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https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/06/tesla-driver-blames-autopilot-for-crash-into-police-car/
A Massachusetts man is facing a negligent-driving charge after his Tesla slammed into a police car that was parked by the side of the road. According to a state trooper, the man had Tesla's Autopilot technology turned on and said that he "must not have been paying attention." The crash occurred in December, but the defendant, Nicholas Ciarlone, was only recently charged in the incident.
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Tesla is aiming to build a more sophisticated self-driving system that fully understands the surrounding environment. Hopefully, Tesla's "full self-driving" software will eventually detect a situation like this and respond appropriately. But as of at least last December, the technology seems to still be a work in progress.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @10:36AM (15 children)
More than a million dead and you are complaining? But that's normal.
https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/ [asirt.org]
It's a fucking WW2 on the roads but you accept that as "normal"? Statistically, if you are not a smoker or drug user, the most dangerous thing you do is drive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_ol2g_4kLE [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRZ9PJguIfE [youtube.com]
I don't see Telsa doing shit like this. It's a fucking IMPROVEMENT!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Nuke on Thursday July 02 2020, @12:06PM (3 children)
Then introduce some serious tests before you hand out driving licences to people, and be more prepared to take them away from proven bad drivers. The driving test in most countries (including the USA) is a joke. We don't need to wait and dream about technical improvements to implement stricter driving licence requirements.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by HiThere on Thursday July 02 2020, @02:13PM
The problem is that people are really bad at paying attention when things are boring...and at high speeds they stop being boring extremely quickly. Being a skilled driver when you're alert isn't sufficient. And for people even 25 mph is high speed, though higher is worse. People have an average reaction time of a quarter of a second, and that's not fast enough. So everything works well as long as your predictions match what happens, but if they're wrong, they don't work fast enough.
I'm not saying Tesla doesn't need to improve their autopilot, I'm saying Tesla *can* improve their autopilot, but you literally can't improve driving skills beyond a rather basic amount. And when people are bored, their reaction times slow.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @04:31PM
You can't do that, because of "muh freedoms".
(Score: 3, Informative) by epitaxial on Thursday July 02 2020, @04:46PM
The cops have pretty much given up enforcing traffic laws for the most part. The state police might still ticket speeders but locally you can do whatever you want. Run red lights and stop signs all day, do triple the speed limit on residential roads, nothing happens.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @12:59PM (2 children)
When self-driving technology is mature and mainstream, it will start to cut into the million deaths and tens of millions of injuries in car accidents each year. That is absolutely a worthy goal, worth pursuing.
But the path to that goal is not releasing self-driving tech before it's ready - especially since the people most likely to be injured and killed when there is a bug aren't even the Tesla buyers. A Tesla Model S is 5000 pounds, if the self-driving mechanism screws up and hits a pedestrian the pedestrian is screwed. If the Tesla self-driving mechanism screws up and hits a 3300 pound Honda Accord, the Honda occupants are screwed. "Buy our cars so that we can use everyone else except you as a guinea pig for our new self-driving technology" is an evil business model.
We absolutely do need self-driving tech. This isn't how to get there. Elon Musk is pushing this out before it's safe for the sake of publicity and boosted sales. He's every bit as soulless as any other auto executive who sold cars with known deadly safety flaws because it was profitable.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Friday July 03 2020, @04:15AM
Tesla's argument, if you believe it, is that the Autopilot+driver combination is already safer than a driver alone. I don't have enough data for an informed opinion on that, but it doesn't seem implausible.
(Score: 2) by EETech1 on Friday July 03 2020, @09:19AM
They're working on it:)
https://youtu.be/3x3SqeSdrAE [youtu.be]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ledow on Thursday July 02 2020, @01:39PM (7 children)
I'm afraid you don't know me at all well.
I would advocate for a far stricter test.
I would advocate for an annual test (when your car is being tested, you should be taken out on a driving test).
I would advocate for every failure requiring a pass to counteract it (so if you fail ten times, you need to pass ten times before you can drive) (I failed my first few, by the way, so I would be automatically unable to drive under my own rules.)
I would advocate that speeding points were multiplied hugely. No such thing as a fine. Points and removal of licence.
I would advocate that driving without a licence or in an unroadworthy or uninsured car would be an automatic jailable offence. None of this "you've been banned from driving for six month even though you're only 15 and not able to drive legally anyway" nonsense.
I love the central government insurance database, ANPR, speed cameras, traffic light cameras, and all the other things they are doing - I think it's brilliant that we can say "Here's a photo of you breaking the law, pay up" or "I've pulled you over because my police car made an alert because you're not insured".
While we have to accept that humans are far from perfect, we also have to accept that Tesla's etc. have undergone NONE of the lower-scale testing that they could have. You wouldn't let someone drive a car if they couldn't walk. You wouldn't let your kid on a motorbike if they can't ride a pushbike. You wouldn't strap a 17 year old into a Formula 1 car when they can't handle a Ford Fiesta.
But we've jumped STRAIGHT from "private testing on enclosed tracks" to "full-on highway speed auto-control" with nothing in between. Where are the "self-driving" golf carts, shopping trolleys, airport disability vehicles, Disney theme park cars, etc.? Nowhere. Nobody made them. They just skipped a prime test ground for low-speed, highly-regulated environment, safer auto-driving entirely because they just want to rush it to market and have you all buy it and they'll "patch it later".
"Ah, but humans are shit too" isn't an argument for. These things MUST ride alongside those shit humans, just the same. In fact, their biggest problems come from predicting human behaviour. But we just skirt over that because "a human would do a worse job".
Sorry, but I would want to see one of these things pass a driving test. Literally identical to a human driving test. No help, remote control, Internet access, etc.
And then when it did pass, I would phase it in - just like some countries - on a reduced licence for a long period of time, excluding motorway driving, night-driving and carrying passengers. Like a human. If they are "better" than humans, they'll have no problem passing that, right? And every software update - the same. Updating the software is changing the driver. It's a drop in the ocean for even Tesla to re-test their vehicle in official conditions for every major update.
You have to think - we are mandating that humans must be able to take over driving from these things in an emergency. They should be held to a similar standard - they should be able to take over driving from us in an emergency. Would you trust a Tesla that can remove your control? That's what a driving instructor / tester has to do!
Tesla's should be treated no differently from humans. And this is a 6-month-old brother with the memories of a 5 year old twin who has never passed a driving test, doesn't hold a licence, isn't penalised when it causes an accident (why does Tesla Autopilot not have a literal driving licence, as a piece of software, that is penalised for incidents like this - it hit the police car as much as the driver did. He got points and fines, what about the software? How many deaths, accidents, insurance-strikes, bumps, traffic violations, etc. until that has to re-take its test? Oh, just corporate liability insurance, and leave it deployed in millions of vehicles, right?), and which has been allowed to go from nothing to instant motorway driving carrying passengers with little oversight beyond a couple of test runs.
Sorry, but your argument sucks, precisely because we've treated it entirely differently to a human, and should be treating BOTH far more harshly.
I literally would not have a licence if I implemented my own rules - and I'm *fine* with that. But then any automated driver that I used in its stead should be held to the same level of accountability.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @02:36PM (1 child)
Driving on suspended and driving with no license are already "jailable". There are lots of people sitting in jail because they have to work, but can't legally transport themselves. Most of the time, their licenses weren't suspended for driving poorly, but as a consequence of being charged with a crime and being too poor to pay the court in what it considers to be a timely manner (which is strangely much shorter than what it views as timely in trials and sentencing).
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @05:46PM
Right. I had a friend who drove for years without a license - or registration, or insurance - for that reason. We lived in the middle of nowhere, and he couldn't afford to move anywhere with public transportation. So his two choices were "drive illegally" and "lose your income, and then your apartment".
So that leads me to my alternative suggestion to ledow: how about taxpayer-funded transit systems that don't suck, all over the country? Then you can make ultra stringent requirements for bus drivers and train crews, and everyone else can still travel where they need to go.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Runaway1956 on Thursday July 02 2020, @05:32PM (3 children)
Yeah, alright. How about first, we define what "unsafe driving" really is. I'll be first to argue that driving 75 in a 55 isn't an unsafe act. (Details - the entire nation was under a 55 mph speed limit at the time, I was traveling on the interstate.) There are plenty of other places where speed limits are all but meaningless.
Motorcycles - either you're unsafe for even getting up on two, or you're a friggin's squid waiting to get run over because you drive like grandma. Motorcycles doing the speed limit are just stupid.
Accumulating points due to driving fast is NOT one of the things that makes you an unsafe driver. Get those fools who always drive 10 to 20 mile under the speed limit first, then we can work some more on defining "unsafe".
I'm in agreement with you that unsafe drivers need to be taken off the road. But, obviously, your idea of unsafe doesn't jibe with my ideas on unsafe. How about drunk drivers? I'm all for taking their licenses for ten years, MINIMUM, and then making them jump through hoops, and performing indecent sex acts in public before they can get it back.
The masses of humanity aren't fit to drive, but the masses of humanity aren't fit to define "safe" and/or "unsafe" to start with. If you can't make people's pulses go through the roof with your driving, you're probably not fit to drive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @06:25PM (1 child)
Speed limits are supposed to be the absolute maximum speed that you can legally go. They should be the absolute maximum speed that you can safely travel under any circumstances.
The problem is that the speed limits are set to be the maximum speed you can travel under specific circumstances. However, there are other specific circumstances where it's perfectly safe to travel faster. The freeway speed limit in California is 65. However, when there is little to no traffic, in certain areas, it's perfectly safe to do 75 or even 80 MPH.
If it's unsafe to travel faster than 65 MPH under a specific condition then those traveling faster should be considered braking the law. But when they are traveling faster than 65 MPH under conditions that are perfectly safe to do so then it should not be against the law for them to do so.
Different parts of the freeways should have different speed limits. A one size fits all doesn't make sense. When there are more sharper curves and turns the speed limit should be lower. But when the curves are less sharp then the speed limit can be faster in the passing lanes when there is little traffic. If the government even cared about the public interest they can even have digital speed limit signs that have sensors that adjust for traffic conditions.
But it comes down to revenue and cost. They spend a ton of money on red light cameras because it brings in revenue. They don't want to put dynamic speed limit signs that make more sense because it will reduce revenue and will incur costs. The public interest is not important to them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @06:28PM
err .... breaking the law *
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday July 03 2020, @02:54AM
When the parents of the Boomers were still racing dinosaurs around the time square, they already knew about the 85th percentile. Real engineers - yes, traffic engineers are a thing - use the 85th percentile.
Police departments desperate for revenues adjust that 85th percentile down to about the 60th. That provides a steady flow of revenue, because only retards drive at the 60th percentile. I mean, people who never should have been given a license.
Let me explain that 85th percentile. You build a road, and you put no speed limit on it. Instead, you use a nice radar setup, and find out how fast everyone is driving on your nice new road. After a month or two, you do the math, and determine that the 85th percentile was driving at 72 mile per hour. THAT is your speed limit. Round it off to 70 or 75, and you're good to go. Many slower drivers will speed up a bit, and many faster drivers will slow down a bit. And there should only be a few outliers who refuse to either slow down, or speed up, to match the speed limit.
If you're interested, you can look it up. Key word is 85th percentile, and traffic engineer.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday July 03 2020, @08:16AM
I would advocate for tax breaks to employers who employ locals and for people who have the business near home.
I would advocate for tax hikes for goods produced and sourced less near than is necessary.
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