The customer is always wrong: Tesla lets out self-driving car data when it suits

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/03/the-customer-is-always-wrong-tesla-lets-out-self-driving-car-data-when-it-suits

by sergeant3 • 9 years ago

112 55 9 years ago

theguardian.com

drzaiusapelord2• 9 years ago

Tesla said it doesn’t show anyone the logs themselves, only a description of the logs that it distributes to media when it feels the integrity of its product has been impugned.
“Drivers don’t have access to this data to defend themselves if they need it,” the Swiss driver said. “So this data is 100% to the disadvantage of the drivers.”

This is scary stuff and is one of the main things that spooks me about Elon's view of the future. He's pretty much the anti-Stallman. My devices log everything I do in a blackbox fashion and when I have a conflict with these companies they can use this logging against me. I can't get these logs and even if I could how could I properly interpret them for my defense. Look at how Toyota had teams of experts from all over the world going over their recent acceleration issues and still had a hard time making heads or tails of it.

How can a consumer like myself ever hope to have these kinds of resources if there's a conflict?

The Guardian could not find a single case in which Tesla had sought the permission of a customer who had been involved in an accident before sharing detailed information from the customer’s car with the press when its self-driving software was called into question.

This is inexcusable. Executitves at Tesla shouldn't be making these calls, the consumer should.

I think IoT and smarteverything is going to have us re-evaluate our relationships with the companies we buy from . There's a fairly major power inbalance in their favor and they are not shy about using it.

ethbro7• 9 years ago

Personally, I'm okay with this in the short term. Electric vehicles are still at a fairly press-sensitive stage of development. And there's definitely skulldoggery that ICE competitors could manufacture if they wanted to.

Or even crazy customers. See: https://www.tesla.com/blog/when-life-gives-you-lemons

After they're accepted and the new normal? Absolutely agreed that the balance should be shifted toward the customer.

ksk2• 9 years ago

I don't think electric car makers should be coddled like this. What exactly is your worry with negative press?

DannyBee2• 9 years ago

Wow. A friend of mine in china told me "What do we need civil rights for right now. It's more important that we become a world leader. We can always get our rights back later"

Once you set a new normal, it's the new normal, and people get used to it. Remember that time we went back to a strong 4th amendment? Or less surveillance? or ...

If electric cars can't survive with negative press, they shouldn't survive. Ends don't justify means.

striking• 9 years ago

Then don't buy a Tesla. There are plenty of cars that log data in a user-friendly fashion, and plenty others that don't log at all.

You have choices.

smnrchrds• 9 years ago

How can I find such cars? Where do I look for the information regarding data collection policies of a specific car? Reading page after page of verbose legalese of licence agreements and trying to interpret them for hidden meanings is not practical. How do I, as a privacy-concoius person, find a car?

woliveirajr• 9 years ago

The driver said he believed Tesla had violated Swiss data protection law by declining to send the raw data

Raw data might not help anything if there are no instructions on how to interpret it. There are two ways of hiding data: by not showing at all and by showing it in a flood of useless data, where it can't be seeing except if you know what you are looking for (and when there is only raw data and no manual, well, you can't make a good use of it).

Yes, having some data is better than none, but I don't expect it to be that helpful for a while.

ethbro7• 9 years ago

The other way to look at it is the difference between not having data, which makes it impossible to interpret, and having data, which makes it somewhere between easy and very difficult to interpret.

bicubic• 9 years ago

Having that full fidelity raw data would be a gold mine, even without instructions. I'm sure the hacker community would reverse engineer it within months.

newman3142• 9 years ago

The logging is also the primary reason why I'm not getting a Tesla.

kylec• 9 years ago

It's a major factor for me as well. I'm even leery of these always-connected infotainment systems in modern cars.

Neliquat• 9 years ago

Pretty much all new cars have it. They are hardly unique in that sense.

trendia• 9 years ago

That is, until we get the new cars to run Coreboot.

newman3142• 9 years ago

AFAIK, they have it for infotainment. Is there information on other manufacturers uploading log data too?

slededit2• 9 years ago

But only one company routinely releases it to embarrass their customers.

Shivetya2• 9 years ago

my 17 Volt reports my driving even without my solicitation. Imagine my surprise the first time I looked at what it had and it showed exactly where I had accelerated too hard or braked too hard; all times showing of electric drive and such to friends.

Needless to say I did not sign up for their related insurance program which sends your driving information to interested insurance companies.

my big concern isn't these affiliates, its the government being able to subpoena such data since its not in my possession and there for not protected by any rights I have.

frgtpsswrdlame• 9 years ago

Is there a transmitter you can disconnect? Or maybe stick a baby faraday cage on?

crispyambulance2• 9 years ago

It seems like there's a large volume of information in the logs. I mean, if Tesla can tell whether the driver has his hands on the wheels there's probably a ton of other details.

It makes me wonder how practical it would be to use these logs. I hear about so-called "black boxes" in cars (not just Tesla), but where are the tools to decipher the data? How much can you trust that the logs reflect reality?

hashkb• 9 years ago

It might be difficult, but that shouldn't impact the right of drivers (if any) to try.

crispyambulance2• 9 years ago

I agree, and it's not just drivers that would be able to make use of such "black box" log data but also insurance companies and law enforcement.

The thing is it would require A LOT of cooperation from Tesla. Once Tesla starts sharing logs, they have to support it and can no longer change it at a "whim" for internal purposes.

Perhaps most importantly, Tesla would also have to defend the accuracy of the logs when they go against other observations. Just because something is in a log, doesn't mean it correct, accurate or true.

I can understand why they would exert a mighty effort to avoid giving out logs.

mikeash2• 9 years ago

I'm skeptical of the "hands on the wheel" thing. They can't actually sense hands on the wheel, what they sense is torque on the steering wheel. I often have my car nag me to put my hands on the wheel when I already have them there, and I'm just not applying enough torque with them.

It's possible that the threshold for the nag is just higher, and that the torque sensor is so sensitive there's no way it could possibly have a false negative here. But we just don't know.

ethbro7• 9 years ago

I wonder if there's enough play in the steering column that you could send generated micro torque amounts back up to the steering wheel, then see if they're resisted.

TorKlingberg• 9 years ago

This has bothered me. Tesla has all the data, but will only release it when it benefits them. It is easy to control the public debate when you are the gatekeeper of facts.

Shivetya2• 9 years ago

I just go surf youtube if I want to real results of AP2 and AP1 unfiltered. Some of them are downright scary. There is not going to be a sudden jump to good autonomous driving.

013a• 9 years ago

Also remember that AP1 wasn't even created by Tesla. That technology belonged to Mobileye, who is now owned by Intel. And it is public that Mobileye was the party who ended their relationship; Tesla was pushing their tech beyond what Mobileye deemed safe.

Thus, AP2 was born.

Tesla is a surprisingly scummy company when you start digging into some of their behavior.

makomk• 9 years ago

The Summon incident certainly was rather sleazy. Tesla's press release made it sound like a long, complicated series of steps were involved that could only be triggered intentionally. In reality, all it took was the car thinking the user double-tapped Park rather than single-tapping it, and then them not noticing and cancelling in time. Not only that, according to other owners there was sometimes a several second lag before message and warning sound to appear, meaning he could well have been outside the car by then.

swiley• 9 years ago

I really like my car's dashboard: there isn't a single touch screen. Everything is a physical button.

zwily• 9 years ago

The Park button referred to above is also a physical button.

Animats• 9 years ago

Some of the "self driving" car companies fear objective evaluation. Uber especially doesn't like to test in California because they have to report accidents and disengagements to DMV. Tesla isn't quite as bad, but they report very few miles driven in California.

This is for real self-driving. Level 2 semi self driving systems like Tesla's old "autopilot" don't have to report, so we don't get data for production vehicles.

From the DMV reports, Google/Waymo is performing about two orders of magnitude better on self-driving disengagements than anybody else reporting.[1] They're up to 5000 miles between disengagements. No disengagements on freeways. That's one of the few objective measures we have in this business. Road and Track, and Top Gear, aren't getting self driving cars to test yet.

[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/disen...

MegaButts2• 9 years ago

While I agree that Waymo is in the lead, I disagree they're two orders of magnitude ahead of the competition. If you look at Cruise, they are clearly making significant progress each month. If you look at their last month available, they have 6 disengagements for 2284.35 miles, or 2.62 disengagements per 1,000 miles.

Waymo reports 0.2 disengagements per 1,000 miles, which is clearly better - but only by 1 order of magnitude. And if you look at how quickly Cruise is making progress, I'd suspect (by as much data as we can glean from these reports, which is limited) that Cruise will be roughly on par with Waymo in <2 years.

mritun• 9 years ago

And if you look at how quickly Cruise is making progress, I'd suspect (by as much data as we can glean from these reports, which is limited) that Cruise will be roughly on par with Waymo in <2 years.

Assuming Waymo is standing still. The last 20% take a lot longer than initial 80% in the machine learning business. The last 2% literally takes a decade.

jsmthrowaway• 9 years ago

What does this have to do with the article?

andor• 9 years ago

This will have to change next year, at least for European customers, when the EU General Data Protection Regulation takes effect. The GDPR grants everybody a right to data portability for personal data:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDPR#Data_portability

The mobility data they collect is regarded personal data because it indirectly allows to identify the driver.

fixermark4• 9 years ago

Will they continue to have European customers once that regulation takes effect?

owenversteeg2• 9 years ago

Elsewhere on HN, someone posted this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ1XLqc5IUg

This was my comment reply:

Wow. That guy is going nineteen miles per hour on a simple road in daylight and the car literally crossed to the wrong side of the road in nine seconds!

That's an absolute disaster.

gambiting2• 9 years ago

As much as I would love to have a self-driving car(and I would!) I honestly shake my head at anyone saying that we will have fully autonomous vehicles in the next 5-10 years. Unless the roads are fully standardised and beacons placed every few meters, this is literally the image recognition problem all over again. In the 60s scientists thought that with the power of computers they will "solve" image recognition completely within a few months. It's 2017 and our best of the best algorithms and neural networks are stupidly bad at things they haven't been specifically trained to recognise, and even then they make catastrophic mistakes. And then we want to put essentially this tech on a car, where our roads are bad, signs are faded or straight up wrong, where you can have any sort of weather conditions obscuring the view and/or lidar, plus the whole thing has to be so reliable that you can put it on a consumer product......within 10 years? If anything, we will get a better version of Tesla Autopilot within 10 years, but full autonomy? Try 50 years.

Nomentatus2• 9 years ago

Humans aren't all that great at driving safely and consistently either. Autonomous vehicles just have to be better than the average (not terrific) driver, not perfect; and progress recently beggars the progress in previous generations. I'm placing my money on sooner rather than later in this case.

cool_look• 9 years ago

"lets out data when it suits"

that is rich coming from a journalist.

dayaz36• 9 years ago

This is the second story that's somehow made it on the front page of hn today that biasedly talks down Tesla and particularly autopilot. All this on the day that Tesla takes over Ford in marketcap. This is not a coincidence. I'm getting the feeling that there is definitely some astroturfing going on here. Instead of talking about this historic day for Tesla and the EV market in general, we're talking about an AP accident from a year ago and some nonsensical study navigant did. Seems like a concerted effort to steer the conversation

The customer is always wrong: Tesla lets out self-driving car data when it suits

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