I kept honking at a sleeping Tesla driver on the freeway, but she didn’t wake up

https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/08/23/some-tesla-drivers-relying-far-too-much-on-self-driving-technology-roadshow/

by yumraj • 5 years ago

103 112 5 years ago

It’s possible that she wasn’t sleeping and instead may have been experiencing a medical emergency like heart attack or stroke.

wikidani• 5 years ago

Literally my first thought

ErikVandeWater• 5 years ago

That was mentioned in the article.

kazinator• 5 years ago

In 2007, a Piper Seneca plane crashed into a condo building in Richmond, BC, Canada. Right over fairly busy intersection, too. The elderly pilot had a heart attack or something.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/1-dead-2-inj...

sdoering2• 5 years ago

I remember a story in Germany the other way around were a Tesla driver detected a car on the highway with an unconcious driver. He set himself in front of the other car, braked and stopped slowly until both cars came to a halt. Both insurances did not want to pay for the damage (voluntarily induced damage and such crap) and Tesla paid the bill for the Tesla driver's repair. [1]

[1 German]: https://www.waz-online.de/Nachrichten/Panorama/Tesla-ueberni...

Griffinsauce2• 5 years ago

This sounds nice but you should NOT stop on a highway. This could've killed both + whoever slams into them.

People die all the time even when stopped on the emergency lane (you should really step over the barrier to be safe).

rachelbythebay• 5 years ago

Happened on the Golden Gate Bridge in 2007. No Teslas involved, naturally, but people sometimes do honorable things to stop an otherwise runaway vehicle.

Beatty took bold and immediate action. He drove his Ford F-350 Super Duty utility truck in front of the Jeep and allowed it to essentially crash into the back of his vehicle so it would latch on, according to bridge officials. He then "slowly and safely" guided the Jeep across the bridge's southbound lanes and brought it to rest in a safe area, away from the flow of traffic.

edit: This was pre-divider, so a runaway vehicle on the GGB could have made quite a mess by crossing into oncoming traffic.

amatecha• 5 years ago

https://archive.is/CvcN2

mrkwse• 5 years ago

Thanks, I'm getting a 'please disable your ad blocker' when I don't even use one

flerchin• 5 years ago

So the sound dampening works well too?

andix4• 5 years ago

It should be possible to overtake a self driving car and carefully slow down in front of it until a full stop. Normally they detect that and stop too.

modeless2• 5 years ago

Tesla autopilot can overtake slow cars. You might have to swerve and block it. Certainly possible, as it is not aggressive, but it wouldn't be as straightforward to stop it as with regular traffic aware cruise control.

_ea1k10• 5 years ago

That's possible, but the article said that it changed lanes to the left while signaling to the right. That rules out having NoA enabled with "confirmationless" lane changes.

WalterSear3• 5 years ago

I, for one, am not getting into a car fight with our robot overlords.

lhorie2• 5 years ago

That in itself can also be dangerous. There are in fact traffic laws in various places against driving too slow or otherwise impeding traffic flow because doing so can cause accidents.

masklinn• 5 years ago

And you can't use your warnings from the front (well you can but they'll be invisible).

So unless the self-driving vehicle has a routine to activate those on weird slowdown it may be very hard for the traffic coming behind to notice, further increasing the danger.

andix4• 5 years ago

You are always allowed to stop in an emergency. Or if your engine stops working for example ;)

AlexandrB• 5 years ago

On a highway that could cause an accident as traffic behind the self driving car would have to screech to a stop or swerve around. There needs to be some way to get it to pull over onto the shoulder.

shadowgovt2• 5 years ago

This highlights a meta-problem of highways in general: they're very high-speed conduits, which are not intended for traffic to whiplash to 0 MPH in a short distance, where accidents and emergencies can definitely create roadblocks that force traffic to whiplash to 0 MPH over a short distance.

It'd be nice to have a solution to that. There are no inexpensive ones (rails handle this with corridor control... Every N miles, a signal indicates whether it's safe to proceed to the next segment. Some sections of highway have signage allowing for this; most don't).

vkou• 5 years ago

If you can't slow down in time to avoid hitting the car in front of you when it slows down, you're tailgating, and are a danger to yourself and the cars around you.

jjk1662• 5 years ago

You shouldn't have to screech to a halt if the car in front of you slowly decelerates.

andix4• 5 years ago

That’s why you should stop slowly in such a case. Create a traffic jam behind you.

A traffic jam is a far less dangerous situation than an intoxicated driver.

invisible• 5 years ago

It's pretty crazy how often people fall asleep behind the wheel.

crossroadsguy• 5 years ago

One of the biggest fear that stops me from buying a four wheeler. I have fucking slept on my two wheeler :(

(Yes, it’s a concern and I’ll be a danger to others as well. I feel so comfortable and sleepy on moving vehicles)

cpuguy83• 5 years ago

When I was younger I would get road hypnosis, particularly at night. Don't even have to be tired, just start "zoning out" completely despite doing things to combat that (roll down windows for fresh air in my face and blast music).

I feel like this lightened up a bit in my late 20s. In any case, I love that I now live in a city where I don't have to drive and do not own a car.

oefrha• 5 years ago

A few years ago I nodded off on a 50mph thoroughfare. I was jet lagged from a transpacific flight a day earlier; I knew I was falling asleep, but there was nothing I could do to stay awake, and there was no exit I could take. Eventually I drifted into the lane on the left, hit a cargo truck, bounced off and hit another car on the right. Thankfully no one was hurt, but it could have turned out really ugly.

Don’t drive when you’re jet lagged — or fatigued, generally speaking.

CarelessExpert• 5 years ago

but there was nothing I could do to stay awake, and there was no exit I could take.

Surely there was a shoulder for use during emergencies. Why on earth didn't you pull over and turn on your hazards?

rhino369• 5 years ago

I wouldn't even try to use AutoPilot for this reason. I'd fall deep asleep if I wasn't actually steering the car.

I get active cruise control. I don't get lane assist. Doesn't everyone else's mind just perform steering pretty much without thought anyway.

ozim• 5 years ago

I thought I am badass and would not start falling asleep while drivning ever but as I got older I noticed it gets worse for me so I get breaks after 3hrs of driving.

I thought you could not get sleepy on a motorbike, because it is loud and you get constant airflow. Got enough road at night and I also had to stop every 2hrs and do sit-ups get some water and only then hit the road back.

It is important to take breaks.

Andrew_nenakhov2• 5 years ago

He could be dead, actually. I imagine a modern adaptation of "The headless horseman": a murdered driver rides in his electric vehicle, self-charging on charging stations and automatically riding between the locations frequented by the deceased owner. ...

m-p-3• 5 years ago

That could be an interesting premise for a Neo-Noir Sci-Fi novel.

Razengan• 5 years ago

Or a Twilight Zone episode.

jtnag• 5 years ago

In Bolo universe ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolo_universe ), there were multiple cases where commander was dead but AI kept its plan.

sdoering2• 5 years ago

Oh what a beautiful idea for a short story. Would have been a great writing prompt over in the redditverse probably.

[Edit:]

Could be a crime novel. A classical who-dun-it, but with the need to trackback the route and stuff like this and things happening in between and the data of the car being tampered with or stuff like this.

lemmsjid2• 5 years ago

There's a powerful sci fi short story I read in an anthology quite a while ago (I believe called The Flying Dutchman) describing a crewless bomber being repaired, fueled, taking off, bombing its target, landing, and then doing the same thing again. As it describes this repetition, you slowly realize that humanity has long since been wiped out and the bombing runs are automated systems repeating themselves. (That's my memory of the story, anyhow, I read it in the 80's :) ).

(Edit: found it, "Flying Dutchman" by Ward Moore, it's from the 50's and you can find its text online with those terms)

lostlogin3• 5 years ago

For the story to work well, there needs to be no logs, or misleading ones. I assume Teslas records travel in at least one log?

shadowgovt2• 5 years ago

This actually happens more often than, I think, people think about. It makes sense when you stop and realize what percentage of their lives Americans spend in their cars (like the old rule "most accidents happen in the home," with an average daily one-way commute of 27.6 minutes, most Americans spend 2.9% of their lives in their cars, so all else being equal 2.9% of medical emergencies can be expected to happen in cars).

I don't have high-quality numbers, but a low-quality Google search tosses out that 20% of accidents are caused by a participant having a medical emergency and losing control of their vehicle (grain-of-salt: the number is from an injury law firm, so obvious incentive to bias the number).

benmanns• 5 years ago

Only if "has medical emergencies" is independent from "drives to work." My guess is more medical emergencies happen in hospitals than on the road, even though the average person spends a lot less time in the hospital than on the road.

lostlogin3• 5 years ago

It would be interesting to know what portion of medical events happen in a car. So many things are less likely (eg whole driving you aren’t using a knife to cut up dinner, or cleaning leaves out the gutter), but so many are worse (eg if you are going 100kmh and you faint).

btilly• 5 years ago

I would expect fewer medical emergencies in a car than in some other settings. But people who've had a medical emergency are likely to get into a car to head to the hospital, and can then run into serious trouble.

In particular it is common for people suspect that they may be having a heart attack, try to drive to the hospital, and then lose control on the way.

This happens enough that standard advice from medical professionals for potential heart attack victims includes tips like, "Survive. Don't drive!" If you've got worrying symptoms, call 9-1-1 and NOT attempt to drive. See https://www.valleyhealthlink.com/blog/2017/february/survive-... for a random example.

That said, the average ambulance ride in California is close to $600. So people have a strong incentive to try to avoid the ambulance, no matter how bad an idea that may be.

crooked-v• 5 years ago

See the short story "Road Stop" by David Mason, published 1963.

    The car called the Traveler, rolling at the stately thirty miles an hour it
    always held, was coming down the road now, and the two men stood, watching. The
    woman, a little behind them, watched too, her face growing whiter. No one said
    anything as the old fashioned car rolled by, straight and steady down the
    highway, holding the center of the lane as sharply as it always did.

    There was a film of dust inside the windows, though the Traveler was clean and
    shining outside. But the film did hide the white bone faces, the despairing
    hands that had long ago stopped trying to break through those closed windows.

You can read the whole thing here: https://archive.org/details/1963-01_IF/page/n91/mode/2up?vie...

twic• 5 years ago

And on the next page, there's that classic Berserker story where the pilot trains his dog to operate a MENACE:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchbox_Educable_Noughts_and_...

josefx• 5 years ago

Reminds me of this short video[1] about an automated house that outlives its owners.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LNHYz89sNc

fitzroy• 5 years ago

The dead driver, his slumped body having fallen toward an "Accept" button on the car's touch screen just as an offer to drive for Uber appeared, now makes $200,000 / year going non-stop without bathroom or sleep breaks.

cjsplat• 5 years ago

See also "There Will Come Soft Rains" by Ray Bradbury.

All you need is a solar powered self driving car, and perhaps a programmed routine. (If occupied, to work in the morning and home at night).

davedx• 5 years ago

https://lightyear.one/ has you covered.

Andrew_nenakhov2• 5 years ago

I've actually read it, about 30 years ago. Good memories.

anigbrowl• 5 years ago

Steven Spielberg's first movie 'Duel' is visually dated but transfers surprisingly easily to a world of automated driving.

rvz• 5 years ago

My questions are these: At what point does the self-driving car stop driving since the person’s hands were still on the wheel? Was there anything else I could have or should have done?

"Steering wheel torque-based driver monitoring" is not good enough for monitoring the attention of the driver.

It is a '"poor surrogate" for driver attention'. Not my words, but the words from the NTSB [0].

[0] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/09/feds-scold-tesla-for-sl...

_ea1k10• 5 years ago

It likely was not using any driver monitoring in the provided scenario.

commandlinefan• 5 years ago

Well, I know you're not supposed to fall asleep while "driving" a Tesla right now but... isn't that the ultimate end goal? Cars that self-drive so well that you can take a nap while you're alone in them?

_ea1k10• 5 years ago

Literally as written, this sounds like a medical emergency.

From the article: "It had its right turn indicator on, but it drifted slowly to the left, into my lane, before slowly going back into its own lane."

For this to have happened, the vehicle could not have had autosteer engaged. At most, it would have had regular traffic aware cruise control on, which would not have been monitoring for wheel input at all anyway. This strongly implies to me that the operator was at least operating the vehicle intentionally to a significant degree.

In any event, calling 911 is an appropriate response to an unresponsive driver.

chrischen• 5 years ago

Is it not possible for AP to lose the lane lines temporarily and then self correct?

bpodgursky2• 5 years ago

Exceedingly unlikely unless the lane demarcation is extremely bad. Lane-holding tech is really standard and reliable now (and even if you don't think AP is great, it's not stupider than what ships in mass-market cars).

Lendal2• 5 years ago

Sure, if there's a blizzard or heavy rainstorm that blocks the cameras. Happens in Florida all the time. Rain so heavy the cameras can't see anything but a gray wall of water. In that case AP will emit an annoying audible alarm and disable itself, at which point you are steering the car manually.

In these conditions, human drivers will "follow the taillights" but I don't think Tesla allows for that yet. If AP can't see outlines of objects due to heavy rain/snow, it cuts out.

InTheArena• 5 years ago

When AP looses the lane lines, and then re calibrates (usually due to very poor markings), it starts beeping rather insistently that you take over immediately.

If you have lane detection on, Teslas will steer you back into the lane, if you start drifting off, even if auto-pilot is off. (This alone is a huge safety feature).

_ea1k10• 5 years ago

Sure, but there's two issues here. The turn signal is on in the other direction. Activation of the turn signal in base autosteer will disable autosteer. Activation of the turn signal in more advanced modes (Nav on Autopilot) will result in a lane change in the direction of the signal.

There might be a way to trigger a scenario like this in an FSD equipped car with all FSD related features turned off, and a really careful sequence of events with the turn signal, I guess? I'd have to try it to be sure, but I think it'd actually take some work to do.

But that last part does have me thinking it might be possible. The weird slowdown that he reported at the end could be consistent with AP finally giving up on alerting the driver and trying to "make safe" by slowing aggressively and probably going crazy with audible alerts. Maybe then the driver perked up and took off the ramp?

But tbh, it all reminds me of a driver that I ran into (thankfully not literally) a while back. They were in an older car, so obviously not on ADAS... just driving that badly and probably under the influence. It happens a lot.

troelsSteegin• 5 years ago

What happens with Teslas on autosteer when an emergency vehicle approaches from behind? Will it safely get out of the way for flashing blue lights (US police), red lights (fire, ambulance). Amber lights - tow trucks? If a police car with lights on pulls in behind and waits, will autosteer pull you over? I am wondering how to safely stop a car with autosteer ON and driver OFF.

heisenbergs• 5 years ago

Apparently, it'll pull over and turn on the emergency blinking lights.

https://www.tesmanian.com/blogs/tesmanian-blog/tesla-autopil...

_ea1k10• 5 years ago

With just regular autosteer, absolutely nothing. Generally speaking, I'd expect the same response out of Nav on Autopilot with the "Enhanced AutoPilot" or "Full Self Driving" features.

slg2• 5 years ago

Something sounds fishy here. The car changing speeds without anything prompting it and swerving in and out of lanes is not behavior that would be seen if it was driving on Autopilot.

lostlogin3• 5 years ago

Asleep on the wheel could cause some issues.

slg2• 5 years ago

The torque required to cause it to swerve out of its lane would also be enough to disable Autopilot. This story isn't newsworthy if Autopilot isn't on.

ggreer2• 5 years ago

It had its right turn indicator on, but it drifted slowly to the left, into my lane, before slowly going back into its own lane. Then it started to slow down considerably.

Autopilot won't let you signal in one direction while changing lanes in the opposite direction. The only way to do that is by driving manually.

My guess is the Tesla was under manual control and the driver was intoxicated, extremely sleep deprived, or having a medical issue.

r053bud• 5 years ago

This exact same thing happened to be in LA. I was driving behind a really slow Tesla (like 35mph on the freeway). I switched lanes to pass him and noticed he was just asleep at the wheel. Maybe he also had a medical emergency, but it seemed like he was just sleeping. Maybe I should have called 911.

cbg0• 5 years ago

"Just" sleeping behind the wheel? I can't imagine not calling emergency services if I ever saw something liked that.

kyleee• 5 years ago

Maybe?

tantalor• 5 years ago

Maybe AutoPilot/self-driving status should be obviously indicated by some light, sort of like an on-duty taxicab.

This could alert drivers to be wary; there maybe/is no human driver.

adwww• 5 years ago

I've always thought this about even cruise control.

I've quite often been sat at 75mph with CC engaged, start an overtake and have the car I'm passing speed up so just tuck in behind... then they slow down and I go to overtake again...

I think a purple (??) CC light, or autopilot light would help people avoid getting aggro about an algorithm.

ajay-b• 5 years ago

If given the time, location, and description of the vehicle, could Tesla track them down?

eointierney• 5 years ago

I refuse to drive because I'm terrified of the responsibilty and risk anyway, notwithstanding people trusting software sufficiently to sleep while responsible.

Please take care driving, said with love and maybe understanding.

Cycling in Dublin is both gorgeous and scary, what with fellow drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians. Walking is great.

The odds on killing somebody while walking are small.

I kept honking at a sleeping Tesla driver on the freeway, but she didn’t wake up

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