[intherdfield]

That is very significant!

Your comment suggests that Tesla's claims about the driver having his hands off the wheel for x seconds before a crash could be wrong. If the sensors detect the drivers hands are not on the wheel when they actually are on the wheel, then data logged about how long the driver's hands were off the wheel should be considered suspect.

I hope that's being investigated.

Personally, I'm having trouble believing the driver who died in the recent accident ignored the warnings for six seconds before the head-on collision, especially when he knew Autopilot didn't work well at that section of road.

I'm not familiar with how the system works. If the warning engages, is there a guarantee that the driver will have to take over shortly? Or are there scenarios when the warning turns off by itself and so the driver could have been waiting to see if the car would correct?

[Edit: lolc and Vik1ng pointed out that the warning isn't related to unsafe conditions as I implied. It's used whenever the sensors think the driver's hands are off the wheel.]

[MertsA]

Tesla didn't claim that he didn't have his hands on the wheel, they claimed that it wasn't detected. Tesla knows how inaccurate that is. Tesla has always been shamefully misleading with all of their victim blaming PR pieces. I get that there's plenty of "unintended acceleration" cases where the driver straight up lies about hitting the wrong pedal but they included that information about what the driver did earlier in the trip and the time he would have had a view of the barrier solely to imply that it's his fault that autopilot killed him. That's never an okay thing to do yet it seems like this is Tesla's modus operandi when there's some high profile accident.

Who cares if he had 5 seconds to see the barrier if he only had 0.5 seconds to realize that the car went into casual murder mode right as it veers into the barrier. They make it sound like it had to have been driver error with facts that are irrelevant to the question at hand. Your assumption that Tesla claimed he didn't have his hands on the wheel at the time of the accident is exactly what I'm talking about, Tesla's PR release is filled with weasel words to do exactly that.

I'm not even trying to suggest that Autopilot is less safe than an alert human driver, but one thing is clear, we certainly can't trust Tesla to determine how safe it is.

[userbinator]

Who cares if he had 5 seconds to see the barrier if he only had 0.5 seconds to realize that the car went into casual murder mode right as it veers into the barrier.

This video is quite relevant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QCF8tVqM3I

A fully alert driver trying (and succeeding) in reproducing this behaviour. Observe how long the barrier is visible, how long it takes him to react, and how close the car was to hitting the barrier.

[brandonjm]

This video is horrifying, I assume even the sensors on cars with automatic braking sensors should be able to identify a barrier that large in front of the car. I am way oversimplifying this but I'm sure there is some level of prioritisation in Tesla's Autopilot software to decide what action the car should take. Is the Autopilot software prioritising staying in lane (the car appears to stick to the left white line) over collision avoidance?

[URSpider94]

It can’t, nor can most cars with automatic braking. The Tesla will happily run headfirst into a brick wall all day long. The reason is that the driving world is chock-full of objects with zero velocity relative to terrain - the trivial cases being a rise in the road ahead, or an at-grade bridge where the travel lanes suck below grade to pass. Therefore, autopilot and many auto-braking algorithms filter out completely static objects (see previous story about a Tesla ramming a fire truck stopped on the highway).

Musk has commented publicly before (though somewhat obliquely) about this flaw. He indicated that the company is trying to build a map of reference data so that it can be filtered out automatically, and real hazards can be seen/found.

[skywhopper]

Mapping can never solve this problem. If these cars don’t yet have the ability to detect stationary physical barriers that represent a crash risk, then they are further away from being practical than I thought, and I’m extremely pessimistic. It is clearly a hard problem to solve with naive tech. Unfortunately we have a huge industry and tens of billions of dollars and politicians, corporations, governments, and media who all believe this naive tech is close to perfect. But it can’t see a wall or a fire truck in its path? If this isn’t solved then this whole house of cards will fall apart. The sooner the better, IMO. Let’s start building cars that supplement driver awareness instead of numbing it.

[slivym]

This would be trivial to solve with a vertical mounted LIDAR. You vertically mount it and if the horzontal distance measured level with the bumper of the car are significantly closer than the horizontal distance at a lower angle you can classify that as a stationary object, if it's a continuous lengthening or shortening then it's a ramp. The classification is almost trivial (though the hardware may be expensive or difficult to implement for high speeds).

[azinman2]

But in the path of travel??!

[saalweachter]

Not to exonerate Tesla, but cars are ALWAYS almost about to hit something. The next time you’re driving down a curvy road, pay close attention to all the obstacles that are by the side of the road and how often you are pointed right at them and how small the steering adjustments you make are and how little time there is between you almost hitting something and then not.

This is part of why trying to second guess a driver or autopilot is insane; a crashing and non-crashing car are almost identical, except for the crash.

[axaxs]

True. But these aren't auto self driving cars. A self driving car should know its next move, 10 seconds before it makes it(or something similar). There's 0 excuse for it hitting a barrier in 0 traffic.

[hyperbole]

Tesla has likely built 80-90% of an autonomous car enough to fool those who use it into believing it can be trusted. But as with all engineering endeavors that suffer from the Pareto principal its going to take far longer to get close enough that it's better than a human whose paying attention.

Its foolish to oversell thru marketing the capabilities of AP, as it's fairly easy to conflate reliability with observed behavior.

As long as the system mimics enough of the capabilities of full autonomy and it's oversold as such customers will underestimate the risks and become victims of an unfinished product

[Latteland]

tesla's system is lane following which has a radar that knows when the cars in front of you slow down or speed up. that's pretty much it. it's not an autonomous car in general. mine is very reliable for cruise control adjustment, good but not awesome for lane detection (falls down in bad rain for example, works well in clear weather). it tells you this, via display, it knows if its working. I can't understand these fools who thinks its some super advanced system. it really does little more than follow lanes and adjust speed based on detection of cars in front.

[hyperbole]

Video from 2016 showing exactly that:

https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-hardware...

If you use this to market your car without any caveats, don't be dismissal of some people who might read into that your car is capable of self-driving, when in reality its clearly absent of anything of the sort.

[greglindahl]

Some Tesla owners are being dismissive of attempts to paint Tesla owners as being unaware of the actual capabilities of Autopilot, based on Tesla's marketing.

Owners see marketing occasionally. Owners see the reminder that they have to stay alert 100% of the time each time they turn on Autopilot. Owners get the alert that they need to put their hands back on the wheel. And so forth.

If you've got data about owners being confused, please share.

Meanwhile, next time an owner offers anecdata about what they personally have learned about Autopilot's capabilities, perhaps you could respond to that, instead of telling the owner that they're being dismissive.

[Latteland]

well probably fool was too strong when they call it "autopilot". once i explain to people (well, programmers) what the tesla system is, they go oh, that seems possible, tesla made it out like there was some magical ai running on the car.

[shkkmo]

> Tesla claimed that the driver had his hands off earlier in the drive, not at the time of the collision.

You are wrong: "the driver’s hands were not detected on the wheel for six seconds prior to the collision."

see: https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-last-week%E2%80%99s-accide...

Perhaps you shouldn't attack Tesla for using "weasel words" in their press release if you don't take the time to read it.

Edit: You seem to have edited your post without any disclaimer. Your edits were not visible when I responded. Most people on HN will edit their comments with an "Edit: I was wrong about ____" rather than ninja editing the mistaken claim away. This help make discussions easier to follow and limits misunderstandings.

[MertsA]

I already corrected that, but the point still stands that their press release is intentionally misleading and Tesla knows very well that detecting hand presence on the wheel has problems. Read the press release in full and tell me that it isn't misleading.

Originally when this was posted there was concern over if "prior to the collision" was talking about the 6 seconds before the collision or earlier in the drive. In any case, Tesla is implying that the victim wasn't driving responsibly and there's no data released to the public that would back up such a claim.

[shkkmo]

I have read the press release. What was misleading? The only thing I see that is potentially misleading where they quote the safety statistics for vehicles with auto pilot equipped.

[geofft]

The sentence is only relevant if it carries information content about whether the driver's hands were in fact on the wheel—the reliability of the hand detection system is not believed to be relevant to the crash in any way.

So, if the statement is actually carrying more information about the reliability of the hand-detection system when it sounds like it should be a claim about the driver's hands (the subject of the passive-voice sentence), it is misleading.

[robotcookies]

That's the point of the investigation. Many things could have happened. Maybe the driver fell asleep, maybe he tried to move the wheel and it got stuck. Maybe the car slipped on a patch and had nothing to do with autopilot. We don't know yet. It takes time to review witnesses, multiple sources of information and that's the NTSB's job.

Tesla seems to think they know exactly what happened after only reviewing data collected from the car. They see what they want to see and have become blind to any other possibility. I think that's terrifying. I couldn't trust an automaker with that kind of arrogance.

[kosievdmerwe]

Given that this video exists, I'm putting my bet on the Tesla actively swerving into the barrier: https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/8a0jfh/autopil...

[asn0]

In that video, it looks like the driver had about 1 second to react to the Tesla's mistake, to avoid hitting the barrier.

Dumb question: if I have to constantly stay vigilant with 1-second reaction time because at any time my assisted-driving car might try to kill me (exactly how changes every time the software updates) -- isn't it less effort to just drive my car myself, so I mostly just have to worry about the drivers around me?

[nugi]

Not dumb at all, it is the big unspoken elephant in the room. It is clear that the current, and next iteritave version of autopilot, self driving, etc. are woefully behild the hype. While in theory a "perfect" ai driver is better, is it true in the chaos of real world traffic? Will drivers even want to be subject to NTSB level scrutiny when an accident happens? There are more questions than answers still.

[JKCalhoun]

Hell, I don't even like letting cars shift for me. /sticksnob

;-)

[Vik1ng]

> ignored the warnings for six seconds

There were never warnings at that time. Tesla just worded it like that to mislead people. It only talks about videos early in the drive.

[shkkmo]

I think the wording is pretty clear, but I think people didn't take the time to fully read the press release, just skimmed it.

This seems pretty clear:

"The driver had received several visual and one audible hands-on warning earlier in the drive and the driver’s hands were not detected on the wheel for six seconds prior to the collision."

[lolc]

The warning is not a reaction to unsafe conditions. It comes on when the system detects (rightly or wrongly) that the driver doesn't hold the wheel.

[kosievdmerwe]

It could also be that a false warning took the driver's attention off the road in the second or two they had to save their life.