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Comment by shiftpgdn | Hacker News Reader

Everyone always gets upset at me when I bring this up. The infamous fatal "autopiloted" Model X crash in the Bay Area happened because the road lanes were painted to drive the car into the narrow side of a jersey barrier. The next day a near fatal accident happened in the exact same spot, likely because Caltrans as an organization has little to no liability and generally doesn't stay on top of freeway conditions.

There is an intersection in Houston that is one of the most dangerous in the USA that kills a dozen people a year due to poor design and planning from TxDOT. There are probably hundreds of intersections like this around the country that will need to be fixed.

If I go paint road lines into a wall painted like a tunnel, are the drivers who hit the tunnel wall responsible, or is it me who painted the road lines?

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I drove past the location of the model X crash shortly afterwards.

The white lines of the two adjacent lanes made it look like there was a well-defined lane there, with the barrier right in the center.

Here's a pretty good picture of what it looked like then:

https://www.autopilotreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/m...

You can see there is no hatching to make it obvious it was a non-drivable area.

I would have expected something like this might have made a difference:

https://driveractive.com/Assets/photos/rm25.png

(that said, why didn't radar help?)

I don't buy any of the excuses, honestly. If the software can be that easily fooled by slightly broken white lines, it's not ready for release. That area of 101 simply isn't that difficult to parse (for humans). If it can't deal with that, how can it driven in places where the roads are truly awful? Lots of places in the USA alone with much worse road conditions than anything CalTrans is responsible for.

Also, there's a huge yellow and black chevron block visible in that picture that any human driver paying attention would have seen and easily avoided. Crosshatching is unnecessary if you're paying the least bit of attention to what's in front of you. What was the software's issue here?

It is absolutely a problem with the Tesla software that it wasn't able to parse that area properly. Doesn't necessarily mean the human driver wasn't at fault.

The crash arrester was missing when the Tesla crashed there, which is also part of the reason it was a fatal accident.

That is not true. It was not missing. Here's a photo showing it was clearly there: https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.files.wordpress.com/2018/...

I do think that it had already stopped at least one, maybe multiple crashes since it has been last replaced.

The discussion here though is about visibility, and the attenuator would have been quite obvious there.

There are a dozen news articles that say it was missing, and even your picture looks like it's just the mount point, not the crash arresting system itself.

I'm not sure I believe the claims of dozens of news articles that say it was missing, but it doesn't really matter. Here's a link to the ntsb report: https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...

Page 2 (which is actually the 22nd page of the pdf) shows an image of the pre-crash state of the attenuator. It is present, but non-operational due to a previous crash. While that crash affected it's usefulness, it's visibility is only marginally reduced.

Sure, if you take a picture cutting out the context that makes it clear it's not a lane, then maybe it looks like a lane. I drove by that every day for years and never thought there was a lane there... Because it's absolutely obvious from the painted lines diverging from a point that it's not a lane. Now, can we make things even more obvious for distracted drivers and shitty AI, sure, and I'm all for that.

Thing is, a lot of exit lanes have white lines you have to cross, which I've wondered about as a driver. Usually you have to cross a white line to get into the hov lane, like an cloverleaf/onramp usually around a meter.

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