Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by coldtea 2898 days ago
Yeah, what could go wrong going suddenly from 150 to 120 on the Autobahn...
2 comments

Better than not hitting the brakes when there is a legitimate danger in the travel path (which is why emergency braking is activated).

Remember, it’s the responsibility of the driver behind you to keep a safe following distance. If they rear end you, they were following too closely.

>Better than not hitting the brakes when there is a legitimate danger in the travel path (which is why emergency braking is activated).

In this case we've established it was activated at random by the autopilot.

>Remember, it’s the responsibility of the driver behind you to keep a safe following distance. If they rear end you, they were following too closely.

That wont be on much comfort during a pile-up...

Is it random? In my experience with Autopilot 2, it’s typically when the front radar is attempting to discern between a metal sign on an overpass and a large object in the travel path, and Tesla hasn’t seen that object enough yet to code it as a known false positive in the Autopilot data corpus.

https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/psa-careful-autopilo...

“But as I recall, the understanding then was that Tesla had a database of things like bridges, and the braking meant that the database was incomplete. So folks were told to file a bug report ASAP after the incident so that Tesla could fix the data.”

So! If this happens while on Autopilot, press the voice command button, and then say “Bug Report <speak bug report here>”

>Is it random? In my experience with Autopilot 2, it’s typically when the front radar is attempting to discern between a metal sign on an overpass and a large object in the travel path, and Tesla hasn’t seen that object enough yet to code it as a known false positive in the Autopilot data corpus.

Random as it concerns the actual road and driving -- in other words un-needed and unexpected for the driver (and other cars).

Why and how the Autopilot came to it, is really irrelevant, except to Tesla engineers.

If I crash because of Autopilot error it's no comfort knowing that it's doing its regular pattern matching just fine, it's just that something hasn't been seen enough to be registered as "as a known false positive"...

>So! If this happens while on Autopilot, press the voice command button, and then say “Bug Report <speak bug report here>”

Let me scrap the remains of my co-passengers and possibly my kids of the seats first. As for the bug, they'll learn all the details about it from my lawsuit.

Does the Tesla driver assistance package often confuse highway signs with large trucks? From parent comment's link:

> Situation: When autopilot is engaged, it somehow sees some shadows/images, and it brakes pretty hard even though no car is in front of you. It does not come to complete stop, but it will go from 65-70 to 45 pretty quickly.

Conditions: Typically for me it has been driving in the dark (evening or early morning) and going under an underpass. I am not sure if others have seen this during the daytime or other conditions.

Another driver's description sounds like Google Maps getting confused by overpasses:

> It just happened to me today when I went under an overpass. The GPS based speed thought I was suddenly off the freeway and on the surface street overpass and said limited autosteer speed to 45. Luckily I had my foot on the accelerator so I could override it but it just jolt me a bit trying to slow down.

That’s exactly the problem. It’s a radar discrimination/GPS resolution/mapping data fusion issue.

They’re pushing hard on the front facing radar to avoid accidents like the fatality of the Floridian driver who wasn’t paying attention when the tractor trailer crossed the road, and false positives are the side effect. Better to rapidly decelerate then be dead.

>Better to rapidly decelerate then be dead.

Even better to non-rapidly decelerate when it's not needed, since that can also have one killed.

~90mi/hr to ~75mi isn't that bad, especially in a stable car with good tires.