TL;DR: Self-Driving Teslas Rear-End Motorcyclists, Killing at Least 5
Brevity is the spirit of wit, and I am just not that witty. This is a long article, here is the gist of it:
- The NHTSA’s self-driving crash data reveals that Tesla’s self-driving technology is, by far, the most dangerous for motorcyclists, with five fatal crashes that we know of.
- This issue is unique to Tesla. Other self-driving manufacturers have logged zero motorcycle fatalities with the NHTSA in the same time frame.
- The crashes are overwhelmingly Teslas rear-ending motorcyclists.
Read our full analysis as we go case-by-case and connect the heavily redacted government data to news reports and police documents.
Oh, and read our thoughts about what this means for the robotaxi launch that is slated for Austin in less than 60 days.
Tesla self driving is never going to work well enough without sensors - cameras are not enough. It’s fundamentally dangerous and should not be driving unsupervised (or maybe at all).
Accurate.
Each fatality I found where a Tesla kills a motorcyclist is a cascade of 3 failures.
Taking out the driver will make this already-unacceptably-lethal system even more lethal.
There’s at least two steps before those three:
-1. Society has been built around the needs of the auto industry, locking people into car dependency
That’s a good thing, because the alternative would be flipping the notion of property rights on its head. Making the owner not responsible for his property would be used to justify stripping him of his right to modify it.
You’re absolutely right about point -1 though.
You two don’t seem to strongly disagree. The driver is liable but should then sue the builder/seller for “self driving” fraud.
Maybe, if that two-step determination of liability is really what the parent commenter had in mind.
I’m not so sure he’d agree with my proposed way of resolving the dispute over liability, which would be to legally require that all self-driving systems (and software running on the car in general) be forced to be Free Software and put it squarely and completely within the control of the vehicle owner.
I would assume everyone here would agree with that 😘
I mean, maybe, but previously when I’ve said that it’s typically gone over like a lead balloon. Even in tech forums, a lot of people have drunk the kool-aid that it’s somehow suddenly too dangerous to allow owners to control their property just because software is involved.
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Most frustrating thing is, as far as I can tell, Tesla doesn’t even have binocular vision, which makes all the claims about humans being able to drive with vision only even more blatantly stupid. At least humans have depth perception. And supposedly their goal is to outperform humans?
Tesla’s argument of “well human eyes are like cameras therefore we shouldn’t use LiDAR” is so fucking dumb.
Human eyes have good depth perception and absolutely exceptional dynamic range and focusing ability. They also happen to be linked up to a rapid and highly efficient super computer far outclassing anything that humanity has ever devised, certainly more so than any computer added to a car.
And even with all those advantages humans have, we still crash from time to time and make smaller mistakes regularly.
A neural network that has been in development for 650 million years.
Ok, maybe project managers are good for something.
Anyone who has driven (or walked) into a sunrise/sunset knows that human vision is not very good. I’ve also driven in blizzards, heavy rain, and fog - all times when human vision is terrible. I’ve also not seen green lights (I’m colorblind).
Human vision is very, very, very good. If you think a camera installed to a car is even close to human eyesight, then you are extremely mistaken.
Human eyes are so far beyond it’s hard to even quantify.
And bullshit on you not being able to see the lights. They’re specifically designed so that’s not an issue for colourblind people.
Some lights are, but not all of them are. I often say I go when the light turns blue. However not all lights have that blue tint and so I often cannot tell the difference between a white light and a green light by color. (but white is not used in a stoplight and I can see red/yellow just fine) Where I live all stoplights have green on the bottom so that is always a cheat I use, but that only works if I can see the relative position - in an otherwise dark situation I only see a light in front of me and not the rest of the structure and so I cannot tell. I have driven where stoplights are not green on bottom and I can never remember if green is left/right.
Even when the try though, not all colorblind is the same. There may not be a mitigation that will work from two different people with different aspects of colorblind.
Why are you trying to limit cars to just vision? That is all I have as a human. However robots have radar, lidar, radio, and other options, there is no reasons they can’t use them and get information eyes cannot. Every option has limits.
Please read my comments before you respond to them.
Bro I’m colorblind too and if you’re not sure what color the light is, you have to stop. Don’t put that on the rest of us.
I can see red clearly and so not sure means I can go.
I’ve only noticed issues in a few situations. When I’m driving at night and suddenly the weirdly aimed streetlight turns yellow - until it changed I didn’t even know there was a stoplight there. The second was I was making a left turn at sunset (sun behind me) and the green arrow came on but the red light remained on so I couldn’t see it was time/safe to go until my wife alerted me.
These fatalities are a Tesla business advantage. Every one is a data point they can use to program their self-driving intelligence. No one has killed as many as Tesla, so no one knows more about what kills people than Tesla. We don’t have to turn this into a bad thing just because they’re killing people /s
they originally had lidar, or radar, but musk had them disabled in the older models.
They had radar. Tesla has never had lidar, but they do use lidar on test vehicles to ground truth their camera depth / velocity calculations.