Why Teslas Keep Striking Parked Firetrucks and Police Cars

https://slate.com/technology/2021/08/teslas-allegedly-hitting-emergency-vehicles-why-it-could-be-happening.html

by RickJWagner • 5 years ago

46 94 5 years ago

hoseja• 5 years ago

What is the average firetrucks-stricken per million driven km for other cars?

enkid• 5 years ago

This is a good question. I couldn't find statistics for striking parked vehicles, but apparently there's something like 20000 accidents a year involving Emergency vehicles. [0]

[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00187208187861...

PinguTS5• 5 years ago

Does not matter, because it is not a systematic failure.

But when a piece of software deployed by an OEM has a problem, then it is a systematic failure where all cars of that OEM are having the very same problem and then the OEM has to do something.

chubot• 5 years ago

Yeah exactly, a failure that is different than a human failure is going to be noticed, even if it's not more common.

It's probably hard to intuit, and no one explicitly thinks about this (except AI engineers and researchers), but emergency vehicles are parked in a way that is "obvious" to human drivers.

Every situation is different -- how much shoulder there is, etc. What the visibility is. The driver unconsciously makes a judgement call to be visible (to humans). There is no way they can judge how an AI is going to view them (which changes from time to time, and across AIs).

So the only solution is for the AI to err in the same way that humans do, or not at all.

darkerside3• 5 years ago

It doesn't excuse anything, but it does matter

JoeAltmaier2• 5 years ago

Unless it is no more than the average, in which case it may not be a systematic failure. Which was their point I believe?

A systematic failure would be striking every emergency vehicle for instance.

Pyramus2• 5 years ago

I wasn't sure of your comment was being sarcastic or not.

In any case the article clearly suggests that it's a systemic issue due to using too few sensor modalities in conjunction with too little training data. Hence it's not restricted to firetrucks, but many new, unlearned situations.

smt886• 5 years ago

There aren't separate stats for stationary firetrucks, but looking at all collisions with emergency vehicles (including at high speed), it's in the order of magnitude of 15,000 collisions with more than 3 trillion miles driven.

Tesla is so many orders of magnitude worse in this area than human drivers that it will be laughable for them to try to resort to Musk's usual lie -- that Teslas are better drivers than humans.

the-dude2• 5 years ago

Here in NL is not uncommon for police vehicles to be the instigator of the accident ( high speed manouvres etc ).

brixon2• 5 years ago

Telsa is only a level 2 self driving car, but it has been sold as something way more advanced (Telsa has since pulled back some of the hype). A lot of people don't understand that there are even levels at all.

bcrl• 5 years ago

In a safety culture oriented organization drivers would have to receive training before operating a machine like this. Some please explain why exactly isn't that the case with Level 2 self driving cars? Drivers clearly don't understand the limitations of the system.

brixon2• 5 years ago

You have to pass a driving test at age 16 (in US), after that you never need to test again (sometimes eye checks when you are old), cause um... nothing changes about driving or cars or rules in the next 64+ years it would seem.

dfxm12• 5 years ago

A lot of people don't understand that there are even levels at all.

People shouldn't really have to. The phrase "self driving car" is a binary yes/no in common, regular English. I don't know if this is Tesla's fault or some committee's fault (SAE?), but it's really terrible marketing to call things "self driving cars" when they can't drive by themselves.

Cars shouldn't be allowed to be marketed self-driving, or autonomous, etc., until a driver isn't required.

curryst• 5 years ago

I'm certain the colloquial use will remain, but "doesn't require a driver" should really be the one to get it's own name. Fully Autonomous Vehicle or Driverless Autonomous Vehicle.

"Self-driving car" is just woefully inadequate to describe the capabilities it encompasses. A century old Model T with a brick on the accelerator could be accurately described as a "self-driving car". It's not very good at driving, but neither are drunk people and we still say that they're driving.

Likewise, I would argue that a car that can maintain speed and steer itself to stay in it's lane is conceptually closer to a "self-driving car" than it is a "fully manual car".

Cars shouldn't be allowed to be marketed self-driving, or autonomous, etc., until a driver isn't required.

That's going to be a licensing thing. Frankly it probably is time for the government to step in and create some kind of licensing for cars that indicates they're fully autonomous. Even if they aren't going to issue any at the moment, it would be good to set the direction that only cars with whatever government seal are actually able to operate without a driver. Then it'd be a little harder for companies to play word games.

masklinn2• 5 years ago

People shouldn't really have to. The phrase "self driving car" is a binary yes/no in common, regular English. I don't know if this is Tesla's fault or some committee's fault (SAE?), but it's really terrible marketing to call things "self driving cars" when they can't drive by themselves.

It's Tesla's, they're the ones calling their system "autopilot" (conjuring the idea of the car driving itself in the 99.99% of the population which has never flown a plane with an autopilot and has no idea how limited they can be) and literally selling a "Full Self-Driving Capability".

Other companies have generally been careful to bill their tech as assistive (Volvo's automation system is even carefully called "Pilot Assist").

And SAE is levels of automation, describing how little / how much automation there is in the driving system, it doesn't intrinsically imply self-driving capability, only that some aspects of driving can conditionally be handled automatically. SAE levels 1 and 2 are specifically worded in terms of assistance as well, here's SAE2:

The driving mode-specific execution by one or more driver assistance systems of both steering and acceleration/deceleration using information about the driving environment and with the expectation that the human driver performs all remaining aspects of the dynamic driving task

effingwewt• 5 years ago

Where I live I have seen Tesla owners riding in the passenger seat (driver's seat empty).

One of these douchenozzles has a sticker that says 'I'm probably not driving'. This particular tesla has whatever 'drive like an asshole' package where the car is accelerating unsafely, weaving between cars/lanes... as this lady is reading a book.

I followed it for a while just out of curiosity. Once it got to a shopping center with dog-legs to turn left, the tesla lost its shit. It began for no reason to ride the curb, and I mean ride it. Brand new tesla just ate up both its driver's side rims to the point sparks could be seen. The lady reached over and did something that did not work, and it just kept going until she slid over and regained control.

If tesla can't even get the simplest of shit right how tf can they claim self-driving? And does it matter that if this person kills someone they are at fault? No one would have died if Tesla hadn't lied about their capabilities.

How many people must die before they are stopped from doing this shit? Tesla says they aren't misleading anyone, but then why do so many of their customers drive hands-free?

ahahahahah2• 5 years ago

There is no such thing as a "level 2 self driving car". Tesla does not have any form of a "self driving car". It has "level 2 automation" just like basically every other large manufacturer (Honda has some production cars with "level 3 automation").

Generally, level 4 and 5 would be considered "self-driving" (read more here: https://www.nhtsa.gov/technology-innovation/automated-vehicl...).

The leaders in vehicle automation have self-driving cars, but Tesla is far behind.

twic• 5 years ago

Why did Tesla decide not to use radar any more?

What wavelengths do other cars' radars operate at? How big are the apertures?

sschueller• 5 years ago

I can only think of three reasons: incompetence, arrogance or cost. I tend to think it's mostly arrogance in believing the self driving "problem" can be purely done with cameras and software. Cost as well as availability of parts became an issue this year as well.

Pyramus2• 5 years ago

My bet is on cost. It's the stated reason not to use lidar and it only makes sense to apply to radar (not knowing the cost of a radar sensor compared to camera - please share if you do).

Elon may not be a great engineer but he is a genius businessman in many aspects so that would also make sense.

Retric3• 5 years ago

Radar has serious issues detecting stationary objects. Which is why early automatic cruse control systems had minimum speeds, they simply don’t work in stop and go traffic.

Lidar on the other hand has no problem with stationary objects, but cars can’t depend on it in all weather conditions. Which means full self driving cars need to be able to operate based on vision like we do. I would expect all level 5 systems to use Lidar especially if costs continue to drop, but it’s not as clear cut as you might think.

dham• 5 years ago

Radar has too many issues detecting stopped objects. A parked car vs a manhole cover. Both Tesla and Comma.ai think solving self driving is purely a software problem and can be solved with just vision. For instance, humans, the only known driving implementation currently, drive with only vision. This videos goes over sensors briefly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6zYS7WSyw8

5423542342354• 5 years ago

The main reason is cost. LIDAR has issues and limitations, but so does every imaging system. A LIDAR/camera system is far superior than a camera only system, and LIDAR does far more thing better than cameras, than cameras do better than LIDAR (judging distance, reduced computing effort, detecting reflective surfaces and surfaces with 2D images on them).[0] But LIDAR was running $70k per vehicle, which is just not feasible. But thanks to technological development and economies of scale, the price of LIDAR (and the size) has drop precipitously, and now can run below $1,000. [1][2]

Now in the long run, for true driverless cars, LIDAR will be rendered obsolete by sufficiently accurate AI interpretations of camera feeds. But in the medium term, I think they are key to filling in huge weaknesses camera only systems have, and freeing up computing power currently being used by trying to judge “depth perception” using cameras, to be freed up to better deal with other things cameras are actually good at like color/text recognition for reading traffic signs, facial recognition for determining if a pedestrian sees you, differentiating between hard and soft objects, etc.

[0] https://www.automotiveworld.com/articles/lidars-for-self-dri... [1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Automobiles/Cheaper-lidar-s... [2] https://news.itu.int/the-price-of-lidar-is-falling/

DeBraid• 5 years ago

IIRC, in this[1] video Andrej Karpathy mentions radar was mostly redundant, and in addition was occasionally harmful (sending conflicting signals vs. video), so they got rid of it to reduce cost and complexity.

[1] https://youtu.be/g6bOwQdCJrc

londons_explore• 5 years ago

In that video Karpathy says a lot of things which are the corporate line, but don't really match up with math and statistics...

snarf21• 5 years ago

Yeah, nothing makes sense except cost. Even for these kind of level 2 system, they should be forced to have camera + lidar + radar. There is no reason to not use as many data sources as possible. If it is to expensive, work on that. Batteries used to be more expensive too but they focused on that. Spend some of your stock on lidar/radar acquisitions.

baybal25• 5 years ago

Apertures are very small, and predominant majority of radars are not imaging.

Yet, that's the very point. These very primitive radars are more than enough for a car to avoid an obvious collision threat.

DoingIsLearning• 5 years ago

Why did Tesla decide not to use radar any more?

System redundancy in safety-critical systems exists for a reason. Either their engineering team refused to see this or they were unable to make Product/Management/Regulatory people see it.

AEB is quite finicky and needs quite a fair bit of calibration and mechanical alignment, still like the article says can suffer from false positives.

But although LIDAR is still prohibitively expensive it is possible to design ADAS that can integrate stereo camera, RADAR and long range sonar, that would at least give you three sources of data for some margin.

What wavelengths do other cars' radars operate at?

The spectrum used for AEB in most transceivers is 76 GHz to 81 GHz (so between about 3.9 and 3.7 mm) some older implementations also worked at 24GHz i think.

Maxburn2• 5 years ago

As a human I find dealing with going around emergency vehicles at night is a bit troublesome. The emergency lights are overwhelming and obscure your vision from other things, like some worker near the vehicle. Also the human distraction that is target fixation can sink your attention on the emergency scene and distract you from checking your lane to see if it's clear. I don't think this situation is limited to tesla...

smt886• 5 years ago

Humans don't have a systemic difficulty avoiding emergency vehicles. Teslas do.

I believe your anecdote, but it's uncommom. Colliding with parked emergency vehicles is extremely rare, almost non-existent.

Source: working in auto insurance

bob332124• 5 years ago

Humans do have a problem with this. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=police+car+hit+...

404mm2• 5 years ago

Is it possible that you are looking at the “wrong” Alice of data? These type of accidents are for sure very uncommon compared to any other accidents just by the ratio of vehicles on the road.

I wonder if you could look at accidents that involved a stationary police vehicle. I’d be curious if it’s still very uncommon.

Anyway, I heard that so many times from cops directly. Squad cars in the night are like magnets for drunk drivers.

hprotagonist• 5 years ago

Colliding with parked emergency vehicles is extremely rare, almost non-existent.

Maybe, but the very first thing i was taught for how to work a MVA was that under no circumstances were you allowed to walk between parked emergency vehicles, because fenders are just a very blunt pair of shears at knee height that will happily amputate you when some dingus rear-ends the parked squad car.

Source: EMT

bluGill3• 5 years ago

It isn't, but humans generally recognize emergency vehicles and know to slow way down. They might not find the correct path, but at slow speeds accidents are not deadly, plus there is a lot more time to respond.

Note that I said generally recognize and not always. Humans are bad drivers and never should be in control of a car. (which is why I'm so in favor of mass transit)

ip26• 5 years ago

FWIW those blinding LED light bars have ambient light sensors & night time dimming support, but the department has to enable it. If you feel they are as truly blinding, message your department and explain that as a driver they are so blinding you are concerned one day an officer will be hit by a car that could not see them through the glare.

dagw• 5 years ago

TL;DR

Almost certainly due to the fact that these vehicles tend to be surrounded by flashing lights in 'random' shapes and colors, and that is confusing the cameras and AI.

bluGill3• 5 years ago

Flashing lights are common and important in the real world. If they confuse AI, then AI isn't ready. No excuses, either figure it out or don't claim you are ready.

dboreham• 5 years ago

In my state (Montana) there is a law that vehicles must move one lane away from a parked emergency vehicle (leaving an empty lane between you and the emergency vehicle). I wonder if Tesla's firmware understands it needs to do that?

404mm2• 5 years ago

I’m curious too. There are several states with a variation of this law. It tends to be: move over if you can or slow down by 20 below the speed limit if you cannot.

tommi• 5 years ago

While it might be interesting to know what it does in such cases, it shouldn't matter. You as a human should always take full control when encountering unusual activity on road. Relying on currently available driving aid systems to handle edge cases is just begging for trouble.

w_t_payne• 5 years ago

I wonder if this is something to do with temporal integration periods in the HDR or AGC processing in the camera, in which case it might be an algorithm developed by an camera imager supplier (for example someone like OmniVision) rather than Tesla themselves. Does anyone know which imagers Tesla uses in the cameras on their cars?

julianlam• 5 years ago

What's equally laughable and gutsy to me is Tesla's assertion that they can achieve parity with cameras, what radar (and now lidar) have been doing for decades.

When Mr. Rajkumar details how a camera works (he did dumb it down for the layperson quite a bit), it seems almost laughable that a technology like that can even work in a real-world scenario like vehicular traffic.

I've always been of the mind that this technology can only work if you reduce the number of variables at play... that means removing the human element altogether (and even then, mother nature may have other plans), meaning self-driving cars should have their own roads. Pipe dream, I know.

baybal25• 5 years ago

if you reduce the number of variables at play... that means removing the human element altogether (and even then, mother nature may have other plans), meaning self-driving cars should have their own roads.

Why a pipe dream? It's one of the most sound solutions to the problem at the moment.

This is the model China went with its self-driving pilot projects for example.

hourislate• 5 years ago

Musk spoke about this (JRE Podcast) and he compared the camera to eyes. He said that the only way we'll ever achieve full self driving is creating a system that is at least as good or better than human eyes.

qzw• 5 years ago

That’s a fine goal, but let’s not then call a system that has nowhere near the acuity, resolution, or dynamic range, and is not hooked up to a (trained) human brain, “Full Self Driving”.

throwaway98797• 5 years ago

Our brains dont have lidar though. right?

c-cube• 5 years ago

And cameras are no substitutes for eyes yet.

vagrantJin2• 5 years ago

meaning self-driving cars should have their own roads.

Or retrofit our roads with Machine friendly signals? Signs that can ping information to the car, other cars pinging information to the car...Those sound like cheaper alternatives and the models can focus more on the difficult problems/edge cases like overtaking and "oh human like dog is crossing the street" on the freeway.

5423542342354• 5 years ago

I've always been of the mind that this technology can only work if you reduce the number of variables at play... that means removing the human element altogether (and even then, mother nature may have other plans), meaning self-driving cars should have their own roads. Pipe dream, I know.

That’s not the only way of reducing variables. I think the key is rethinking how self-driving cars can fit into a broader ecosystem of transportation, instead of narrowly thinking about self-driving cars as a one to one replacement for human driven cars.

Self-driving or not, cars are a terribly inefficient way to move people. 10 buses that are only a third full replaces 260 single commuter cars. A light rail running at 50% capacity carries more people per hour that 4 full lanes of highway [1]. Even if we build more and more roads, that just causes more traffic, not less [2]. The problem with public transport is the “first mile, last mile” problem. Unless you are in a dense well-designed environment, it is a huge pain getting from your house to the public transport, and from the public transport to your office/store/ballet recital. People don’t want to drive 3 miles and park their car at the light rail station, ride to the closest stop, take a bus 2.5 miles, and then walk the last half mile to the office. But if a self-driving car could pick you up at the curb and take you right to the lightrail, and another could pick you up from your stop and drop you right at the office, suddenly that changes the calculus. Why sit on the highway for 90 mins in your self-driving car, surrounded by 100,000 other people in self driving cars, when you could make the same trip in 40 mins using the light rail and a couple Uber-driverless.

In that situation, you can reduce variables by having self driving cars drive at lower speeds (in residential and urban areas) and by having a few dedicated lanes on strategic artery roads to move people to central locations for transport on bus/lightrail/train, much like we have dedicated lanes for buses in some places.

Once you have some basic infrastructure like that, then it makes more sense to reduce the massive amount of streets and parking wasting space in dense urban environments. If you want a car for your suburban life, fine, but you have to park it outside downtown and take the lightrail in and grab a little self-driving car to get where you want to go.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_rail [2] https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/

drcongo• 5 years ago

I expected the entire article to read "Because Tesla is just a grift on the gullible. The end."

strebler• 5 years ago

This problem is actually pretty obvious to fix and you don't even need a neural net - it can definitely be done "old school" computer vision.

Simply detect the presence of "flashing emergency lights" in the oncoming lane and disable autopilot when present. No object detector needed. The signal is so strong it's literally flashing extremely brightly in a regular, predictable pattern - any vision grad student should be able to figure this out.

Could there be false positives? Yep, but very few things will flash quite like that, and most half baked vision engineers can do this. The worst case is literally simply the driver taking over on occasion at night (maybe near strip clubs? lol)

vagrantJin2• 5 years ago

I don't think the problem is as simple as that. Sure flashy lights with reflectors confuse the current model sure, but can we consider that an edge-case and work from there? Also LED's flash too in a regular pattern too. I don't know though, seems like something that would have been accounted for as it's a pretty important part of driving awareness...maybe they didn't think people would want to stay on "full auto" when a police/Emergency vehicle is in the vicinity since you might have to do some sort of maneuver to get out of it's way. So yeah, I'll say it's an edge case for now.

Disclaimer: I'm an idiot so take my view with a boeing 747 load of salt

burntwater• 5 years ago

The solution of disabling autopilot in the presence of flashing emergency lights seems so incredibly obvious to me, that I can only assume I'm missing some glaring reason for it to not have been the case since day one.

plain4• 5 years ago

This seems like it would create a great attack vector for Teslas. Setup a flashing red light on a corner and watch the Teslas fly off the road.

baybal25• 5 years ago

This problem is actually pretty obvious to fix and you don't even need a neural net

So can be controlled collisions as such.

Simplest FMCW radars are more than enough for every emergency braking system on the market.

It's not uncommon to even use them in parallel with some more "brainy" radar imagers like on Mercedes cars. That is to make a collision preventable in case the main imaging computer hangs, or crashes.

nextweek2• 5 years ago

Whilst I agree with your point, I'd also like to see an additional strategy employed.

How about emergency vehicles broadcast on 5Ghz their intended route (for the next 300 meters) or just that they are blue light in the area.

This would only be active in a blue light situation. Manufacturers can then add a detection and warn the driver.

A while back I heard about car to car communications, but I heard next to nothing these days, this is a great use case if you ask me. If someone has more details of recent developments, I'd love to read more.

dividedbyzero• 5 years ago

How about emergency vehicles broadcast on 5Ghz their intended route (for the next 300 meters)

How would the vehicle know what the driver intends to do in the next 15-30 seconds (depending on speed)?

jareklupinski• 5 years ago

can't wait to start making clones of the device for taxi fleets so they too get all the green lights and clear lanes :)

bjtitus• 5 years ago

Good luck getting this rolled out in even a fraction of the emergency vehicles on the roads.

There are literally tense of thousands of these emergency departments and even more when you consider other vehicles which may be stopped roadside.

Perhaps something great to discuss for the future but not at all practical for the next few years or even decade.

bananapub• 5 years ago

because it isn't a proper self-driving car and people need to stop thinking or acting like it is.

eloisius• 5 years ago

It would help if it wasn't marketed as one.

988747• 5 years ago

It would help if Tesla was fined $1B for false advertising then... Even naming the whole thing "Autopilot" qualifies as punishable offence, in my opinion.

Why Teslas Keep Striking Parked Firetrucks and Police Cars

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