
Tesla Autopilot has driven over 1.2B estimated miles - nthuser
https://hcai.mit.edu/tesla-autopilot-miles/
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samfisher83
Its really not autopilot. Its adaptive cruise control and lane keeping. Why
don't we compare it to other cars lane keeping and adaptive cruise control.

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chaosphere2112
As an owner of a car with ACC and lane keeping, I frequently get to experience
the always fun sensation of my car accelerating full bore at a turn. My
understanding is that Tesla actually made the two systems talk to each other,
which is definitely not the case in my Honda. Calling it "just" ACC and lane
keeping is disingenuous.

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kmonsen
I have an Audi and they actually include gps data in the ACC so it slows down
before curves. It is a setting that can be turned off.

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tgtweak
Audi ACC is great, but the lane keep assist is quite "bouncy" and will ping-
pong between left and right lane barriers and will self-disable after a few of
these.

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thrav
I think this is by design. My Subaru does this too. My feeling is that it’s an
emergency feature meant to keep you on the road, not something you should rely
on to steer the car completely, so they don’t want it to be too good. The
quicker jerk back into lane is also enough to grab your attention, and bring
it back to the wheel.

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deegles
This metric is at best misleading. It's presented as a proxy for safety, but
that should only apply to a single hardware/software combination.

I want to know how many miles are driven (both IRL and in simulation) per
software release?

If you accept that the Autopilot software improves over time, then you accept
that it changes over time. If it's changing, then there will be situations
that will behave differently in the future. The implicit assumption is "the
software will only make _better_ driving decisions with each point release",
but that doesn't follow! There's no proof that a situation that was driven
safely by version 1.1 will also be driven safely by version 1.2 (unless it was
tested in simulation).

If this means the pace of self-driving development would slow down, then so be
it. I wouldn't let a driver turn on Autopilot with me in it.

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lgbr
The more the better, I find. For all the hate that Autopilot gets, it really
is a game changer, and I can see consumers demanding this and similar
technology in all cars from now on. A majority of the driving that I do, both
per mile and per minute, are spent on Autopilot, and the sheer convenience is
night and day. Being able to open a bottle of water, to tweak the navigation
or change the song, or to be able to just have a second set of eyes in case
you're not paying attention really has a huge benefit.

At the moment, there remains some bugs to work out, as last night Autopilot
decided to slam on the brakes at 150 km/h on the autobahn for no reason, but
given how close it is to perfection on freeways, and how many improvements I
see in the updates, I'll go so far as to say we should be requiring this
technology in all cars like we now require emergency braking and backup
cameras.

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feintruled
"as last night Autopilot decided to slam on the brakes at 150 km/h on the
autobahn for no reason"

Holy shit! That's a hell of a caveat!

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lgbr
> Holy shit! That's a hell of a caveat!

Indeed it is. To make it clear, it slams on the brakes bringing me down from
150 to 120 km/h, it doesn't come to a dead stop, so unless someone is
seriously tailgating, then it's not creating any danger, it's just
uncomfortable.

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coldtea
Yeah, what could go wrong going suddenly from 150 to 120 on the Autobahn...

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toomuchtodo
Better than not hitting the brakes when there is a legitimate danger in the
travel path (which is why emergency braking is activated).

Remember, it’s the responsibility of the driver behind you to keep a safe
following distance. If they rear end you, they were following too closely.

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coldtea
> _Better than not hitting the brakes when there is a legitimate danger in the
> travel path (which is why emergency braking is activated)._

In this case we've established it was activated at random by the autopilot.

> _Remember, it’s the responsibility of the driver behind you to keep a safe
> following distance. If they rear end you, they were following too closely._

That wont be on much comfort during a pile-up...

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toomuchtodo
Is it random? In my experience with Autopilot 2, it’s typically when the front
radar is attempting to discern between a metal sign on an overpass and a large
object in the travel path, and Tesla hasn’t seen that object enough yet to
code it as a known false positive in the Autopilot data corpus.

[https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/psa-careful-
autopilo...](https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/psa-careful-autopilot-
sudden-braking.114810/)

“But as I recall, the understanding then was that Tesla had a database of
things like bridges, and the braking meant that the database was incomplete.
So folks were told to file a bug report ASAP after the incident so that Tesla
could fix the data.”

So! If this happens while on Autopilot, press the voice command button, and
then say “Bug Report <speak bug report here>”

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stephengillie
Does the Tesla driver assistance package often confuse highway signs with
large trucks? From parent comment's link:

> _Situation: When autopilot is engaged, it somehow sees some shadows /images,
> and it brakes pretty hard even though no car is in front of you. It does not
> come to complete stop, but it will go from 65-70 to 45 pretty quickly.

Conditions: Typically for me it has been driving in the dark (evening or early
morning) and going under an underpass. I am not sure if others have seen this
during the daytime or other conditions._

Another driver's description sounds like Google Maps getting confused by
overpasses:

> _It just happened to me today when I went under an overpass. The GPS based
> speed thought I was suddenly off the freeway and on the surface street
> overpass and said limited autosteer speed to 45. Luckily I had my foot on
> the accelerator so I could override it but it just jolt me a bit trying to
> slow down._

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toomuchtodo
That’s exactly the problem. It’s a radar discrimination/GPS resolution/mapping
data fusion issue.

They’re pushing hard on the front facing radar to avoid accidents like the
fatality of the Floridian driver who wasn’t paying attention when the tractor
trailer crossed the road, and false positives are the side effect. Better to
rapidly decelerate then be dead.

~~~
coldtea
> _Better to rapidly decelerate then be dead._

Even better to non-rapidly decelerate when it's not needed, since that can
also have one killed.

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stephengillie
What if cars had rear adaptive cruise sensors? They could modify their follow
distance by averaging the follow distance of the car behind them.

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anant90
I don't understand how reports like these make sense. A mile driven by a
Waymo/Cruise car on route/conditions carefully chosen to test an update, or
gather data on a new type of route/conditions is way more valuable than
another mile driven on the same freeway stretch/conditions that already works
perfectly. Just totaling up the number of miles driven seems to be the vanity
metric of the Self-Driving Car industry.

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ModernMech
It's the same thing Apple did with the app store. They touted the number of
apps they hosted, even though tons of them were things like a trip guide per
every city on the planet. Not a useful metric, but then every other app store
used the metric and then it became a competition about who had the most apps.

This is what happens when people enter a new market: They look for metrics,
any metrics, and then optimize on those (because that is how business usually
makes money in well understood fields) even if they are not really
representative.

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jfoster
Pretty much every business will use different numbers in marketing themselves
than they should be using to measure the health of their business. The purpose
of marketing numbers is different, because they have to sound impressive to a
broad audience rather than the most critical thinkers within that audience.

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Retric
At ~1.2 deaths per 100 million miles in the US you would expect approximately
~10-20 deaths over that distance. Adjusted for type of car and driving
conditions.

Autopilot seems to be around those numbers which is promising assuming
continued improvements. Though it's not currently dramatically safer their is
reasonable expectation it will improve over time.

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jordache
you forgot that auto pilot likely is only used or only works under certain
conditions. So that 1.2B miles is selective. You can't extrapolate that to the
10-20 deaths, which I assume you calculated from ALL miles driven

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Ienuur4i
But are the parts that are easy for machines also what is easy for humans?
Human attention decreases when things get more simpler and more monotonous
while an autopilot can deliver constant attention.

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adrianN
The problem with systems like autopilot is that the human _still_ needs to pay
attention. The driver needs to take over in a matter of seconds when the
system encounters a situation in can't handle. Autopilot makes things simpler
and more monotonous while still requiring perfect attention from the human.

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Retric
In theory that's a huge problem. In practice we have 1.X billion miles of data
and it does not seem to be such a huge deal. Either the systems are already
fairly good, or people mostly pay attention.

Granted, I am approaching this from the perspective of a more relaxing driving
experience not necessarily from a pure safety standpoint. People spend 20,000+
hours driving in a lifetime making that less stressful is a huge benefit even
if they are still stuck in their cars and can't get work done.

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lleddell82
I've followed this groups research over the past year or so. Their approach to
understanding the (human) issues behind semi-automated driving are quite
intriguing, yet they haven't produced much research on the topic. Waiting to
see where this goes.

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vinay_ys
How many unique miles is driven? And unique lighting and traffic conditions
were they driven in? (day/night/season/location) Do those miles have sensor
in/out recordings that can be used for training autopilot or building
simulators?

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GrumpyNl
When your source is a Elon Musk Tweet, the credibility of the report goes down
the drain.

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cup-of-tea
What's an "estimated mile"?

