
The customer is always wrong: Tesla lets out self-driving car data when it suits - sergeant3
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/03/the-customer-is-always-wrong-tesla-lets-out-self-driving-car-data-when-it-suits
======
Animats
Some of the "self driving" car companies fear objective evaluation. Uber
especially doesn't like to test in California because they have to report
accidents and disengagements to DMV. Tesla isn't quite as bad, but they report
very few miles driven in California.

This is for real self-driving. Level 2 semi self driving systems like Tesla's
old "autopilot" don't have to report, so we don't get data for production
vehicles.

From the DMV reports, Google/Waymo is performing about two orders of magnitude
better on self-driving disengagements than anybody else reporting.[1] They're
up to 5000 miles between disengagements. No disengagements on freeways. That's
one of the few objective measures we have in this business. Road and Track,
and Top Gear, aren't getting self driving cars to test yet.

[1]
[https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/disen...](https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/disengagement_report_2016)

~~~
MegaButts
While I agree that Waymo is in the lead, I disagree they're two orders of
magnitude ahead of the competition. If you look at Cruise, they are clearly
making significant progress each month. If you look at their last month
available, they have 6 disengagements for 2284.35 miles, or 2.62
disengagements per 1,000 miles.

Waymo reports 0.2 disengagements per 1,000 miles, which is clearly better -
but only by 1 order of magnitude. And if you look at how quickly Cruise is
making progress, I'd suspect (by as much data as we can glean from these
reports, which is limited) that Cruise will be roughly on par with Waymo in <2
years.

~~~
mritun
> And if you look at how quickly Cruise is making progress, I'd suspect (by as
> much data as we can glean from these reports, which is limited) that Cruise
> will be roughly on par with Waymo in <2 years.

Assuming Waymo is standing still. The last 20% take a lot longer than initial
80% in the machine learning business. The last 2% literally takes a decade.

~~~
MegaButts
If Waymo stands still, I suspect Cruise will be there in ~1 year. And right
now Waymo is in the throes of a managerial clusterfuck, which is why most
people left.

------
drzaiusapelord
>Tesla said it doesn’t show anyone the logs themselves, only a description of
the logs that it distributes to media when it feels the integrity of its
product has been impugned.

>“Drivers don’t have access to this data to defend themselves if they need
it,” the Swiss driver said. “So this data is 100% to the disadvantage of the
drivers.”

This is scary stuff and is one of the main things that spooks me about Elon's
view of the future. He's pretty much the anti-Stallman. My devices log
everything I do in a blackbox fashion and when I have a conflict with these
companies they can use this logging against me. I can't get these logs and
even if I could how could I properly interpret them for my defense. Look at
how Toyota had teams of experts from all over the world going over their
recent acceleration issues and still had a hard time making heads or tails of
it.

How can a consumer like myself ever hope to have these kinds of resources if
there's a conflict?

>The Guardian could not find a single case in which Tesla had sought the
permission of a customer who had been involved in an accident before sharing
detailed information from the customer’s car with the press when its self-
driving software was called into question.

This is inexcusable. Executitves at Tesla shouldn't be making these calls, the
consumer should.

I think IoT and smarteverything is going to have us re-evaluate our
relationships with the companies we buy from . There's a fairly major power
inbalance in their favor and they are not shy about using it.

~~~
ethbro
Personally, I'm okay with this _in the short term_. Electric vehicles are
still at a fairly press-sensitive stage of development. And there's definitely
skulldoggery that ICE competitors could manufacture if they wanted to.

Or even crazy customers. See: [https://www.tesla.com/blog/when-life-gives-you-
lemons](https://www.tesla.com/blog/when-life-gives-you-lemons)

After they're accepted and the new normal? Absolutely agreed that the balance
should be shifted toward the customer.

~~~
DannyBee
Wow. A friend of mine in china told me "What do we need civil rights for right
now. It's more important that we become a world leader. We can always get our
rights back later"

Once you set a new normal, it's the new normal, and people get used to it.
Remember that time we went back to a strong 4th amendment? Or less
surveillance? or ...

If electric cars can't survive with negative press, they shouldn't survive.
Ends don't justify means.

~~~
fixermark
Remember the time the United States was doing terrible damage to the
environment (noon in Pittsburgh, strip mining, coal ash in the rivers), then
we became a world superpower, then the EPA was given teeth to clean up the
environment?

History suggests your friend might have a point. _Might._ There are likely
good counter-examples to consider.

~~~
DannyBee
This is the usual argument. Here's the problem: There's always another thing.
_always_. In the history of the world, we go from thing to thing to thing,
always teetering on the edge.

So if you always say "hey, just doin it for this crisis, we'll go back to
normal later", you'll be doing it forever.

EIther we make it without that, or truthfully, we aren't goign to make it as a
species over time.

~~~
ethbro
How would we have industrialized without massive amounts of coal and oil-
fueled power?

Sometimes there are stages you _must_ go through in order to reach the other
side (e.g. an excess energy future where we can afford to research and pump
out solar panels).

------
andor
This will have to change next year, at least for European customers, when the
EU General Data Protection Regulation takes effect. The GDPR grants everybody
a right to data portability for personal data:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDPR#Data_portability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDPR#Data_portability)

The mobility data they collect is regarded personal data because it indirectly
allows to identify the driver.

~~~
fixermark
Will they continue to have European customers once that regulation takes
effect?

------
makomk
The Summon incident certainly was rather sleazy. Tesla's press release made it
sound like a long, complicated series of steps were involved that could only
be triggered intentionally. In reality, all it took was the car thinking the
user double-tapped Park rather than single-tapping it, and then them not
noticing and cancelling in time. Not only that, according to other owners
there was sometimes a several second lag before message and warning sound to
appear, meaning he could well have been outside the car by then.

~~~
swiley
I really like my car's dashboard: there isn't a single touch screen.
Everything is a physical button.

~~~
zwily
The Park button referred to above is also a physical button.

------
TorKlingberg
This has bothered me. Tesla has all the data, but will only release it when it
benefits them. It is easy to control the public debate when you are the
gatekeeper of facts.

~~~
Shivetya
I just go surf youtube if I want to real results of AP2 and AP1 unfiltered.
Some of them are downright scary. There is not going to be a sudden jump to
good autonomous driving.

~~~
013a
Also remember that AP1 wasn't even created by Tesla. That technology belonged
to Mobileye, who is now owned by Intel. And it is public that Mobileye was the
party who ended their relationship; Tesla was pushing their tech beyond what
Mobileye deemed safe.

Thus, AP2 was born.

Tesla is a surprisingly scummy company when you start digging into some of
their behavior.

------
owenversteeg
Elsewhere on HN, someone posted this video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ1XLqc5IUg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ1XLqc5IUg)

This was my comment reply:

Wow. That guy is going nineteen miles per hour on a simple road in daylight
and the car literally crossed to the wrong side of the road in nine seconds!

That's an absolute disaster.

~~~
gambiting
As much as I would love to have a self-driving car(and I would!) I honestly
shake my head at anyone saying that we will have fully autonomous vehicles in
the next 5-10 years. Unless the roads are fully standardised and beacons
placed every few meters, this is literally the image recognition problem all
over again. In the 60s scientists thought that with the power of computers
they will "solve" image recognition completely within a few months. It's 2017
and our best of the best algorithms and neural networks are stupidly bad at
things they haven't been specifically trained to recognise, and even then they
make catastrophic mistakes. And then we want to put essentially this tech on a
car, where our roads are bad, signs are faded or straight up wrong, where you
can have any sort of weather conditions obscuring the view and/or lidar, plus
the whole thing has to be so reliable that you can put it on a consumer
product......within 10 years? If anything, we will get a better version of
Tesla Autopilot within 10 years, but full autonomy? Try 50 years.

~~~
Nomentatus
Humans aren't all that great at driving safely and consistently either.
Autonomous vehicles just have to be better than the average (not terrific)
driver, not perfect; and progress recently beggars the progress in previous
generations. I'm placing my money on sooner rather than later in this case.

~~~
gambiting
You see, this is where I disagree. "better than a human" was never a valid
defense against a machine failing and killing someone. Why would it be
different with autonomous cars?

Let's say we have a fully 100% autonomous car, where you don't have to pay
attention to the road. It crashes, injures or kills someone - who is
responsible?

If a human did that, then we call it "an accident" and your insurance company
foots the bill. With an autonomous car, sure, an insurance company will pay
for the damages - but they will demand that a problem is fixed or they won't
insure those cars anymore.

So anything less than 100% perfect is a huge liability for manufacturers, and
we are very very far off 100% perfect.

I cannot imagine a world where autonomous cars have minor/major accidents but
we just brush it off as "meh, whatever - humans have a higher rate of
accidents so it's fine".

Or maybe think about it this way. Introduction of autopilot in airplanes
resulted in a major improvement in safety, the number of plane crashes has
literally plummeted(sorry) after its introduction. But it hasn't eliminated
crashes entirely - and every time there is a crash, Boeing/Airbus will ground
their entire fleets to investigate what went wrong, if there is a perceived
fault then thousands of planes have to be updated before they are safe to fly.

Now bring that analogy over to cars - small, personal transportation vehicles,
where profit margins really aren't that fantastic. Which manufacturer will
risk releasing a product where they have to keep updating and maintaining the
autopilot for the lifetime of the car, and for which they are liable every
time it fails? Not to mention that planes are held to ridiculous safety
standards, while cars are not(so far, I haven't heard an answer to what
happens if a bird shits on the lidar and you don't clean it - it's an
instrument with almost chirurgical precision which requires similar level of
maintenance, and I know people who buy a car and then don't even wash it once
in 3 years of owning it).

I'm not saying we won't get there. I'm saying that I don't see any chance that
this technology will be ready in 5-10 years, and if anyone is foolish enough
to sell an "autonomous" car in the next 10 years, they will set back our
progress massively because the car _will_ fail, and there will be public and
legislatory backlash.

~~~
Nomentatus
We get used to things that seem unsafe but are safe very quickly according to
history. Elevators, for example. When I was young they generally had human
operators, but now they're all autonomous, have been for a while, fail
sometimes here and there but nobody seems hugely exercised about it.

------
newman314
The logging is also the primary reason why I'm not getting a Tesla.

~~~
Neliquat
Pretty much all new cars have it. They are hardly unique in that sense.

~~~
slededit
But only one company routinely releases it to embarrass their customers.

------
crispyambulance
It seems like there's a large volume of information in the logs. I mean, if
Tesla can tell whether the driver has his hands on the wheels there's probably
a ton of other details.

It makes me wonder how practical it would be to use these logs. I hear about
so-called "black boxes" in cars (not just Tesla), but where are the tools to
decipher the data? How much can you trust that the logs reflect reality?

~~~
mikeash
I'm skeptical of the "hands on the wheel" thing. They can't actually sense
hands on the wheel, what they sense is torque on the steering wheel. I often
have my car nag me to put my hands on the wheel when I already have them
there, and I'm just not applying enough torque with them.

It's possible that the threshold for the nag is just higher, and that the
torque sensor is so sensitive there's no way it could possibly have a false
negative here. But we just don't know.

~~~
ethbro
I wonder if there's enough play in the steering column that you could send
generated micro torque amounts back up to the steering wheel, then see if
they're resisted.

~~~
mikeash
You might be able to do it just by using road vibration that comes through the
steering column. I think it's quite possible to detect hands with pretty good
sensitivity in this way, it's just that the evidence suggests it's not
actually that sensitive.

~~~
ethbro
Good idea. It's definitely an interesting problem and seems like it would be
really relevant to the safety side of an autopilot.

E.g. if there are no hands on the wheel, autopilot should probably do whatever
it can to prevent a likely accident it sees

------
woliveirajr
> The driver said he believed Tesla had violated Swiss data protection law by
> declining to send the raw data

Raw data might not help anything if there are no instructions on how to
interpret it. There are two ways of hiding data: by not showing at all and by
showing it in a flood of useless data, where it can't be seeing except if you
know what you are looking for (and when there is only raw data and no manual,
well, you can't make a good use of it).

Yes, having some data is better than none, but I don't expect it to be that
helpful for a while.

~~~
ethbro
The other way to look at it is the difference between not having data, which
makes it impossible to interpret, and having data, which makes it somewhere
between easy and very difficult to interpret.

------
dayaz36
This is the second story that's somehow made it on the front page of hn today
that biasedly talks down Tesla and particularly autopilot. All this on the day
that Tesla takes over Ford in marketcap. This is not a coincidence. I'm
getting the feeling that there is definitely some astroturfing going on here.
Instead of talking about this historic day for Tesla and the EV market in
general, we're talking about an AP accident from a year ago and some
nonsensical study navigant did. Seems like a concerted effort to steer the
conversation

------
cool_look
"lets out data when it suits"

that is rich coming from a journalist.

