Tesla knew Autopilot caused death, but didn’t fix it::Software’s alleged inability to handle cross traffic central to court battle after two road deaths
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I remember reading about the ethical question about the hypothetical self driving car that loses control and can choose to either turn left and kill a child, turn right and kill a crowd of old people, or do nothing and hit a wall, killing the driver. It’s a question that doesn’t have a right answer, but it must be answered by anybody implementing a self driving car.
I non-sarcastically feel like Tesla would implement this system by trying to see which option kills the least number of paying Xitter subscribers.
At the very least, they would prioritize the driver, because the driver is likely to buy another Tesla in the future if they do.
Meanwhile hundreds of people are killed in auto accidents every single day in the US. Even if a self driving car is 1000x safer than a human driver there will still be accidents as long as other humans are also sharing the same road.
When a human is found to be at fault, you can punish them.
With automated driving, who’s to punish? The company? Great. They pay a small fine and keep making millions while your loved one is gone and you get no justice.
People generally aren’t punished for an accident unless they did it intentionally or negligently. The better and more prevalent these systems get, the fewer the families with lost loved ones. Are you really arguing that this is a bad thing because it isn’t absolutely perfect and you can’t take vengeance on it?
I think the whole premise is flawed because the car would have had to have had numerous failures before ever reaching a point where it would need to make this decision. This applies to humans as we have free will. A computer does not.
Software’s inability to handle cross traffic…You mean the Driver’s inability to handle cross traffic, while also trusting his life to a glorified Speak n Spell.
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That is precisely why autopilot is called a driver assist system. Just like every other manufacturer’s LKAS.
Don’t you think that might be just a wee bit confusing?
How is that confusing? If you look at the capabilities an airplane autopilot does, it will maintain altitude and heading and make turns at pre-determined points. Autopilot in an airplane does absolutely zero to avoid other airplanes or obstacles, and no airplane is equipped with any AP system that allows the pilot to leave the cockpit.
Tesla autopilot maintains speed and distance from the car in front of you and keeps you in your lane. Nothing else. It is a perfect name for the system.
And you think the average person knows the capabilities of an airplane autopilot?
I’d hope they would before willfully getting behind the controls of one to operate it. Regardless of what we call it, these people still would have crashed. They both drove into the side of a semi while sitting in the driver’s seat with their hands on the wheel.
Exactly. Until the next maybe 2 decades, it should only be called driver assist.
Didn’t, or couldn’t? Tesla uses a vastly inferior technology to run their “automated” driving protocols. It’s a hardware problem first and foremost.
It’s like trying to drive a car with a 720p resolution camera mounted on the license plate holder versus a 4k monitor on the top of the car. That’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s close enough for those not aware of how cheap these cars and their tech really is.
It remains to be seen what hardware is required for autonomous driving as no company has a fully functioning system, so there is no baseline to compare to. Cruise (the “4k monitor” in your anaology) just had to cut their fleet of geofenced vehicles after back to back crashes involving emergency vehicles along with blocking traffic and attempting to run over things like fire hoses.
Calling it Autopilot was always a marketing decision. It’s a driver assistance feature, nothing more. When used “as intended”, it works great. I drove for 14 hours during a road trip using AP and arrived not dead tired and still alert. That’s awesome, and would never have happened in a conventional car.
I have the “FSD” beta right now. It has potential, but I still always keep a hand on the wheel and am in control of my car.
At the end of the day, if the car makes a poor choice because of the automation, I’m still responsible as the driver, and I don’t want an accident, injury, or death on my conscience.
Of course not. Fixing it would cost money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto
The other day I said on here that self driving cars arent ready and got downvoted to fuck. This is why I said it.
https://www.wardsauto.com/blog/my-somewhat-begrudging-apology-ford-pinto
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-02-10-mn-1335-story.html
Two examples of the media creating a frenzy that wound up being proven completely false later.
In OP’s case, both of these drivers failed to see a semi crossing the road right in front of them even though they were sitting in the driver’s seat with their hands on the wheel. This technology certainly needs improvement, but this is like blaming every auto manufacturer when someone crashes their car while texting on their phone.
Ford Pinto says what?
Boom.
I do agree the name and Teslas general advertising of drivers assists are a bit misleading.
But this is really on the driver for not paying attention.
“A bit misleading” is, I think, a bit of a misleading way to describe their marketing. It’s literally called Autopilot, and their marketing material has very aggressively pitched it as a ‘full self driving’ feature since the beginning, even without mentioning Musk’s own constant and ridiculous hyperbole when advertising it. It’s software that should never have been tested outside of vehicles run by company employees under controlled conditions, but Tesla chose to push it to the public as a paid feature and significantly downplay the fact that it is a poorly tested, unreliable beta, specifically to profit from the data generated by its widespread use, not to mention the price they charge for it as if it were a normal, ready to use consumer feature. Everything about their deployment of the system has been reckless, careless, and actively disdainful of their customers’ safety.
You don’t even seem to get the terms right so makes me question how well informed you really are on the subject.
Autopilot is the most basic free driver assist version that comes with every Tesla. Then there’s Enhanced Autopilot which costs extra and is more advanced and lastly there’s Full Self Driving BETA. Even the name indicates you probably shouldn’t trust your life with it.
Everybody who has a bit of an idea what an autopilot in a plane actually does is not mislead. Do people really think that commercial airline pilots just hit the “autopilot” button in their cockpit after disengaging the boarding ramp and then lean back until the boarding ramp at the destination is attached?
Why do you think companies need to warn about stuff like “Caution, Contents are hot” on paper coffee shops? People are stupid.
Those labels are there because people made a quick buck suing the companies when they messed up, not to protect the stupid customers.
If the courts would apply a reasonable level of common sense, they wouldn’t exist.
They’re not buying a plane though. They’re buying a car with an autopilot that is labeled as “full self driving”. That term does imply it will handle a complete route from A to B.
People are wrongly buying into the marketing hype and that is causing crashes.
I’m very concerned about some of the things I’ve seen regarding FSD on Teslas. Such as sudden hard braking on highways, failing to avoid an accident (but it’s OK it disengaged seconds before impact so the human was in control) and of course the viral video of FSD trying to kill a cyclist.
They should not be allowed to market the feature this way and I don’t think it should be openly available to normal users as it is now. It’s just too dangerous to put in the hands (or not) of normal drivers.
Autopilot has never been “Full Self Driving”. FSD is an additional $15,000 package on top of the car. Autopilot is the free system providing lane keeping with adaptive cruise, same as “Pro Pilot Assist” or “Honda Sensing” or any of the other packages from other car companies. The only difference is whenever someone gets in an accident using any of those technologies we never get headlines about it.
I’ve never sat in a Tesla, so I’m not really sure, but based on the things I’ve read online, autopilot and FSD are two different systems on Tesla cars you can engage separately. There shouldn’t be any confusion about this.
I’ve never sat in a Tesla, so I’m not really sure
There shouldn’t be any confusion about this.
U wot m8?
There’s three tiers. Autopilot, Enhanced Autopilot and FSD Beta
Well, if it’s just the lane assistance autopilot that is causing this kind of crash. I’d agree it’s likely user error. The reason I say if, is because I don’t trust journalists to know or report on the difference.
I am still concerned the FSD beta is “out there” though. I do not trust normal users to understand what beta means, and of course no-one is going to read the agreement before clicking agree. They just want to see their car drive itself.
If it were about the FSD implementation, things would be very different. I’m pretty sure that the FSD is designed to handle cross traffic, though.
I do not trust normal users to understand what beta means
Yeah, Google kinda destroyed that word in the public conciousness when they had their search with the beta flag for more than a decade while growing to be one of the biggest companies on Earth with it.
When I first heard about it, I was very surprised that the US even allows vehicles with beta self-driving software on public roads. That’s like testing a new fire fighter truck by randomly setting buildings on fire in a city and then trying to stop that with the truck.
Yeah, I don’t trust a machine that has been trained for millions of hours and simulated every possible traffic scenario tens of millions of times and has millisecond reaction time while seeing the world in a full 360 degrees. A system that never drives drunk, distracted or fatigued. You know who’s really good at driving though? Humans. Perfect track record, those humans.
So I need to understand the autopilot of a plane first before I buy a car?
I would be mislead then, as I have no idea how such autopilots work. I also suspect that those two systems don’t really work the same. One flies, the other drives. One has traffic lights, the other doesn’t. One is operated by well paid professionals, the other, well, by me. Call me simple, but there seem to be some major differences.
This is a pretty absurd argument. You could apply this to literally any facet of driving.
“I have to learn what each color of a traffic light means before driving?”
“I have to learn what white and yellow paint means and dashes versus lines? This is too confusing”
God help you when you get to 4-way stops and roundabouts.
Not absurd, but reality. We do that in driving school.
I don’t know where you are from and which teaching laws apply, of course, but I definitely learned all those lessons you mentioned.
Yeah, there are some major differences in the vehicles, but both disengage when there’s anything out of the ordinary going on. Maybe people base their understanding of autopilots on the movie “Airplane!” where that inflatable puppet groped the Stewardess afterwards.
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I’m sorry, what? If you set an airplane to maintain altitude and heading with autopilot, it will 100% fly you into the side of a mountain if there’s one in front of you.
True, good point. As far as I know, it does turn itself off if it detects something it can’t handle, though. The problem with cross traffic is that it obviously can’t detect it, otherwise turning itself off would already be a way of handling it.
Proximity detection is far easier up in the air, especially if you’re not bound by the weird requirement to only use visible spectrum cameras.
(To make things clear, I’m just defending the engineers there who had to work within these constraints. All of this is a pure management failure.)
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Back on 2016 Tesla released a video that says “our cars drive themselves, you don’t the driver”.
Is that like “Man door hand hook car door”? What?
but im saving the planet and making sure elon gets a cut of my money
The driver was also not even paying attention to the road so the blame should be on him not the car. People need to learn that Tesla’s version of autopilot has a specific use case and regular streets is not that.
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They should really have called it something else than autopilot/FSD. It’s a driver assist and everyone knows this but it’s so easy to dunk on them when it fails because of the name though I’m 100% sure the system tells you to keep your eyes on the road and hands on the steering wheel when you engage it. If you crash a “self driving” car it’s the fault of the driver - not the vehicle.
I feel like some people are such Tesla fanboys that they will argue when I say Tesla FSD is not real and never has been.
I have nearly 20k miles on tesla’s FSD platform, it works amazingly well for something thats “not real”. There are countless youtube channels out there where people will mount a gopro in their car and go for a drive. Some of them like AIDRIVR and Whole Mars Catalog pretty much never take over control of the car without any drama. Especially in the past ~6 months or so of development it has been amazing.
I just don’t trust this computer vision stuff, for me to consider FSD real, it needs to work and never have a fatal incident
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by this definition, full human driving isn’t real.
Probably because calling something “not real” is infuriatingly vague.
Feel free to expand on your position, I actually do want to know what “not real” means in this context.
If you mean, from a semantics perspective, that FULL means it should be a completely independent and autonomous system, bravo, you’ve made and won the most uninteresting form of that argument.
I mean, don’t call your service something it’s not? Words should have meaning? Tesla’s Autopilot is very impressive, but it’s not fully independent, and that’s okay. Honestly if it had an accurate name people wouldn’t attack it so much. Other manufacturers are gaining similar capabilities but no one is complaining that their cars aren’t perfect either.
Autopilot is an accurate name as it takes over the mundane portions of the task. Airline pilots don’t just hit a green button on the dash that says “fly” and the autopilot takes over until they hit a red “land” button. You can argue that people have a misconception about the word but the word itself is correct.
It’s my understanding that they actually could do that at this point, commerical flying is a controlled and predictable environment compared to driving on the road. Ten years ago I was hearing anecdotes from pilots saying the only thing they do is takeoff and land and even then the computer could handle it just fine if they let it. Maybe the autopilot in a Cesna sucks, but it’s pretty much fully automated in an Airbus.
Yeah that’s a really tired argument. I agree, they should call it whatever will stop people from arguing about the name. Something super generic and meaningless and uncreative that doesn’t encourage conversation. Something like Blue Cruise, ooh, or super cruise!
At least then 99% of the complaints wouldn’t be about the least possible interesting part of it
Yet Phoney Stark keeps on whinging about the risks of AI but at the same time slags off humans who actually know their stuff especially regarding safety.
Tesla Autopilot has nothing to do with AI. It is a lane keep assist system with cruise control.
It has a lot to do with AI. Their systems use a lot of deep learning etc to recognize agents/obstacles on the road (perception), to infer how the agents will move in the future (prediction), and to generate trajectories for their car (motion planning). It definitely isn’t Artificial General Intelligence, but it is most certainly AI.
You are referring to FSD. Not Autopilot.
Which is why the name Autopilot is (very dangerous) false advertising.
Also lets not forget the “your Tesla will be an autonomous Robotaxi” Bullshit.
Autopilot is not full self driving. FSD is an additional $15k option on top of autopilot. The article posted here was for an accident in 2019 before FSD was available to anyone. My tesla fully self-drives itself every single day regardless of what you might think.
Its false advertisement or at least a poor naming choice. Should have called it “Megadrive Exo Giga Assistent” or something.
Which uses computer vision, which is a form of AI. It doesn’t have to be complex, or even work well, to be considered AI. All you need is a computer that makes decisions based on dynamic inputs and a set of rules on how to handle them.
A times B times C equals X… I am jacks something something something
A times B times C equals X… I am jacks something something something
Narrator: A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don’t do one.
Woman on Plane: Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents?
Narrator: You wouldn’t believe.
Woman on Plane: Which car company do you work for?
Narrator: A major one.
When you’re selling a million cars, it’s guaranteed that some of them will have a missed defect, no matter how good your QC is.
That’s why you have agencies like the NHTSA. You need someone who can decide at what point the issue is a major defect that constitutes a recall.
but when it’s the software it would be the same on all vehicles more than likely
Correct. They also push updates so they know exactly what software is running.
They’ve create a chain of liability.
The big automakers better be taking notes because it they seem to be trying to follow Tesla down this legal rabbit hole
”One of the major ones”
All of the major ones. On the other hand, the Pinto’s gas tank exploded less ofteb than competing models in the era, and wasn’t the only design with the lowered gas tank.
Look up the You’re Wrong about podcast on the Ford Pinto which is a great deep dive on car development. and product investigative reporting.
Since when has autopilot, especially in 2019, ever had the ability to deal with “cross-traffic” situations? It always has been a glorified adaptive cruise with lanekeeping and has always been advertised as such. Literally the same as any other car with LKAS. Tesla’s self-driving software wasn’t released to the public until 2021/2022.
Meanwhile about 120 people died in traffic related accidents today in the US.
