> “These technologies assist drivers, but do not replace them,” said the statement from the federal institution responsible for transportation policies and programs ...
> Tesla’s website states, “All new Tesla cars come standard with advanced hardware capable of providing Autopilot features today, and full self-driving capabilities in the future.”
... full self-driving capabilities in the FUTURE ...
So it is a DISHONEST marketing issue that creates a wrong perception in the consumer, and that's what the government should address.
Create regulation that do not allow such vehicles to be marketed as "self-driving". Create some kind of certification to earn the right to advertise a vehicle as "self-driving". And define and standardize better labels for the current technologies used, and publicize it well.
German courts share this opinion and Tesla is prohibited from naming their product Autopilot or referencing any FSD.
The person in this story wasn't confused and didn't even attempt a defense that Tesla had mislead them.
If something gets good enough you will rely on it more and more. It will work, until it doesn't.
Rhetoric like this works until it won't anymore. And that rhetoric breaks when innocent bystanders start getting killed in numbers. Line up enough grieving families in front of congress and congress will act, and then the new rhetoric will be "The car should be your mother."
Which there's two things to separate out; the lack of a feature on a vehicle doesn't particularly free the driver from responsibility for things they do, and then there's what sort of idiotic vehicles we are willing as a society to share the road with.
"A car is not your mother" doesn't really answer the second part.
People need to understand THEY are responsible for what they are doing, not the companies for not preventing them doing stupid things.
"A car is not your mother"
I am definitely going to use it:)
Given this and the man's other past incidents, the Tesla was only a minor contributing factor in the guy's global stupidity and danger that he inflicts on the world daily?
Edit: Btw, what would be the end accident scenario here? Presuming that the car wouldn't hit any other car on the road, would it lose control on a curve that was too tight for the speed, or fail at the end of the freeway or something? Would it alarm and then come to a gradual stop? Not a Tesla owner here.
Right now, in Canada, we have to meet certain criteria and pass multiple tests to get our drivers license without which we cannot legally drive on public roads.
Until there is some kind of similar certification for self driving systems I don't understand why there would be any legal difference between doing this in a Tesla Model S and doing it in a '94 Miata.
Two people in the car with both front seats reclined, “appearing to be asleep.”
The asleep part is almost certainly sensational drivel. This is a driver with a history of reckless driving who was screwing around with his friend.
But because he was screwing around in a Tesla it is therefore newsworthy.
The seats were reclined, but there is no evidence that the driver and passenger were both asleep. They “appeared asleep” because the seats were reclined.
This was undoubtably a stupid prank. I’ll be glad for the day when kids can’t pull stupid pranks in their cars. The trade-off is we’re unlikely to truly “own” our own cars at that time, they will operate as essentially private taxis.
12-car accident triggered by manual mode
defense attorneys stated a poor decision due to fatigue, while prosecutors provided evidence that the driver had taken a 25-minute power nap, woke up and performed well in a class she was taking, and then proceeded to override the autonomous vehicle system in a manner which showed specific and malicious intent to cause the accident.
The Law Commission instead suggests that responsibility should fall on the developer or manufacturer of the hardware that enables self-driving functions on the vehicle.
see https://thenextweb.com/shift/2020/12/18/autonomous-vehicle-m...
https://s3-eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/lawcom-prod-storage-11jsx...
Everyone has to use public roads, not just you. You are endangering all other diligent road users with your behavior, not just yourself.
I think the biggest problem with all of these self driving systems is that in cars they can require you to be fully 100% aware of your surroundings and take over in a split second. People compare it to plane autopilot, but I don't think that's quite right - in a plane, you will have at least a minute or two before you hit the ground, even if the plane takes a straight nose dive. In a car, you go from being fine to being headed for a head-on collision in no time at all.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-crash/tesla-driver-...
It also beeps when it thinks I’m going to hit a stopped car and other things that demonstrate that this claim is false.
Alarmed engineers taking the exact same route to reproduce the bug successfully.
Empirically, you’re absolutely right, except that it’s not wrong.
I’ve come to terms with it. How long are we going to bleat about morals while the world ignores it?
I’m asking genuinely, for what it’s worth. It’s one of the central questions I’ve faced. What are your morals worth? Why cling to them? It feels good to call out Tesla as immoral, but both legally and practically this seems to be mistaken.
Self-driving is a sensing and intelligence problem, while flying seems like a mechanical, aero, and policy one.
You can be driving below speed limits very unsafely (and above them safely) and the constant focus on speeding, especially via automated mechanisms like cameras at the expense of traffic officers means we risk a much lower standard of driving and much less safe roads.
Note though my concern is not the crackdown on those who flout the law and/or break speed limits; but the misunderstanding of what unsafe driving is (as implied by your comment), and headline anti-speeding measures that are used to reduce costs and increase risk.
Not necessarily, because humans fail in ways that Tesla autopilot wouldn't.
1.5 million people are killed in road accidents every year. 54 million people are injured.
'Full self driving capability' is a hardware capability, not a feature that you can turn on - it is there so you don't need to replace the hardware when the autopilot software can be replaced with fully autonomous driving software.
Edit: Downvoters, please explain. It is not okay to redefine words for your purposes.
In your opinion, in front of the court of law, would you consider that John Smith has purchased a car that has something called "Full Self-Driving Capability", or not? In front of the same court of law - would you consider that Tesla advertises such a thing when presenting their cars?
>>Autonomous features are not called autopilot anywhere, ever.
You are absolutely correct, other car companies call this what it is - (adaptive) cruise control. Not autopilot.
>>'Full self driving capability' is a capability, not a feature that you can turn on
Well, but the website itself says that at the moment, as-is(not in the future!) the car will be able to autonomously drive from on-ramp to an off-ramp on the motorway - so.....that sounds like a feature to me? It even has a button for it! What is it about turning it on or off?
You can argue wikipedia isn't a valid source, but IMO that's not in good faith. So, 'autopilot' has a shifting meaning depending on aircraft capability.
That it does so as safely and legally as a human driver is implied by the word "full"
ADAS are designed as an additional safety level for ACTIVE driving, when the driver is 100% driving the car, and not for a potentially much more dangerous situation, when the driver (as encouraged by the manufacturer) is completely disconnected but supposedly "alert" at all times.
The only thing that makes me question is that only around 5 people have been killed by a Tesla on autopilot or FSD, which frankly is shocking to me given the multiple videos of abuse of these systems floating around the internet.
It does slow down for traffic, but I think many people don't realize something - it works with moving traffic, because then it can definitely recognize that you are approaching a car(or at least something that moves in the same direction you do), so it knows it has to slow down for it.
>>It also beeps when it thinks I’m going to hit a stopped car and other things that demonstrate that this claim is false.
Read up on it, I'm sure the upper limit for this function is when the delta speed is <50km/h. It won't work with a delta of 150km/h because it's physically not possible.
>> but it’s not true that “the system is trained to ignore stationary objects”
These are not my words, that's exactly what Tesla said after the "trailer across a highway" accident, saying that of course they have to ignore stopped objects otherwise the car would emergency brake for overhead signs since they reflect radar the same way a stationary car does - at large enough distance there is no difference.
>> Read up on it, I'm sure the upper limit for this function is when the delta speed is <50km/h. It won't work with a delta of 150km/h because it's physically not possible.
I think both of these have the same explanation: if you want to release a feature like this specced at a 50kph delta, you design for a safety factor of 2-3 (100-150) so that you can be confident that it’s safe at 50kph. The claim that “it’s physically impossible” doesn’t make sense to me: humans drive safely with such deltas using only “a video feed” and sound.
Anyways, I’m fairly certain I’ve come to a stop on autopilot from at least 60mph (100kph).
My logic is as follows - at 150km/h, you are covering 41m per second, and an approximate stopping distance from that speed is about 130m. Human eyes are much better at recognizing objects from a distance than computer based vision is, and Tesla is in fact relying on cameras for its forward object detection, plus a rudimentary distance-based radar. There is no chance(that's why I said "physically impossible") that whatever camera is mounted in the Tesla can reliably recognize an object(and tell that it's stopped!) at 130m. Of course the system needs to do the processing, make a decision, send a signal to the brake actuators and actually engage them. Let's be generous and add a full second to this - so to stop from that speed Tesla would need to recognize a car, identify it as a hazard, and make a critical "all brakes at maximum strength" decision from 170m away. There's no chance.
>>Anyways, I’m fairly certain I’ve come to a stop on autopilot from at least 60mph (100kph).
Ok, but there will be an upper limit to this, and I'd love to know what it is. I know that Deimler's solution only guarantees full avoidance at deltas up to 50km/h, and "reduced" impact at higher deltas - it just doesn't see far enough. Tesla's technology is fundamentally very similar, so I'd love to know what they consider as reasonable distance for full autonomous stop.
Let it continue to work forever then.
> And that rhetoric breaks when innocent bystanders start getting killed in numbers. Line up enough grieving families in front of congress and congress will act, and then the new rhetoric will be "The car should be your mother."
Do I get to line up mine? Cars doing what idiots tell them to is remedied by punishing those idiots. Cars not doing what people need them to results in fatalities.
Bob is a big dude. He weighs 400 pounds and can only fit in the car by putting the seat all the way back. There are a million Bobs and you just prohibited any of them from ever using driver assist, which would have improved safety and saved lives.
Your car won't let you drive more than 10MPH over the speed limit. But then it thinks you're on a service road with a 30MPH speed limit when you're really on the highway with a 70MPH speed limit, forces you to decelerate to a speed 30MPH slower than the traffic flow, and you get rear-ended and cause a twelve car pile up with nine fatalities.
You're on a family vacation driving through a deserted area in the middle of nowhere and stop to stretch your legs. When you get back in the car, some sensor has failed and the vehicle's computer won't let you put the vehicle back into motion again, but there is no wireless coverage or anyone else around, so you and your family die in the wilderness.
You need to drive your car the wrong way down a one way street because you need to get to a hospital and the other road is blocked, or you're currently impeding a fire truck answering an emergency call, or you need to get away from a forest fire. The computer refuses.
"I can't let you do that, Dave." -> People die.
That said, Ralph Nader's "Unsafe At Any Speed" is a great example of why regulation of automobiles is needed. There's also a reason why cars have safety glass on the windshield.
I'd like to see your entire post again, but related only to self-driving cars.
Are the numbers behind alcohol-related vehicular injuries and deaths not high enough to be a political or public priority?
All of these systems have to ignore stationary objects ahead of them, or the car would be emergency braking in too many daily situations to be usable.
Simple case, at 150km/h you are travelling at 41m/s. The stopping distance at that speed is roughly given as 130m[0]. So the car would need to see and recognize objects at least ~150m ahead to stop autonomously from that speed. That's just physically not possible, the cameras on the Tesla don't have enough resolution to do such a recognition. Instead, a radar-based distance measure is used - but again, even if the car detects that you are rapidly approaching "something" 150m ahead of you, that information is nearly useless. At that distance, you cannot differentiate between a stopped car 150m ahead of you, an overhead sign, or a large rock next to your lane which poses absolutely no danger whatsoever - it all gives the same signature. LIDAR doesn't have that range either. And then of course even if the car could reasonably detect that there is something ahead of you that you are absolutely 100% definitely heading towards, it has no idea if the road doesn't curve in such a way that you would avoid it. Famous case of adaptive cruise systems freaking out at bends, because according to the radar/image recognition you are CLEARLY heading for that telephone pole standing next to the road - but of course the road curves so you aren't actually going to hit it. Problems like that.
[0] https://www.random-science-tools.com/physics/stopping-distan...
My Subaru has no problem detecting stationary objects. It uses stereo cameras, for which object detection and locating the object is a thoroughly solved problem, whether the object is moving or stationary. No magic needed. It just works. For example, there is a sharp turn near my home with prominent turn signs along the curve, which puts them directly in front of you as you approach the turn. Those stationary signs quite reliably set off my collision warning if I'm approaching them too fast.
Tesla has the problem because it uses radar for object detection. The radar can tell them the presence of an object, but cannot tell them the object's location. An overhead sign or overpass or whatever looks the same as an object in the road. So to avoid countless false positives, they need to ignore signals from stationary objects because they chose to use radar. It's a self-inflicted problem that other vehicles do not have.
"How long before the tech exists to address this issue?" I'm not sure if that's a problem with tech as such. We have fantastic cameras, yet famously Google's best image recognition algorithm just couple years ago would reply, with 100% confidence, that a sofa in a zebra print is in fact a Zebra, after all the stripes are there, it has 4 legs.....it must be a zebra.
So in my(personal) opinion, self driving will face the same challanges image recognition has faced - we will rapidly get 90% of it right, then the last 10% will be a massive pain to get right for decades if ever.
> Miscalibration - a mismatch between a model's confidence and its correctness - of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) makes their predictions hard to rely on. Ideally, we want networks to be accurate, calibrated and confident. We show that, as opposed to the standard cross-entropy loss, focal loss [Lin et. al., 2017] allows us to learn models that are already very well calibrated. When combined with temperature scaling, whilst preserving accuracy, it yields state-of-the-art calibrated models. We provide a thorough analysis of the factors causing miscalibration, and use the insights we glean from this to justify the empirically excellent performance of focal loss. To facilitate the use of focal loss in practice, we also provide a principled approach to automatically select the hyperparameter involved in the loss function. We perform extensive experiments on a variety of computer vision and NLP datasets, and with a wide variety of network architectures, and show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art calibration without compromising on accuracy in almost all cases.
Calibration will be practically solved in couple of years. Then a bit longer for addressing adversarial robustness.
Or maybe because the potential for disaster is too great, like the 737 max attempting to nosedive into the ocean because of a single sensor failure.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/26/business/global/26airindi...
Besides, how would you even establish that the hardware is self driving capable if the software isn't? You might need to change the hardware once you realise the software needs changes too?
There is no "full self driving" button in a Tesla, and the Autopilot button will first produce a notice about the capabilities and it says you absolutely can not stop driving, you have to confirm it before it engages.
