
Autopilot was active when a Tesla crashed into a truck, killing driver - close04
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/05/feds-autopilot-was-active-during-deadly-march-tesla-crash/
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aphextron
>"...our data shows that, when used properly by an attentive driver who is
prepared to take control at all times, drivers supported by Autopilot are
safer than those operating without assistance."

This is the key phrase. Tesla is all in on marketing "Autopilot" as a fully
autonomous driving agent when it's not. It's an advanced lane-keep assist
system combined with dynamic adaptive cruise control. No more advanced than GM
Super Cruise or Honda Sensing. The lies from their marketing department and
Musk himself are causing these deaths, not the technology. If they were
responsible in representing what the system really is, people would actually
be more attentive to the fact that they are still driving a car, and not
blindly trust their lives to a level 2 system. Honda and GM do this, and have
yet to see any fatalities.

~~~
frosted-flakes
>> "...who is prepared to take control at all times..."

I honestly don't see the point of "autopilot" if I have to be prepared to take
control at all times. It's not like it's any less work than actually driving
manually (the hard part is maintaining focus, not twiddling a steering wheel
back and forth). In reality, I don't think people who use it are _actually_
prepared to take control at all times. Hence the accidents.

> It's an advanced lane-keep assist system combined with dynamic adaptive
> cruise control.

Can these features be activated independently in Tesla vehicles?

I like the idea of adaptive cruise control (ACC), but I don't think I'd like
it if my car steered for me. That seems reasonable, and many cars do have ACC
without lane-assist, but what about the other way around? What if I want to
control the gas pedal, but have the car keep itself in the lane? Like if I'm
eating a sandwich and need to take my other hand off the wheel for a few
seconds, but I'm not prepared to put it into full auto mode.

~~~
m463
It is WAY less work than actually driving. You maintain your alertness, but it
takes away much of the physical load of driving. It might even preserve your
alertness.

It's the BEST THING EVER in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Also you can steer yourself and let it maintain the distance to the car in
front of you by turning on only Traffic Aware Cruise Control.

That said, you should be alert while you use it. If you're a text-while-you-
drive person, the only positive thing I can say is it protects other people
from you.

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howard941
These crossing-the-T accidents are difficult to avoid manually but radar might
have helped. The article's claim that "Radar systems lack the angular
resolution to distinguish a truck crossing the road from a large street sign
suspended over the road, so they tend to simply ignore stationary objects" is
spurious because signs don't typically move across one's straight-ahead line
of travel. Edited to add that a doppler-only radar would fail, perhaps they
meant that, or one with awful vertical resolution, but a radar exploiting a
static return as in the Bosch adaptive cruise in my ancient chariot has enough
horizontal angular discrimination to usually succeed at distinguishing the car
in my lane of travel from vehicles in adjacent lanes subtending less than
10-15 degrees off of my heading.

It's not clear what time of day we're talking about but if it was in the
afternoon on a clear day the truck, south of the Telsa, traveling from w->e,
possibly was in or near sun glare and given poor roadside maintenance,
obscured by all of the foliage along both roadways.

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gpickett00
The overarching tone of the article is "Tesla isn't doing a very good job with
its autopilot and could have prevented this". I wonder if there's any data
about how many Tesla's get in crashes versus other cars. I'd suspect that
given that only 2 people have died in over 1 billion miles driven in autopilot
that Tesla's are safer than other cars.

~~~
gambiting
I feel like that's absolutely irrelevant. If you trusts a device with your
life, it shouldn't kill you under any circumstances other than actual
malfunction.

I like to bring up an example of a radiotherapy machines here - a machine that
treats you with radiation cannot have a state in which it kills the patient,
even if the chance of that happening is 1 out of a million. In that scenario
it doesn't matter that a manually operated machine would kill more people on
average - an automatic one should kill absolute zero.

Or maybe for another example - plane autopilot has saved countless lives. But
any time one fails, every single plane of that type is removed from service
until the issue is found and fixed.

I feel like at the moment the approach these companies take is "well yes the
autopilot can make mistakes, but it's still safer than manual driving so it's
fine, yeah?". No tesla, it's absolutely not fine on any possible layer. Tesla
should be disabling autopilot on every single Model S and Model 3 sold until
the issue is found and fixed.

~~~
trca
That's a staunch overreaction. You're correct in saying that you can equate
Tesla's auto-steer and adaptive cruise control to the autopilot in an
airplane, however what you fail to account for is that in an airplane
operating on autopilot, the pilots are still required by law to be attentive
and paying full attention to the system. This is very similar to how Tesla
portrays current-generation of autopilot. Sure, their marketing team does
state that all cars are _capable_ of self-driving (i.e. they have the required
hardware bar HW3 processor), but they never state that current generation cars
_are_ self-driving _currently_. It's on consumers to understand this
difference and pay full attention while driving. My mom was a flight attendant
on a major U.S. airline until a few years ago, and it wasn't uncommon at all
to hear of a an autopilot system malfunctioning ever-so-slightly in that it
steers slightly off-course due to a miscalibrated sensor but, since the pilots
are actively paying attention, this error never puts the lives of those
onboard the plane in-danger. I would say that Tesla's software should be held
to the same standard, in that the operator is required and absolutely needs to
pay full attention to the system, but there is no need for Tesla to "disabl[e]
autopilot on every single Model S and Model 3 sold until the issue is found
and fixed"

~~~
gambiting
If anything, it's underreaction - not only Tesla should disable the autopilot
on all their models temporarily, there should be heavy fines for both allowing
it on the roads in this state and for calling it autopilot in the first place.

>>It's on consumers to understand this difference and pay full attention while
driving.

Then this is a crazy assumption to be making. Like literally crazy. Pilots are
trained over and over again to pay attention - and they still fall asleep
during flights. With cars, even engineers who are employed and paid(!!!) to
pay attention have fallen asleep while testing level 3 autonomy[0]. Expecting
a regular customer to both understand the difference and pay attention is
wishful thinking. The lowest bar for this technology that we should be aiming
for is "the vehicle should never under any circumstances fail to observe and
react to a stationary object in front of itself". Simple as that. If Tesla's
autopilot cannot meet this bar it shouldn't be on the road, no matter how many
times safer on average it is than a regular driver.

[0] [https://www.thedrive.com/tech/7730/ford-engineers-are-
fallin...](https://www.thedrive.com/tech/7730/ford-engineers-are-falling-
asleep-while-monitoring-self-driving-cars)

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mimixco
It feels like we are getting further away from autonomous vehicles, rather
than closer.

~~~
coldtea
Autonomous vehicles had an investment / media hype and it's now on its last
legs.

We still might have them some day -- but the vision sold throughout the 2010s
of us having them anytime soon is bogus, like other such fads before it (fuel
cells, VR, AR, and tons of other things besides).

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drcross
>it's still worth asking whether lidar could have prevented the crash that
killed Jeremy Banner.

Lidar doesn't automatically make a car safer without the software written to
accompany its use. Its a very trite summation on a very complicated and cost
conscious subject. The same sentence could be equally re-written:

>it's still worth asking whether _paying more attention to the road, while
using a system you are supposed to_ could have prevented the crash that killed
Jeremy Banner.

And it's more to the subject.

~~~
malcolmgreaves
This discussion is in the context of relying upon an automated driving system.
Depth perception is a key requirement of a self driving car. When these
conversations mention lidar, the implication its s information is fused with
oper sensors to produce a coherent mapping of the environment.

The technical limitation of every Tesla vehichle thus far is their inability
to reliably understand the proper depth of objects.

People have died as a result of their design flaws. That is the ultimate cost
in making an automated car.

