Video of Tesla on Autopilot Crashing into Stopped Truck at 75mph

https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1473307236952940548

155 298 5 years ago

rvz• 5 years ago

Proof that this system lacks night vision. No different to the video of the deer getting run over by another Tesla on autopilot [0] and the near miss that happened when the system malfunctioned and tried to hit another car [1] - both cases at night.

Sounds like the risks in using both either autopilot or FSD systems at night is even more dangerous but very surprising that these systems still have no night-vision system.

Shocking.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28732566

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29515784

jeffreygoesto8• 5 years ago

Active sensing like Lidar is even better than night vision. The side view of a damaged truck is really hard to train as a relevant class reliably, even for Karpathy.

Workaccount2• 5 years ago

All the data should be there for the computer to decide that yes there is a large object, yes it is in the road, and yes we are on track to hit it.

KaiserPro6• 5 years ago

not really, its a generic obstruction. You don't need to classify it as a car, just a generic object blocking the way.

tyingq2• 5 years ago

Wikipedia seems to indicate the car should have had front-facing radar. I'm curious why that appears to have not helped.

uptown• 5 years ago

The tweet mentions that it is a "radar-equipped car (but hw2.5 of course)"

Does hw2.5 not use the radar data?

jeffreygoesto8• 5 years ago

Even if... Tesla (like many others) suppressed Radar standstill targets to prioritize driving over stopping. Without another modality, they are indistinguishable from ground clutter in some scenes and who would want to full stop for a manhole cover every now and then... Elon maybe thought, getting rid of radar might solve that problem. It doesn't.

tyingq2• 5 years ago

Reading this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot#Hardware_2.5

It seems like it does use the radar. The generation after 2.5 (3.0) did appear to improve the "frames per second" processing from ~110-200/sec to ~2300/sec.

I'm guessing the comment means something like "if this was related to sensor processing throughput or latency, the 2.5 version might be meaningful".

jeffreygoesto8• 5 years ago

That is marketing blurb. The higher number stems from more cameras, not higher frequency or lower latency per camera.

camjohnson262• 5 years ago

The truck is more visible in the non-compressed video.

https://twitter.com/haenschengross/status/147332613675511808...

hindsightbias2• 5 years ago

Panel truck driving in the other lane didn't see it either, only braked after passing the wreck.

pengaru2• 5 years ago

As if their braking is a reliable indicator of precisely when they see what...

pandaman• 5 years ago

The truck probably was braking as the cars that merged to the right from the lanes with the wreck slowed the right lane.

jandrese• 5 years ago

Watching the video I'm not sure I would have been able to stop in time. There's like a quarter second between first seeing the truck and slamming into it.

chemeng• 5 years ago

There’s little way to tell from the video.

Human eyes have much higher dynamic range than typical video cameras. What the video shows is not likely representative of what your eyes would have seen.

ncallaway2• 5 years ago

I think it's pretty likely that a human driver would have collided with the truck.

A major difference is that (from watching the uncompressed footage), a human driver would likely have stomped on the breaks before impact. That last minute breaking could make a world of difference.

A collision at 75 mph has a lot more energy (4.5x ish) than a collision at 35 mph. So every 1/10s of breaking will do a lot to reduce the damage of the impact.

That's one of my concerns about driverless vehicles that I want to see the statistics on. I have a hunch that automation will reduce the absolute number of impacts, but may lead the impacts that remain could be higher energy impacts, because they result from a classification error.

avereveard4• 5 years ago

dodging sudden obstacle is not something one usually does with higher level reasoning. if you fullscreen the better quality version from streamable and immerse in the situation, while the truck is hard to spot, brain can definitely see something is occluding road painting and other cars light.

in person one might not realize a truck is there, but brain would probably think "something not right" and alert senses maybe even reflexively release pressure on the accellerator, so that when higher level consciousness makes out the truck, body is primed to act.

simonbarker872• 5 years ago

I’m reasonably sure I would have avoided that based on the uncompressed, from pretty early on you can see “somethings not right”.

Wife works in automotive engineering and I asked her why FCW and AEB didn’t detect it and her only thought is that because the truck is on the same angle as the central reservation and already in a bit of state it might not have detected it, although she thinks that more likely something just went wrong

BitwiseFool2• 5 years ago

If I'm being honest with myself, I would have hit the truck going just as fast and not noticed until it was far too late. The first sign of a problem was the skid marks, but but then the collision was unavoidable. I tried going back and looking to see if the oncoming headlights were obscured by the body of the truck, but I wasn't able to discern that.

I also thought I might have been able to take the 18 wheeler's reaction as a clue, but it passed the wreck in the other lane and only starting braking right as it passed it.

swat535• 5 years ago

I’m reasonably sure I would have avoided that based on the uncompressed I'm not so sure I would have.

If I'm driving at 120km/h , at night, chances are I'm also tiered and reacting that quickly at that speed with limited vision would have been a coin toss for me.

I'm all for making these cars safer but we are watching that video, knowing the truck would be there but fail to consider all the extra context around it. I think accidents can and will happen with self driving cars, no matter what we do.

pavon• 5 years ago

Thanks for posting that. That is a big difference - around 4-5 seconds of time to react in this video vs less than 2 in the compressed video.

fblp2• 5 years ago

Agreed, the silhouette fo the truck is clearly visible 2 seconds before impact which is actually quite a lot of time to react.

I'm reminder of this multi-vehicle accident where you can see some drivers clearly reacting 1-2 seconds before impact. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9yqXzZ16ns

dxhdr• 5 years ago

Thanks for posting! Having watched this version there's no way any human driver paying attention would hit that truck. It would have been more visible in actuality as the dynamic range of video doesn't compare to eyesight.

6gvONxR4sf7o3• 5 years ago

And I’d bet the difference between video and in-person would be even greater than the difference between compressed and non-compressed video.

silicon2401• 5 years ago

Not saying I wouldn't have crashed, but it's way more visible in this video. It's not even close. Definitely would have at least tried to brake, whereas in the compressed video the truck seems to just pop into existence out of the darkness.

strikelaserclaw2• 5 years ago

big big difference, the first video i thought to myself "yea i probably would have hit it too", this video shows me that i could have definitely slammed the brakes to have minimal impact or maybe even stop entirely.

mecha_ghidorah• 5 years ago

Wow that is a huge difference, thank you for sharing. I am fucking against this auto pilot stuff a good deal and even I was looking at the video in the original link thinking "Fuck I dunno if a human would do any better".

In the uncompressed video it seems very obvious that there is an obstacle in the road much earlier

traceroute66• 5 years ago

The other question to ask is what was the Tesla doing bombing along in the outer lane when there was (seemingly) negligible traffic anywhere except the truck in the inner lane.

Whilst its unlikely the Tesla autopilot would have fared much better in the centre lane, the impact could have been substantially less.

allemagne• 5 years ago

It's in the outer lane because that's either where the driver turned autopilot on or told autopilot to switch to.

On the other hand I think it's at least plausible that a human driver would have been able to notice the truck in time, even being in the outer lane.

yalogin2• 5 years ago

Did Tesla respond to this? I am curious if this an algorithm issue or an issue with real time scheduling where the necessary signal did not arrive in time and so the whole system failed to react.

ars2• 5 years ago

Did you watch the video? The truck is almost impossible to see it's so dark.

However human night vision is much better than camera night vision, so I wonder what an actual human would have seen in that scenario.

But it's certain the camera could not really see it.

bitshiftfaced2• 5 years ago

The truck still blocks the view of headlights of the traffic in the other lane. It also blocked view of the lights of the right-lane truck near the end. I don't know what the state of the art is like, but humans can tell something is "off" up ahead when they see this kind of "disappearing headlights" pattern.

In any case, the tweet claims there was no braking of any kind, and I'd expect braking at least in the split second before the crash, where the truck is visible to the camera.

jabedude• 5 years ago

The non-compressed video[0] is much clearer. I can clearly see the truck ~1s before the crash

[0]. https://twitter.com/haenschengross/status/147332613675511808...

pwillia72• 5 years ago

I feel like you would definitely notice the broken white lane lines ... You can see it pretty well in the uncompressed version.

kybernetyk2• 5 years ago

There's a "less compressed" video. The computer had ample time to react: https://streamable.com/7ixg7l

FireBeyond• 5 years ago

That's part of the issue - Elon says that LIDAR is "a deadend" and removed radar from Teslas as being "unnecessary", because their cameras "could do everything needed".

Either one of those would have detected this.

My Audi's radar works great in pea soup fog. Has prevented me from nearly rear-ending a gray vehicle with no lights on in heavy fog.

vb6sp64• 5 years ago

scroll down. there is an uncompressed version that is a easier to see. It had plenty of time to apply the brakes

aeternum• 5 years ago

The truck driver also did not brake until just past the wreck and truck drivers a significantly more experienced than the average human driver.

It's hard to see in the video even when primed for it, much less likely a human would see it when not expecting it.

yalogin2• 5 years ago

I think folks here are misunderstanding what I am trying to say above.

The system seems it, at least the sensors will and then they send the image to the module that processes this and runs the algorithm to detect that its a stationary object and that it needs to hit the brakes. Then the signal needs to be sent to the module that brakes. Being a real time system, all of these need to happen within a time window for the brakes to be applied at the right time. Its possible that because of some resource constraints or poor programming/design one of the steps in the chain is not triggered and so the system did not brake.

kiba2• 5 years ago

As a human, I would probably crash into it, depending on what I seen from non-compressed and compressed version. However, camera works differently from human eyes.

ryanSrich• 5 years ago

Idk. The non-compressed version makes it seem like the truck was very visible. I think any driver paying attention would have at least applied some braking.

kiba2• 5 years ago

I watched the compressed version before seeing this non-compressed version, so I was primed to expect the black truck.

Maybe I would have stopped. Maybe not.

dymk• 5 years ago

Yes, and your human eyes have far better dynamic range than these cameras. Plus, I could tell there was something in the road early on despite the truck not being illuminated, because I saw the oncoming headlines disappearing behind an obstruction.

Really shows how Tesla has probably made a big mistake going all-in on camera only vision. And their vision system couldn't make the inference of an obstruction based on the oncoming headlights.

Lidar would have been able to detect this easily.

xboxnolifes• 5 years ago

To me the biggest issue is that there doesn't seem to have been any braking attempt, even at very close distance. Even if it was imperfect or hard to see at a distance, I would expect to see the 75mph reduced even slightly before impact. Every speed reduction is a statistical increase in surviving a crash.

jaclaz• 5 years ago

I concur, it doesn't seem to me like it reacted too late, it didn't react at all seemingly.

toddh• 5 years ago

Maybe you could. https://twitter.com/TAndersen_nSCIr/status/14733171491712000...

Tom Andersen: Your eyes have much wider brightness range than any video camera ever made, and many many times better than the $1 camera on a Tesla.

That is not a representation of what human eyes would see. It's a cheap video camera.

KaiserPro6• 5 years ago

You have to remember that you have a much greater "dynamic range" of vision as a human. That means that you can see much darker and brighter things at the same time.

The thing that would(or should) have alerted you as a driver is the reflecting of the truck's lights on the paint of the broken down pickup as it drove past. Although why the truck driver didn't slowdown as it passed a crash is a bit of a mystery.

However, Teslas have radar for this sort of things. On the other hand this does kinda underscore the problem of using cameras with global shutter control for self driving. The auto contrast couldnt cope with the oncoming lights, so stopped down the sensitivity of the camera, leaving it blind to that broken truck.

seanmcdirmid2• 5 years ago

Do Teslas have radars? I thought their self driving tech was based solely on conventional video cameras?

Found:

Beginning with deliveries in May 2021, Model 3 and Model Y vehicles built for the North American market will no longer be equipped with radar.

from https://www.tesla.com/support/transitioning-tesla-vision, so radar-less is a new thing. That Tesla should have had a radar unless bought recently.

vgeek• 5 years ago

What is the practical solution for cameras only besides sensors with more dynamic range? Secondary cameras with faster apertures and higher ISOs(or different exposure settings)? Would that also help by allowing triangulation for distances and minimizing false positives for stationary objects? It is more of a technology or cost problem?

fillskills• 5 years ago

I was driving from Bay Area to a nearby city at night. Lighting was similar. Was driving at about 70-75mph. Saw a flash in the far distance. Had no idea a crash had happened. Out of extreme caution slowed down to 60mph. In about a minute had a truck right in my lane just like this video. Swerved to another lane to avoid crash. The only reason we survived was that we had slowed down based on a random flash.

Another thing I don’t understand is why wont Tesla invest in a front only radar sensor to avoid such collisions.

nwvg_7257• 5 years ago

This is a black truck, facing sideways in a lane, with no reflective surfaces of any kind, at night. Why is it surprising that a car hit it?

lab14• 5 years ago

This specific car has multiple laser vision cameras that detect objects from long distances, supposedly even at night.

MPSimmons• 5 years ago

What laser system do you think Teslas have?

solarkraft• 5 years ago

Elon Musk is adamant about but needing such systems because "after all, humans are fine without them as well". I don't know what systems the current hardware has, but am sure there's no LIDAR.

skhr06805• 5 years ago

I counted three seconds from noticing the truck to hitting it. Three seconds of braking is a lot more than zero

BitwiseFool2• 5 years ago

Devil's Advocate: You already knew what to look for* when you watched the video. I would say that a typical driver in the same scenario certainly wouldn't have had nearly as much of three seconds between noticing and collision.

Edit: *Specifically, to be on the lookout for a black sideways truck on an unlit road directly in ahead of where the car is traveling.

mikhailt5• 5 years ago

Okay, now imagine you're driving home after a long day at work and it is dark; you still think you will react fast enough?

davesque4• 5 years ago

Because the car had radar. There are plenty of other car brands that ship similar emergency breaking features that wouldn't have missed this. Also, I, as a human viewing a video with crappy color balance (much inferior to human night vision), noticed the car long before it was struck. At least I would have begun breaking before hitting the car.

mensetmanusman2• 5 years ago

For around $50 Million, someone could pay to have every truck add high visibility markers: https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/p/d/b00012368/

torbTurret• 5 years ago

Should be legally required tbh.

mensetmanusman2• 5 years ago

My emergency responder friend added this material to the bottom of his family vehicle as well as to the side.

He has responded to so many night crashes where they have had trouble locating the vehicle, that he wanted to make the next emergency responder’s job easier by helping them see the flipped vehicle if that were ever to (unfortunately) occur.

ck2• 5 years ago

The power-on screen for teslas should be required by law to show checkboxes:

[ ] "YOU are the beta-test of all features including collision avoidance when using this vehicle"

[ ] "YOU will be used to detect bugs before they can be fixed, including collisions at high speed"

Because these things are assumed in a non-computerized car but the opposite when it's "gee-whiz".

If your phone app crashes well you just reboot the phone. If the car has a bug, you crash and you reboot.

MBCook2• 5 years ago

Ok I’m no Tesla fan.

Wow. I don’t know how anything without night vision wouldn’t have hit that. It’s practically invisible.

I think it was a huge mistake for Tesla to remove radar from their vehicles but radar isn’t very good on stationary objects so not much help here.

This must have been terrifying to be there for.

ironmagma3• 5 years ago

Keep in mind the human eye is very good at detecting low level lighting, better than a camera. Some studies say it can even detect a single photon. It was likely easier to see in person.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12172

hunterb1232• 5 years ago

Single photon detecting eyes or not, most of us drive and know how hard that scenario would be to prevent.

I doubt I would have seen it or reacted in time.

There was a human in the Tesla that apparently didn't see it either.

- edit -

Sure... maybe a human could have "lessened the blow", maybe some humans, but now we're hindsight backseat driving and pulling things out of our ass.

As a human there's a lot that goes into it, it depends on how long you were driving, your vision at the time, whether you were talking, your driving skills, your reaction time, your handling of accidents, knowing where you can swerve to.

Some humans with full attention may have prevented it or weakened the crash, but that's a maybe, and assuming full attention.

Many people in this thread who think they would have noticed the subtle lighting effects on a pitch black pickup in the middle of the road. I've nearly hit blacked out cars on the road, you don't see them. You could go back and probably see it in a dashcam, but you know it's there then.

The uncompressed version you're still expecting a truck, it seems like it's much slower than what rounding a corner going 75mph on a freeway is, I don't think any of us could judge without being in the seat at the time.

All in all, this is the most speculative thread I've ever seen on HN. Very reaching, but anti-Tesla is hot news here so...

The big takeaway for me is how that Tesla just took that head-on collision at 75mph without compromising the cabin.

runarberg5• 5 years ago

I think it is kind of unfair to apply your own intuition without any tests. Perhaps the average human will see there is something weird in front without being conscious of it (e.g. the lack of the white lines etc.) that is you would see it without seeing it. Or at least enough to slow down a little and be more cautious going forward. It is pretty hard to know this without doing tests.

MBCook2• 5 years ago

You’re right, that’s possible.

But from that video this looks like the kind of thing an attentive driver could easily miss until it was too late. Maybe they’d start breaking but would they have stopped anywhere near in time? I doubt it.

dragontamer12• 5 years ago

Wow. I don’t know how anything without night vision wouldn’t have hit that. It’s practically invisible.

Radar and Lidar work in the dark. But yes, this is a problem with optical-only, especially since the camera-systems Tesla uses are pretty badly spec'd (1.2MP, not even 1080p)

Tesla _used_ to have a RADAR system installed. But stopped installing them and rewrote the software to get rid of it earlier this year.

jeffreygoesto8• 5 years ago

That is actually a benefit for low light conditions. Less resolution = bigger pixels = better efficiency.

jazzyjackson5• 5 years ago

Couldn’t an infrared camera have helped? black paint is not anyways black in infrared, and the recently-crashed car would likely have a heat signature. I wonder if they would have to start from scratch with their training data, or if black and white could be used for everything.

6gvONxR4sf7o3• 5 years ago

It’s practically invisible.

Have you ever tried to take a picture on your phone at night? Or even dusk? Things that are clearly visible render as 'practically invisible.' It's a safe bet that this video isn't a good representation of how visible the thing is, and it's guaranteed that the truck was more visible than it appears. The question of how much more visible probably isn't easy to answer other than "much more."

skhr06805• 5 years ago

Isn’t this the kind of situation where the autopilot is meant to slam your brakes on and make you think it’s magic?

soheil12• 5 years ago

No, but there are many adjacent cases where it does do that, however, due to selection bias you will never hear about them.

skhr06805• 5 years ago

A car’s autopilot braking in the nick of time to avoid an “invisible” obstacle is basically a perfect viral video, surely that would be a top post here and on Facebook and Reddit if it existed

yumraj5• 5 years ago

At this point it is very clear, to me, that anyone using FSD/Autopilot is risking their lives by trusting their lives on a beta, or perhaps even alpha product.

It has issues during the day, at night it is downright dangerous.

I do agree that while watching the video the stopped truck is not visible till very late and based just on the video it is not clear if a human would have done any better. However, I'm not sure we can make that call since it's not clear what the quality/aperture of the video is and what the human eye was able to see.

Still, even then, a human would have slammed the breaks or swerved to the right to a free lane and depending on how good the Tesla breaks are, I don't own one, it may have stopped/slowed down substantially.

EDIT:

I think some people are underestimating their reaction time. I have had a case, once in my life, where I was driving on a Freeway at ~65 mph, 87 N for those from the Bay Area, and due to the curving of the Freeway I did not see the traffic stopped in front of me in the left most lane. It was very similar to this, but while the freeway was curving. I did not slam the breaks, but swerved to the right lane, which very luckily for me was empty till I could slam the breaks. It was purely reflex action driven, no thinking was involved.

In this case there are two things:

- human eye can see farther at night than a camera as others have also noted.

- swerving would/could have prevented a head on collision since there was no traffic in the middle lane (though the stopped truck is occupying a bit of it) and would have hit the Tesla on the left side. Much better than a full head on collision.

kybernetyk2• 5 years ago

I know too much about computer and software to trust any driving auto pilot. Heck, even normal adaptive cruise control makes me very nervous.

yumraj5• 5 years ago

even normal adaptive cruise control makes me very nervous

Thank you, it seems I'm not the only one. My foot hurts much more when I'm using adaptive cruise control since it's always hovering over the brake but not touching it - unless there is absolutely not traffic whatsoever. Due to this, I almost never use it.

dragontamer12• 5 years ago

At this point it is very clear that anyone using FSD/Autopilot is risking their lives by trusting their lives on a beta, or perhaps even alpha product.

Somewhat. The product costs $10,000 and has been enabled since 2015 (originally $5000). Its reasonable for people to think that this thing works. Sure, perhaps those individuals should do better research, but there's a huge degree of misinformation coming in from the top here.

The root-cause of the problem is Tesla. Its unreasonable for Tesla to pretend it works, charge significant sums of money for the "feature", and ignore the difficult questions when this thing crashes into stopped Firetrucks over-and-over again (https://www.consumerreports.org/autonomous-driving/nhtsa-saf...)

At some point, we as a society need to accept and admit that Tesla is __lying__ about this feature. That it is dangerous, and always has been dangerous.

There's a degree of blame we can assign to the Tesla-fanboys who accept this marketing without any level of critical thinking. But the root cause of the problem is Tesla's marketing.

slg5• 5 years ago

It isn't just Tesla that is leading to confusion here. For example, both you and the comment you are responding to treat Autopilot and Full Self Driving as interchangeable when they are distinct features.

Autopilot has been on cars for years, has driven multiple billion miles, and now comes free with every Tesla. In reality it is just lane and traffic aware cruise control which numerous cars come with today.

Full Self Driving doesn't have near the track record, is still in beta (and maybe should still be in alpha), and has that 5 figure price tag you mentioned.

When you blur the lines between the two, it also results in people thinking Autopilot is more capable than it is or that Full Self Driving is safer than it is.

jazzyjackson5• 5 years ago

Cadillacs have had infrared night vision since the year 2000, how is it teslas cannot see in the dark?

briffle• 5 years ago

at 75mph, even with a very quick reaction time of 0.7 seconds to shift your foot from gas to brake, your already approching 80', and haven't even started slowing down. Yanking the wheel sideways on most vehicles that speed means you either roll-over, or side-swipe a vehicle in the next lane, since you didn't have time to check that lane before swerving. I think you are drastically overrating your driving abilities.

dawnerd• 5 years ago

Really if its that dark out and you can't see that far, on autopilot or otherwise, you shouldn't be going that fast. It's the same thing with people speeding in dense fog.

michaelt2• 5 years ago

Personally I consider it my responsibility, as a driver, to avoid any collisions with stationary objects. That means managing my speed and visibility accordingly.

Isn't that just basic, competent driving?

ModernMech6• 5 years ago

IMO your foot should be on break if you're in FSD mode. That's where my foot is using just cruise control even. The slightest tap on the break turns off cruise control.

Also, if it's so dark that you can't stop before hitting a car in front of you, then you're going too fast. The speed limit is a max, not a min, and it changes depending on prevailing road conditions no matter what the posted signs say. For example, if it's raining and you get into an accident, you can be fined for speeding even if you were going the speed limit. Going 75mph in pea-soup fog is a recipe for disaster. The dead of night has the same calculus. You should only go as fast as you can see. A good rule of thumb is you should always be able to see 12 seconds clearly ahead of you. That's how some professional human drivers manage to drive literal millions of miles over a career without a single accident.

Frankly, all this talk about how Teslas will improve the safety of traffic because they perform at a superhuman level is belied by this video evidence. Apparently these machines only drive as well as the drivers who programmed them. I wonder if there are even any professional drivers on the engineering team consulting on this project.

If the car can't even operate within the envelope of its own sensing and computing limitations, then how can we make any claims about its safety? It's driving at top speed in situations where it's essentially blind. When I'm blinded, I pull over. When the Tesla is blinded, it doesn't even know. See also, the guy who ran full speed into a tractor trailer and lost his head. It's been years since that incident and Teslas are still driving full speed into things they can't see. How is that a basis for platform that will save us all due to how safe it is?

everforward3• 5 years ago

They're not going to roll unless it's something incredibly top heavy like a Jeep. It's a car, turning the wheel 90 degrees only turns the wheels like 10 degrees.

Also, a sideswipe is almost certainly preferable for everyone than plowing head on at full speed.

Take a guess where that truck is going to go after it gets hit at 75 mph. Probably into another lane, potentially into oncoming traffic.

Human reactions are poor. Houseplant reactions are worse. Tesla acted more like a houseplant than a human

oceanplexian• 5 years ago

Assuming the driver was paying attention to the road, even taking ~2 seconds (About how long it took me to clearly recognize the truck in the video) and slowed down from 70MPH from 40MPH, it would reduce amount of kinetic energy in the collision by ~300%. It could be the difference between a survivable accident and a lethal one.

robotresearcher• 5 years ago

A 100% energy reduction would leave zero energy. 300% doesn’t make sense.

mikhailt5• 5 years ago

Based on my experience with drivers and driving at night, it is very unlikely that humans would do better in most circumstances.

till, even then, a human would have slammed the breaks or swerved to the right to a free lane

Most humans unfortunately do not have the experience of knowing what to do at the right time; they may swerve to the left here in this video and crash into a more dangerous object (another high-speed car or truck) and cause a more dangerous pileup. There is no right or wrong answer in this situation, we don't do drills (at least in US) that at least tell people what to do in bad situations like this. This may be a practical question but in reality, no one has the training or experience to deal with this _instantly_ and worse, in dark environments.

Also, most people is likely to be tired if they're driving at night such as coming home from work.

What this proves is that we need emergency lighting systems in the event of a crash. Like if an airbag has been deployed, lights around need to be visible to avoid this kind of scenario.

It would be awesome if we could provide VR training and use videos like this as examples to train folks.

badRNG• 5 years ago

What this proves is that we need emergency lighting systems in the event of a crash.

This is the first time I've been introduced to this idea, and it now feels immediately obvious that we should've been doing this for a long time.

vanusa3• 5 years ago

Most humans unfortunately do not have the experience of knowing what to do at the right time;

What's worrying isn't that the autopilot didn't "know what to do"; but that it didn't detect the oncoming parked car at all.

Also, most people is likely to be tired if they're driving at night such as coming home from work.

I'd say more like around 10 percent would be significantly impaired. Heck, I'll give you 20.

"Most" (meaning > 50 percent) is just off the page, and doesn't jibe with reality. Sounds like you're a bit too eager to give Tesla a pass, here.

barbazoo2• 5 years ago

Maybe just driving a bit slower would help in those conditions. Easy as that.

cdtwigg• 5 years ago

I also feel like the way Tesla drives is really aggressive, I basically can't use is adaptive cruise control in slow/stop-and-go traffic because it ZOOMs right up the the car in front and then slams on the brakes, rather than just going along at a reasonable pace. Similarly, in this scenario with this visibility I might choose not to drive 10mph over the speed limit.

soheil12• 5 years ago

There are cases where a human driver is better, but there are significantly more cases where Autopilot is better. For example when you drive for 4 hours straight or driving through stop and go traffic. Think about about the lives being saved and be sure any conclusion we reach is based on rigorous analytics and not just gut feeling after having watched a horrific video, which also happens numerous times on daily basis to all types of cars.

datavirtue2• 5 years ago

This sounds like shilling.

josefx• 5 years ago

For example when you drive for 4 hours straight or driving through stop and go traffic.

If I had a uninterrupted four hours of drive as part of my regular commute I wouldn't buy a Tesla, I would buy a gun and a single bullet with my name on it. Two hours one way every day were already enough to drive me almost insane.

IsThisYou• 5 years ago

it is very clear

I would really be interested in your source on this.

yumraj5• 5 years ago

I’ve clarified in my comment that it is clear to me.

michaelt2• 5 years ago

watching the video [...] it is not clear if a human would have done any better.

Anyone who's ever taken a photograph in low light conditions knows that in the dark, cameras fail to capture loads of detail that humans can make out just fine.

I'd wager a human driving in such circumstances would have seen the truck much more easily than we can see it in some dark, blurry dashcam footage.

dragontamer12• 5 years ago

And as bad as it looks like on that camera, its a way better camera than the 1.2MP 1/3" CMOS sensor that Tesla uses for its "self-driving" cameras.

In any case, our human eyes are actually really, really good. Far better than typical CMOS technology at capturing dynamic range and whatnot. Our Iris opens/closes depending on a variety of conditions, and our retina itself is 22 mm, far larger than typical camera CMOS sensors (but smaller than the top-of-the-line 35mm cameras).

Not only is our surface-area larger... our rods / cones seem to be superior in dynamic range than CMOS technology.

----------

That being said: I think a big problem for Tesla's system is that they use tiny and cheap 1/3" CMOS sensors at low resolutions, and then expect AI to magically fix all their problems.

Other companies are willing to not only buy more expensive cameras, but also more-expensive sensors, such as RADAR or LIDAR, to assist the camera.

azth• 5 years ago

Naming plays a big role. "Autopilot" implies something that people might not fully comprehend.

vanusa3• 5 years ago

I think some people are underestimating their reaction time.

Agreed; the human brain has special chemicals which significantly amplify our processing capabilities during moments of acute danger. I was once going up freeway, in the dead of night, and spotted a (darkly painted) car fully flipped over, about 2 seconds ahead of me. Managed to both decelerate (just enough) and bear gently to the right (not swerve), with room to spare.

Granted I was going 60, not 75. But I'm not the one telling people to drive on AP at 75, in the dead of night, no less

theptip2• 5 years ago

At this point it is very clear, to me, that anyone using FSD/Autopilot is risking their lives by trusting their lives on a beta, or perhaps even alpha product

Are you using population-level accident statistics to make this assessment?

I’ve seen analysis that suggests the overall safety numbers for self-driving mode are better than human drivers, though I’ve not dug deeply enough to be confident in them.

I’d caution against extrapolating from individual incidents though. I think we should expect that at the point that self driving is safer than a human driver, it will be worse than humans in some cases - simply because it can pick up a lot of gains by never being tired, distracted, or drunk. If one just looks at the pathological cases and says “I could have avoided that accident, therefore self-driving is a worse driver than me”, I believe one would be making an error of reasoning.

There’s an interesting philosophical/legal question at play here. Does self-driving have to be strictly superior - ie no edge-cases where it is worse than a human - to be acceptable? Or can it be worse at some tasks if it’s killing fewer people overall? Many people will die if we are too strict here. And yet, people need to trust the system as well. I suspect this will be optimized based on expected costs of lawsuits, which is a poor proxy for morality…

taylodl• 5 years ago

People expect self-driving cars to be better than human drivers and not just statistically better. Any accident a self-driving car gets into that most humans would have avoided should be considered a fault of the self-driving system. There shouldn't be wholly new ways to get killed on the highway and us just shrug it off as yeah but fewer people are dying overall. That's not gonna fly.

We must demand better.

kybernetikos• 5 years ago

I’ve seen analysis that suggests the overall safety numbers for self-driving mode are better than human drivers, though I’ve not dug deeply enough to be confident in them.

All similar analysis I've seen compared all-road all-vehicle driving stats against autopilot stats. Of course, the correct comparison would be against luxury cars (with similar safety features) and only on the same kinds of roads that autopilot gets used on (i.e. primarily easier highway driving). As far as I can tell we are extremely far away from the hypothetical you raise where self-driving is better than human.

yumraj5• 5 years ago

Are you using population-level accident statistics to make this assessment?

I’m making a rather simple assessment. I’ve seen Tesla autopilot/FSD fail catastrophically in situations where I would have been fine. This does not inspire confidence that it will do better in situations where I would have failed. As such, I’m not willing to put my life in its hand. And, I really hope no effing Tesla hits me.

barbazoo2• 5 years ago

I was driving on a Freeway at ~65 mph, 87 N for those from the Bay Area, and due to the curving of the Freeway I did not see the traffic stopped in front of me

I always shudder when I hear that people drive too fast to be able to stop in time based on visibility. Same with the crash in the video. Way to high a speed for that visibility.

strikelaserclaw2• 5 years ago

i think driving tech will get there but right now i wouldn't trust it with my life. Humans are basically short sighted, they basically rely on their short term sense of induction and gain a sense of over confidence. Oh it works once? ok i feel a little better, works twice? ohh even better, works for the 10th time? Hell yea, let me whip out my phone and watch videos while the car drives itself. I think for my i will trust this amazing thing in my head.

chrismcb2• 5 years ago

While it might be the case that the human eye can see father than a camera at night, the car should have other sensors that should enable the car to see further. That is the whole point

manicdee• 5 years ago

I think the fact that the human didn’t intervene means that no, human eye can’t see further in these conditions. There’s more to eyesight than maximum possible sensitivity and no the driver’s night vision is not going to be particularly good thanks to oncoming headlights. What you see on the video is the result of transcoding the actual CCCR camera feed to RGGB, reducing resolution from image native to what YouTube wants, and then compression to minimise the file size of a video with lots of black and lots of blown out areas.

Swerving could have prevented the collision, but braking is always the safer option. Swerving would still require the object to be detected, which neither the AP nor the human did in this instance.

Regardless you are still correct that people trusting their lives to AP instead of monitoring it like they are nagged to do by Tesla software are being foolish. I would never have been in the inside lane in this scenario, most likely if using AP I would be happily cruising behind the coach, meaning in any collision with a stationary object the coach would absorb the bulk of the collision energy.

Making this incident about AP is putting the cart well and truly before the horse.

a_square_peg3• 5 years ago

Visibility of the stopped truck aside, one could see even in the non-compressed version of the video how the truck obscures headlights of on-coming vehicles. Human drivers can pick up on that contextual information to see that something might be there to obscure the light even if it's not clearly visible on its own.

animal_spirits5• 5 years ago

I think this is one of the big points about humans vs. computers for complicated problem solving like this: context. The autopilot's job is to drive the car safely when it can. It's job isn't to pick up the tiny minutia of offputting sensory input like obstructed headlights - it isn't programmed to _reason_ about things like that, something that would raise the hairs on a human and cause them to double check what's in front of them.

a_square_peg3• 5 years ago

Yeah, I think this is really fascinating and challenging aspect of AI and self-driving. We have a model of the world in our brain and we're constantly evaluating what ought to be there or not and checking consistency between all the sensory information we receive but don't think AI is quite there yet.

soperj• 5 years ago

I love all the other people saying that they wouldn't have been able to avoid it, but the many people who were actually driving on the road managed that just fine.

hunterb1232• 5 years ago

You mean the truck who braked only after passing it?

The video shows noone else in the lane, who are you saying avoided it?

That truck in the road was a recent wreck, its most likely the Tesla was the first to come upon it.

mikhailt5• 5 years ago

but the many people who were actually driving on the road managed that just fine.

How do you know when the crash occurred? How do you know for sure other people managed to do just fine?

Watch the video; there was no other car in that lane for 10s at the very least.

cryptonector2• 5 years ago

The first accident seems to have been very fresh. This Tesla may have been the first car to happen upon it. Though at least from TFT we can't be certain.

rootsudo• 5 years ago

Pickup truck, crashed on the highway, and the tesla cabin looks pretty good.

Scary, but it happens all the time to humans too.

I'm more impressed how the Tesla looked at that 75mph accident, the cabin really was not compromised at all. Wow.

jacquesm2• 5 years ago

I'd hate to have been in that crash though. 75mph to zero in a couple of milliseconds is not something that is good for your system.

analyte123• 5 years ago

Many people would have hit the pickup. But some would have been able to respond and manually brake before impact, and this is the exact sort of collision that Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) is supposed to mitigate, and there are dozens of cars of different makes that have it installed [1]. It's not like Tesla is the only car on the road with sensors. This is a failure. The fact that a radar-equipped "full self-driving" car doesn't even tap the brakes in the two seconds before hitting a unavoidable solid object in the middle of the road is a travesty.

[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/most-new-cars-hav...

extropy• 5 years ago

All radar based braking systems in the market filter out stationary objects because too many false positives.

To my knowledge there is no AEB system in production that could reliably avoided this.

xuhu• 5 years ago

Sccessful AEB test with stationary object: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ridS396W2BY

DoingIsLearning2• 5 years ago

All radar based braking systems in the market filter out stationary objects because too many false positives.

Absolutely categorically NOT true.

It may not fit your narrative but Front Radar electronics/firmware filter out stationary object ONLY if they are outside the vehicle trajectory envelope.

The majority of false positives are due to overhead passthroughs which may fall within the envelope, if the radar calibration is insufficient.

EuroNCAP tests for AEB include both moving targets AND stationary targets. [0]

Even those low-cost Bosch front Radar assemblies in entry-level vehicles could have mitigated that impact.

[0] https://cdn.euroncap.com/media/17719/euro-ncap-aeb-test-prot...

crackercrews• 5 years ago

Perhaps all radar-based systems filter stationary objects. But Subaru's stereo camera system reliably stops when driven at large cardboard boxes. [1]

1 https://youtu.be/Qk4zIqOiOjc

mrguyorama• 5 years ago

My Volkswagen AEB based on radar has warned for stopped vehicles multiple times.

Rebelgecko• 5 years ago

IME Subaru's radar cruise control will brake for stopped vehicles 100% of the time on freeways. (Although it's a little finicky on windy roads)

gamblor956• 5 years ago

To my knowledge, there is no AEB system in production, other than Tesla's, that filters out stationary objects in the path of the vehicle.

rich_sasha• 5 years ago

My Volvo has a system like this. I had maybe 4-5 benign false alarms since buying the car 4 years ago, and once it did stop me read-ending stationary traffic once.

Never did it not react to my late braking.

kwhitefoot2• 5 years ago

What does full self driving have to do with it? The car is running on Autopilot (called Autosteer in the UI of my Model S).

his is the exact sort of collision that Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) is supposed to mitigate, and there are dozens of cars of different makes that have it installed

Is it supposed to? And do they actually mitigate it?

vkou• 5 years ago

Many people would have hit the pickup.

1. Many people don't view the world through a shitty 480p camera with compression artifacts.

2. Almost nobody would have hit the pickup still going at 75 MPH. Even dropping 10 MPH at that speed reduces the energy of the crash by 25%.

3. As another poster pointed out, nobody else on the road has managed to hit that truck. So, either all the other drivers are incredibly lucky, or it is, in fact, more than possible to both see and avoid that truck.

neogodless• 5 years ago

I don't know how much is from knowing there was a truck in the road, but I noticed in my first viewing how something was blocking oncoming headlights.

If you're going 75mph, that should really get your spidey-sense tingling. At least let off the accelerator/cancel cruise control. Be prepared to brake. Once you're closer and lined up, it's harder to tell there's anything going on because you're no longer approaching a bend with headlights on the other side of the truck, so by then it's too late.

But this is, again, all hindsight talking. In the moment, it's much harder to assess how a "typical human" might have reacted, if at all.

jazzyjackson5• 5 years ago

Had the same feeling, incoming headlights are not visible = obstruction. pity the car has nothing that could be called intelligence.

I’ve spent a lot of time staring at the road thinking how I’d write a program to do it. Main thing I’d do differently is provide visual feedback of confidence. Having the autopilot disengage when it gets confused isn’t good enough, I want to know when the system is losing confidence /before/ it disengages, and I need it to let me know that it’s not 100% sure the next thousand feet of road is actually clear. Tesla seems to drive unperturbed until its classifier recognizes an obstacle.

dkonofalski6• 5 years ago

As someone who is a decent-ish programmer that's recently worked on recognition from videos, I would be totally lost trying to figure out how to handle a situation like this. As a human person (I swear!), I could see in the video that the headlights were being obstructed by something but, as a human programmer, I'm completely at a loss for how I would even determine if the headlights are blocked by something up close vs. far away using just the camera's view. Headlights get blocked by things all the time. How in the hell would you figure out that that's what's going on just by the visual?

In other words, it's a good thing I don't make this stuff. My car would be phantom braking every 10 seconds, especially at night.

soheil12• 5 years ago

You have the advantage of knowing before hand something terrible is about to go down. The driver was probably driving for several hours at night and has his/her spidey-senses a bit fatigued.

ASalazarMX• 5 years ago

This is a dark truck with no lights in a high-speed road at night, I would probably have crashed too. Yes, human eyes have better night vision, but people have different visual acuity, attention span, and reflexes. Also, headlights from other cars can blind you momentarily.

Still, I don't understand why Tesla is so opposed to LIDAR. The more information the autopilot has, the better decisions it can make.

mzkply• 5 years ago

man, until you said that, it wasn't something i had noticed, and I was staring straight at it with full attention. I can't imagine someone driving for hours picking that up. After all it could an obstruction in the median.

clavicat• 5 years ago

FSD = Filming Sudden Death

cblconfederate2• 5 years ago

how many human drivers crashed on the same car?

vb6sp64• 5 years ago

in this case? 0

trompetenaccoun4• 5 years ago

In this case 1. Unless it's a ghost Tesla that travels the highways on its own?

aaomidi• 5 years ago

When your car is so smart it forgets to do emergency breaking.

This literally feels like spy kids 2, this watch can do everything except show the time.

soheil12• 5 years ago

Sure radar would have detected that, but even with naked eyes you cannot see the black crashed car against pitch black background without any lights emitting form it.

NewEntryHN• 5 years ago

Comparison with human ability aside, this would most definitely not have happened with Lidar. Musk's argument has always been that you don't need Lidar because humans don't need Lidar, but since the goal is to do better than humans this might not really work out in the end.

dkonofalski6• 5 years ago

Agreed wholeheartedly. This is a perfect example of why computers should be assisted by things that humans aren't.

soheil12• 5 years ago

Please try not to draw general conclusions from specific examples. First we need to know what percentage of crashes are due to lack of lidar/radar instead of looking at anecdotal cases.

trompetenaccoun4• 5 years ago

Apart from the higher price why would you not want additional sensors like radar and lidar? If all human driven cars were already equipped with radar and emergency stop systems, mass pileups would be a thing of the past.

Obviously there are situations where cameras or our eyes simply won't be able to see enough. Dark unlit objects at night aren't exactly an obscure edge case scenario, the crash from the video is something we already see on a regular basis with human driven cars, sadly. And even if not, I'd rather pay $1000 or so extra to protect me from that freak scenario that's likely never going to happen. Until it does.

I also have airbags in my car although I never needed them.

Someone1234• 5 years ago

Even if it was only used for AEB instead of AutoPilot (i.e. acting as an actual backup to autopilot) that would be a vast improvement.

A Tesla vehicle, when under human control, has AEB but when under AutoPilot it essentially does not since it is the same logic used for both processes and therefore it doesn't act as an additional safety feature.

nicoburns• 5 years ago

Yep, their bet on not using Lidar seems bizarre to me. Presumably it’s been done for cost purposes, but lidar will likely be cheap by the time AI driving is viable.

ashtonbaker• 5 years ago

I think the issue at this point is that they've promised - i.e. taken money for - "full self driving" features that are supposed to be delivered using the car's hardware as-is. So they have to either work with the cameras they have, or retrofit a bunch of cars with LIDAR, or just fail I guess.

soheil12• 5 years ago

Machines are already faster/better in reaction times, not getting fatigued, etc. than humans why do you need more reasons to be better than humans?

camjohnson262• 5 years ago

Because of tradeoffs. A brick is more resilient than a human, that doesn’t make it better.

davesque4• 5 years ago

However, the car was equipped with radar. Twitter author also said that the truck was seen by radar. I don't see how something like this could have been missed by a radar-equipped car. I chalk it up to the black-box nature of these models and the general lack of awareness about what bizarre edge cases could be encoded in the model's parameters.

fblp2• 5 years ago

How is black truck stuck in your lane an edge case? Seems more like negligence.

ModernMech6• 5 years ago

It also shouldn't have happened with a RADAR. From the second tweet:

  the truck was seen by both the radar and also could be clearly observed by the narrow camera from quite a distance away (pictures are spaced 1 second apart)

This is more about beta quality robotics software being shipped to actual customers and used in production. If you're someone who won't even use a programming language or library in production before it reaches v1.0, this is about a million times worse than that.

By the way, as a roboticist this whole situation is completely baffling to me. We go through such great lengths in our research to make our robots safe. Safety is a huge concern to our community. How is it that this company can just ship beta quality software to customers for use in production amongst the rest of us? In industry, we paint our robots orange and put them behind impenetrable cages due to safety concerns. Entire facilities are designed around the robots to make their operation safe. Operators are trained to use them. People working around them are trained to work along side them and observe proper safety protocols. Proper insurance is carried in case of accidents. And when an accident does occur, the situation is taken apart, analyzed, and changes are made so they won't happen again.

Not in the marketplace though, it seems. Apparently it's okay to just code whatever you want; put the code on whatever machine you want, even if it's "beta" quality; ship it to whomever you want who can pay for it; provide little to no training; lie about the capabilities ("Full self driving" minus the full, and self, and driving. "Autopilot" that isn't.); and when people inevitably and predictably end up dead, apparently it's okay to just keep on pushing this software out without a shred of self reflection or humility. Because you're saving the world I guess? I just don't understand this culture.

a-dub• 5 years ago

Musk's argument has always been that you don't need Lidar because humans don't need Lidar, but since the goal is to do better than humans this might not really work out in the end.

aren't auto manufacturers that don't have features like autopilot currently adding things like lidar and automatic breaking to improve safety?

why wouldn't you add the thing that will make your system as safe as possible?

what's the goal here? some aspirational tech challenge that competes on arbitrary merits in some humans vs. machines challenge problem or building the best and safest way to move vehicles around?

ModernMech6• 5 years ago

The issue is that the guy who runs the company and controls everything doesn't know what he doesn't know. He made the uninformed decision years ago to go all-in on camera technology because he thought that he would be able to throw a bunch of money and engineers at the problem, and solve Full Self Driving in essentially 5 years. That was more than 5 years ago and the technology seems to have plateaued at a place where it runs frequently into parked or stationary objects.

They have since taken untold sums of cash from people (millions? tens of millions?) who they promised would get access to "Full Self Driving" with the hardware on board. Now they're in the situation where they cannot admit that the problem requires more hardware. The hardware is a fixed property here, a design requirement; they have to achieve actual full self driving with the hardware in place, or they're going to face refunds and lawsuits.

So now it's a delay game. I think it's clear now that short of AGI, Tesla will never get to "full" self driving with the sensor suit they have. Nonetheless they can't switch to a new sensor suit because that will admit defeat. Instead, they have to show continual improvement of the current sensor suite, while promising that "Full" self driving is just around the corner so they can continue the charade.

avereveard4• 5 years ago

so is tesla running cameras with 21+ stops range? idk why isn't this argument dismantled every time musk mentions it just by pointing at how actually good eyes are.

animal_spirits5• 5 years ago

This is incredibly terrifying. I hope the person driving and behind the truck holding the flash light is okay.

ChildOfChaos• 5 years ago

How is this worrying?

You basically cannot see it until it's too late. No issue here, any other car on the road would of crashed into the truck as well.

mdoms• 5 years ago

Watch the uncompressed footage. The truck was clearly visible for multiple seconds before the impact.

https://streamable.com/7ixg7l

stunt2• 5 years ago

Next time you drive at night time, compare what was visible to your eyes to what your dashcam captured. Then upload the video on Twitter, and compare it again.

Same video, without Twitter compression https://streamable.com/7ixg7l

Watch it full screen on your desktop monitor (still wouldn't be as good as human field of vision) and remember this was recorded by an average quality dashcam, not a high-end camera.

onphonenow• 5 years ago

The tesla safety story should be whole system.

My question - how did the driver do in this crash?

This isn't super clear cut, the vehicle was unlit in fast lane on the freeway. That could be a tough for a number of drivers.

That said, one lidar sensor maybe? Just to let at least brakes come on?

BurningFrog• 5 years ago

An alternate take is that black cars should not be allowed to drive at night.

999900000999• 5 years ago

This is why you get flairs, hazards or something.

I know most people would of probably hit that truck. Don't blame Tesla here. The uncompressed video is slightly better, but unless you get lucky your still hitting that truck.

Philip-J-Fry• 5 years ago

It's a camera based autonomous driving system. One with some really low quality cameras that can barely see in the dark. I would not trust this thing with my life.

They are gambling on the ability for AI to "just sort it out". Even if the system can drive in the dark, you can bet it's mostly just looking at white lines 10 ft ahead. It's not looking for obstacles or anything like that, it can't even see them.

So dangerous. A complete black box where every second of driving you never know whether there's an obscure edge case where the car decides today is your final day and it drives off the side of a cliff because the image processor saw something it didn't understand.

davesque4• 5 years ago

Honestly, my take away from this as a pedestrian and a driver is that I should keep a very close eye on Teslas driving around me. How could I not do that after seeing this footage? I don't think it's a stretch to say that we have Elon Musk's ego to thank for this. A radar-equipped car that purports to be self-driving should not have hit a solid object in the middle of the road without so much as tapping the break. There are many other car manufacturers that ship this kind of emergency breaking functionality for which this accident wouldn't have occurred because they simply have a tighter QA process for car features.

asow92• 5 years ago

To be fair, I think I'd hit it too; didn't even see it in the video until it was too late.

6gvONxR4sf7o3• 5 years ago

Remember that how it looks on a dash cam isn’t going to be nearly what it looks like for a person. Our eyes will effectively have much higher dynamic range (can see brighter details and darker details at the same time).

Think about the times you've taken pictures on your phone at night and the clearly visible background details render as nearly invisible on camera.

I’d bet that truck was much more visible in person than it is in the video.

encoderer2• 5 years ago

You don’t need LIDAR to notice the speed at which this thread is dropping in the HN ranking.

MerelyMortal• 5 years ago

Geez, out of curiosity I went back to check, and it's now #120 (page 5).

drcongo• 5 years ago

I'm disappointed that this post doesn't have the usual Musk apologists defending everything he or his cars do. Is the tide turning, even on HN?

modeless• 5 years ago

Tesla's cameras are just not good enough. A camera with a clean lens and better dynamic range would have made the truck much more visible. But also the software approach needs to change. The current approach cannot use cues like headlights or lane lines being occluded or the reflection of lights in the side of the black truck to infer the presence of an object. To enable approaches that can do this, the compute hardware needs to be much faster.

I believe cameras and software can drive cars safely. But these cameras and this software can't.

thinkski• 5 years ago

Unfortunate that the truck was at an angle — much of radar likely bounced off to the right rather than returning back. The color of the truck provided little contrast, probably wasn’t resolved by the sensor, which has a dynamic range of 115dB, low compared to ~160dB of human eye, and 1MP (before debayering), again low compared to human eye at the center of vision.

areyousure• 5 years ago

In case anyone is curious, the following disturbing video provides some data on how human drivers would do in the same situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9yqXzZ16ns

In this video, the reporter attempts to illuminate the car so that it is more visible.

EForEndeavour• 5 years ago

Horrifying. My nervousness about highway driving in the dark just got worse.

hungryhobo• 5 years ago

One thing we need to remember is we are seeing the scene from a recorded video.

Our eyes have much better dynamic range so a person would have much better grasp on what the road is like behind the wheels than what they can see from the recorded video.

jmartrican• 5 years ago

Maybe lidar is a good idea.

codeddesign• 5 years ago

Two black cars and no overheard street lights..craziness

mikewarot• 5 years ago

Yikes - I thought it was going to hit the semi-truck on first viewing. Title should be changed to Crashed Truck, not stopped/parked truck.

So many questions

  1> Why isn't the back corner of the pickup truck reflecting any light? Were the reflectors somehow tinted?
  2> Was there still power in the truck? The hazard blinkers weren't on.
  3> How sure are we there is zero latency between the UI and the frames as they roll in from the camera?
  4> Does Tesla have a red team working to generate/test these type of corner cases? If not, why not?
  5> Does Tesla FSD actively watch for mammal eyes at night in the country, like Deer, Moose, Bear, etc?  If not, why not?

I likely would have been following the semi in his lane, as is my habit at night. I assume they have a better view, younger eyes, and they'll hit deer, etc. so I don't have too.

If I was driving in that lane, I would probably have hit it, if I hadn't noticed the occlusion.

morpheos137• 5 years ago

It is clear to me that the tractor trailer truck to the right spotted the vehicle and engaged in evasive action. Seeing the truck engage in evasive action would have stimulated me to be cautious as a human driver.

Second, in the video the range of the low beams on the tesla seems absurdly short.

tablespoon• 5 years ago

Explain to me why camera-only self-driving cars is a good idea again? That wreck was basically invisible except as an intermittent silhouette against traffic in the other direction. "Full self-driving" cars should be far safer than human-driven cars, and data from sensors with no human equivalent seems like a good way to get that in situations like this.

Also, how hard is Tesla training their object-detection models for things that are only an intermittent silhouette against opposing traffic? I'm guessing not at all.

dver• 5 years ago

Had this happen, freeway speed, car stopped no lights.

I managed to get on the brakes but slammed into the vehicle still.

(Was in my 20's, so still youthful reaction times, drove lot, did SCCA events so at least an avg driver)

stunt2• 5 years ago

Ironically software programmers have least trust in autopilot for obvious reasons.

Video of Tesla on Autopilot Crashing into Stopped Truck at 75mph

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