SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the keep-your-eyes-on-the-road-and-your-hands-on-the-wheel dept.
Tesla's advanced driver assist system, Autopilot, was active when a Model 3 driven by a 50-year-old Florida man crashed into the side of a tractor-trailer truck on March 1st, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) states in a report released on Thursday. Investigators reviewed video and preliminary data from the vehicle and found that neither the driver nor Autopilot "executed evasive maneuvers" before striking the truck.
[...] The driver, Jeremy Beren Banner, was killed in the crash. It is at least the fourth fatal crash of a Tesla vehicle involving Autopilot.
This crash is eerily similar to another one involving a Tesla in 2016 near Gainesville, Florida. In that incident, Joshua Brown was killed when his Model S sedan collided with a semitrailer truck on a Florida highway in May 2016, making him the first known fatality in a semi-autonomous car.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) determined that a "lack of safeguards" contributed to Brown's death. Meanwhile, today's report is just preliminary, and the NTSB declined to place blame on anyone.
Source: The Verge
Also at Ars Technica.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 17 2019, @04:21PM (4 children)
Absolutely, I much prefer an Impala, or a tricked out Malibu. ;-) (OUS: Google "Chevrolet Models")
When I'm commuting on 3-5 lanes each way of interstate to-from work, speed limit 65, commonly observed slowest vehicles moving up to 80mph, I'm continually shocked at the number of commuters who are following at less than 1 second distance to the car in front.
I'm no longer shocked at the daily accidents, and the traffic jams they regularly create. Fatal accidents are fairly rare, but accidents that could have been fatal with a little worse luck are all too common.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday May 17 2019, @05:52PM (3 children)
I think it was about 4 years ago that I witnessed an accident in the left lane on the highway about 4 cars in front of me. I can't remember what precipitated it, but the 4-5 cars in front of me piled up, one of them being run off the road and another being hit and spun completely around on the highway. I had left a reasonable cushion in front of me (as I always do), but still barely had a chance to come to a stop as I swerved out of the lane.
Just a few minutes before, I remember being tailgated by one of those cars, which had sped around me and passed me on the right, simply because I wasn't willing to tailgate the car in front of me (I wasn't going slower than the traffic in front of me -- just leaving a reasonable gap).
For many years I always tried to follow the rule about leaving a gap, but now I'm even more certain to do it. Unfortunately, most people I think never experience something like this and just assume all will be okay, because they tailgate all the time and nothing bad has happened to them.
I don't really understand why the police don't ticket more people for tailgating, as it's generally a lot more dangerous and likely to cause accidents than minor speeding or other minor stuff people often get pulled over for. Maintaining a safe following distance is actually the one reason I look forward to the days of autonomous cars (which unfortunately I think are much further in the future than most people seem to think, at least without dedicated roads for them). But nothing will stop idiocy: I'm sure an autonomous car maintaining a safe following distance will get passed and cut off in even more dangerous maneuvers, as people become impatient as if filling in the constant gap in front of them will somehow get them to their destination more than a few seconds faster.
The ironic thing for me is how it's those idiots who actually cause most traffic jams. Not just with accidents, but by following too closely and thereby necessitating huge braking maneuvers in strings of cars with just one minor error, merge, cut-off, etc. If you maintain a reasonable distance and something like that happens, you probably don't even need to brake -- just lay off the accelerator, and you and everyone behind you keeps moving. Tailgate and then you have to brake hard, and all the dozen tailgaters behind you brake hard, setting up accordion-like traffic waves that propagate backward and end up screwing up everyone's commute so we all take twice as long to get home. But hey -- at least you didn't allow that darn gap of a few car lengths to be open in front of you!
(Score: 3, Informative) by bob_super on Friday May 17 2019, @07:36PM (1 child)
> I remember being tailgated by one of those cars, which had sped around me and passed me on the right
I do have to point out that if a tailgater passed you on the right, the smart thing to do would have been to merge right as soon as you could to let the tailgater go.
He's an asshole (pretty safely assuming it's a guy), but you shouldn't have stayed in the left lane in front of an asshole, if there was enough space to GET BACK TO THE RIGHT.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday May 23 2019, @01:34AM
It was heavy rush hour traffic. The car took advantage of a rare gap and cut people off to do it.
Everyone was tailgating. Hence the pileup. It is standard rush hour practice in all lanes in some areas.
Normally I do what you recommend when I can do it safely. I could not. He did not.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by lentilla on Friday May 17 2019, @11:46PM
I have driven a number of cars with active radar that will follow the car in front and leave an appropriate amount of distance to the preceding car (the distance is even adjustable). These are higher-end models but the technology will find its way into regular models in short order. I would like to see this implemented directly in to the accelerator (gas pedal): even if active cruse control is turned off, if you follow too closely, a servo on the accelerator pedal actively pushes back. So; yes; you can follow the car in front leaving a microsecond gap, but you have to constantly work hard to do so. My theory is that most people won't put in the effort, and once "everyone" is leaving an appropriate safety buffer, the drive to tailgate will be greatly diminished.