U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

But when a supposedly 'all-seeing always watching' autopilot drives straight into a large stationary object in clear daylight, we have no understanding of how the situation occurred.

This I think has a couple of effects:

1) The apparent randomness makes the idea of these crashes a lot more scary -- psychologically we seem to have a greater aversion to danger we can't predict, and we can't tell ourselves the 'ah but that wouldn't happen to me' story.

2) Predictability of road incidents actually is a relevant piece of information. As a road user (including pedestrian), most of my actions are taken on the basis of what I am expecting to happen next, and my model for this is how humans drive (and walk). Automated drivers have different characteristics and failure modes, and that makes them an interaction problem for me.

""" These events occur typically when a vehicle is partially in a lane and radar has to ignore a stationary object. This is pretty standard and inherent with TACC + radar.

The faster Tesla pushes the vision only stack to all cars after they’ve validated the data, the faster this topic becomes moot. Andrej Karpathy talks and shows examples of what that would do here. Minutes 23:00-28:00 https://youtu.be/a510m7s_SVI

Older examples from manuals of other TACC systems which use radar:

Volvo’s Pilot Assist regarding AEB/TACC.

According to Wired, Volvo’s Pilot Assist system is much the same. The vehicles’ manual explains that not only will the car fail to brake for a sudden stationary object, it may actually race toward it to regain its set speed:

“Pilot Assist will ignore the stationary vehicle and instead accelerate to the stored speed. The driver must then intervene and apply the brakes.”

Cadillac Super Cruise - Page 252

Stationary or Very Slow-Moving Objects

ACC may not detect and react to stopped or slow-moving vehicles ahead of you. For example, the system may not brake for a vehicle it has never detected moving. This can occur in stop-and-go traffic or when a vehicle suddenly appears due to a vehicle ahead changing lanes. Your vehicle may not stop and could cause a crash. Use caution when using ACC. Your complete attention is always required while driving and you should be ready to take action and apply the brakes.

BMW Driving Assistant Plus - Page 124

A warning may not be issued when approaching a stationary or very slow-moving obstacle. You must react yourself; otherwise, there is the danger of an accident occurring.

If a vehicle ahead of you unexpectedly moves into another lane from behind a stopped vehicle, you yourself must react, as the system does not react to stopped vehicles. """

- Car switching in/out of my lane, I manually take over

- Tight curve in the freeway, manually take over

- Very frequently check the dashboard indicator that shows if the sensors "sees" the car front or not

- Anything unusual like construction, cones, car on shoulder, manually take over

- Anything that looks difficult like weird merging lanes, manually take over

- Any bad weather or condition like sun directly in front, manual drive

- Frequently adjusting max speed setting on ACC. It's safer to not be too much above the prevailing speeds. Otherwise, if ACC suddenly becomes blind, it can accelerate dangerously as it tries to reach max set speed.

- I don't trust lane keep much, it's mostly a backup for my own steering and making my arms less tired turning the wheel

The key thing is to recognize just how dumb this technology is. It's not smart, it's not AI. It's just a bit above the old cruise control. With that mindset it can be used safely.

Actually, from talking with friends who are first responders, many times they will park fire trucks, etc so that they are blocking enough of the road to protect the first responders and the victims. The last thing you want is to have another car come and crash into first responders or victims of the initial accident. That is why they will deliberately park the truck at an angle to protect the people.

The fact that an huge formal investigation happened with just a single casualty is proof that it may actually be superior for safety in the long-term (when combined with feedback from regulators and government investigators). One death in conventional vehicles is irrelevant. But because of the high profile of Tesla’s technology, it garners a bunch of attention from the public and therefore regulators. This is PRECISELY the dynamic that led to the ridiculously safe airline record. The safer it is, the more that rare deaths will be investigated and the causes sussed out and fixed by industry and regulators together.

Perhaps industry/Tesla/whoever hates the regulators and investigations. But I think they are precisely what will cause self driving to become ever safer, and eventually become as safe as industry/Tesla claims, safer than human drivers while also being cheap and ubiquitous. Just like airline travel today. A remarkable combination of safety and affordability.

This might be the only way to ever do it. I don’t think the airline industry could’ve ever gotten to current levels of safety by testing everything on closed airfields and over empty land for hundreds of millions of flight hours before they had sufficient statistics to be equal to today.

It can’t happen without regulators and enforcement, either.

I need to be touching the wheel and applying some force to it or it begins yelling at me and eventually brings me slowly to a stop.

I’ve had it for a year now and I cannot perceive of a way, without physically altering the system (like hanging a weight from the wheel maybe?) that would allow me to stop being an active participant.

I think the opposite is true: Tesla’s move fast and kill people approach is the mistake. Incremental mastering of autonomous capabilities is the way to go.

Conversely, if it didn't warn me right before an accident, then the absence of that warning would be useful too.

All of that information should be put back into the model based on crash reporting. Everything else can be ignored.

I would argue that the information should be available to all automakers (perhaps using the NHTSA as a conduit), so that each of them have the same safety information, but can still develop their own models. The FAA actually does this already with the FAA Accident and Incident Data Systems [0] and it has worked pretty darn well.

[0] - https://www.asias.faa.gov/apex/f?p=100:2:::NO:::

"The average driver" includes everyone, ranging from drivers using it as intended with close supervision, drivers who become inattentive because nothing is happening, and drivers who think it's a reasonable idea to climb into the back seat with a water bottle duct taped to the steering wheel to bypass the sensor.

OTOH, the average driver for the unassisted scenario also includes the driver who thinks they're able to drive a car while texting.

It's just that the companies that are NOT doing incremental approaches are largely at the mercy of some investors who don't know a thing about self-driving, and they may die at any time.

I agree with you that it is technically flawed, but it may still be viable in the end. At least their existence is not dependent on the mercy of some fools who don't get it, they just sell cars to stay alive.

That's one of the major problems of today's version of capitalism -- it encourages technically flawed ways to achieve scientific advancement.

Autopilot bothers me for a number of reasons. Fundamentally it's a poor driver, spending time in people's blind spots unnecessarily, braking and accelerating in rather abrupt ways, and just generally acting like a teenage driver who just got their license. It simply doesn't practice defensive driving.

I also spend a lot of time driving on undivided rural highways. These are highly dangerous roads, with closing speeds in excess of 200 km/hr at times. In those situations autopilot drives far too much according to the strict rules of the road and can't adjust to the situation. It doesn't use the lane space to leave additional room and it doesn't give a wide berth to cyclists.

It also bothers me deeply that one of the ways to override autopilot is to make steering input and that's also the indicator Tesla uses to determine the user participating. I haven't used autopilot much for the reasons above, but the few times I did active it the steering input required to tell the car I'm there is also enough steering input to move the car several feet in the lane due to very direct steering. It feels like I'm just fighting the car. That is deeply unnerving since the force required to override autopilot feels like enough to jump nearly half a lane and cause a collision.

I would be terrified to share the road with someone of this mindset. Your vehicle is a lethal weapon when you are driving it around (assisted or otherwise). At no point can someone claim that a tesla vehicle circa today is able to completely assume the duty of driving. You are still 100% responsible for everything that happens in and around that car. You had better have a plan for what happens if autopilot decides to shit the bed while a semi jackknifes in front of you.

The exceptions are what will kill you - and others - every single time. It's not the boring daily drives where 50 car pileups and random battery explosions occur. Maybe your risk tolerance is higher. Mine is not. Please consider this next time you are on the road.

Obviously that's a single anecdote, and I don't know if it would have gone through with it because I immediately corrected, but that was my experience.

Ive been driving for 25 years, cars, trucks, trailers, standard and auto transmissions, and I have never once thought to myself "I'd be such a better diver if I didn't have to pay attention to my speed, lane keeping or following distance" Why? Because those mundane things are already on autopilot in my brain.

Posts like yours are so absurd to met that I cant help but think shill.

I'm curious about this part. Do you manually input a limit, or trust it to read street signs?

And how often do you look at your speedometer anyhow? I think on the highway I glance at it maybe once every few minutes and otherwise match speed with the other vehicles, and in the city I look more often but mostly just drive at what feels a safe pace (which seems to match the limits, more or less.)

Do you have a truly reliable source for that? Because I hear this statement once in a while, and it feels flawed.

A helmet protects you from severe head injury if you are in an accident. There are more reasons for accidents than reckless car drivers. For example:

- Bad weather

- Driver not seeing the biker at all (no matter with or without helmet)

- Crash between 2 cyclists

A nice and very sharp 8" stainless steel spike on the steering wheel facing the driver.

Source please

Doesn't that just speak to the effectiveness of seatbelts? Most people wear them, and two-fifths of those who died in a crash did not wear a seatbelt.

If we had the same proportion of deaths as we have seatbelt wearers, that would indicate the belts are ineffective.

Once full self driving is statistically safer than humans how will you not let people use it? It is like saying you would rather have 10 children die because of bad driving skills rather than 1 child die because they were not paying attention at all times.

You cannot, that's the simple truth. You're supposed to focus on the road anyways and should be able to take over once any sort of autopilot or assist system starts working erroneously, yet in practice many people simply assume that those systems being there in the first place mean that you can simply stop focusing on the road altogether.

It feels like the claim of "fully self driving vehicle" is at odds with actual safety, or at least will remain so until the technology actually progresses far enough to be on average safer than human drivers, moral issues aside. Whether that will take 15, 50 or 500 years, i cannot say, however.

That said, currently such functionality could be good enough for the driver to take a sip from a drink, or fiddle around with a message on their phone, or even mess around on the navigation system or the radio - things that would get done regardless because people are irresponsible, but making which a little bit safer is feasible.

Obviously that's not exactly the same thing as taking over for a real car when the driver assistance features give up, but seems similarly challenging to take over the controls at the most precarious moment of travel, without being sort of "warmed up" as a driver.

Anyway, perhaps I'm in a minority here, but I feel as though my driving has gotten _significantly safer_ since getting a Tesla, particularly on longer road trips.

Instead of burning energy making sure my car stays in the lane I can spend nearly all my time observing drivers around me and paying closer attention farther down the road. My preventative and defensive driving has gone up a level.

> I just don't understand how you can have a "self driving car but you must but be ready to put your hands back on the steering wheel and your foot on the pedal(s)".

I've not hit animals and dodged random things rolling/blowing into the road at a moment's notice. This isn't letting autopilot drive, it's like a hybrid act where it does the rote driving and I constantly take over to quickly pass a semi on a windy day, not pass it on a curve, or get over some lanes to avoid tire remnants in the road up ahead. I'm able to watch the traffic in front and behind and find pockets on the highway with nobody around me and no clumping bound to occur (<3 those).

To your suspicion, it is a different mode of driving. Recently I did a roadtrip (about half the height of the USA) in a non-Tesla, and I found myself way more exhausted and less alert towards the end of it. Could be I'm out of habit but egh.

Anyway, so far I've been super lucky. I don't think it's possible to avoid all car crashes no matter how well you drive. But I _for sure_ have avoided avoidable ones and taken myself out of situations where they later occurred thanks to the extra mental cycles afforded to me by auto-pilot. My safety record in the Tesla is currently perfect and I'll try and keep it that way.

I don't think autopilot is perfect either but I do think it's a good tool and I'm a better driver for it. Autopilot has definitely helped me spend better focus on driving.

However, I also once so far have experienced what happens when this system experiences a poorly-marked construction zone. Whilst most construction sites on the interstate system place temporary road lines for lane shifts, this one solely used cones. While I was paying attention and never left the flow of traffic, the car actually fought a little bit against me following the cones into another lane, because it didn't see the cones, it was following the lines.

It doesn't surprise me at all that if someone gets too comfortable trusting the car to do the work, even if they think they're paying attention, they could get driven off the roadway.

This is a situation that you simply shouldn’t put yourself in. There is no reason to ever drive right next to a large vehicle, on either side, except for very short periods when overtaking them on a straight road.

Edit: I think the page count at the bottom of that list is off, it seems to repeat the last page so it might be less.

[1]https://www.respondersafety.com/news/struck-by-incidents/?da...

now running into unlit emergency vehicles? still think tgat's rather difficult sans inebriation or sleep dep.

For example: it's not morally equivalent to die while drunk driving at 150 km/h vs dying as a pedestrian because someone ran over you.

I would prefer 10 drunk drivers die instead of just one innocent person.

Your take seems a lot more plausible.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26869962

This is kind of a position I've held for a long time but a different aspect of the problem. I think a system similar to IFF in aircraft would solve all of these issue. If every car knew where every other car was at all times, you could easily devise a system that would be nearly flawless. The issue is, there is no incremental path to this solution. You would essentially have to start over with the existing transportation network.