Tesla was likely on autopilot in deadly fire truck crash in Bay Area, feds say
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If that’s all autopilot is, why not market it as adaptive cruise control? Search in your heart, I believe you know the answer.
If someone needs to know the definition of a feature in order to dispel myths based on the name, surely you can admit it's a bad/misleading name?
One warning though: my product is not safe for toddlers.
You are basically stating that it's the consumer's job to know when a marketing tactic is deceiving them, that simply doesn't work in a society... Or why do you think there are consumer protection laws?
This is such a staggeringly, damning statement to be made about the state of self driving technology in 2023 - yet it's significance will be completely lost on so many people.
There doesn't seem to be any higher level self protection layer on top of it to handle the general cases of the 1000s of things that have not been specifically trained yet/ever.
The current state of Tesla AP/FSD willfully ignores the saying "Things that never happened before happen all the time". If you have ever lived somewhere like NYC you will have seen things happen on the road that can never be trained.
I remember the example of FSD trying to turn left across the path of an oncoming trolley car. What is incredible was that the UI had rendered the trolley, so it knew a large object was moving towards it and yet decided to turn. Similar responses from Tesla booster of "well it was never trained on trolleys before, and now it is".
What is it going to do when a car goes the wrong way down the road? What is it going to do when someone is cruising in reverse half a block to get a parking spot? We can think of untrained scenarios all day. "Big moving object closing on my trajectory" seems like a general case being missed.
If other statements on this thread are correct, then this Tesla likely did not have autopilot and certainly not FSD- it had a pre-autopilot ACC system which led to a tiff between the vendor and tesla (possibly because tesla was being irresponsible while deploying it). So it's really hard to say this is a case of tesla cars automatic driving being systemically faulty. I do believe that to be the case, even for FSD, but it's entirely speculation.
Tesla vehicles accelerate much faster than my vehicle too, which would give me more time to react if a vehicle ahead of me left my lane, exposing a stationary emergency vehicle (or other hazard), and the ACC acts to resume the set speed.
Your entire point is predicated on mislabeling Elon's fraudulent service. Yes, every time Elon's "Full Self-Driving" technology gets into a horrific accident and exposes the depths of the lies he peddles, it will become news.
If Tesla labeled the technology "adaptive cruise control", 90% of these stories would go away. No one cares about any other companies cruise control. They only care about "10X Tesla // autonomous taxi // Full Self Driving" future cars getting into accidents.
iirc Mobileye right?
It's a significant problem if vehicle's critical safety software/parts fail yet are still on the road. The future utopia of self driving vehicles can never become a reality if slightly older models kill people because they are no longer supported or updated.
[1] https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2022/02/how-old-are-cars/#:~:....
Where is the disconnect happening here? Not driving full-speed into stationary objects strikes me as "Driver Assist 101" stuff...
As long as the car still had functioning brakes and steering, this is on the driver.
People are so desperate to blame literally anything except the person directly responsible.
I think it's relevant because back then Tesla did not advertise "FSD", whatever that means.
If you look at my comment history, you can see I routinely criticize their practices around FSD, not insulate them from liability.
Like the 3d view in many cars is just a Bosch module.
If I had to bet, I’d bet on Teslas having better numbers. A guy intentionally drove off a cliff in a murder-suicide attempt and failed, after all.
Pretty sure there is government agency that tracks these data…
Autopilot results in 10x fewer accidents than a car without it.
That's some salt.
Apparently, blind hatred for someone can excuse an awful lot of illicit behavior...
> Messages were left Wednesday seeking comment from Tesla, which has disbanded its public relations department.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/tesla-firetruck-autopilot-investi...
It seems more unbecoming to me to keep marketing and selling a system called 'autopilot' without responding to the very reasonable criticism that it has a rather dubious safety record - 'According to AP News, “at least 15 Teslas have crashed into emergency vehicles nationwide while using the system.”' I don't have fine-grained accident statistics for emergency vehicles year by year, but that seems disproportionately high for a somewhat niche brand.
No 2014 Model S's were sold with FSD. The product didn't exist yet. It's not subject to that recall notice, so the final sentence is just outright incorrect.
At this point I just give up on the ability of society to deal rationally with anything involving "Tesla". This was a decade-old car with a lanekeeping solution along the lines of what normal cars have today. Absolutely no one ever billed it as an autonomous vehicle. And, like normal cars today, sometimes they end up in fatal crashes. But no one cares if a Lexus on cruise control hits someone. That's not news.
Doesn't matter. My car drives me around anyway. Haters gonna hate, as it were.
this reporter didn't know it's a public company, not owned by Musk?
The CEO of Mobileye thought very differently, and walked away from a Tesla partnership after Musk's rhetoric killed someone in 2016[1].
Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua claiming that Tesla "was pushing the envelope in terms of safety" and that Autopilot is a "driver assistance system" and not a "driverless system"
Musk has been calling it Autopilot since day one, and promising features and safety levels that are completely unobtainable even today.
But it doesn't matter, because putting "Tesla" in the headlines drives people absolutely bananas. We'll literally engage in screaming matches on the internet about whether it's fair to blame brand new autonomy software for an accident involving a nine-year-old vehicle running a tech stack from a different company. Because Tesla.
[1] After a very public split where Mobileye lost their biggest customer, they still haven't really recovered and at this point are way behind Tesla, Waymo and Cruise.
The facts are - Tesla installed this system, called it Autopilot, told the buyers it does magical things, and people have died and probably will continue to die.
I understand some people badly want Tesla to succeed no matter what. But this is silly... they chose not to call it a Driver Assist (like all the other car manufacturers) on purpose. Now Tesla reaps what it sowed...
And again I ask for a contemporary cite relevant to the car in question where Tesla (or Mobileye) claimed it would drive autonomously. They didn't make that claim, and you know it. So... I guess your whole argument rests on the name[1] of the product[2] and not the technology? If they called it "BananaDrive" you wouldn't be upset? That seems doubtful.
Look: this is a 100% vanilla distracted driver accident under cruise control, and you know it. It's not the first. It won't be the last. It happens probably every day in other makes of cars with very similar systems, and you don't care. You only care because of the name of the company that made the car.
[1] Not to put a fine a point on it, but Chrysler was selling cars with "Auto-Pilot" in the 50's. People didn't freak out about those.
[2] Again, to repeat: not the product being sold today or at any time over the last seven years, with which you keep trying to conflate.
1. Some 2014 model S were retrofitted and subject to the recent recall. The news article simply said some model S were subject to a recent FSD recall. It did not say whether the one in the recent fatal accident was
2. Musk as recently as 2021 was bragging that “autopilot” specifically (not FSD) reduces crash rates by a “factor of 10”
This is completely 100% untrue
The stats Elon continues to tout currently about safety are a complete joke, and not normalized by road type, driver age, or condition
It’s like telling someone drug A given to cohort 1 had no side effects, while drug B given to cohort B caused tons of bad effects, and leaving out the fact that cohort A is 20 year old men and cohort B is 95 year old men
You’re not a victim. Please allow people to have normal discussions that are had about all cars.
No, they weren't. That generation of cars can get a HW3 upgrade[1], but that's only offered to cars that purchased FSD. No FSD was installed on a 2014 vehicle, ergo no 2014 S's have HW3. Is it possible someone got an aftermarket part installed? Sure. Is it likely? Be real. It is correct for a journalist (or you) to say that this car was subject to the FSD recall? Absolutely not.
> 2. Musk as recently as 2021 was bragging that “autopilot” specifically (not FSD) reduces crash rates by a “factor of 10” [...] This is completely 100% untrue
They literally release a safety report with data to back that kind of thing up (honestly not sure which Musk statement you're talking about, you didn't cite, but the numbers are indeed in the order of magnitude range). Yelling about it in an HN comment from a 1-comment green account doesn't make it "100% untrue".
[1] Edit: post-some-research, even that's not necessarily true. Apparently early S's lacked the camera mounting points and can't be upgraded for mechanical reasons. Exactly where the cutover happened isn't clear.
Also, I love my car driving me around. It's the reason I bought it and it is amazing.
Don't sleep on FSD. I've had it for a year and a half and it's improved dramatically in that time.
Also, anyone who has ever used an actual aircraft autopilot knows that they are actually very similar to what Tesla has. They relieve you of making constant control inputs need near constant supervision. Is the marketing deceptive, perhaps, but its not incorrect.
Contradicts the headline, which implies that NHTSA told AP that they had specific reason to believe Autopilot was engaged.
Tesla Autopilot is 10x safer than driving without it [0]. We keep seeing speculative clickbait headlines because "Tesla" gets clicks. We also keep seeing confirmation a few months later that, oh yeah... turns out the driver was drunk and pressing the accelerator, and Autopilot wasn't engaged. Telemetry clears these up easily.
Also the "recall" (OTA software update) they mention at the end was for FSD, not Autopilot, and it was unrelated: they asked Tesla to eliminate human-like rolling stop behavior and to stop at yellow lights.
No, Autopilot only works in relatively safe conditions where accident rates are already lowest (highway driving). A fair comparison would be accidents per mile for Autopilot vs. Accidents per mile with human drivers in similar conditions, where Autopilot is almost certainly not significantly better, and that's why Tesla doesn't share that data.
> Contradicts the headline, which implies that NHTSA told AP that they had specific reason to believe Autopilot was engaged
No it doesn't unless both the original headline and HN updated in the past 3 minutes.
If you are using AP as intended, then you are using it on the easiest places to drive - limited access highways in good weather.
All of the accidents my family & I have been in over the course of our lives have been in places you are not supposed to be using AP.
Crossing traffic, left hand turns, mall parking lots, etc are where the majority of accidents happen.
There is also arguably selection bias in the driver profiles. Young males (16~20ish) and older people (75+) have significantly higher accident rates but are less likely to be driving a Tesla, on AP.
Tesla themselves say that the tech is meant to assist the driver, and not be FSD in the true sense of the words. And even with assistance, it only makes driving somewhat safer, and somewhat more dangerous in other areas.
I wouldn't want to use FSD in the city with my kids in the car, let's say it this way. It's an amazing technology to my SWE brain. And from a business perspective, it disrupted the automotive industry. We should appreciate it for what it is, not try to make it what it is not. And full self driving it is not. Reasonable self driving, maybe it is. It would be more accurate to call it full driving assist.
Although Level 2 vehicles were claimed to have a 43% lower crash rate than Level 1 vehicles, their improvement was only 10% after controlling for different rates of freeway driving.
Direct comparison with general public driving was impossible due to unclear crash severity thresholds in the manufacturer’s reports, but analysis showed that controlling for driver age would increase reported crash rates by 11%.
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19439962.2023.21...