Germany: 1 Dead, 9 injured after BMW self driving test car veers into traffic

https://apnews.com/article/technology-germany-8a2333532b91635d5b214485043ed94a

by belltaco • 4 years ago

53 48 4 years ago

apnews.com

hypertele-Xii• 4 years ago

Title is missing the 1 from "1 Dead"

hedora• 4 years ago

It was not a self driving car:

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/bmw-ix-with-an-autonomous...

It was a test EV with level two autonomy (driver is always in control) features that are currently in production vehicles. It sounds like the test driver's family was in the car as well.

I hope everyone is as well as can be. Having media attention like this focused on an apparent driving error must be terrible.

The autonomous driving label was probably on the car to comply with a German privacy law.

oblib4• 4 years ago

"It was not a self driving car"

That doesn't work for me. The car was clearly "self driving" when it crossed the lane line. Even at very slow speeds that can be deadly because we're talking about something that can happen in less than a second or two.

You cannot tell someone "this car can drive itself but you must be ready to take control at all times because if it fails it's your fault" while knowing that a failure can happen in less than a second.

From what I've found you're more than twice as likely to get into a wreck when using this tech.

detaro• 4 years ago

The car was clearly "self driving" when it crossed the lane line

Because it's impossible the driver was driving it manually and made a mistake?

It's entirely possible that this was indeed a testing incident (although late afternoon and family with the driver doesn't sound like it, could still be), but we do not know that yet.

joshstrange5• 4 years ago

The car was clearly "self driving" when it crossed the lane line.

Literally not a scrap of proof that is the case here and yet you are willing to state it as fact.

From what I've found you're more than twice as likely to get into a wreck when using this tech.

Source? This smells like FUD.

Demonsult• 4 years ago

Agreed because humans do a poor job of passively monitoring automated things for an extended time. I don't think we can talk our way out of that.

jnwatson• 4 years ago

Level 2 automation doesn't typically switch lanes.

I'd wager 10-to-1 odds this was an active mistake by the driver. It is possible, however, that the car was in lane-following mode and got horribly confused (in which case, it is still a mistake by the driver, just different).

topspin• 4 years ago

You cannot tell someone "this car can drive itself but you must be ready to take control at all times because if it fails it's your fault" while knowing that a failure can happen in less than a second.

You can; you only need to be powerful enough to dilute responsibly for failures enough to get away with it. It is self evident that the margin for error is too small to rely on human intervention. It is absurd to expect humans to maintain the equivalent of manual driving situational awareness at all times. But when you're hell bent on selling automated driving you lose the capability of grasping these things.

cmsj8• 4 years ago

Level 2 is the equivalent of Tesla's Autopilot. The driver is not always in control, but they must always be monitoring and be ready to immediately assume control.

(In many ways, L2 is just about the dumbest imaginable level of automation)

panick21_• 4 years ago

(In many ways, L2 is just about the dumbest imaginable level of automation)

Except that it literally helps 100000s of people make their drives more enjoyable and is perfectly fine in a in many situations.

oblib4• 4 years ago

This is just wrong. Innocents being injured or killed while testing this tech is more akin to a negligent murder via technology than an "accident".

Many years ago the 3M company created a magnetic tape for the lane lines on roads and a device to detect those for automobiles, along with a gizmo that would vibrate the driver's seat on the side the vehicle was getting too close to crossing the lane lines.

That could help prevent these kinds of incidents, but cameras trying to detect painted lane lines have many obvious fail points and one of them is keeping the car in it's lane. This incident proves that once again.

You cannot tell a human "this car can drive itself but you need to be ready to take control at all times" because that's a clear oxymoron. It either works, or it doesn't, and if it doesn't it's potentially deadly, and it only takes a second to become deadly, and humans cannot react to that failure 100% of the time. That's been proven too many times already.

cmsj8• 4 years ago

Innocents being injured or killed while testing this tech is more akin to a negligent murder via technology than an "accident".

I'd like to see us treat autonomous road safety the way we treat aircraft safety, where even minor incidents are thoroughly investigated and often lead to industry-improving changes. Their approach clearly works because despite the fact that we hurl hundreds of thousands of people through the air every day in millimetre thick metal tubes, it's the safest way to travel.

Leaving autonomous driving to the whims of the empathy-deficient utilitarianist VCs of the world, and barely regulating their work at all, is really not ok.

shultays3• 4 years ago

    I'd like to see us treat autonomous road safety the way we treat aircraft safety

To do that you need to increase your standards for being a car driver up to being a pilot. Since most accidents would involve human error.

joshstrange5• 4 years ago

Did you read the article?

“The vehicle has a level 2 driving assistance system that is already incorporated in production vehicles today and which can support the driver on demand,” the company said. “With level 2 vehicles the driver always retains responsibility.”
BMW added that the vehicle was required to be marked as a test car for data protection purposes, because it was recording footage.

This was not self-driving to start with and could end up being 100% operator error. Though even if it was self-driving (again, it wasn't) I'm nowhere near ready to call it "negligent murder via technology". It's terrible when self-driving tech causes accidents like this but opponents of self-driving seems all too comfortable ignoring the other crashes that happen daily and on top of that there is no way to know how many accidents have been prevented by self-driving/driver assist systems. At the end of the day I care a lot more about the net-difference in car deaths, not the causes of only ones that involved "technology" (obviously accidents per-capita, by car automation type, should be taken into account here). Should we also get rid of drive-by-wire? Since that's tech that can fail? Where does this end?

cmsj8• 4 years ago

seems all too comfortable ignoring the other crashes that happen daily

In your view, what is the MVP for self-driving car safety, in terms of the number of crashes/deaths per day?

c7DJTLrn• 4 years ago

It's basically a space race between companies to build a self driving car, except nobody knows what they're doing and they're willing to put as many lives on the line as necessary. We have Elon Musk and his bullshit to thank for this.

njarboe• 4 years ago

Billions of people travel in cars. Those lives are on the line every day. One million people die in car crashes each year. The amount of injuries to people and property is huge. Preventing most of this carnage is a major goal of these self driving car initiatives. How many deaths from someone not following explicit instructions of always being ready to take over from the beta version of some self driving car system would you accept to save 1/2 a million lives per year? One, ten, one hundred, one thousand, more?

macspoofing• 4 years ago

That could help prevent these kinds of incidents, but cameras trying to detect painted lane lines have many obvious fail points and one of them is keeping the car in it's lane. This incident proves that once again.

Hold on a second. Lane-assist is a perfectly fine feature that is obviously meant to be used in conjunction with an alert driver with their hands on the wheel. That is typically dubbed 'Level 1' of autonomous driving, similar to adaptive cruise control. This accident wasn't related to that, but instead to a 'Level 2' autonomous driving where there is some level of driving automation.

fredgrott• 4 years ago

Hmm, where have we heard this argument before and even the facts that prove it wrong?

Ahem, the Airline industry already found out why this not true. Automation always requires more training not less.

gdy• 4 years ago

"This is just wrong. Innocents being injured or killed while testing this tech is more akin to a negligent murder"

Meatbags do it all the time.

Two people die in a car accident every minute [0] and nobody cares. (Actually, two and a half, but that's just too gory.)

[0] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi...

dehrmann• 4 years ago

To Tesla's credit, it mostly kills its own passengers.

bengoodger• 4 years ago

Have a BMW X5 with this auto-steer nonsense and have had several incidents where it's abruptly turned the wheel, where if I weren't grabbing it it would have caused an accident. Ended up disabling the assistant system.

_trampeltier• 4 years ago

Two years ago an rental Audi A2 almost crashed me several times into the tunnel wall on the right side. It was a rainy night and sometimes when I drove into the tunnel, the car steared really hard right.

prodent• 4 years ago

The Audi A2 has been out of production since 2005. Maybe a Q2?

GekkePrutser• 4 years ago

Ouch... That sounds very heavy.

I wonder why they were testing this if it's exactly the same as the production system? Because if I read it correctly that's what they're saying now. That makes no sense. There must be something beta in there.

At least it sounds the thing was chock full of cameras and telemetry recorders so it shouldn't be hard to find out exactly what happened, and prevent it in the future.

zht• 4 years ago

I have autosteering on for my 3 series and it really makes the drive easier.

that being said you have to pay attention and you have to be ready to intervene. it doesn't try to kill me often but it does happen occasionally

such a shame for those to die this way

happytoexplain• 4 years ago

I would hesitate to refer to being in a condition where you are watching a machine, ready to grab it the moment it tries to kill you, as "easy", but I understand how you're using the word.

chgo1• 4 years ago

The article was updated to: "Germany: 1 dead, 9 injured after test car veers into traffic"

hindsightbias• 4 years ago

Why is a child riding in a “test” vehicle?

Germany: 1 Dead, 9 injured after BMW self driving test car veers into traffic

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