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Thread: Self-Driving Tesla Was Involved in Fatal Crash, U.S. Says

  1. #1

    Self-Driving Tesla Was Involved in Fatal Crash, U.S. Says

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/01/bu...tion.html?_r=0

    There was not enough lighting contrast between a white truck and the sky for the car to recognize the obstacle. They said the driver was watching a movie instead of the road so he missed it too.

    DETROIT — The race by automakers and technology firms to develop self-driving cars has been fueled by the belief that computers can operate a vehicle more safely than human drivers.

    But that view is now in question after the revelation on Thursday that the driver of a Tesla Model S electric sedan was killed in an accident when the car was in self-driving mode.

    Federal regulators, who are in the early stages of setting guidelines for autonomous vehicles, have opened a formal investigation into the incident, which occurred on May 7 in Williston, Fla.

    In a statement, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said preliminary reports indicated that the crash occurred when a tractor-trailer made a left turn in front of the Tesla, and the car failed to apply the brakes.

    It is the first known fatal accident involving a vehicle being driven by itself by means of sophisticated computer software, sensors, cameras and radar.

    The safety agency did not identify the Tesla driver who was killed. But the Florida Highway Patrol identified him as Joshua Brown, 40, of Canton, Ohio.

    He was a Navy veteran who owned a technology consulting firm. In a news release, Tesla on Thursday described him as a man “who spent his life focused on innovation and the promise of technology and who believed strongly in Tesla’s mission.”

    Mr. Brown posted videos of himself riding in autopilot mode. “The car’s doing it all itself,’’ he said in one, smiling as he took his hands from the steering wheel.

    In another, he praised the system for saving his car from an accident.

    The death is a blow to Tesla at a time when the company is pushing to expand its product lineup from expensive electric vehicles to more mainstream models. The company on Thursday declined to say whether the technology or the driver or either were at fault in the accident.

    In its news release it said, “Neither autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor-trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied.”


    The crash also casts doubt on whether autonomous vehicles in general can consistently make split-second, life-or-death driving decisions on the highway.
    More at link.

    But in its statement on Thursday, the company cautioned that it was still only a test feature and noted that its use ‘‘requires explicit acknowledgment that the system is new technology.’’
    Last edited by Zippyjuan; 07-01-2016 at 07:24 PM.



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  3. #2
    Okay.


    Does a self driving car being involved in a fatal crash prove that they are more dangerous than human driven cars?

  4. #3
    We just need to limit speed to 40 mph (for both normal and self-driving) until the links are worked out and its 100% safe.
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  5. #4
    Fatality is unfortunate, but glad to see Musk get some more comeuppance, especially since gas prices are rising a little bit again.

  6. #5
    Ban white trucks making left turns when it is daylight
    "Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it."
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  7. #6
    And, this is why airliners still have pilots.
    "I am a bird"

  8. #7
    Windows has never crashed on me. Can't wait for a car "driven by Microsoft".
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  9. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by luctor-et-emergo View Post
    And, this is why airliners still have pilots.
    For now
    It's all about taking action and not being lazy. So you do the work, whether it's fitness or whatever. It's about getting up, motivating yourself and just doing it.
    - Kim Kardashian

    Donald Trump / Crenshaw 2024!!!!

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  11. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by Brian4Liberty View Post
    Windows has never crashed on me. Can't wait for a car "driven by Microsoft".
    Well first, you click "Start", lower left hand corner .........

  12. #10
    For starters the cars only need to be somewhat better than the average driver. Ain't too tough.

  13. #11
    Along For the Ride

    http://ericpetersautos.com/2016/07/0...ver-passenger/

    by eric • July 2, 2016

    A guy was killed by his auto-piloted Tesla last week (new story here) and Uncle is looking into it. Of course he won’t do anything about it. Because “if it saves even one life” is very selectively applied. It applies only when whatever the danger happens to be is something Uncle wants to use as an excuse to impose yet another mandate.

    Never to rescind one.

    See, for instance, air bags.

    Or – lately – cars that drive themselves.

    Uncle very much wants such cars and so is prepared to do nothing about their potential – and now actual – lethality.

    Because, you see, the point is not that cars that drive themselves are “safe” (they’re not, bear with me) though that is much talked up (like air bags, which also aren’t “safe”) and used as the pretext for force-feeding them to us. Note that. We are never given the choice. Never offered whatever the thing in question is and allowed to weigh the pros and cons and then choose for ourselves. Free people are not merely allowed such latitude, they are entitled to it. It is not bequeathed, conditionally, by political parents in a remote bureaucracy but respected as an inviolable moral principle.

    In a free society, that is.

    But we are not free except to do as we are told.

    Back to this Tesla thing.

    The “driver” (who wasn’t) in the recent lethal incident was reportedly doing something else besides paying attention to what was in front of him. In this case, a big rig making a left turn in his path of travel. The Tesla’s autopilot did not grok the big rig and drove right into it.

    Right under it, actually.

    According to Tesla, “autopilot is getting better all the time but it is not perfect and still requires the driver to remain alert.” (Italics added.)

    Really?

    Then why bother with autopilot?

    Isn’t the touted benefit of cars that drive themselves this idea that “drivers” no longer have to remain alert?

    That they can take a siesta or play Candy Crush or watch a DVD or do some work on their laptops? If they have to remain alert, they cannot do those things, too.

    Remaining alert means keeping one’s eyes on the road at all times – not occasionally. It means being prepared to react to changing conditions.

    Like a tractor trailer turning left in front of you.

    The imbecility of all this makes my teeth ache.

    Vehicular autopilot is often likened to autopilot in commercial airplanes but the parallel doesn’t parse. Airplanes don’t just take off and fly wherever, however. Their flight plans are filed in advance and strictly adhered to, their course (speed and altitude) strictly monitored the entire time. Spur-of-the-moment deviation is not allowed. The airspace is controlled at all times to keep one airplane away from another airplane. Pilots have very little latitude to control their aircraft’s flight path.

    And that’s what we’re really getting at here.

    Control.

    Autopilot in cars makes sense if all cars are similarly under control. If you have to file a “flight plan” before you go anywhere – and your course is monitored and subject to control the entire time. Then it might be possible to avert incidents such as the one described above. The auto-driving Tesla would have known about the big rig’s intention to turn long before the turn ever occurred – and accommodations could have been made by each vehicles’s computer brain.

    Lovely, if you don’t mind mind the idea of no longer being in control of your vehicle.

    Ever.

    For automated cars to be “safe,” it is necessary – mandatory – that the caprice of human drivers be taken entirely out of the picture. Else, the vagaries of human imperfection will lead to accidents – and that is not “safe” and so Uncle will step in.

    And human imperfection behind the wheel continues to worsen as less and less is expected of these human drivers as drivers. As even former basic competences like the ability to parallel park a car are no longer required because technology can handle that now. Every incremental dumbing-down – starting with ABS back in the 1980s through to the present day and cars that automatically brake, can come to a complete stop without the “driver” even touching the brake pedal – has been at least tacitly an effort to get the driver out of the driver’s seat.

    To render him a passenger.

    It is possible that Tesla and Google and the rest of the juggernaut don’t consciously grok the fact that what they are pushing requires the driver to become a passenger. You can’t, on the one hand, fit cars with systems that invite the driver to stop driving – and at the same time expect him to “remain alert.”

    You’re either a driver.

    Or you’re not.

    What’s it going to be?

  14. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by TheTexan View Post
    For now
    If airliners no longer have pilots in them. I won't be in them anymore. Obviously.
    "I am a bird"

  15. #13
    Solution. 1 thermal camera in the front of the vehicle. It wouldn't even have to be high resolution, that would provide enough info to differentiate when color data was inadequate in nearly all circumstances. At least in this case the vehicle would have "alarmed" and likely attempted to stop.

  16. #14
    Quote Originally Posted by RonPaulIsGreat View Post
    Solution. 1 thermal camera in the front of the vehicle. It wouldn't even have to be high resolution, that would provide enough info to differentiate when color data was inadequate in nearly all circumstances. At least in this case the vehicle would have "alarmed" and likely attempted to stop.
    More than one of anything significant is prohibited from even attempting to occupy the exact same space, at one time.

  17. #15
    Quote Originally Posted by TheTexan View Post
    For now
    Build the Elon Musk hyper tubes and be done with airliners all together
    http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/1324...rain-explained

  18. #16



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  20. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by TheTexan View Post
    We just need to limit speed to 40 mph (for both normal and self-driving) until the links are worked out and its 100% safe.
    Would you perhaps agree to 99.999% safe? What's the current average human driving safe percentage?

  21. #18
    Quote Originally Posted by Ronin Truth View Post
    Would you perhaps agree to 99.999% safe? What's the current average human driving safe percentage?
    http://www.forbes.com/sites/moneybui.../#6b23cf0050f9

    How Many Times Will You Crash Your Car?

    If you haven’t been in a car accident, consider yourself lucky. Or overdue.

    By car insurance industry estimates, you will file a claim for a collision about once every 17.9 years. That’s if you’re an average driver, which, whether you’re willing to admit it or not, you likely are.

    So if you got your license at age 16, the odds are quite good that you’ll experience some kind of crash by the time you’re 34, at the latest. Over the course of a typical long, driving lifetime, you should have a total of three to four accidents.

    Chances are these crashes won’t be deadly. There are about 10 million accidents of all kinds each year, from parking lot scrapes to multi-car pileups, according to the National Safety Council; in 2009, just three of every 1,000 of those accidents involved fatalities.

    But these crashes most likely will be costly. More than 2 million people are injured in crashes every year. In 2010, the average claim for injuries to cover both the insured driver and others involved in the crash had risen to $23,450, thanks in large part to soaring medical costs, according to the Insurance Research Council, a nonprofit research group.
    More at link.

  22. #19
    I am not an average driver. Heck everyone has by default a 50% chance to be better than average!
    “…let us teach them that all who draw breath are of equal worth, and that those who seek to press heel upon the throat of liberty, will fall to the cry of FREEDOM!!!” – Spartacus, War of the Damned

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  23. #20
    Quote Originally Posted by kpitcher View Post
    I am not an average driver. Heck everyone has by default a 50% chance to be better than average!
    "Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." - Garrison Keillor quotes .

  24. #21
    I think today was Keillor's last show- he is retiring. I am sure there will be lots of reruns though.

  25. #22
    Another crash....

    A Southfield art gallery owner told police his 2016 Tesla Model X was in Autopilot mode when it crashed and rolled over on the Pennsylvania Turnpike last week. The crash came just one day after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a report on a fatal crash in May involving a Tesla that was in self-driving mode.

    Albert Scaglione and his artist son-in-law, Tim Yanke, both survived Friday's crash near the Bedford exit, about 107 miles east of Pittsburgh.

    The Free Press was not able to reach Scaglione, owner of Park West Gallery, or Yanke, but Dale Vukovich of the Pennsylvania State Police, who responded to the crash, said Scaglione told him that he had activated the Autopilot feature.

    In his crash report, Vukovich stated that Scaglione's car was traveling east near mile marker 160, about 5 p.m. when it hit a guard rail "off the right side of the roadway. It then crossed over the eastbound lanes and hit the concrete median."

    After that, the Tesla Model X rolled onto its roof and came to rest in the middle eastbound lane. A 2013 Infiniti G37 driven in the westbound lane by Thomas Hess of West Chester, Pa., was struck by debris from the Scaglione car, but neither he nor his passenger was hurt.

    Vukovich said he likely will cite Scaglione after he completes his investigation, but he declined to specify the charge. Anyone who has driven on the Pennsylvania Turnpike knows that its narrow shoulders and concrete medians leave little margin for driver error. There's not enough evidence to indicate that Tesla's Autopilot malfunctioned.
    http://www.freep.com/story/money/car...rash/86712884/

  26. #23
    Quote Originally Posted by RonPaulIsGreat View Post
    Solution. 1 thermal camera in the front of the vehicle. It wouldn't even have to be high resolution, that would provide enough info to differentiate when color data was inadequate in nearly all circumstances. At least in this case the vehicle would have "alarmed" and likely attempted to stop.
    Sounds like a good suggestion to me.

  27. #24
    Might it have been worse with an average human driver, driving?



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  29. #25
    Quote Originally Posted by Brian4Liberty View Post
    Windows has never crashed on me. Can't wait for a car "driven by Microsoft".
    Blue Screen White Tractor-Trailer of Death ...
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