a clear indication of "i am going to change lanes and fully come to a stop"? And then turning off all signals and coming to a full stop without hazards on is a clear indication of "i am stopping"?
[0] https://www.gov.uk/driving-lessons-learning-to-drive/using-l...
This is incredibly true and obvious.
It's likely people monitoring their car aren't doing anything at all: sleeping, reading a book, whatever.
But if anything, actual monitoring is harder than doing: it means actively watching what the machine does, understanding it, thinking about what one would have done, doing a diff and analyzing it, all in real time, all the time. It's exhausting.
That a situation like this is even legal is amazing.
It's as if they expect the speed limit sign to adapt to the circumstances. They have the attitude, "Well if I need to slow down, why does the sign say I can go 70mph?"
It could be freezing rain with black ice or a fog with zero visibilty, and the overwhelming majority of American drivers would not change their driving one bit. I have seen this in every corner of the country and it is noticeably different from other countries.
There will always be unexpected obstructions in the roadbed of major highways. Stuff falls off. People lose control and roll and end up obstructing the lanes.
So while the Tesla and its self-driving mode were the proximate cause of the obstruction that led to the collision in this particular instance, they were absolutely unrelated to the actual cause of this entire category of accidents.
This attitude affects many other aspects of American life. Notably, gun violence. Exactly the same feeling of entitlement to go full speed ahead and damn the consequences dictates the occasional outcome of both highway driving and eating your lunch quietly in the school cafeteria.
There is little difference between an American in a pickup truck barreling down out of the Alleghenies at 80mph in fog and freezing rain and and American with a not-meaningfully-regulated gun barreling into a classroom and opening fire.
Both are the direct result of a sense of entitlement, and both regularly lead to mayhem and death.
You can't blame the Tesla for this.
It's so frustrating how mind-bogglingly polar everything has to be. Nothing in your entire post precludes the Tesla from being partially at fault. No matter how long you go on about how reckless American drivers are (and they are), none of it serves as one iota of evidence as to whether or not the Tesla behaved reasonably or whether its features were advertised properly. Why is absolutely everything either an admit-nothing attack on our "enemies" or an allow-nothing defense of our "allies"?
Sure you can, because this was 100% the fault of the Tesla. The SUV did nothing wrong. Nothing.
As for the safety distance: This is a valid point. If the Tesla has not kept a safe distance to the following car when changing lanes, there is a problem with the automation. It should always be as defensive as possible. I don't see that from the police report, but the video shows the distance to be rather short, maybe two car lengths. Call it 10m. The second car doesn't really seem to brake very hard (no emergency braking assistant?) and that crash is definitely on the Tesla as it cut the distance, unless the speed limit in that tunnel would be around 20kph or so. But now it gets interesting: The third car does stop successfully. The big pileup happens afterwards.
In conclusion: The big pileup happens because the third car suddenly stops - and rightfully so but the following cars don't keep their distance to that third car. The Tesla getting rear ended is just a lazy excuse for these drivers that simply drive recklessly.
Abolutely nothing was in front of Tesla, nothing could have loose the load.
The difference is that the humans in the cars behind will be able to see that too and anticipate the reason for the braking. In this case, the Tesla just changes into the leftmost lane and then brakes very quickly to a stop for no apparent reason. A human doing the same thing would almost certainly be at fault too.
You can see on the video that it's not just suddenly stopping, it's changing lanes (with what appears to be very little room from the car behind) and then suddenly stoppping.
The Tesla safety report which the company boastfully released wouldn't have counted this incident since the Tesla itself wasn't harmed.
Stuff like this happens all the time. Pile ups on highways have been a regular thing for as long as highways have existed. The pattern is always the same: something unexpected happens in front of somebody and they fail to respond or they over react. The problem recurses behind them as more vehicles become part of the problem. It doesn't matter if the problem at the front is real or not. The actual problem is that drivers further back are not prepared for a thing that should be considered something that can happen at any time.
The car in front of you might have all sorts of reasons to suddenly slam the brakes. You have no way of telling when they will do that because they are blocking your view to what's in front. There might be an unseen obstacle, engine failure, fog, a hole in the road, whatever. You have no way of telling until the brake lights in front of you come on. It doesn't actually matter why they slam their brakes or whether there even is a good reason for them to do that. You have to be ready for that eventuality and the appropriate response is going to be slamming your own brakes. And the car behind you had better be ready for that too.
Obviously we had a cascading failure of multiple drivers not being ready for that here. And they are dodging their own responsibility by pointing to the problem in front of them instead of the idiot behind them, or themselves. The second car obviously wasn't the problem as they avoided crashing into the Tesla. Good job. The Tesla is fine. It was the driver behind them that was the real problem.
The irony of human failures like this is that taking them out of the loop might make things safer. The Tesla stopped. It doesn't matter why. Human drivers behind it failed to act. Would that have happened if they all had FSD on or would we just have had a weird traffic jam occurring for no good reason at all? That too happens all the time.
The automated cruise control and lane-keep on my previous car, an Audi, would occasionally do crazy things too. The hyper-focus on this being Tesla's fault continues to baffle.
I think this is the thing that makes the most sense. But if I were to bend over backwards giving the benefit of the doubt - is it possible the driver feared resuming the previous speed because they were worried the car saw an obstacle that they couldn't?
Like the article suggests - if you're not fully engaged, it's as if you're driving impaired. And there's so much automated that it's difficult to be so vigilant. Once the car starts braking, how much latency can I afford just assessing what caused it to slow down? How hard is it braking and how closely is traffic following me?
I feel like such a shill responding to these comments, but based on my experience, these same drivers would get into accidents in other brand's cars as well. We only focus on the story because it's Tesla.
I'm not sure what the solution is.
Additionally, how can you blame the driver? Did you watch the video? It's not as if the car slowly stopped. It slammed on the brakes. There wasn't time for the driver to correct for this before the car behind -- which Autopilot had just moved in front of -- slammed into them.
Tesla's Autopilot and Full Self Driving get a lot of focus and criticism for two big reasons; 1) their product names clearly and deliberately paints a picture that the features do not live up to and disclaimers do not fix that. 2) they are unsafe on public roads as they operate today. They are a menace to public safety.
It's not a Tesla problem. I think we hyper-focus on Tesla because their system is the best. This is a problem for all automated driving systems (even the basic ones found in almost all brands now.)
What is the reason I should pay all of this extra money and still have to maintain full focus and attention on the road around me at all times? What is the market for it unless it's for me to be able to zone out more while driving?
Umpty-years ago I worked on robot tanks for the US Army, and we had a devil of a time answering this question. If the driver still has to be fully monitoring a single vehicle at all times, why isn't s/he driving it directly? What benefit does this not-quite real self-driving provide? Our soldiers told us that it mostly got in their way, because they wanted it go over here and the computer wanted it to go over there, and so they felt like they were fighting the computer more than anything else. It is possible that someone will come up with a better adjudication than we did, but it really made me question whether any level between 2 and 5 is actually useful to anyone.
Until "self driving" is good enough that you're legally allowed to ride it drunk, it should not be allowed to do anything more complicated than radar cruise and lane-keeping.
Other self driving implementations e.g. Cruise, Waymo have LiDAR which is an additional and in my opinion necessary sensor for detecting objects.
Because in this case it sure looks like a phantom breaking issue.
Anyone know how much a LiDAR system cost nowadays?
https://www.motorsafety.org/us-government-investigates-1-7-m...
https://www.macheforum.com/site/threads/phantom-braking-expe...
https://www.chevybolt.org/threads/ok-lets-talk-phantom-braki...
The focus on perfection rather than improvement is surprising to see on HN.
All those examples just reinforce my point that it's a necessary sensor.
On the other hand the sooner we get FSD cars, the sooner we will also get ASI and with it potentially the end of human kind.
Like, how do people reason about this? It seems uniquely American to me.. These videos of people simply driving into stuff that's in plain sight right in their lane? What do they do if there's a fallen tree, tire, shopping cart? Simply pile into it instead of braking?
I'm wondering because, in my country, when you drive a car, you're supposed to pay attention to the road, and always be ready to break if something gets in your way ? But in USA, the thinking seems to be "I'm not driving too fast, I have the freedom of way here" ?
As for the article, all points are entirely valid! Systems need to either be fully autonomous, or require some level of constant engagement.. This is kind of analogous to the previous stuff written about the deskilling of labor and automation.. It's an impossible position to put someone in "this works in every easy case, almost never fails, and when it fail, it might get arbitrarily complex and require the exact skills that the operator has very rarely any opportunity to practice"
The way this comes about has to do with the suburban model. When you're in an environment where traffic is commonplace, you can drive defensively or aggressively. During traffic crunches, defensive drivers are completely walked all over by aggressive drivers, and will easily double their time sitting in traffic. Leaving a safe distance means leaving room for people to dangerously merge.
This leads to a nash equilibrium of aggressive driving, and now you literally have Americans criticizing the idea of "brake-checking" tailgater as a way of signaling their displeasure at being tailgated (literally just tapping the brakes to slow down).
It's a completely messed up system, and it terrifies me that it seems to be spreading to other countries.
A six year old behind the wheel sitting in your lap.
That's also known plainly as "illegal".
I have no fucking idea why this is being tolerated on our public roads, nor why SAE has even classified these child-equivalent levels of autonomy as if they're acceptable.
Well, you could have extremely visible/audible signals for the driver to take over when the driving system is failing (internal lighting becoming red and blaring alarms), but that wouldn't be very popular I guess, especially with half-assed self-driving systems.
-- diff feature - still - eeek --
Person: lol how are you gonna pay people enough to test something that might endanger them?
Tesla: no they will pay us for the privilege
> then I’ll see a crash like this, [...] and I realize that, no, people still don’t get it.
That's just an example. You can't make conclusions based on a single example, you need lots of data. Your feelings that this is less safe than regular drivings are not enough to justify your conclusions that L2 is less safe than regular driving. I have the feelings of the opposite (I think it reduces the number of accidents), but I don't know wether this is true. Accidents that were avoided by L2 don't make it in the news, there's a huge selection bias here.
I think this kind of article might be very dangerous, because it makes people more afraid, and if L2 is actually safer on average, then reducing its usage will just increase the number of accidents.
So you can switch on your hazard lights, gradually slow, let cars past and then pull over.
No normal, competent driver would act like this incident.
1. How many fatalities per mile does tesla FSD have, compared to its best alternative if we ban it?
2. Focusing on specific failure cases is not relevant since the political decision to allow it is all or nothing.
3. It'd be perfectly logical to accept road testing FSD, even if it's significantly worse in some areas, as long as this is not exploitable, AND the net gain from allowing it is still overall positive.
I'd like to hear reasonable disagreements like "Tesla isn't actually all-in net positive" or "Here's why we should judge policy by something more than just net lives lost/saved".
Edit: the discussion fragments into two versions depending on the state of facts, which isn't clear:
A) Tesla FSD is not actually safer per-mile. If this is the case, I and most people would probably agree not to allow FSD on public roads. That's not really what this is about.
B) Tesla FSD is actually, on net safer per mile, but we should not allow it anyway.
I'm welcome to hear other options, too, but while replying I'd like to hear which one you think.
Most people, especially non technical people, aren’t going to care about numbers that say it’s safer or better on net when the car still occasionally does things that humans view as crazy or stupid.
i.e. if Tesla causes 100 new crashes of type A but saves 200 of type B, isn't that a gain? Even if type A crashes are one which humans don't normally make.
A way in which I agree with you is if type B crashes are more avoidable by conscientious drivers, and you feel that your personal base rate of B is therefore already low, and that introducing new type A risk is actually NOT an all-in improvement for you.
Insisting on not replacing a driver until every subcategory of driving type is strictly improved seems too stringent.
You still have an out here by saying that you're willing to accept more net risk due to "meta" factors like "driver not meeting minimal competence factors". But it would still be more honest in that case to fully admit that this reasoning requires knowingly accepting likely real-world increased fatalities.
And as an aside, for humans, "minimal competence" testing is reasonable - but at large scales & in statistical realms, such metrics value in protection from false claims are of less value since we already have millions of miles of real-world performance tests.
My overall analysis is: Tesla has some very serious enemies in other automakers, lawyers, etc. And yet, there are no clear studies or statistics saying they're worse, and Tesla claims they are safer. This isn't a very good analysis and I'd love to have a clearer more well-defined group for statistical comparison, but it at least seems plausible to me.
By that logic proffeshional racing drivers should be allowed to drive drunk and stoned
I think you're overestimating human drivers frankly. Collisions like this one happen between humans every day, multiple times per day across North America, you just don't hear about it because normal human error is at fault.
That a Tesla crashes in ways a human wouldn't doesn't seem true. From what I've seen, even the most common accident type for a Tesla occurs at a lower rate than non-Tesla cars.
Do you have more info that's more specific about the types of crashes?
The problem here is a lot of the worst crashes are caused by humans behaving crazy and stupid. It's not a good criticism.
This is a discussion that comes up a lot in medical technology, and if I had to guess why this form of rhetoric fails is not just because it's easier to empathize with a human, but also because when the failure case seems "simple", the issue seems a lot more like an oversight and systemic issue. That in turn makes the probability of failure probably look much higher than it really is, while also implying further undiscovered oversights.
That also kinda addresses point 2, in that, specific failure case or not, it implies a weak system with obvious oversights. That definitely doesn't help the political case for complete FSD approval.
I'm generally skeptical of this utilitarian, rationalist form of rhetoric, if only because it's overly optimistic about the ability to overcome issues in some amorphous future. Sure, a future with full FSD is probably a net good, and we can even say it's probably in within our lifetimes, but the claim that future mitigated harms outweighs all current harms of live-testing FSD won't win enough people over, and drowns out other possible policies like advocating for adapting our infrastructure to support FSD rather than having cars attempt to read signs and signals designed for humans.
That said, at some point FSD could have been banned, it wasn't, and we are living in a world where it's likely saving lives on net. The only problem is if naive arguments to ban it are accepted despite them not actually challenging its net safety gains.
I don’t agree with that assessment.
It needs to make fewer mistakes than humans at all times, not just most of the time. Great with a disaster here and there is terrible.
A: occasional random suicide (100 deaths/year), no other deaths B: no random suicide, 10k deaths per year from normal driving
You would be saying you choose B?
It's not really about the exact numbers here - just trying to get on the same page - would you really weigh your uncomfortableness with "random deaths" highly enough that you would accept increased actual deaths?
Another possibility is that the random death situation really is a signal of "actually hard-to-detect badness". If so, it should come out in statistics and we should easily be able to come to agreement in that case.
But, if the choice really is between accepting "weird mistakes+lower deaths" or "status quo+many deaths" I feel pretty uncomfortable accepting the latter knowing the real-world consequences.
What if the investigation here showed the Tesla was 100% correct to do what it did?
What it did is so odd I wouldn’t want to trust it. Maybe the problem is it needs to fail in a more human-like way?
If the death numbers get low enough, I think it will likely speak for itself and people will trust it. But it can’t be a 30% reduction in deaths. It needs to be like 95%.
Enough that it feels safer instead of questionable/dangerous. Even if it was actually safer the entire time.
Secondly, that's what planes are. A lot of new plane safety comes from very automated, very complicated systems.
In some situations these planes fail in a way that leaves the pilot in a more dangerous plane than one with no electronics at all.
Why do we tolerate this? Because it doesn't matter how poorly something handles failure, what dominates is the base rate of the failure occuring.
If you ban these extra-automated driver aids, and people drive Teslas less, more people die. Same as if it causes a delay in developing real FSD.
I would rather live next door to an RBMK-1000, than drive a car 10 years older than my current one.
I caution you against changing automation policy based on an accident caused by human error.
We don’t know if that’s what happened.
And that's daily. It's only every few months that we see a story like this, and this one had no fatalities.
It's totally fair to criticize Tesla, Autopilot, and/or FSD, but these discussions always implicitly accept that the status quo is acceptable, and whether or not this technology should be allowed is debatable. The status quo is an unimaginable amount of human death and injury that we accept only because it's been normalized.
Delaying self-driving cars by one year comes at a cost of up to 1.35 million human lives [1]. That doesn't excuse failures like these, but the context should be understood.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index...
Citation needed. There is nothing so far proving that self driving cars currently have less crashes then humans in comparable conditions. And they disengage in difficult conditions when most crashes happen.
Dont just start with assumption "self driving is currently safer" and then go on blame people for not trusting it.
My claim doesn't depend on that assumption. My claim depends on it being the case someday.
If the US tightens regulations on ADAS today, and that results in the day self-driving cars fully replace human-driven ones being 11 years away instead of 10, it has been delayed one year, at a cost of up to 1.35 million human lives.
If they tighten regulation, they are saving lives. Also, mandating companies to put in more testing would force companies to test. Without that, they are economically motivated to make big claims, but to to not invest into reproducible quality.
If regulation delays the day in the future that it is safer than human drivers and that human drivers are replaced, then it is costing lives. And it would.
The only way it wouldn't is if the regulation saves more lives in the meantime than would have been saved by having self-driving cars ubiquitous sooner, but that's tough to argue when we're already losing 3,700 per day.
And if regulators won't act, it will never be safe, because it is cheaper to produce unsafe products. It earns more to lie about safety of a product, unless you have functional regulations.
So are all 20 manufacturers going to get the right to endanger my life just so they can train their self-driving? Or is this spesific to Tesla?
Do I and my family get some compensation for this danger, or in case we are killed? Do we get a share of the profit this self driving car will generate for Tesla ?
What if Tesla never produces a good self deiving car, goes bancrupt, then I died for nothing?
Defensive driving was one of the first thing I learned, before even getting my drivers license, how come others seem to flat out ignore things like that, even for their own safety?
Are you seriously avoiding to leave any sort of space in front of you just because other cars might go into that space? Seems like a dangerous game to play not just for yourself, but for others too.
That's just it, why not? I always have the expectation that some unexpected can happen around me in traffic, at any time, and position myself accordingly. If I'm too close to the one in front of me so I can't handle them braking suddenly, then that's telling me I'm too close.
I've been close to a lot of accidents, but never actually in one. Being vigilant at all times when driving and taking breaks when I stop being vigilant, I'm sure have played a huge role in being able to avoid these accidents.
I guess, you're not part of the target audience. :-)
(More seriously, congratulations and many thanks for being a responsible adult.)