The desire to have a car that drives itself is so high that it overrides folks' self preservation. They'll pay kilodollars for unsafe systems. Regulation is the only solution I can see to prevent buggy beta software unleashing mayhem on the road.
All the facts I've seen are there was a vehicle stopped in traffic lanes with its lights off. At least one human driver ahead of the accident car that avoided the stopped vehicle, but was close enough to observe the collision.
There's lots of scenarios that fit these facts, some of which are hard for humans; all of which are hard for driver assistance software that ignores stationary objects.
Even if an active human driver would be likely to still hit the other car, they may have begun braking sooner and reduce the energy involved in the collision.
If the accident car was closing following the observer car, both in the same lane as the stopped car, and the observer car changed lanes to avoid the stopped car 'at the last second', yeah, that's hard for humans too when there's limited visibility ahead of the car in front (which is a good reason to avoid following so closely, but things happen). If it was just light traffic at high speeds and a stopped car, I'd expect an active driver to at least reduce speed significantly. Yes, it was at night and the stopped car had no lights; however, the accident car's headlights should illuminate the stopped car's reflectors if nothing else, and given the observer car had passed the accident car recently, there should have been some light cast from its headlights as well.
I imagine it pretty much is an instance of following too closely and going too fast for the lighting conditions for the possibility of suddenly encountering a completely stopped object in the road. I agree, its a bad limitation of "self driving" systems, but in the end I imagine the average human would have probably had a similar following distance and also be travelling at a similar speed.
The Ford system does track attentiveness and will drop out of bluecruise mode and bring the car to a stop if the driver isn't paying attention. It does a lot of gaze tracking with IR lights and cameras. Its not like on some cars where attaching a little weight to the wheel is enough to fake attention. The driver was paying attention to the road, at least within the last few seconds.
EDIT: Sounds like the stretch in question is a 70mph area. Still, I imagine on an open highway and how loads of Texans drive, they were probably going about 80mph. Also, it does appear this section of I-10 does have roadway lighting.
FWIW, I've seen lots of cars slam into the back of a stopped car on a highway in bright daylight conditions without the assistance of driving aids. My old office had a pretty good view of a long stretch of a major 70mph highway; I saw a lot of collisions. Meatbag drivers are pretty terrible.
Sounds like the Ford wasn't maintaining a safe following distance.
I'd still say a human would probably have also had an unsafe following distance and speed in this scenario.
If a self driving car (or driving aid at least) behaves unsafely in some consistent way, that could cause far more accidents than the "typical human driver" typically behaving in that unsafe way. It's frankly outrageous to me that it's literally possible for automated or assisted driving to fail such a common-sense, basic rule of road safety as following distance.
And that's my real concern with self-driving cars (apart from considering them a competitor to the public transit I'd rather see), that it doesn't feel like there's a sufficient baseline level of caution for their bread-and-butter behaviors.
I drive with traffic aware cruise control always on maximum separation (Tesla S), but hardly anyone else abides by the recommendation. Even 1 second separation is 7 car lengths at that speed.
> Even if they slammed on the brakes and managed to cut half their speed they're still slamming into a stationary, heavy object at 40ish mph.
A 40 mph collision is often survivable these days (that's the speed used for crash tests!). The accident vehicle driver survived regardless; the driver of the stopped car didn't though.
Driver assistance is really unhelpful in these situations. Most likely the lead car slowed down, at least a bit while changing lanes, so an active driver would also be slowing and may be quicker to slow more when an unexpected car is there, but driver assistance is going to see the lead car left the lane and there's no other cars (because stationary objects are ignored) so go ahead and speed up. Tesla's are known to have a very high rate of acceleration in this case, not sure about the acceleration for the MachE.
Adding more speculation: as an untrained armchair internet crash investigator, my guess is the collison happened at over 40 mph. The IIHS crash test [1] seems to show less damage than the accident vehicle, and the stopped vehicle was overturned in addition to significant damage.
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Po_QfX5U8lI&pp=ygUXbWFjaCBlIGN...
So the answer in both cases is definitely "There was a human operating the vehicle, they saw the vehicle running headlong into stopped traffic, and they failed to use the brake in time." They may, perhaps, have trusted the semi-automation too much, but that's no more excuse for rear-ending a stopped car than setting your regular cruise control to 55 and failing to disengage when you see traffic stopped ahead is.
We want the technology to do better than human, but (unless NHTSA turns up something truly bizarre and awful, like "Driver tried to brake and BlueCruise overrode the command to disable braking," which should be impossible) the situation in both these cases is people died because the car was being driven by a human and the human made a bad call.
The witness changed lanes to the right to avoid striking the vehicle and later, in her rearview mirror, saw another vehicle strike the stopped Honda.
If that interval was very short, then I could imagine the witness car blocking the Ford's view of the Honda until there wasn't much time to react?
Every year we delay having safe self-driving cars, about 50,000 people die on the road who don't need to die.
Is this also the case with Blue Cruise? Does the eyeball monitoring camera count watching ditches & sidewalks as "paying attention" or does it force you to strictly keep eyes front?
> But, as pilots were being freed of these responsibilities, they were becoming increasingly susceptible to boredom and complacency--problems that were all the more insidious for being difficult to identify and assess. As one pilot whom Wiener interviewed put it: "I know I'm not in the loop, but I'm not exactly out of the loop. It's more like I'm flying alongside the loop."
I think these assisted driving features in cars are the same way. I personally like the idea of them, humans seem to be incredibly horrible drivers (especially here in the Bay Area). However, when attention and monitoring is still required, people get complacent.
All that said, I'm not sure what the answer is -- maybe these systems need to get to a point where they are fully autonomous? But how do we get there and feel comfortable about it in the first place? Take air travel for example -- planes are probably perfectly capable of taking off, flying themselves from point A to point B, and landing without human intervention. Would you travel on a plane with no pilot? Probably not!
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/hazards-au...
The US average passenger vehicle age is also 13 years. This puts _many_ existing vehicles on the road outside the range of modern driver assistance equipment which of course would affect this chart.
(One Everest is around $50,000-$100,000.)
It comes down to trust: do you trust a machine to get it right every time, or a human to get it right every time? I think people will answer differently based on their differing experiences with machines and people.
(... but to my money: when the machine malfunctions, we can crack open its black box, look at its analysis logs, find errors, and update every other clone of the machine to never make that mistake again. Can't do that with humans; for all the lessons we learn about road safety, we are trying inefficiently to imprint them on a new, naive crop of drivers every day).
Machines distribute accidents without bias. Individuals who are otherwise safe drivers could crash viciously if using self driving modes.
Sometimes you can develop intuition for what cars are being driven by bad human drivers and you can avoid them. Machines will appear to be driving just fine until suddenly they’re not, and this can happen very quickly.
Also, if you know a car is being driven by a human rather than a machine, you can use your empathy to anticipate what a human driver is going to do in a situation and prepare for that, where as a machine can behave suddenly and unpredictably, increasing your chances of engaging in an accident.
Keep these self driving vehicles in their own lanes.
Isn't that a good thing? Or are we assuming we have control over the other drivers who are bad drivers and will kill us when they wreck into us?
> Also, if you know a car is being driven by a human rather than a machine, you can use your empathy to anticipate what a human driver is going to do in a situation and prepare for that
People keep claiming this but I think it's a claim without sufficient evidence. I've watched humans go backwards up a one-way street. I've watched humans stop at three stop signs and miss the forth. I've watched humans drive perfectly up until the point they had a coronary. I suspect it's something people like to believe because they get to say "I avoided that idiot swerving on the highway; that kept me safe" and they miss the huge confirmation bias that they're really safe because they didn't get wiped out by the guy who had the heart attack and suddenly drifted into the oncoming traffic lane, leaving no time to react. It's an illusion-of-safety feeling that, ironically, comes from so many human drivers being erratic in non-immediately-dangerous ways, far more often than an automated vehicle is erratic at all.
We don't hear a lot about from the tens of thousands of drivers killed on the road every year failed to use empathy to avoid that crash, because they're dead. So we're missing a huge datapoint to evaluate the "humans can communicate with each other empathetically on the road so they're safer than sharing the road with automata" claim.
I find predictions informed by observation much more difficult with automated driving systems. In many cases, such cars will appear to be driving perfectly, right up until a severe mistake is made. Instead of having observable clues, it requires an understanding of what sensor suite and what version of software is in which vehicle in order to understand the tendencies of that vehicle. Something we can't possibly keep up with, especially given that the developers of the machine learning models being deployed can't deeply characterize each deployment's failure modes.
Given all that, I feel more able to defend myself against human mistakes than automated mistakes.