Tesla Model S On Autopilot Rams Into Parked Fire Truck On Freeway

[Swordsmyth]

A Culver City firefighting truck was hit by a Tesla on Monday morning, reports stated. The crash occurred while the crew was responding to an accident on the 405 freeway in Washington Boulevard, CBS Local reported.
According to the authorities, the Tesla Model S was on autopilot mode when it crashed into the back of a parked fire truck which was attending the scene of the accident. No injuries were reported in the crash.
The Culver City firefighting department confirmed the crash on Twitter. In a tweet, the fire department said that the Tesla, which was on autopilot mode, was traveling at a speed of 65 mph when it rammed into the fire engine.

More at: http://www.ibtimes.com/tesla-model-s...reeway-2644087

[oyarde]

Teslas are death traps .

[dannno]

No injuries reported?? Wtf?

[Anti Federalist]

Teslas are death traps .

If this was any other car maker, the Safety Nazis would marching in the streets, looking for blood.

But because Teslas are "hip" and "green" and "with it", their explosions, spontaneous combustions and wrecks get glossed over.

[Anti Federalist]

You folks thinking that you'll be able to sleep, eat, drink, get fellated or what have you while the driver-less car speeds you to your destination, are nuts.



Who's driving? Autonomous cars may be entering the most dangerous phase

https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...false-security

Autopilot controls are not yet fully capable of functioning without human intervention – but they’re good enough to lull us into a false sense of security

Olivia Solon
@oliviasolon
Email

Wed 24 Jan 2018 03.01 EST
Last modified on Wed 24 Jan 2018 09.59 EST

When California police officers approached a Tesla stopped in the centre of a five-lane highway outside San Francisco last week, they found a man asleep at the wheel. The driver, who was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving, told them his car was in “autopilot”, Tesla’s semi-autonomous driver assist system.

In a separate incident this week, firefighters in Culver City reported that a Tesla rear-ended their parked fire truck as it attended an accident on the freeway. Again, the driver said the vehicle was in autopilot.

CHP San Francisco (@CHPSanFrancisco)

When u pass out behind the wheel on the Bay Bridge with more than 2x legal alcohol BAC limit and are found by a CHP Motor. Driver explained Tesla had been set on autopilot. He was arrested and charged with suspicion of DUI. Car towed (no it didn’t drive itself to the tow yard). pic.twitter.com/4NSRlOBRBL
January 19, 2018

The oft-repeated promise of driverless technology is that it will make the roads safer by reducing human error, the primary cause of accidents. However, automakers have a long way to go before they can eliminate the driver altogether.

What’s left is a messy interim period when cars are being augmented incrementally with automated technologies such as obstacle detection and lane centering. In theory, these can reduce the risk of crashes, but they are not failsafe. As a Tesla spokeswoman put it: “Autopilot is intended for use only with a fully attentive driver.”

Autonomy gives people a sense something is in control, and we have a tendency to overestimate technology’s capabilities
Nidhi Kalra, information scientist

However, research has shown that drivers get lulled into a false sense of security to the point where their minds and gazes start to wander away from the road. People become distracted or preoccupied with their smartphones. So when the car encounters a situation where the human needs to intervene, the driver can be slow to react.

At a time when there is already a surge in collisions caused by drivers distracted by their smartphones, we could be entering a particularly dangerous period of growing pains with autonomous driving systems.

“People are already inclined to be distracted. We’re on our phones, eating burgers, driving with our knees,” said Nidhi Kalra, senior information scientist at the Rand Corporation. “Additional autonomy gives people a sense that something else is in control, and we have a tendency to overestimate the technology’s capabilities.”

Steven Shladover, of the University of California, Berkeley’s Path programme, was more sharply critical of car manufacturers: “These companies are overselling the capabilities of the systems they have and the public is being misled.”

Waymo, Google’s self-driving car spin-off, discovered the handoff problem when it was testing a “level 3” automated driving system – one that can drive itself under certain conditions, but in which the human still needs to takeover if the situation becomes tricky. The next level, four, is what most people consider “fully autonomous”.

Most of the advanced driver assist features introduced by Tesla, Mercedes, BMW and Cadillac are categorised as level 2 automation.

During testing, Waymo recorded what its CEO, John Krafcik, described as “sort of scary” video footage of drivers texting, applying makeup and even sleeping behind the wheel while their cars hurtled down the freeway. This led Waymo to decide to leapfrog level 3 automation altogether, and focus on full autonomy instead.
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“We found that human drivers over-trusted the technology and were not monitoring the roadway carefully enough to be able to safely take control when needed,” said the company in its 2017 safety report.

Ian Reagan from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) shares Waymo’s caution, although he acknowledges that the safety potential for automated systems is “huge”.

“There are lots of potential unintended consequences, particularly with level 2 and 3 systems,” he said, explaining how the IIHS had bought and tested several cars with level 2 automation including vehicles from Tesla, Mercedes and BMW. “Even the best ones do things you don’t expect,” he said.
Elon Musk lines up $55bn payday – the world's biggest bonus
Read more

During tests the IIHS recorded a Mercedes having problems when the lane on the highway forked in two. “The radar system locked onto the right-hand exit lane when the driver was trying to go straight,” he said.

Tesla’s autopilot suffered from a different, repeatable glitch that caused it to veer into the guardrail when approaching the crest of a hill. “If the driver had been distracted, that definitely would have caused a crash,” he said.

Concern over this new type of distracted driving is forcing automakers to introduce additional safety features to compensate. For example, GM has introduced eye-tracking technology to check the driver’s eyes are on the road while Tesla drivers can be locked out of autopilot if they ignore warnings to keep their hands on the steering wheel.

That hasn’t stopped some enterprising owners from finding a way to trick the autopilot warning system by wedging an orange or a water bottle into the steering wheel.

[Schifference]

At least accidents will not be any persons fault. No fault insurance.

[Anti Federalist]

At least accidents will not be any persons fault. No fault insurance.

Sure it will.

It will be your fault for not maintaining a state a cat like readiness to take over.

Pilots and mariners who have autopilot failures or incidents are still held liable.

[Brian4Liberty]

You folks thinking that you'll be able to sleep, eat, drink, get fellated or what have you while the driver-less car speeds you to your destination, are nuts.

It's even worse than that. They are adding new ways to watch the driver at all times and no doubt record it...

"Our system indicates your eyes were not in the correct position at the time of the accident, thus you are at fault."

GM has introduced eye-tracking technology to check the driver’s eyes are on the road

[Anti Federalist]

It's even worse than that. They are adding new ways to watch the driver at all times and no doubt record it...

"Our system indicates your eyes were not in the correct position at the time of the accident, thus you are at fault."

Yup, exactly.

You will be under total surveillance, just like on plane's flight deck or a ship's bridge.

Every button you push, every move you make, every inch you travel, every word you say, will all be recorded in real time, to be reviewed and held against you in the event of an incident.

And trust me, as someone who has to live in that hellhole of a world, they will find something to hang you for, even if it's just contrived, chicken $#@!, bull$#@!.

And I won't even start on all the inspections and paperwork and checklists and compliance forms that will soon be required as well.

[fisharmor]

I had the misfortune of having to move a couple new cars around a few weeks ago, and determined right then and there I would not buy another new car for the rest of my life.

This is without driverless tech or any of the other crap talked about here.

Both were Lexuses. High end cars, supposedly.

I had to move two cars because one older Honda in a garage had a dead battery. I was given keys to the Lexus sedan next to it so we could jump the Honda.
Only it was a hybrid, and once we got the hood open, both my Brother-in-Law and I took one quick look, said "$#@! a bunch of that $#@!ing nonsense" when we realized there weren't any posts, and decided to move a real car into the garage.

First, I was given a purse to start the car, and it wasn't until a few moments later that I realized there was an RFID googaw for each of the Lexuses in there. So I got into the front car, started it, and handed my BiL the purse so he could move the SUV.

Only the moment we took the purse out of the sedan, it wouldn't go anywhere. Turns out if you take the RFID key out of the car, even though it is running, it disables itself. And it doesn't ding or anything. You have to read the screen for it to tell you what's wrong.

I pulled up a spitball mental schematic of everything that would be required to make all that happen and audibly said "Oh, no, $#@! YOU." There are at least a dozen failure points involved in that, and at least several hundred dollars of equipment, to replace a key ignition system that probably costs the manufacturer a whopping $7.

Things did not improve once we started moving things around. Both cars had pedals that felt like wet sponges, only the brakes not only had no resistance to them, they were also the grabbiest brakes I've ever felt. Ever been in a 70s truck with no ABS that just locked the second you stepped on the brake? It felt like that, only without the capacity to skid. I could tell that some safety nazi had made stopping power the main focus without actually thinking about how driveable it is.

I'm going to make a prediction. People like me, and AF, and a lot of the rest of you, are going to teach our kids to drive older cars, and how to keep them up, because we're not going to be able to spend $30,000 every three years on a brand new car... and as a result, old cars are going to be on the road for as long as we're allowed to drive them. From the late 80s to the early 2000s millions of cars were made that won't rot from the inside-out like cars built up through about 1985.... and they're going to stay on the road forever. America is eventually going to look like communist Cuba.

I've said on many occasions that I'm driving my 1991 Saturn until it literally gets folded in half around a tree, and even then, I'm going right out and buy another pre-1997 Saturn to replace it.

And I've already determined that when it's time for my 2002 GMC van to go, I'm going to see if Cash-For-Clunkers left anything from before 1992 still on the road, and I'm putting a modern engine in it, and I'm going to get 20 miles to the gallon in a full size van. Even if I replace literally everything on it, it'll still be well under the $40,000 asking price for a brand new one that'll weigh an extra ton and have all this safety wank on it.

So this thing with Tesla.... it's all just a distraction from a much larger problem that led directly to the ideas that Tesla is causing.

[Anti Federalist]

I had the misfortune of having to move a couple new cars around a few weeks ago, and determined right then and there I would not buy another new car for the rest of my life.

This is without driverless tech or any of the other crap talked about here.

Both were Lexuses. High end cars, supposedly.

I had to move two cars because one older Honda in a garage had a dead battery. I was given keys to the Lexus sedan next to it so we could jump the Honda.
Only it was a hybrid, and once we got the hood open, both my Brother-in-Law and I took one quick look, said "$#@! a bunch of that $#@!ing nonsense" when we realized there weren't any posts, and decided to move a real car into the garage.

First, I was given a purse to start the car, and it wasn't until a few moments later that I realized there was an RFID googaw for each of the Lexuses in there. So I got into the front car, started it, and handed my BiL the purse so he could move the SUV.

Only the moment we took the purse out of the sedan, it wouldn't go anywhere. Turns out if you take the RFID key out of the car, even though it is running, it disables itself. And it doesn't ding or anything. You have to read the screen for it to tell you what's wrong.

I pulled up a spitball mental schematic of everything that would be required to make all that happen and audibly said "Oh, no, $#@! YOU." There are at least a dozen failure points involved in that, and at least several hundred dollars of equipment, to replace a key ignition system that probably costs the manufacturer a whopping $7.

Things did not improve once we started moving things around. Both cars had pedals that felt like wet sponges, only the brakes not only had no resistance to them, they were also the grabbiest brakes I've ever felt. Ever been in a 70s truck with no ABS that just locked the second you stepped on the brake? It felt like that, only without the capacity to skid. I could tell that some safety nazi had made stopping power the main focus without actually thinking about how driveable it is.

I'm going to make a prediction. People like me, and AF, and a lot of the rest of you, are going to teach our kids to drive older cars, and how to keep them up, because we're not going to be able to spend $30,000 every three years on a brand new car... and as a result, old cars are going to be on the road for as long as we're allowed to drive them. From the late 80s to the early 2000s millions of cars were made that won't rot from the inside-out like cars built up through about 1985.... and they're going to stay on the road forever. America is eventually going to look like communist Cuba.

I've said on many occasions that I'm driving my 1991 Saturn until it literally gets folded in half around a tree, and even then, I'm going right out and buy another pre-1997 Saturn to replace it.

And I've already determined that when it's time for my 2002 GMC van to go, I'm going to see if Cash-For-Clunkers left anything from before 1992 still on the road, and I'm putting a modern engine in it, and I'm going to get 20 miles to the gallon in a full size van. Even if I replace literally everything on it, it'll still be well under the $40,000 asking price for a brand new one that'll weigh an extra ton and have all this safety wank on it.

So this thing with Tesla.... it's all just a distraction from a much larger problem that led directly to the ideas that Tesla is causing.

You crawled inside my head.

+rep

I am now putting together the plans for a final F-100 build, pre 1971 (zero emissions equipment) that will make it last me the rest of my life, or until government mandated fatwas turn us all into extras in a "Red Barchetta" real life video.

We wonder why traffic deaths are spiking, when it takes an MIT engineering degree and five minutes of finger $#@!ing to turn the heat down on a modern, touchscreen run, interconnected car.

[Anti Federalist]

"A brilliant red barchetta from a distant, better, time."

[NorthCarolinaLiberty]

But, but, but those really cool "autonomous" braking car commercials means I can tailgate and not pay attention!

[Swordsmyth]

The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Authority has launched an investigation into a crash that involved a Tesla Model S and a fire truck. The driver of the Tesla said the car was in Autopilot mode when it rear-ended a fire truck.
This is the second investigation into the crash, after on Tuesday—one day after the crash—the national Transportation Safety Board said it would send two investigators to the site to probe both the car and the driver.

More at: https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-N...sla-Crash.html

[AZJoe]

Dashcam of a Tesla autopilot acceleration and crash

[angelatc]

Dashcam of a Tesla autopilot acceleration and crash

That's what happens when drive a car that's the same color as a tree.

[Anti Federalist]

Tesla gears up for fully self-driving cars amid skepticism

https://www.apnews.com/09894dee68d7496399f176a77a8bc98d

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE and TOM KRISHER

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Tesla expects to have full self-driving cars in which humans won’t have to touch the steering wheel around the second quarter of next year.

The company made the announcement during an investor conference at its Palo Alto, California, headquarters Monday, in which it outlined its bold but risky bid to transform Tesla’s electric cars into driverless vehicles.

CEO Elon Musk told investors that the company’s computer to enable its electric cars to become self-driving vehicles is powered by the best processing chip in the world.

Tesla had never made its own computer chip before it hired an ex-Apple engineer three years ago to design it. Now, Musk boasts the chip is better than any other on the market “by a huge margin.”


Experts say they’re skeptical whether Tesla’s technology has advanced anywhere close to the point where its cars will be capable of being driven solely by a robot, without a human in position to take control if something goes awry.

“It’s all hype,” said Steven E. Shladover, a retired research engineer at the University of California, Berkeley who has been involved in efforts to create autonomous driving for 45 years. “The technology does not exist to do what he is claiming. He doesn’t have it and neither does anybody else.”

More than 60 companies in the U.S. alone are developing autonomous vehicles. Some are aiming to have their fully autonomous cars begin carrying passengers in small geographic areas as early as this year. Many experts don’t believe they’ll be in widespread use for a decade or more.

Musk’s description of Tesla’s controls as “Full Self-Driving” has alarmed some observers who think it will give owners a false sense of security and create potentially lethal situations in conditions that the autonomous cars can’t handle. They also say they’re waiting for Musk to define self-driving and show just under what conditions and places the vehicles can travel without human intervention.

Some Tesla critics say Musk is making the full self-driving announcement to distract from poor earnings expected Wednesday. Analysts polled by FactSet predict a $305.5 million first quarter net loss based on disappointing deliveries. Even bullish analysts expect bad news.

Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives, who expects Tesla shares to outperform its peers, wrote in a note Monday that while positive news is expected Monday, he foresees “a train wreck quarter.”

Meanwhile, Musk continues to use both his Twitter account and Tesla’s website to pump up a new computer now in production for full self-driving vehicles. Once the self-driving software is ready, those with new computers will get an update via the internet, Musk has said. Currently the self-driving computer costs $5,000, but the price rises to $7,000 if it’s installed after delivery.

On Monday, Musk said Tesla has a huge advantage over autonomous vehicle competitors because it gathers a massive amount of data in the real world. This quarter, he said Tesla will have 500,000 vehicles on the road, each equipped with eight cameras, ultrasonic sensors and radar gathering data to help build the company’s neural network.

The network allows vehicles to recognize images, determine what objects are and figure out how to deal with them.

That’s different from the self-driving systems being built by nearly every other company in the industry, including Google spinoff Waymo, General Motors’ Cruise Automation, and Ford-affiliated Argo AI. They all use cameras and radar covering 360 degrees, and also have light beam sensors called Lidar to the mix as a third redundant sensor, as well as detailed three-dimensional mapping.

“Vehicles that don’t have Lidar, that don’t have advanced radar, that haven’t captured a 3-D map are not self-driving vehicles,” Ken Washington, Ford’s chief technical officer, said during a recent interview with Recode. “They are great consumer vehicles with really good driver-assist technology.”

But Musk trashed Lidar on Monday, calling it a “fool’s errand.”

“They’re expensive sensors that are unnecessary,” he told investors. “It’s like having a whole bunch of appendixes.”

Amnon Shashua, CEO of Israeli autonomous vehicle computing company Mobileye, says cars with 360-degree cameras and front facing radar could drive autonomously, but they would not be as safe as human drivers. Careful humans can drive 10 million hours without a mistake leading to a fatal crash, but cars without full redundant sensors cannot, he said.

Tesla already has been offering a system called “Autopilot” that can control cars on a limited basis with constant monitoring by a human driver. But questions already have been raised about Autopilot’s reliability after its involvement in three fatal crashes.

In one, neither the driver nor a Tesla Model S operating on the company’s Autopilot driver-assist system spotted a tractor-trailer crossing in front of it on a Florida, highway in 2016. The car drove under the trailer shearing off the roof and killing the driver.

In a 2017 report , the National Transportation Safety Board wrote that driver inattention and design limitations of Autopilot played major roles in the fatality, and it found that the Model S cameras and radar weren’t capable of detecting a vehicle turning into its path. Rather, the systems are designed to detect vehicles they are following to prevent rear-end collisions.

The agency also is still investigating the two other lethal crashes, one last month in Delray Beach, Florida, eerily similar to the 2016 Florida crash, and another involving a Tesla SUV that was operating on Autopilot when it hit a highway lane-dividing barrier in Silicon Valley.

Tesla maintains that its current systems are only for assistance, and that drivers must pay attention and be ready to intervene.

With “Full Self-Driving Capability,” Tesla touts that you get automatic driving from the highway on ramp to the off ramp including interchanges and changing lanes automatically to overtake slower cars. Later this year, the cars will be able to recognize and respond to traffic lights and stop signs and drive automatically on city streets, the website says.

Those feats are something that Tesla will likely have to prove to regulators in California — its largest U.S. market so far — before its fully autonomous cars are allowed on the roads there. But most other states don’t have the same requirements as California, where Tesla would need a state permit and have to prove the cars can drive safely on public roads without a human driver. And experts say there’s no federal law requiring preapproval for fully autonomous driving, as long as a vehicle meets federal safety standards, which Teslas do.

“Unfortunately, it may be necessary for several people to die before regulators step in,” Shladover said.

[Anti Federalist]

And another S model spontaneously combusts, this time in China.

[Anti Federalist]

When CO2 emissions linked to the production of batteries and the German energy mix - in which coal still plays an important role - are taken into consideration, electric vehicles emit 11% to 28% more than their diesel counterparts, according to the study, presented on Wednesday at the Ifo Institute in Munich.

Mining and processing the lithium, cobalt and manganese used for batteries consume a great deal of energy. A Tesla Model 3 battery, for example, represents between 11 and 15 tonnes of CO2. Given a lifetime of 10 years and an annual travel distance of 15,000 kilometres, this translates into 73 to 98 grams of CO2 per kilometre, scientists Christoph Buchal, Hans-Dieter Karl and Hans-Werner Sinn noted in their study.

The CO2 given off to produce the electricity that powers such vehicles also needs to be factored in, they say.

When all these factors are considered, each Tesla emits 156 to 180 grams of CO2 per kilometre, which is more than a comparable diesel vehicle produced by the German company Mercedes, for example.

http://brusselstimes.com/business/te...an-study-shows

...

[ATruepatriot]

...

They are bombs waiting to happen... Just like the falcon heavy... and the falcon manned... What is up with the disconnect?

[Anti Federalist]

They are bombs waiting to happen... Just like the falcon heavy... and the falcon manned... What is up with the disconnect?

Well, there is an agenda, driven by the powers that be, to convert the fleet to EVs.

They sell EVs as "green", "hip", "with it" and Tesla's are sexy and fast and luxurious, not lumpen-proletariat Priuses.

The reason they are pushing EVs is that "they" know that current and any near future battery technology will not work in this application, not on widespread and daily use for millions of people.

So they push this, and give Musk a pass, for the deliberate purpose of making personal automobile transportation impractical, expensive, and not worth it, thus moving the real goal forward: to corral us all into compact urban zones, where we will walk to our green "jobs" to collect our weekly UBI subsidy of New Credits to spend on Soylent Green, all under the watchful eyes of total surveillance.

And based on the attitude towards driving the next generation coming up shows, "they" have been successful.

And this is global: New sales of ICE powered cars are banned by 2030 in India, China, Germany and the UK, just to name a few places.

[ATruepatriot]

Well, there is an agenda, driven by the powers that be, to convert the fleet to EVs.

They sell EVs at as "green", "hip", "with it" and Tesla's are sexy and fast and luxurious, not lumpen-proletariat Priuses.

The reason they are pushing EVs is that "they" know that current and any near future battery technology will not work in this application, not on widespread and daily use for millions of people.

So they push this, and give Musk a pass, for the deliberate purpose of making personal automobile transportation impractical, expensive, and not worth it, thus moving the real goal forward: to corral us all into compact urban zones, where we will walk to our green "jobs" to collect our weekly UBI subsidy of New Credits to spend on Soylent Green, all under the watchful eyes of total surveillance.

And based on the attitude towards driving the next generation coming up shows, "they" have been successful.

Oh I know... And they subsidize it with debt my grandchildren will have to pay. Just like going to the moon again for no reason, this ignorant crap has to stop. It is all parasitic with intent. And until we start looking at the bigger picture and stop debating ignorant semantics it will continue.