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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

More clarity may change people’s opinion of the accident, but IMO pedestrian meaningfully represents someone who is limited to human locomotion and lacks any sort of protection in a collision.

Which seems like a reasonable description of the type of failure involved in the final few seconds before impact.

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Omitting that the pedestrian was on a freeway meaningfully mis-represents the situation.

People walking on freeways may be rare from the perspective of an individual driver but not a self driving system operating on millions of vehicles.

What does that have to do with the original article's misleading title?

I don’t think it’s misleading. It’s a tile not some hundred word description of what exactly happened.

Calling them motorists would definitely be misleading by comparison. Using the simple “fatal crash” of the linked title implies the other people might in be responsible which is misleading.

Using accident but saying Tesla was at fault could open them up to liability and therefore isn’t an option.

> I don’t think it’s misleading. It’s a tile not some hundred word description of what exactly happened.

"Pedestrian killed on freeway" instead of "pedestrian killed" doesn't take 100 words and doesn't give the impression Tesla's are mowing people down on crosswalks (although that's a feature to get clicks, not a bug).

Without context that implies the pedestrians shouldn’t have been on the freeway.

It’s not an issue for Tesla, but it does imply bad things about the victims.

A title of "U.S. to probe Tesla's 'Full Self-Driving' system after pedestrian killed on freeway" would in no way imply bad things about the pedestrian who was killed.

It was my first assumption when I was read pedestrian on freeway in someone’s comment without context. Possibly due to Uber self driving fatality.

Stranded motorists who exit their vehicle, construction workers, first responders, tow truck drivers, etc are the most common victims but that’s not the association I had.

Why? I would hope we all expect pedestrian detection (and object detection in general) to be just as good on a freeway as on a city street? It seems the Tesla barreled full-speed into an accident ahead of it. I would call it insane but that would be anthropomorphizing it.

No, you’re not allowed to hit pedestrians on the freeway either.

There are many reasons why a pedestrian might be on the freeway. It’s not common but I see it at least once a month and I drive extra carefully when I do, moving over if I can and slowing down.

This sort of framing you're engaging in is exactly what the person you're replying to is complaining about.

Yeah, the person who got hit was technically a pedestrian but just using that word with no other context doesn't covey that it was a pedestrian on a limited access highway vs somewhere pedestrians are allowed and expected. Without additional explanation people assume normalcy and think that the pedestrian was crossing a city street or something pedestrians do all the time and are expected to do all the time when that is very much not what happened here.

Dealing with people on freeways is the kind of edge case humans aren’t good at but self driving cars have zero excuses. It’s a common enough situation that someone will exit a vehicle after a collision to make it a very predictable edge case.

Remember all of the bad press Uber got when a pedestrian was struck and killed walking their bike across the middle of a street at night? People are going to be on limited access freeways and these systems need to be able to deal with it. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54175359

I'd make the argument that people are very good at dealing with random things that shouldn't be on freeways as long as they don't coincide with blinding sun or other visual impairment.

Tesla had a long standing issue detecting partial lane obstructions. I wonder if the logic around that has anything to do with this.

17 percent of pedestrian fatalities occur on freeways. Considering how rarely pedestrians are on freeways that suggests to me people aren’t very good at noticing them in time to stop / avoid them.

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2022/06/09/why-20-of-pedestrians...

That, and/or freeway speeds make the situation inherently more dangerous. When the traffic flows freeway speeds are fine but if a freeway-speed car has to handle a stationary object…problem.

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