Tesla Whistleblower Says ‘Autopilot’ System Is Not Safe Enough To Be Used On Public Roads::“It affects all of us because we are essentially experiments in public roads.”
Unfortunately this is one of those things that you can’t significantly develop/test on closed private streets. They need the scale, and the public traffic, and the idiots in the drunkards and the kids speeding. The only thing that’s going to stop them from working on autopilot will be that it’s no longer financially reasonable to keep going. Even a couple handfuls of deaths aren’t going to stop them.
The fact is that most technology that we take for granted today went through a similar evolutionary phase with public use before they became as safe as they are now, especially cars themselves. For well over a century, the automobile has made countless leaps and bounds in safety improvements due to data gathered from public use studies.
We learn by doing.
That’s fine but Waymo, Cruise et al do trials on closed courses and in co-operation with states to assure a high degree of public safety. Tesla is testing without asking regulators.
Tbf, Tesla’s are the only cars that actually know you are on your phone and/or not paying attention.
Unfortunately this is one of those things that you can’t significantly develop/test on closed private streets.
Even if we hold this to be true (and I disagree in large part), the point is that Tesla’s systems aren’t at that stage yet. Failing to recognize lights correctly during live demos and such are absolutely things you can test and develop on closed streets or in a lab. Tesla’s shouldn’t be allowed on roads until they’re actually at a point where there are no glaring flaws. And then they should be allowed in smaller numbers.
Do you really think they didn’t test that before they got to this point?
I’m willing to bet they had been through that intersection before hundreds of times and never seen this. It’s not like it can’t detect a stoplight and they’re just out there randomly running through them all.
Of the millions of variables that were around them something blinded it to light this time. The footage from that run has probably been reviewed at nauseam at this point and is done more for them finding the problem than they could have done sitting in a closed warehouse making guesses when the car never fails to detect a red light.
edit: look keep smacking that downvote, but it’s not going to change anything. I hate musk too, but we’re going to make progress toward automated driving unless it becomes more dangerous than existing driver. In the next generation or so, most driving will become automated and all deaths by automobiles will drop significantly. Old and young people will get where they need to go. You cannot automate driving without driving in the real world. If you think they haven’t been doing this in a simulation for a decade, you’re on crack.
I still wouldn’t trust the company with a CEO who unilaterally decided that not having redundant systems makes for a better product.
Do you really think they didn’t test that before they got to this point?
Yes.
Should a couple handfuls of deaths if as you said you can’t test it any other way? Autopilot systems could already be saving thousands of lives if more widely deployed and a lack of good reliable autopilot systems has the opportunity cost of blood on our hands. Human drivers are well established to be dangerous. Testing and release of autopilot systems should be done as safely as possible, but to think the first decade or so of these systems will be flawless seems unreasonable.
That’s true, but I think the issue people have with “AutoPilot” is about marketing.
Tesla brands their cars’ solution as being a full replacement for human interaction and word from Musk, other Tesla employees, media personalities close to Tesla, and fanboys all make out like the car drives itself and the only reason you need a driver in place is to satisfy laws.
It’s bullshit. They know exactly what they’re doing when they do the above, when they call their system “AutoPilot”, when Musk makes claims his cars can travel from one side of the US to the other without human interaction (only to never actually do it, of course!), and sells car upgrades as Full Self Driving support.
If they branded it as Assisted Driving, Advanced Cruise Control, Smart Cruise, or something along those lines, like all the other carmakers do with their similar systems, I’d be less inclined to blame Tesla when there’s an unfortunate incident. I think most would agree with me, too.
But Tesla markets and encourages, both officially and unofficially, that their cars have the ability to drive themselves, look after themselves, and that you’re safe when using the system. It’s a lie and I’m absolutely astounded they’ve had little more than a series of slaps on the wrist for it in most markets.
100% accurate.
They want people to use it so they get data from it. Accidents and deaths will happen… honestly, they’ll always happen… they happen now without it, it’s just more acceptable because it’s human error. Road safety is absolutely awful.
The reason they get away with it is Lobbying, Money and Political favors. They got where they are by greasing a whole shit ton of wheels with dumptrucks of money.
Shitty means, but pretty righteous ways.
Is it really whistleblowing if what they’re leaking is already common knowledge?
Proof by looking at internal information and data.
The data leaked by Krupski included lists of Tesla employees, often featuring their social security numbers, in addition to thousands of accident reports, and internal Tesla communications. Handelsblatt and others have used these internal memos and emails as the basis for stories on the dangers of Autopilot and the reasons for the three-year delay in Cybertruck deliveries. From NYT:
I mean, are humans really any better?
I know it’s not the answer you’re looking for but, what is safer for pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers, is to have less cars on the roads. Buses can move dozens of people with a single trained professional driver. Trains can move hundreds. It’s illogical to try to push for autonomous cars for individuals when we already have “self driving” technologies that are much much safer and much more efficient.
You anti car people find any way to insert your views into a conversation. Let me guess, you also do Crossfit?
Being “anti car” is good for people that love cars. More public transit means less trafic, less congestion, less demand for gas and generally just more space for people that actually like to drive cars.
Plus, if some people don’t want to drive a car and just want to get places, maybe don’t get a car? There’s already safe and proven “technology” to do that. I understand the added safety bonus of “autonomous” cars but let’s be real, it’s not advertised as something to boost the safety of everyone around, it’s advertised as “autopilot” or even worse, “Full Self Driving”.
I am certainly anti car, but pointing out the flaws in “FSD” or “autonomous cars” and how it’s being falsely marketed to people is also on topic and is not exactly “inserting my views”. People can still love cars and use them, just don’t BS us with the “FSD” and “autonomous” spiel.
Someone paying proper attention probably would be. But a huge chunk of accidents happen because idiots are looking at their phones or fall asleep on the wheel, and at least a self driving cars, even Teslas on Autopilot, won’t do that.
No, they just relinquish control to a sleepy driver without a warning whenever they are about to crash.
If you are referring to autopilot, yeah, technically it does that - it turns off once it realises it can’t do anything anymore to avoid the collision so that it doesn’t speed off afterwards due to damaged sensor or glitches etc. But the whole “autopilot turns off so it doesn’t show in statistics” was a blatant lie as Tesla counts all crashes where it has been on before the crash.
I lost all trust in their ‘Autopilot’ the day I read Musk said (Paraphrasing) “All we need are cameras, there’s no need for secondary/tertiary LIDAR or other expensive setups”
Like TFYM? No backups?? Or backups to the backups?? On a life fucking critical system?!
or other expensive setups
As much as I lost trust in his bullshittery a long time ago, his need to mention the cost of critical safety systems is what stuck out to me the most here. That’s how you know the priorities are backwards.
Hell every iphone has lidar and the pro models have two lidar cameras. The tech is not very expensive, epecially not for a $80,000 car.
My partner’s econobox has lidar for its cruise control, but Tesla can’t seem to figure out how to make it work.
Skimping on cost is how disasters happen. Ask Richard Hammond. “Spared no expense” my ass, hire more than 2 programmers, you cheap fuck.
Edit: This was supposed to be a Jurassic Park reference, but my dumb ass mixed up John Hammond and Richard Hammond. That’s what I get for watching Top Gear and reading at the same time.
Were Richard Hammond’s many crashes a result of cost skimping? If so, I had no idea. Could you elaborate?
Ah, but you see, his reasoning is that what if the camera and lidar disagree, then what? With only a camera based system, there is only one truth with no conflicts!
Like when the camera sees the broad side of a white truck as clear skies and slams right at it, there was never any conflict anywhere, everything went just as it was suppo… Wait, shit.
what if the camera and lidar disagree, then what?
This (sensor fusion) is a valid issue in mobile robotics. Adding more sensors doesn’t necessarily improve stability or reliability.
After a point, yes. However, that point comes when the sensor you are adding is more than the second type in the system. The correct answer is to work into your algorithm a weighting system so the car can decide which sensor it trusts to not kill the driver, i.e. if the LIDAR sees the broadside of a trailer and the camera doesn’t, the car should believe the LIDAR over the camera, as applying the brakes and speeding into the obstacle at 60mph is likely the safer option.
sees the broad side of a white truck as clear skies and slams right at it
The truck driver, Frank Baressi, 62, told the Associated Press that the Tesla driver Joshua Brown, 40, was “playing Harry Potter on the TV screen” during the collision and was driving so fast that “he went so fast through my trailer I didn’t see him”.
The crazier and stupier shit was that part of his justification was that “people drive and they only have eyes. We should be able to do the same.”
Its a stunningly idiotic justification, and yet here we are with millions of these “eyes only” teslas on the road.
That’s terrifying for showing how little he understands about the problem he is attempting to solve.
Humans use up to four senses at times to accomplish the task of driving.
I can add more, we don’t only have five senses. Elementary school propoganda that is. Here’s all the ones I can think of while driving.
- Vision
- Hearing
- Tactile feedback from wheel, pedals, you could break this down further into skin tactile pressure receptors, and also receptors of muscle tension, though muscle tension and stretching receptors also involved in number 4
- Proprioception, where your limbs and body are in space
- Rotational acceleration (semi circular canals)
- Linear acceleration (utricle and saccule)
- Smell, okay this might be a stretch but, some engine issues can be smelly
And that doesn’t even consider higher order processing and actual integration of all these things which despite all it’s gains with Ai recently can’t match all the capabilities of the brain to integrate all that information or deal with novel stimuli. Point is Elon, add more sensors to your dang cars so they’re less likely to kill people. And people aren’t even perfect at driving, why would we limit it to only our senses anyways? So dumb
Reminds me of Mao not brushing his teeth, because tigers didn’t brush theirs either.
Bot to be a hard-on about it, but if the cameras hace any problem autopilot ejects gracefully and hands it over to the driver.
I aint no elon dicj rider, but I got FSD andd the radar would see manhole covers and freak the fuck out. It was annoying as hell and pissed my wife off. The optical depth estimation is now far more useful than the radar sensor.
Lidar has severe problems too. I’ve used it many times professionally for mapping spaces. Reflective surfaces fuck it up. It delivers bad data frequently.
Cameras will eventually be great! Really they already are, but they’ll get orders of magnitude better. Yeah 4 years ago the ai failed to recognize a rectagle as a truck, but it aint done learning yet.
That driver really should have been paying attention. Thee car fucking tells you to all the time.
If a camera has a problem the whole system aborts.
In the future this will mean the car will pull over, but it’'s, as it makes totally fucking clear, in beta. So for now it aborts and passes control to the human that is payong attention.
So I drive a tesla as well. Quite often I get the message that the camera is blocked by something (like sun, fog, heavy rain).
You can’t have a reliable self driving system if that is the case.
Furthermore, isn’t it technically possible to train the lidar and radar with Ai as well?
Furthermore, isn’t it technically possible to train the lidar and radar with Ai as well?
Of course it is, functionally both the camera and lidar solutions work in vector-space. The big difference is that a camera feed holds a lot more information beyond simple vector-space to feed the AI straining with than a lidar feed ever will.
Starting off with 3d data will always be better than inferring it. Go fire up Adobe after effects and do a 3d track and see how awful it is, now that same awful process drives your car.
The AI argument falls short too because that same AI will be better if it just starts off with mostly complete 3d data from lidar and sonar.
Lidar and sonar are way lower resolution.
Sonar has a hard time telling the difference between a manhole cover, large highway sign and a brick wall.
any problem autopilot ejects gracefully and hands it over to the driver.
Gracefully? LMAO
You can come back when it gives at least 3 minutes warning time in advance, so that I can wake up, get my hands out of the woman, climb into the driver seat, find my glasses somewhere, look around where we are, and then I tell that effing autopilot that it’s okay and it is allowed to disengage now!
Yes, that’s exactly how autopilots in airplanes work too… 🙄
I think camera FSD will get there, but I also think there are additional sensors needed (perhaps not lidar necessarily) to increase safety and like the point of the article states… a shitload more testing before it’s allowed on public roads. But let’s be reasonable about how the autopilot can disengage.
ejects gracefully and hands it over to the driver.
Just in time to slam you into an emergency vehicle at 80…but hey…autopilot wasn’t on during the impact, not Musk’s fault.
Nah, with hands on the wheel, looking at the road, the driver, who agrees they will pay attention, will have disengaged the system long before it gets to that point.
The system’s super easy to disengage.
It’s also getting better every year.
5 years ago my car could barely change lanes on the highway. Now it navigates lefts at 5 way lighted intersections in big city traffic with idiots blocking the intersection and suicidal cyclists running red lights as well as it was changing lanes on highway… And highway lane changes are extremely reliable. Cant remember my last lane change disengagement. Same car; just better software.
I bet 5 years from now it’ll be statistically safer than humans… Maybe not same car. Hope it’s my car too, but it’s unclear if that processor is sufficient…
Anyway, it’ll keep improving from there.
ejects gracefully and hands it over to the driver
This is exactly the problem. If I’m driving, I need to be alert to the driving tasks and what’s happening on the road.
If I’m not driving because I’m using autopilot, … I still need to be alert to the driving tasks and what’s happening on the road. It’s all of the work with none of the fun of driving.
Fuck that. What I want is a robot chauffer, not a robot version of everyone’s granddad who really shouldn’t be driving anymore.
Uhhhh…
…any level 4 car actually, according to the federal governments and all the agencies who regulate this stuff.
NAVYA, Volvo/Audi, Mercedes, magna, baidu, Waymo.
Tesla isn’t even trying to go past level 3 at this point.
Why the fuck did I get down voted for looking for an ev Tesla alternative… This place makes no sense. Are you all Tesla fan boys or what?
To be fair, humans have proven all you need are visual receptors to navigate properly.
To be fair, current computers / AI / whatever marketing name you call them aren’t as good as human brains.
No, but they can be improved to the point where all that’s necessary are cameras and the means to control the vehicle.
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And how many vehicle accidents and deaths are there today? Proven that humans suck at driving maybe
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No we don’t, we use sight, sound and touch/feeling to drive at a minimum
Touch? Sure, barely. But you can drive without being able to hear.
I’d also wager you can get a license if you have that rare disease that prevents you from feeling. Since, you know, how little we use touch and hearing to drive.
But hey? Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you can provide a source that says you can’t get licensed if you have that disease or if you’re deaf. That would prove your point. Otherwise, it proves mine.
