The CRV was stopped with hazards and lights off, at night, in the center lane of a 10 lane freeway. Certainly a human driver could have easily made this mistake.
Can it save the human in a moment of inattention? Absolutely, my prius has shouted at me to brake when I was messing with the radio, but it doesnt matter how good your radar is when you're flying around a blind turn or coming up behind an invisible, stopped object.
(%50 reduction would be good, drunks taking robo taxis home is great, but IMO driving is easy and robots wont be better at it)
There are things that humans can learn and do extremely quickly, or figure out on the fly, that robots require extensive training for.
> Moravec wrote in 1988, "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility".
> Steven Pinker wrote in 1994 that "the main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard."
Although that has obviously changed in recent years.
"According to the NTSB, a witness had come across the stopped CR-V prior to the collision and noted that neither its taillights or hazard lights were illuminated, She was able to change lanes and avoid hitting the Honda, but after she passed it, she saw the Mach-E strike the stopped crossover in her rearview mirror."
That means the witness car likely obstructed the view of the stopped vehicle, then changed lanes at the last minute, revealing the stopped vehicle after it was too late for the Ford to stop.
except a human driver in front of the Mach-E did see the car and avoided it successfully.
that's why cars with driver assist features are supposed to be using radar to detect obstacles.
im not familiar with the Mach-E's feature here that's referred to as "handsfree". Usually these features are supposed to make sure the driver is still in control of steering at all times, like the Ioniq 5. I'm probably going to be a teeny bit more wary of Mach-Es on the road if they are using a not totally reliable radar detection system.
That makes it harder for the car behind. The Mach-E is following a moving car, which is blocking the view of the stopped car. She swerves out of the way, and the situation goes from everything normal to disaster in half a second. A difficult situation for humans or autonomous system.
It uses the radar, GPS, laser highway maps, and the car’s camera system to do the driving.
There is a camera directly behind the wheel monitoring the driver at all times. You don’t need your hands on the wheel but if you look away for more than a few seconds it will disengage.
Also notice I mentioned laser highway mapping. It is only available on premapped divided highways that have no crossings, only on ramps and off ramps. Some areas will not be supported when they have otherwise would be due to a sharp bend or the number of cars entering and leaving the road there, or if the sensor data doesn’t match the maps (construction/etc).
I’d say it’s a very well designed system from a safety perspective. It does its best to ensure it only runs when it’s capable in areas pre-determined to be within its capabilities.
But it’s still level 2. The human has to be engaged.
If the car in front of it was driving like normal and swerved away from the stopped CRV late, the Ford wouldn’t have even known that CRV was there until the other car swerved out of the way. I’m not aware of any ADAS system that can interpret what a sudden swerve might mean. And no system has radar that can safely detect a stopped vehicle.
This is a situation it was never designed to handle and why the driver is required to pay attention the whole time.
If it was on at the time then either the human was paying attention and didn’t do anything or they had very recently looked away. Unfortunately at TX highway speeds a few seconds is a lot of ground.
Why not turn on hazards? Had it been there long at all? Did the electrical system fail or something preventing the hazards/brake lights/etc?
(Friendly reminder to always have safety triangles, e.g. [1], in your car.)
[1] https://www.mcmaster.com/products/traffic-warning-triangles/
Hasn't this ship sailed?
The people angry about self-driving cars aren't other drivers. They're people upset about displaced taxi jobs.
I’m not alone. I’ve talked to plenty of people that recognize that car infrastructure is inherently unsafe in many places, the last thing I want is an incentive to have more vehicles driving around because now you don’t need humans inside the car.
My gut feeling is we're perfectly happy with self-driving cars that are even substantially worse than human-piloted ones, so long as they crash the way humans do. Rear ending in the dark, okay. Barreling full speed into a highway divider [1] or dragging pedestrians to get out of traffic [2], not.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/04/theres-growing-evidence...
[2] https://abc7news.com/cruise-autonomous-cars-gm-recall-sf-rob...
No. I’m very not ok with this. Many human drivers are terrible. Most collisions are entirely avoidable, and I certainly don’t want more of the same from computers. If I keep getting my life put at risk more often by incompetent driverless cars, I’m going to be pissed! Maybe people that spend their time in cars agree with you, but as a cyclist and pedestrian the common accident modes are the ones that pose the greatest risk to me. Pinball off the jersey barricades all you want, but stop passing bikes too close, and plowing through crosswalks just because you can get away with it.
I’ve been hit twice on my bike, both times 100% the driver’s fault. The stakes are life and limb for me, so I absolutely do not accept a higher accident rate.
Eh? How many taxi jobs have these displaced? Like, I think the answer is essentially zero.
Yes, and we have clear rules and precedent for who is responsible. This scenario is rather more complicated.
Laws always tend to put the driver as the last stop in the chain responsible too.
This is very unfortunate. There’s a good chance that CRV was going to be hit if the Mach E avoided it.
But the person in the drivers seat is still the one responsible.
I would love to know the stories of both the Ford and Honda drivers. Doubt the public will ever know.
Certainly a heavily inebriated driver might have made this mistake if the car were difficult to see at a distance, but otherwise... no, I don't see this happening at all.
I've experienced this many times as I used to drive a lot at night. To me it was like half of my mind falling asleep while the other half followed the white line for hours. I used to drive close to 70k miles at night every year, all along the same routes, with no stimulation, just the white line. I know I wasn't asleep or tired, but it was like driving in a dream sometimes.
It is probably much, much more common than we know, and I think this state would completely fool the attention-tracking systems in self-driving cars.
What is worse, many people drive the same routes commercially every night, like sleeper coach drivers. I think if they even did so much as spoke about this, it could significantly harm their careers. So it's unlikely that this demographic that could be most affected will talk about it openly. But there is almost nothing you can do to prevent it. After a certain number of thousands of miles along the same route, seeing the same white line, for hours, in the dark, you zone out.
Another thing that's making it worse is that I could only ever catch myself in this state when I already did something irresponsible. Like I'd go past a speed limit sign without reacting, and in a couple of seconds my brain would wake up to say "hey, something is happening, let's pay attention again". Otherwise, it's almost impossible to catch your mind drifting gently away.
I'm happy to finally put a label to the experience.