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Comment by hbarka | Hacker News Reader

It’s relatively easy to take over the controls which instantly disengages FSD or Autopilot. Why this Bay Bridge driver didn’t do that just boggles me. It’s almost like these drivers have lost or no sense of a mechanical aptitude and so when something like this happens they freak out and freeze. No mechanical sense at all and just stays there to get rear ended. No athletic sense either. Driving school ought to incorporate playing tag or pushing around a grocery cart in a supermarket for a day and equate all that you do as an analog to driving mechanics and athleticism. (Just don’t use IKEA carts or you’ll go mad.)

It’s really easy to step on the accelerator or brake or turn the wheel which instantly makes the car human operated again.

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To start doing that, a driver needs situational awareness. Getting that takes time. If you truly believe it's fully self driving, you think you can afford to look away and loose that awareness.

This gap between 'sometimes needs attention' and 'never needs attention' is hard to bridge and very dangerous, obviously

I’ve seen the video. This driver had Autopilot on and experienced “phantom braking”. If you drive a Tesla you’ll have experienced phantom braking at some point, a false positive condition when the Autopilot cameras thinks there’s a wall up ahead, for example if going under an overpass. It will literally brake. You step on the accelerator and cuss once or twice at Elon and you’re good to move on. This Bay Bridge driver could not make a decision and let the car brake to a stop. It’s not uncommon. Anecdotally I would say Teslas get rear-ended quite often.

You're not making a good case for Tesla. Maybe the best thing to do is to not buy a Tesla in the first place.

>“If you drive a Tesla you’ll have experienced phantom braking at some point, a false positive condition when the Autopilot cameras thinks there’s a wall up ahead, for example if going under an overpass. It will literally brake. You step on the accelerator and cuss once or twice at Elon and you’re good to move on. This Bay Bridge driver could not make a decision and let the car brake to a stop. It’s not uncommon. Anecdotally I would say Teslas get rear-ended quite often.”

This level of apologism is shocking. “Everyone knows Teslas emergency brake to a stop in the middle of highway traffic randomly, bro. Just gotta be ready for it! No biggie!”

Yikes. Ever considered rental cars? Borrowing a friend’s car that you’re not familiar? Or just 100+ years of automotive history in which random no-input braking was considered completely unacceptable and not even a thing?

Hey you’re misquoting me. I’m no Tesla apologist actually looking to get rid of it but this is the way you live with Autopilot. I’m done with Musk and his hypocrisy. All I’m saying is that everyone and their neighbor now drive Teslas but don’t have a mechanical sense for what lane keeping assist is.

The byproduct of the migration of the modern automobile into a rolling living room will, no doubt, result in people driving who should not. I don’t mean to sound like a “standard shift get off my lawn and into a jeep” old man but…

Yes, it’s all anecdotal evidence from both my time as a vehicle owning adult and in my nearly 20 years picking up people from car accidents as a firefighter.

But yeah, super easy to just zone out these days.

It's also really easy to criticize from an armchair.

Nothing to do with mechanical sense or athleticism, all to do with attention and surprise. Self-driving encourages people to reduce their vigilance - after all, that's what they bought it for, so they could do less driving - while at the same time it introduces a whole new category of surprises.

People are trained for normal driving. They are not trained to deal with this kind of emergency.

A self-driving system that can't be relied on and needs constant vigilance has turned the "driver" into a driving instructor who needs to do nothing except for occasionally correct the mistakes of the computer. This is a harder job than regular driving.

It drives me nuts that we could expect people who are not driving to maintain the same level of engagement as someone actively driving. It is absurd.

Not to mention as peoples skills at controlling a car atrophy, via being a passenger, we expect them to be able to immediately switch on in a high pressure high context situation and make good decisions.

I will happily use a car that drives itself. But only once I am sat facing backwards, purely a passenger.

The issue is the FSD, not the driver. Also, drivers might not react quickly enough; what reaction time is needed to OODA. Finaly, if drivers are 100% engaged, they have no use for FSD.

If this exact same thing had happened 20 years ago, we would all agree that the people to blame are the ones behind. The person who rear-ends another is almost always at fault.

So even if FSD made the very poor decision to slow down or stop right there (and I will point out we have good reason to think this was not FSD, but rather autopilot or human driving), the blame still goes to the rear-ender.

The Tesla switched fucking lanes. You're can't fault someone in the second lane for not predicting some asshole will cut them off and slam on the brakes. The robot is a laughably bad driver. If a human had the collective record of either Autopilot or FSD they'd be uninsurable and have long ago lost their license.

The Tesla is certainly at fault here, and the driver who rear-ended it is not at fault. The cars behind him are another matter, though.

Well, the police, the judges, and the insurance companies fault people for rear-ending others in similar situations all the time.

Only due to the absence of other information. This is why lots of people have started using dashcams.

Yeah... But in the vast majority of cases, rear-ending is caused by some combination of inattention and tailgating rather than the malice of the leading car. Let's not forget that humans are really bad at driving in general, and that this is extremely frequent.

And even if the leading car was non-malicious and merely incompetent, it's your responsibility to not hit anything in front of you. For liability, you worry about what's in front, not what's behind.

The only way you get out of being liable for rear-ending someone is if the leading car maliciously caused you to rear-end them, or if something unpredictable happened that would have made it impossible for you to avoid hitting the other car.

> The only way you get out of being liable for rear-ending someone is if the leading car maliciously caused you to rear-end them, or if something unpredictable happened that would have made it impossible for you to avoid hitting the other car.

This is literally what happened in this situation. If you have a dashcam and something like this happens, you won't be found at fault.

The driver behind the Tesla ought to have noticed the Tesla signal its lane change and would have had several seconds to ensure they were leaving sufficient space for the Tesla. If the driver had been attentive and slowed down prior to the Tesla changing lanes, as he should have, then this would have been totally avoidable.

If you went to court for having rear-ended someone in a similar set of circumstances, that's basically what the judge would tell you. Would that be frustrating to hear? Yes, but it's how it works.

It's called autopilot. The person engaging it may come to the understanding that it is the car who is driving, not they. Yet the reality is they must be more attentive than a regular driver because the Tesla can behave unpredictability. Much like overseeing an unprepared student driver.

> I will point out we have good reason to think this was not FSD, but rather autopilot or human driving

No, the actual research says otherwise

> If this exact same thing had happened 20 years ago, we would all agree that the people to blame are the ones behind.

No, not if someone comes to a sudden stop in a busy lane.

Coming to a sudden stop in a busy lane may well be necessary if there's some unexpected obstacle in front of you. Which is why road rules require maintaining sufficient distance to the car in front of you that if it has to brake hard, you have enough time to react and do the same thing without ramming into it.

IIRC police has already said that at least some cars involved in the accident did not maintain such a safe distance, and their drivers thus bear their share of responsibility for the crash.

What “actual research”? This article? There’s no source.

> No, not if someone comes to a sudden stop in a busy lane. Why not? You’re meant to maintain enough distance to the car in front of you at all times that you should be able to come to a complete stop without rear-ending them.

>It’s relatively easy to take over the controls which instantly disengages FSD or Autopilot.

What a naive assertion. Have you read takeover studies? Driver assistance systems put drivers in a state of inattention (universally, not just ones named “Autopilot” or “Full Self-Driving”, which undoubtedly makes it worse). Regaining attention and building a model of actors and hazards around you takes time — too much time to make the necessary split second maneuver to avoid an accident at highway speeds.

So, if you constantly have to maintain full attention even with FSD engaged, what are you really buying for $15k? You don’t get to sleep. You don’t get to watch a movie. You don’t even get to relax your awareness at all. If you do, the company that you paid $15k to for “Full Self-Driving” will say YOU were the one being irresponsible.

Basically, I see Tesla’s FSD as the following proposition: “Would you like to pay $15k to allow an overly-cautious and sometimes-erratic beginner driver to drive you around everywhere? Most of the time, this driver will drive so cautiously that it will frustrate you and confuse other drivers on the road. This driver may also get confused by shadows and abnormal visual phenomena, and this may lead to inexplicable emergency braking or incorrect path selection at any time. To help this driver, we’ll install a second steering wheel and pedals at your passenger seat so that you can take over driving at any time (which you WILL be required to do regularly and immediately). If you guys get in an accident, YOU will be at fault, no matter what.” Sooner or later, people will stop buying this garbage and just opt to drive themselves.

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