Self-driving cars are often marketed as safer than human drivers, but new data suggests that may not always be the case.
Citing data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), Electrek reports that Tesla disclosed five new crashes involving its robotaxi fleet in Austin. The new data raises concerns about how safe Tesla’s systems really are compared to the average driver.
The incidents included a collision with a fixed object at 17 miles per hour, a crash with a bus while the Tesla vehicle was stopped, a crash with a truck at four miles per hour, and two cases where Tesla vehicles backed into fixed objects at low speeds.
Got this saved next time someone tells me that a robot can drive better than a human. They almost had me there, but data doesn’t lie.
This is more specific to Tesla than self driving in general, as Musk decided that additional sensors (like LiDAR and RADAR on other self driving vehicles) are a problem. Publicly he’s said that it’s because of sensor contention - that if the RADAR and cameras disagree, then the car gets confused.
Of course that raises the problem that when the camera or image recognition is wrong, there’s nothing to tell the car otherwise, like the number of Tesla drivers decapitated by trailers that the car didn’t see. Additionally, I assume Teslas have accelerometers so either the self driving model is ignoring potential collisions or it’s still doing sensor fusion.
Not to mention we humans have multiple senses that we use when driving; this is one reason why steering wheels still mostly use mechanical linkages - we can “feel” the road, we can detect when the wheels lose traction, we can feel inertia as we go around a corner too fast. On a related tangent, the Tesla Cybertruck uses steer-by-wire instead of a mechanical linkage.
This is why many (including myself) believe Tesla has a much worse safety record than Waymo. I’ve seen enough drunk and distracted drivers to believe that humans will always drive better than a
humanrobot. Don’t get me wrong, I still have concerns about the technology, but Musk and Tesla has a history of ignoring safety concerns - see the number of deaths related to his desire to have non-mechanical handles and hide the mechanical backup.humans will always drive better than a human
Typo, or what did you mean?
Whoops! Definitely a typo. Thanks for the catch!
A robot can theoretically drive better than a human because emotions and boredom don’t have to be involved. But we aren’t there yet and Teslas are trying to solve the hard mode of pure vision without range finding.
Also, I suspect that the ones we have are set up purely as NNs where everything is determined by the training, which likely means there’s some random-ass behaviour for rare edge cases where it “thinks” slamming on the accelerator is as good an option as anything else but since it’s a black box no one really understands, there’s no way to tell until someone ends up in that position.
The tech still belongs in universities, not on public roads as a commercial product/service. Certainly not by the type of people who would at any point say, “fuck it, good enough, ship it like that”, which seems to be most of the tech industry these days.
Reddit loved that idea.
a crash with a bus while the Tesla vehicle was stopped
Okay, idk why we would blame this one on the self driving car…
a collision with a heavy truck at 4 mph, and two separate incidents where the Tesla backed into objects, one into a pole or tree at 1 mph and another into a fixed object at 2 mph.
The difference is a lot of these are never reported when it’s done by a human driver. I very highly doubt the rate is 4x higher than humans. I’m not saying the self driving cars are good. I am just saying human drivers are really bad.
4mph is close to the maximum speed in downtown Austin traffic.
Are we surprised?
Clearly, AI isn’t just challenging human performance, it’s exceeding it. Four times the crash rate is just the beginning. Just imagine the crash rate when super intelligence comes!
🚘💥🚗
Optical recognition is inferior and this is not surprising.
Yeah that’s well known by now. However, safety through additional radar sensors costs money and they can’t have that.
Nah, that one’s on Elon just being a stubborn bitch and thinking he knows better than everybody else (as usual).
just one more AI model, please, that’ll do it, just one more, just you wait, have you seen how fast things are improving? Just one more. Common, just one more…
I NEED ONE MORE FACKIN’ AI MODEL!!
Musk = POS Nazi.
POS Nazi *pedophile
Hopefully, the French judicial system will throw his worthless pedo neo-Nazi ass into prison.
Curious how the French have jurisdiction over Austin?
“In the recorded history of what is now the U.S. state of Texas, all or parts of Texas have been claimed by six countries: France, Spain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the Confederacy during the Civil War, and the United States of America.” [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Texas ]
Does THIS answer your question? That’s right, Captain. Put’em up! Or shall I say… peut demains apres?
EDIT: It’s the Epstein files. The French are investigating. Musk is in them.
Do the French still have a death penalty? If no, pass.
It’s important to draw the line between what Tesla is trying to do and what Waymo is actually doing. Tesla has a 4x higher rate, but Waymo has a lower rate.
Not just lower, a tiny fraction of the human rate of accidents:
https://waymo.com/safety/impact/
Also, AFAIK this includes cases when the Waymo car isn’t even slightly at fault. Like, there have been 2 deaths involving a Waymo car. In one case a motorcyclist hit the car from behind, flipped over it, then was hit by another car and killed. In the other case, ironically, the real car at fault was a Tesla being driven by a human who claims he experienced “sudden unintended acceleration”. It was driving at 98 miles per hour in downtown SF and hit a bunch of stopped cars at a red light, then spun into oncoming traffic and killed a man and his dog who were in another car.
Whether or not self-driving cars are a good thing is up for debate. But, it must suck to work at Waymo and to be making safety a major focus, only to have Tesla ruin the market by making people associate self-driving cars with major safety issues.
Use lidar you ketamine saturated motherfucker
Can’t do that. Then he would have to upgrade all legacy cars. And he is missing the lidar dataset.
The best time to add lidar would have been years ago, the second best time is right now. I don’t think he would have to update the old cars, it could just be part of the hardware V5 package. He’s obviously comfortable with having customers beta testing production vehicles so he can start creating a lidar set now or he can continue failing to make reliable self-driving cars.
Agree, but since he stated multiple time that all cars since xxx years were hardware capable of L5 self-driving next year (no need to precise the year, the statement is repeated every year), adding LIDAR now would be opening the way to a major class action. So he painted himself in a corner, and like all gigantic-ego idiots, he doubles down every time he’s asked.
I agree with you. Musk’s ego doesn’t.
I do (sarcastically) love knowing Leave the World Behind is a documentary.
Thanks Obama.
Whoever could have predicted this?
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They’re 4 times as capable of crashing as a human driver. How efficient!
