from the you'll-never-take-me-awake-coppers! dept.
Police chase ensues after Tesla driver falls asleep with autopilot on:
Before we leave last year behind for good, it's worth looking back at one outrageous story that we nearly missed as 2022 came to a close. According to a police report from December 29th, a Tesla on Autopilot led a patrol of Bamberg traffic officers on a high-speed chase on Autobahn 70 (A70) after the driver had fallen asleep behind the wheel of the car.
"The driver was driving on the A70 from Bamberg [a town in Germany] in the direction of Bayreuth around 12 p.m. when the police patrol wanted to subject him to a traffic check," the report claims. "He did not respond to stop signals or repeated horns from the officers."
[...] Finally, after 15 minutes of police chasing him down on the highway while blaring their horns, the driver woke up and pulled over. Police say the 45-year-old man in the Tesla "showed drug-typical abnormalities," suggesting that he was under the influence of something. They also claim to have found a "steering wheel weight" in the footwell, which explains how Autopilot was operating when the driver's hands weren't on the steering wheel.
[...] This is just the latest in a growing series of disturbing reports concerning Tesla's self-driving features and the havoc they can cause when abused.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05, @12:28AM (1 child)
Dollars to donuts the sleeping driver was white (I didn't check for a photo). If he was black he'd have bullet holes in him, or holes in his tires as a minimum.
(Score: 3, Redundant) by krishnoid on Thursday January 05, @01:19AM
I don't think German police use firearms all that often [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Funny) by krishnoid on Thursday January 05, @12:29AM (3 children)
I guess we're finally here [youtu.be]. But when the cops start accusing you of things, "deny everything" is still good advice.
(Score: 4, Informative) by crafoo on Thursday January 05, @02:00AM (2 children)
No, that's terrible advice. Do not say a single word to any police officer, ever, under any circumstances. Talk to your lawyer only. No exceptions.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday January 05, @02:14AM (1 child)
How do you then not get dragged away in handcuffs for "obstructing"? It seems they have a lot of discretion.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Reziac on Thursday January 05, @05:23AM
Advice from a lawyer and a cop:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE [youtube.com]
Don't talk to the police.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05, @01:00AM
Damned NAZIs.
(Score: 4, Informative) by looorg on Thursday January 05, @01:23AM
The A70 is autobahn so there should be no speed limits, unless it was in an urban section, as far as I can recall. He wasn't even going particularly fast, 110 km/h is more or less normal highway speed in most of Europe. Was it a "random" traffic stop or what? Did they smell all the drugs as he buzzed by them? They apparently did observe him being hunched over and not in control of the vehicle. But what is to say he wasn't on autopilot and had had some kind of medical incident (stroke, heart attack etc)? Or did they see his bong in the passenger seat (not sure if he had one or whatever kind of drugs they claim to have seen he was on)?
So this was probably not by accident then. Also they don't claim to have found a steering wheel weight. The report, in german ( Im Fußraum fanden die ...), say that they did find one. By having this extra device clearly there to circumvent safety features of the car I would say he is probably quite screwed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkOZNJYAZ7c [youtube.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday January 05, @02:41AM (2 children)
I still prefer Autopilot to drive a drunken guy home than the dude driving himself.
Of course, I'd rather neither Autopilot nor the dude drove at all.
Incidentally, it's kind of strange that a vehicle as advanced as a Tesla car doesn't include a simple breathalizer fitting in by default - as in, if you're drunk, the car stops by the side of the road and tells you to sleep it off or take a cab all by itself.
(Score: 2) by Frosty Piss on Thursday January 05, @04:15AM
That's not how Tesla autopilot works, you don't just enter an address and it takes you there.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Thursday January 05, @04:58PM
Tesla's big touch screen makes it possible to administer sobriety tests interactively.
If you cannot factor a second degree polynomial then the car will not move. (alternative: or only autopilot can be doing the driving?)
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Thursday January 05, @07:33AM (5 children)
I don't think BGR stands for Bad German Reporting. Since when do Euro police make police reports using AM and PM? Some 'Murican stumbled across this report, and decided to interpret the news, rather than report the news. https://bgr.com/about-bgr/ [bgr.com]
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Thursday January 05, @12:12PM (4 children)
There you go, here's the original police report:
https://www.polizei.bayern.de/aktuelles/pressemitteilungen/041271/index.html [bayern.de]
For non-German speakers, I recommend
https://www.deepl.com/ [deepl.com]
Apparently and not in the press writeups anywhere, the officers noted that the Tesla would strictly keep distance at 110 kph. Which doesn't make much sense, because at constant speed, they'd have a hard time noting it, because many cars, not only Teslas, have a "distance assistant". I'd assume they slowed down because they wanted him to overtake, and he didn't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05, @04:17PM (3 children)
> I'd assume they slowed down because they wanted him to overtake, and he didn't.
Saw that too. It doesn't say, but I'm guessing that one way to stop that Tesla would be for two cop cars to get in front, side by side (assuming a 2-lane section of autobahn) and both slowly slow down. No way to pass, so the automatic cruise control would continue to maintain a fixed following distance (or a gap based on time).
Not a great idea if the autobahn was crowded, but perhaps a third cop car could lag behind with lights flashing to warn regular traffic that they were coming up on an unusual situation.
A related thought--some police driving trainers might take notice of this event and think about adding some new tactics to their school?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday January 05, @05:04PM (2 children)
This idea has possible drawbacks, but suppose police had a way to signal vehicles to stop? Not just Teslas but other modern vehicles as well.
Such a system would need to be secure enough to prevent use by unauthorized non-police persons.
It would be best if vehicle did not stop in middle of roadway.
What if vehicles would not operate without a valid registered license plate? (oh, but what would sovereign citizens do?) Continuing that thought, what if the vehicle required a valid driver license?
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by crotherm on Thursday January 05, @05:16PM (1 child)
Have any of these AI delivery systems even tried to pass a human style driving test with a DMV person sitting shotgun? I might even watch that video.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday January 05, @05:21PM
Maybe that would be a good benchmark for automated driving systems.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Frosty Piss on Thursday January 05, @05:44PM
https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/04/tesla_driver_slept_as_autopilot/ [theregister.com]
(Score: 2, Disagree) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday January 05, @09:47PM (5 children)
I read this a little differently than the author. The headline I would have chosen is "Tesla Autopilot saves life of man that falls asleep at the wheel.".
Crashes and fatalities from falling asleep while driving are surprisingly common. Reducing those is a good thing.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Thursday January 05, @10:58PM (1 child)
Autopilot is more likely to lull you to sleep at the wheel, because you have nothing active to do. Chances are that this guy would not have fallen asleep if he had been required to steer. Anyway, in this incident it sounds like the guy had intended to doze off because he had applied steering wheel weights to overcome the safety interlock.
Citation?
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Friday January 06, @05:03AM
Citation: Personal experience. n=1, crashes=2. I lived through both of them, and I was lucky. If I'm the slightest bit tired now I'll pull over and take a nap, even if I'm only half a mile from my house. (both of those crashes were at the same effing red light half a mile from my house.)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by theluggage on Thursday January 05, @11:02PM (2 children)
...except the Tesla autopilot is (AFAIK) only a level 3 [epa.gov] self driving system and shouldn't be operating without a (conscious) human driver behind the wheel. With such a system, if the driver stops responding the system should react by immediately pulling over and stopping. It failed. OK, if the driver deliberately used some sort of weight to fool the system then a lot of the legal responsibility is on him, but Telsa developers ought to be able to drink a can of Monster and puke a better 'driver detection system' than that.
The next question is whether the driver was encouraged to get behind the wheel while stoned and sleepy because he had something called an "Autopilot". Most likely - so the Autopilot "saved" him from a situation which probably wouldn't arisen if the Autopilot hadn't been there in the first place.
Basically, "Level 3" self-drive is a mindbogglingly stupid concept that expects humans to do something that they are very, very bad at: staying alert while getting bored stiff because they're not even engaged in driving. A driver of a Level 3 car is paying to be a legal scapegoat for the car maker while they crowdsource the training of their ML systems in the hope that, if they clock up enough miles, they'll ascend to Level 4... because a fleet of development cars with properly trained test drivers (advanced driving instructors or similar - not minimum wage warm bodies from the local rehab centre) taking detailed notes would be kinda expensive.
I'll get behind the no-wheel of a self-driving car if and when the manufacture indemnifies me against any accident... not because I think I'm infallible, but because it's the only way I'd trust the manufacturer's judgement that their software is safer than I am. You wouldn't get in the passenger seat next to a human who expected you to take the blame if they have an accident (OK, parents teaching teenage kids to drive, I hear you :-) ).
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Friday January 06, @05:25AM (1 child)
I understand the limitations of Level 3 and lower autonomy, and I agree that they are far from perfect. Your points about the stupidity of the driver detect system and the driver bypassing it are also valid.
Setting that aside, compare the outcome of this scenario to the outcome if I fall asleep at the wheel (or am otherwise incapacitated) of my 99 Ford F-150. My truck would drift to the left, and unless stopped by a guardrail or bridge abutment would veer into oncoming traffic at speed. A vehicle on autopilot (without a driver defeat) would do as you said, warn the driver and then pull over to stop. Even with a driver defeat it would, in most situations, maintain the vehicle in lane and at a reasonable distance from the vehicle in front of it. Both of those are far better outcomes.
Another anecdote. I witnessed an accident where an elderly woman had a heart attack at the wheel of her land-wagon, ran off the road down a steep ditch, hit an embankment that launched the vehicle several feet in the air, and it crashed into some trees. If her vehicle had drifted left instead of right, it would have hit me at ~40 mph. In that scenario only luck saved me from a crash. Autopilot would have reduced that risk. It would have been super disconcerting to find a (mostly) dead person sitting in their car on the side of the road, but not any more disconcerting than seeing a flying corpsemobile crash into a bunch of trees.
Boiling it down, for me, I feel like it would be safer for others on the road if I was driving a vehicle equipped with a system like autopilot even if that system is imperfect. I am also an imperfect system, but the sum of both of our abilities likely exceeds either of us individually.
We live in interesting times.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Friday January 06, @12:46PM
...but you don't need a not-quite-self-driving "Autopilot" for that - well-established existing tech can monitor your driving, detect you drifting out of your lane or getting too close to the car in front and trigger an alarm. If you don't correct within a few seconds then - and only then -the computer can take control, go into lane/distance keeping mode while it gradually slowed and came to a stop. You get the extra safety you're looking for but you're still actively driving and less likely to get bored, start daydreaming and fall asleep.
For me, I really don't think I could sit doing nothing for hours while Autopilot drove the car and then at short notice be expected to mentally shift into gear and take over driving because Autopilot had encountered something it couldn't deal with. I'd much rather drive with the computer watching my back than vice versa. Autopilot doesn't work for me until I can safely and legitimately open a beer (if I don't, other drivers will) and read a book and leave the driving to the computer.