> The point of this study is not to shame Tesla, but rather to advocate for driver attention management systems that can give drivers feedback in real time or adapt automation functionality to suit a driver’s level of attention. Currently, Autopilot uses a hands-on-wheel sensing system to monitor driver engagement, but it doesn’t monitor driver attention via eye or head-tracking.
Precisely. I said this before and now this study supports my previous points even further [0]. Using the wheel to monitor driver attention is not even close to good enough to determine if the driver is paying attention or not. Comma.ai seems to be able to implement eye-tracking for their driver monitoring system.
I'm quite surprised that Tesla continues to lack such a system to monitor the drivers eyes on the road when they are behind the wheel especially when the user is using autopilot or not.
Especially since there's a hardware camera built in to every Tesla, right at the driver's eye level. I'd rather have that system than the wheel sensor. Accidentally applying too much force on the steering wheel disables the autopilot while too little force doesn't register. It's annoying, trying to get the amount of Goldilocks force just right. But the eyes don't lie.
pro-tip: either of the scrollwheels, volume adjustment or speed adjustment, are considered driver inputs. I typically go +1 kph, -1 kph its not even noticable
I guess i have to explain that applying torque to the wheel is less safe than adjusting your volume. My tip is a safety tip, your joke doesn't really apply?
You're talking about defeating a safety feature in an unsafe manner. I'm talking about how to let the car know I'm paying attention without inadvertently disabling autopilot in the process. Not comparable at all.
>I'm quite surprised that Tesla continues to lack such a system to monitor the drivers eyes on the road
I'm not sure if it's documented anywhere but I think the 2021 Tesla models do this [1]. That said, I'm not sure if this is enough - this is the same issue Google faced which led them to believe they had to go L4 of bust.
We should absolutely shame Tesla. Their marketing is selling "Full Self Driving" and have many times in the past hinted that autopilot is something it isn't. Elon claiming that your car will be a RoboTaxi in - 2 years also doesn't help and makes people think autopilot must be quite good.
The multiple warnings and the dialogue that explicitly requires confirmation might be a good hint.
But I think we all know this problem hasn't materialized in crash data, because if it did, that's what we'd be talking about. Instead it's just more FUD about the names of features, some of which are explicitly not yet delivered.
Are Tesla's cars with Autopilot involved in fatal crashes at a notably higher rate than comparable cars? If the answer were "yes," you wouldn't be pointing me to anecdotes. You'd be pointing me to that data.
The lack of that data is why, despite years, hundreds of thousands of vehicles, and millions upon millions of miles driven, people are still blaming the names of features.
It's time to move on. Over 100 people die in the US per day in traffic accidents. How many years need to pass before a handful of anecdotes and speculation doesn't pass as valid criticism?
Yes, why do we care that Boeing withheld crucial information about the MCAS? Is two crashed planes a lot compared to other plane models? Why do we determine the root cause for every crashed plane, there aren't a lot of those anymore?
There is statistics, and then there is addressing obvious design flaws. The latter is worth doing a lot more than the former.
There’s a difference between instances and data. GP is saying that if someone had a damning graph of large-scale statistically-significant data showing AP is crashing more, we’d be talking about it.
Can you point to the actual stats on that page? I skimmed and went to their Carsurance source link and it was garbage, even admitting that they were counting mistakes by other drivers causing issues like being rear ended and sideswiped as incidents against the self driving cars. And somewhere one of the articles said there were less fatalities during active driver assistance.
> I'm quite surprised that Tesla continues to lack such a system to monitor the drivers eyes on the road when they are behind the wheel especially when the user is using autopilot or not.
Perhaps we shouldn't expect that of people? If you've taken the vast burden of driving off their minds, we should accept that human nature means they'll stop paying attention to driving.
That, however, explicitly implies that automation needs to be much better before it can be used.
> I'm quite surprised that Tesla continues to lack such a system to monitor the drivers eyes on the road when they are behind the wheel especially when the user is using autopilot or not.
You are surprised for no cause. Tesla uses exactly that system.
Did you not realize that the driver in the image has just tricked the so-called 'Driver monitoring system' with a static image? Just like how lots of drivers have fooled the wheel sensors?
I was expecting this to be more advanced than Comma.ai, but after seeing this, I'm even more disappointed with Tesla. What if the driver is using autopilot when they are driving at night? It appears that there is no night vision in the car cabin cameras of this system. [0]
That means that it can't determine the driver's attentiveness when you are driving in the night; the most dangerous time to drive. Therefore, this system is unreliable and very dangerous and it already can be fooled. I'm afraid that this implementation is still not good or safe enough to use.
Both of us know that Tesla is a multi-billion dollar electric car company which operates in a highly regulated industry on driver safety and is supposed to be years ahead of its competitors. Correct?
The system that you showed to me ‘as evidence’ may qualify as ‘basic eye tracking’ but it does not qualify as ‘safe’ when the tester in the video not only tricked it easily (just like the wheel torque tricks) but it can’t track the drivers attention at night; most dangerous time to drive, even with autopilot or FSD on.
Once again, I’m surprised that this so-called driver monitoring system came from Tesla given that it is still unreliable.
It is not clear to me that the metrics of attention people traditionally use are optimally desirable when evaluating Autopilot-like systems. Anecdotally, I have found myself not staring forward anywhere as much, but in fact I am more attentive at what other drivers are doing and taking control where necessary--in effect delegating the lowly work to the machine. I do feel this is much safer than constantly forcing me to look at the road in front of me or touching something.
Given that there really is scant proof that backup cameras work in keeping people safe, the hypothesis that autopilot makes people safe is shaky at best.
Heres a biology point: accurate self-assessment is extremely difficult for the human brain, because the ability to assess yourself is one of the first things to suffer a loss of performance with external stimuli or sleep deprivation.
All you can really say is that you _feel_ more attentive.
The self-evaluation aspect is kind of beside the point. The core question is given a fixed amount of "attention", do you want to spend most of it staring forward to keep yourself in the lane and avoid rear-ending the next car? Current Tesla Autopilot does that particular task almost perfectly today, on highway at least.
Given a fixed amount of attention, I do want to spend most of it on making sure my car is not about to crash into an obstacle, like another car, or highway divider.
Because Tesla requires people to do that, as there are no guarantees that the autopilot won't [1].
This seems sensible, but I do wonder whether actively steering the car is as attention intensive as merely verifying that the car is steering correctly.
This is pure speculation, but it feels like humans have a very robust model to determine when something is about to go wrong (i.e. this car is about to crash into an obstacle). If it takes less attention to determine that the car steers correctly as opposed to steering the car, this would leave more attention available to, for example, monitor other cars behavior.
It’s akin to sitting in the passenger seat of a car - you can be idly looking out the windshield, not really thinking about driving, and your brain will freak out the moment the driver doesn’t do what you expect. It’s like my brain always has a predicted path and velocity, and deviation from that is so easy for me to detect I do it subconsciously.
Maybe other people aren’t like that, but I certainly am. I find myself wishing there was an FSD-like depiction of what’s going on in the driver’s brain, to answer the “you _are_ planning to stop eventually, right?” question.
>This seems sensible, but I do wonder whether actively steering the car is as attention intensive as merely verifying that the car is steering correctly.
There is a lot of research explaining why it's true, particularly when it comes to piloting airplanes.
The TL;DR is that doing something with your hands, involving touch, engages more of your brain.
>This is pure speculation, but it feels like humans have a very robust model to determine when something is about to go wrong
Yes, this is pure speculation, and also incorrect.
Again, if you were to look things up instead of speculating, you'd quickly find plenty of information.
Some situations are fully-qualifiable IMO. For instance, on those 80mph highway sweeping curves, my car is nailing the centerline better than i possibly ever could. As a result i'm glancing at the cars around me, both visually and using the 3D model, rather than focusing on where my tires go.
Yeah there's a reason that forward attention is the default. Spreading attention to lower probability and lower gravity issues may not be optimal, even if it feels better. I'd guess it's riskier than maintaining attention in the direction of momentum. But it depends on the statistics of autopilot failure.
That's like saying "There's a reason bash scripting is the default." when first confronting high level languages.
Yup. Legacy. Humans are legacy equipment, required up until very recently. Constant forward-looking may seem beneficial since most things come at you from the front. You might think they are the most important class of problems because you're forced to focus on them constantly.
However, when you're on the 9's tail of problems you encounter on the road, very few of them are things approaching you from the front. Many of them are unexpected things on your sides, rears, and blind spot.
The implication of alot of these comments that assisted drivers HAVE to pay full attention to all minutae of driving just as if they were driving is really debased from the reality of self-driving i experience.
In terms of statistics right now AP is 4x safer than average human per mile travelled.
>In terms of statistics right now AP is 4x safer than average human per mile travelled.
Because the profile of the average autopilot useris: poor, overworked, young, inexperienced driver, driving a 10 year old Honda civic without any active safety features?
"In terms of statistics right now AP is 4x safer than average human per mile travelled."
My father has driven through a switchback mountain path without markings, during hailstorm, and wasn't always sober. On a car that has hasn't seen a mechanic in years.
Autopilot doesn't even work in those conditions, it gets all it's miles on a straight highway in good weather.
You play the game on easy mode, you get a better score.
And a huge number of people have done the same thing and completely ignored their surroundings while using AP.
The question isn’t if people reading a book are capable of using auto pilot safely, the question is if people can supervise level 3 self driving systems or if they need to evaluated assuming generally inattentive drivers.
Counterintuitively, the less people have been paying attention when AP is engaged the closer it is to being a level 4 system. Aka if people are catching 90% of potentially fatal mistakes then in level 4 it would be 10x as deadly. Alternatively, if their catching 10% of potentially fatal mistakes it would be almost as safe as a level 4 system.
"the question is if people can supervise level 3 self driving systems or if they need to evaluated assuming generally inattentive drivers."
Finally someone in the thread points out that we are pretending that the agreement "you are responsible for intervening at a moments' notice to avoid a crash" is anything but a cover-your-ass legal fiction. This is like allowing an airline to pass off responsibility for engine failure to it's customer.
It should not be legally valid unless we can prove that this method actually works. It's not just the driver's life at stake, it's also pedestrians and other people around them that did not get a 'choice'
If you want data on whether Autopilot is harmful or helpful, you could take a look at crash statistics for highway Autopilot-on miles vs highway miles of average vehicles. The Autopilot-on miles are much better than the American national average.
Visual behavior pattern changes are a microbenchmark that may not even be measuring attention at all. Regardless, the pattern changes don't seem to increase crash risk as compared to not using Autopilot in any study that I'm aware of.
If there is data supporting a claim that Autopilot actually increases crashes, I would be curious to see it. "A Tesla crashed on Autopilot once" is just an anecdote; humans crash cars constantly, and the question is whether Autopilot results in greater or fewer crashes.
>If you want data on whether Autopilot is harmful or helpful, you could take a look at crash statistics for highway Autopilot-on miles vs highway miles of average vehicles. The Autopilot-on miles are much better than the American national average.
Source please.
Also a comparison with autopilot-off miles in Teslas would be necessary here to control for Tesla owners not being representative of average driver in the US.
Poor young overworked mininum wage job drivers aren't driving Teslas.
Nor is Tesla with autopilot off comparable to 1999 Honda Civic in terms of safety.
Tesla releases safety reports every quarter. In the most recent quarter, crash rate for Autopilot-on miles beat the national average by about 10x.
Also a comparison with autopilot-off miles in Teslas would be necessary here to control for Tesla owners not being representative of average driver in the US.
Luckily, they also release crash rates for Autopilot-off miles, as per your desire; Autopilot-on beats Autopilot-off by about 2x. Disabling all active safety features is of course even worse, losing to Autopilot by roughly 4x — although still beating the national average handily, since as you hypothesized, Tesla cars and drivers tend to not be similar to 1999 Honda cars and drivers.
The GPs is supporting that core argument with anecdotal evidence from self-assessment. Dunno how you can say that's not relevant to point out, particularly since you agree.
An interesting and observable self metric I've been able to use to assess my mental acuity has been to look at my statistics on clearing 40 lines in Tetris. (tetr.io if anyone else is interested)
On fully rested, deep sleep days, I can drop the tetronimoes at 1.5 to 1.6 pieces per second (pps), while, sleep deprived states (4-5 hours), no matter how hard I try (and it "feels" like I'm performing very fast) drops to 1.2-1.3 pps.
There's also a bit of a qualitative measure on how difficult it was to sustain focus for the 1 minute to 1.5 minutes that gives me an idea of my ability to focus and perform.
Ha! I came to a similar conclusion, but using the game Spelunky.
One thing that I find interesting is how i can see the differences in my performance through the day, as i hit a lull in the afternoon, and come back in the early evening.
>Anecdotally, I have found myself not staring forward anywhere as much, but in fact I am more attentive at what other drivers are doing and taking control where necessary
This honestly sounds exactly why it's a bad thing. It's not just cars to worry about ahead of you.
Have you never driven anywhere that people didn't just spontaneously cross the road outside of a crosswalk? Especially at night? Not wearing anything remotely reflective or easy to see?
I've seen this happen on the freeway too. Guy wearing beige/dark green jacket, tan pants who should not have been there, yet was being dangerous to any drivers out on the road. Broad daylight. If I hadn't been looking ahead I would've missed him and at least thankfully in my scenario he didn't enter my lane.
While it's extremely important to (as my dad labeled it) "drive for other drivers" (as in, observe cars in your surroundings and anticipate any dumb actions they may make), that does not mean you should take focus off everything else, not least of which things you'd see by "staring forward" as much as possible.
I had a similar situation one night, in a bad part of town a attractive woman jumped into the road ahead of me trying to flag me down. My primate brain told me something was off, she didn't seem afraid or in need but more like she was luring me. I got in the other lane, as it was either that or lock up my brakes and went around her. Watching in my rear view she did the same to the car behind me but they slowed down, as I turned the corner I noticed a man with a baseball bat come out of the bushes. No idea what happened next.
If I had something like autopilot my car might've stopped like theirs did.
Would you automatically assume Autopilot is not able to see and brake for the pedestrian at night and a human pair of eyes would see better? It’s unclear to me that will be the case. Either way that is a straw-man argument: even in manual driving you have to pay attention to surroundings but that comes at a much bigger cost of briefly letting go of what’s forward. Autopilot is an additional “pair of eyes” if you will and one more safety layer in that scenario (and one that is lower latency once it sees the pedestrian). Either one of you can brake and that might be an argument strongly in favor of such driver assistance systems.
> We haven't reached any kind of semblance that Autopilot or similar systems are capable of that.
Oh, I was not suggesting that AP would more intelligent overall than humans, rather the vision stack might (or might not) be more sensitive to such pedestrian/background contrast at night than human eyes, simply due to the sensory differences.
Did MIT study whether the "inattentive" drivers had higher accident rates and fatality rates than other drivers?
That should be the question.
"MIT study shows folks drive 5MPH faster with seatbelts on" - doesn't mean we should get rid of seatbelts if overall damage and accidents / injury rates are reduced.
Im serious - do the study. Put someone in a 6 hour drive or simulator for an SF to LA drive or something, one in a car with tesla's drivers aids one without. Then have something happen (sudden braking / someone cutting in front of you etc) on drive in half of the trips.
Who crashes? The "inattentive" tesla driver? Or the other driver.
Based on my own observation, there are drivers in regular cars texting, looking up directions, playing with their phone maybe for music? I've seen people putting on makeup, sitting at a light for 5 minutes on their phone (when it is green) etc. I've seen people drift out of their lanes crazily. These are folks in normal cars. I've seen folks speeding and swerving in and out of traffic, some without using blinkers etc.
I’ve only driven a Tesla with Autopilot once, for ten minutes or so. By the end of it, I was struck by how much more time I was spending looking far ahead, or looking in the mirrors for longer. It felt like I switched to farther-field situational awareness once I was confident the car wouldn’t rear end the dude in front of me.
So if attentiveness is measured as “staring at the license plate in front of me”, my attentiveness went down. But I felt safer since I was looking hundreds of yards down the road for situations I might have to handle or avoid, at a longer timescale.
This is how I feel as well (having driven many miles with a Comma), but I have no idea if I represent an average driver or if my perceived attentiveness matches what is really happening.
I do think that it is very easy for me to spend longer looking at a screen or button when the autopilot is driving for me, since there is no immediate penalty (lane line, rumble strips, etc) for looking away.
Do people really stare at the license plate in front of them anyways, though? It was made quite clear during driver training courses many years ago not to do this and that your glance pattern should always start and return to near the horizon (whether that be hundreds of yards in a city, or miles away on a highway).
I've always had the opposite problem, if I'm not maintaining situational awareness to the horizon, I'll inevitably fall asleep after an hour or two out of sheer boredom. I prefer to drive long distances in manual-transmission vehicles (there's more to do!), and commercial vehicles with loads requiring careful management of engine RPM are even better. Those I can drive for 10-12 hours in a day without issue. I never saw myself as anything other than an ordinary driver.
In my case, a Tesla autopilot is the worst possible compromise. It removes enough attention requirements that it feels much harder to stay attentive, but without automating the process completely. Other people I've talked to that operate large pieces of mechanical equipment have often said similar things about automation that it's best to either be a) fully manual or b) fully automated for some duration of time.
"I felt safer since I was looking hundreds of yards down the road for situations I might have to handle or avoid, at a longer timescale."
I was taught to do this while driving. It was a basic lesson in "Driver's Ed".
Making it a habit though is a different thing. For me that was easier because it was one of the things that pro racers mentioned they did as well.
That is certainly a key to avoiding accidents. Others would be always keeping a safe distance between you and the cars in front of you and what's going on behind and around you.
I made a habit when I first started driving to always stay focused on the task of driving. I almost never turn on the radio or play music. That's because I want to hear what's going on around me.
The best advice I ever got was from a California Highway Patrol officer who told me "Drive like everyone is trying to crash into you".
Where I live now almost everywhere I drive it's on curvy two lane mountain roads. Most have a 55mph limit with curve signs as low as 25mph. We also have deer by the thousands here, and they forage at night. You really have to pay attention to just to stay on the road and not hit deer.
There is no way I'd trust a Tesla to drive me around here (or anywhere for that matter).
> "Drive like everyone is trying to crash into you"
That advice (for cyclists) was also in one of Neal Stephenson's early novels, Zodiac... I've found it useful. Now I just get annoyed when drivers insist on yielding to pedestrians and cyclists when they don't need to, it would be faster if they didn't and they aren't blocking any other traffic. The driver feels like they've helped, I guess, but the pedestrians are not safer.
You can't just compare attentive Tesla drivers (where you're probably projecting your own self onto this driver) with the worst non-Tesla drivers.
You have to compare the worst Tesla drivers to the worst drivers in regular vehicles. Average Tesla drivers to average drivers of regular vehicles, etc.
And I'm not sure a simulator is the best comparison.
"Individual glance metrics calculated at the epoch-level and binned by 10-s units of time across the available epoch lengths revealed that drivers in near-crashes have significantly longer on-road glances, and look less frequently between on- and off- road locations in the moments preceding a precipitating event as compared to crashes. During on-road glances, drivers in near-crashes were found to more frequently sample peripheral regions of the roadway than drivers in crashes. Output from the AttenD algorithm affirmed the cumulative net benefit of longer on-road glances and of improved attention management between on- and off-road locations."
I ride a motorcycle and can pretty easily spot patterns of distracted driving, but after buying a truck with some ride height, it is amazing how many people are regularly on/touching their phone for something while driving. On the order of 50-75% in a city environment. After this recent revelation I'm almost more amazed at how few accidents there are given the sheer number of cell phone addicts.
This. Every study suggesting holding a cellphone is equally risky to drunk driving must be false.
I rode a commuter bus for years and saw the exact same thing you describe, and no one would seriously suggest 50-75% of drivers are (equivalently) drunk.
>Every study suggesting holding a cellphone is equally risky to drunk driving must be false.
Or drunk driving isn’t as dangerous as previously thought.
Or there’s many more drunk drivers than previously thought.
I don’t necessarily agree with either of those, but the point is there are many possible explanations and we should be careful about jumping to conclusions.
A better way of refuting those claims is to find flaws in their methodology
The flaw is obvious. People put their phones down when their semi-subconscious driving “algorithm” detect anything out of the ordinary. At that point, they bring their full attention to whatever weirdness is going on. This tends to happen with drivers no matter if they’re absorbed in the radio or just lost in their thoughts. I’d guess that the amount of driving time matters a great deal here.
Inebriated is much different. They are less likely to notice something in the first place because their senses are deadened. If they do notice, their full attention while intoxicated is much less as is their ability to rationally make decisions. There’s no way to un-distract if something gains.
The issue with drunk driving and texting is not that they can’t focus but can they when they have to. Unless someone’s slam dunk, they can. It’s the time to react when something happens that’s the problem.
With texting and driving there are other major daily hassles. A common scenario for me as I walk my dog is that I no longer assume a car will yield on a crosswalk - even the ones with a stop sign or a signal. May be the impact is that few people bike or walk? Or walk elsewhere like a trail or a park instead of sidewalk and neighborhoods? End of the day, it’s about what we want as a society. If we decide that people should be allowed to focus on their phone, we have to start redesigning the streets now.
Not just as a pedestrian, even as a driver I don’t assume I can go in green light anymore. People seem to miss red lights on the regular now
I don’t assume that a car is going to stop at a crosswalk or stop sign until I can see the driver’s eyes and tell that they are aware of me and are stopping. Otherwise I wait. I have done this since much before mobile phones were a problem.
It was new to me that cars even stop for me. But there was a brief period ‘12-‘16 may be, where I truly felt comfortable walking and biking. This was before Uber and lyft and also before smartphones where this addictive. Most people where still browsing Facebook on their computers.
Was this 1912? It'd be weird because that would make you very old, but it's even weirder to read someone saying cellphones were not very addictive in 2015.
This is true, but people can also judge ahead of time when problems are more likely to occur, letting them put down the cellphone and pay attention to the road when it is more likely they'll need to react quicker.
I'd also guess most people are not constantly on their phones as they are checking notifications/texts and that kind of thing, so you get more of an on-and-off effect rather than just being consistently drunk for the entire duration.
Not that it makes the practice any better, but it does seem like a complicating factor when trying to frame the problem in terms of drunk driving.
>People put their phones down when their semi-subconscious driving “algorithm” detect anything out of the ordinary.
I think this ignores the fact that people can’t actually pay attention to more than one thing at a time, generally. Meaning, they aren’t simultaneously looking at their phone and being vigilant of “weirdness” That switching overhead from one focus to the other may be enough to delay reactions to cause accidents.
So while they’re not offline, the sensory input cycle is slowed enough to be much less useful.
Is that what the comparison is saying or that being on the phone is just as not in controll as one thinks the same as if someone was drunk and thinks they are just tipsy. I never read it saying it was a percentage of drivers doing that was the same. I'd definitely be willing to say that >75% of drivers are at some point in a drive unattentive because they are looking/operating a device.
> it is amazing how many people are regularly on/touching their phone for something while driving
Yep. About 10 years ago, I took a bus from Boston to Hartford and I spent most of my time looking down into cars along the highway.
Aside from drivers looking at their phones, I saw people block their entire field of view by unwrapping burgers and lifting them up to eat, fixing their clothing, makeup, etc.
Tesla publishes data on accident rates with and without autopilot, and the rate with autopilot engaged is lower. The problem is, that data is mostly meaningless because people don't use autopilot in conditions when an accident is most likely to occur.
I suppose you'd have to compare against only manual driving in good conditions to make a fair comparison. Not sure that data exists anywhere.
Tesla is responsible for the consequences of their actions. If their cars exploded when hitting potholes, and the government didn't stop them, Tesla is still responsible.
No. The MIT study exclusively selected the data of 19 drivers in Boston and only selected AP disengagements "on free-flow highways (min speed when AP was active was above 30 mph) in daylight (cameras were not infrared) that are not safety critical (no system warnings and no sustained deceleration above 3 m/s )."
Its findings were that drivers paid more attention before engagement and after engagement than when AP was engaged.
> Did MIT study whether the "inattentive" drivers had higher accident rates and fatality rates than other drivers?
> That should be the question.
Why should that be the question? If the feature is dangerous, removing it will improve safety. If there are more dangerous features, we can remove those too.
That should be the question because we don’t know if the drivers being inattentive actually lead to anything bad happening, I think. If the drivers are inattentive but there is no downside to that, then it doesn’t really matter.
Because we need to define "dangerous" - the authors and you are making an assumption that what they call "inattention" is the same as "dangerous" whereas the comment you are replying to is questioning that assumption. If the link between "inattention" and accident rates is strong, then measuring that should be equivalent.
In medicine there is a concept of measuring disease-oriented outcomes instead of patient-oriented outcomes, because it's easier to show an intervention affects the disease-oriented outcomes, and much harder to show a change in patient-oriented outcomes.
So for example, a disease-oriented ourcome for hip-replacement surgery would be "range of movement after 2 weeks", patient-oriented might be "can go up a flight of stairs"
>>... Who crashes? The "inattentive" tesla driver? Or the other driver.
That's bullshit.
I'm sure it's safe to assume both crash more than very attentive drivers, which is the only question that matters when it comes to Tesla's autopilot.
What you're really asking is "who'd you rather have smash into you, someone in a Tesla using autopilot, or someone texting on their phone while driving?
No. That is NOT the question... because... Autopilot and FSD software suite users are required to remain attentive and ready to intervene in case o a software failure (often seen in many YouTube videos). But because they obviously, become inattentive, Autopilot usage is actually much more dangerous than having the drivers drive their cars by themselves.
It creates complacency because the moment a driver physically removes feet from the pedals and hands from the steering wheel, his or her mind cannot maintain focus on two things at the same time.
What are those two things an Autopilot user needs to perform simultaneously?
First is watching the car's surroundings, the traffic around the vehicle.
Second is watching and trying to understand software behavior in those constantly changing traffic situations.
No average Joe, college kid, grandma or grandpa is capable of focusing on two things at the same time in constant life and death environment.
Airplane pilots are not average Joes and they are constantly trained to understand flying Autopilot software limitations and capabilities in a lot less stressful and busy traffic environments, two of their main job requirements being discipline and responsibility. That is not the case with the average driver on the road.
I think OP is right with what the ultimate question should be.
Let's agree that a normal driver without autopilot (ND) is mostly attentive, with occasional attention lapses (frequency depending on the individual).
That same normal driver according to MIT, is less attentive when using an autopilot system - let's call this autopilot distraction (AD).
However, the Autopilot system, despite its weaknesses, likely offers some extra safety benefit (ASB) - especially if it can somewhat counteract the attention lapses that a normal driver would have.
So the question becomes, does the autopilot's marginal benefit outweigh the autopilot distraction?
Is: ND > (ND - AD + ASB)?
However, determining this would be difficult without real-world testing. In the real world, the factor which matters most is whether accidents happen (kind of the Overall Survival of this experiment) - which is why testing the real-world accident rate is important - and is ultimately the important question.
Autopilot creates a false sense of safety, as long as the people that payed for it and are eventually using it, are (by their own standards that made them buy it) not good at driving and not interested to get better at it.
But the fallacy stands in the numbers where Autopilot “safety report” is presented by Tesla and compared to average drivers performances.
Why a fallacy? Because the human driver drives everywhere, at any time, in any weather conditions and on all drivable roads. The Autopilot goes on and off based on how drivable the environment is by the Autopilot system detection done by the sensors involved. In addition to that, up to this point, almost all of its errors where caught and corrected by its users, so no one could actually estimate what would happen if Autopilot owners would let the software do the driving for 100%, same thing the humans do.
Also, once disconnected from the driving system (feet off the pedals and hands off the steering wheel) the driver would need up to 20 seconds (or even more) to reconnect and fully understand what the car does and what the traffic around is like. That is a recipe for disaster while every second the situation changes inside and outside the car.
The autopilot system, including the inattentive driver, is the system currently. We don't need to test what happens if ONLY the software drivers, that is not is what happening.
Based on my own observation, Tesla drivers, despite being supposedly inattentive, catch a fair number of errors in autopilot. So they are part of the system.
That factor (human involvement, even if imperfect) coupled with the overall safety of the tesla approach (which includes safety benefits in a whole range of areas) may mean that despite this supposed "expose" of the "inattentive" driver the system is safer overall.
One thing folks "exposing" tesla drivers seem to assume is that non-tesla drivers are very good drivers. They are not. It's takes minutes looking into cars to see this. I was just next to a non-tesla road rager who nearly caused three accidents trying to get at this truck.
If places like MIT did some more actual studies on system effectiveness I'd be REALLY curious at fatality rates etc for folks driving Teslas in a normal way, yes, in driving in ANY kind of weather.
Same thing with emergency vehicle accidents which made the news. How many first responder fatalities were caused by Tesla's vs non Tesla vehicle? It could turn out that many / most are caused by inattentive gas powered no auto-pilot cars that are the ones actually killing first responders.
I was tempted to not reply, as some of what you wrote feels like it's verging into axe-to-grind / genuinely crazy / TSLAQ territory, but here goes...
> Autopilot creates a false sense of safety, as long as the people that payed for it and are eventually using it, are (by their own standards that made them buy it) not good at driving and not interested to get better at it.
Or... there are people that are good attentive drivers who buy it as a driver aid - to minimise tiredness on long journeys?
> But the fallacy stands in the numbers where Autopilot “safety report” is presented by Tesla and compared to average drivers performances.
Yes, the methodology of the safety report is probably flawed, but that's a totally different subject.
> Also, once disconnected from the driving system (feet off the pedals and hands off the steering wheel)
...which isn't how Autopilot currently works - you are asked to maintain contact with the steering wheel and have to prove it by providing torque on the wheel every few seconds. (Yes,
> the driver would need up to 20 seconds (or even more) to reconnect and fully understand what the car does and what the traffic around is like. That is a recipe for disaster while every second the situation changes inside and outside the car.
...really, just... what?
a) where does this (frankly ludicrous) 20 seconds statistic come from?
b) you're not accounting for (the many?) people who might not be actively driving when Autopilot is functioning (that's the point, of course) but are still watching the road, mirrors, maintaining situational awareness, etc.
This research itself is still valuable, as it proves that drivers become irresponsible with autopilot turned on. I don't get why you connect this to the safety of Tesla vehicles, or maybe I get the reason, but it's unspeakable.
Also would a single water molecule be wet? Or is it group of water molecules that are wet? "Water is wet" folks should clarify as it definitely doesn't seem water would always be wet.
This is why a Comma.ai style system putting a camera facing the driver to make sure they are paying attention and awake is essential. Even ignoring self-driving a big number of accidents happen when people fall asleep at the wheel.
I’m not sure whats stopping them. It can be done locally to avoid privacy concerns.
It also has better UX than the weird wheel touch sensors on some vehicles where you have to be touching the wheel at all times when activated (I haven’t decided if that make sense as a requirement, leaning towards no).
the goal is no wheel , just set a destination and put your seatbelt . From that perspective it would make sense to put least amount of effort on driver monitoring.
That's like saying if the eventual goal is realistic telepresence through BCI, we should just go ahead and remove the seatbelts to quit wasting effort on things that won't be in the final vision.
You can't set destination with buses, also they usually don't have seatbelts. I have no idea where you are finding any similarity here. If anything it would be similar to an Uber.
The Model 3 has an interior camera above the rear-view mirror. The camera is not accessible via dashcam, and the owner's manual states that Tesla may be able to access the footage in the event of a crash.
When academic studies are dedicated to trivial stuff that is either obvious to an unscientific mind (saying this to calm you down) or would be easily debunked in another study, and worse, from an institution inextricably linked to science, is there any wonder that when they come out and say "masks are safe" many unscientific minds (doubling down to still make you feel good) don't give a hoot?
But I guess the days when academic study (time, funds, energies, raw intellect) was spent on more pressing issues are behind us and we'd have to deal with these types of studies going forward. I'm so looking forward to the MIT study that finds that most of HN comments are not read.
Of course they do, that is the point of AP. The question that matters is if the drivers are safer, to themselves and others, than they would be without AP. From what I have read this is undoubtedly true.
i went through the article .. read the paper it was based on ... saw the data they sited .... saw the conclusion they reached ... was severely worried of the state of academia and what qualifies as "research"
>> the only significant conclusion this paper had was a driver was more than 22% likely to look at the "down and center stack" when on AP
>> the paper was based on data found on this https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8751968 paper author by none other than my favourite podcaster D Lex Friedman . the study is conducted on 25 cars all either model S/X from 2016-2019 AKA pre fsd hardware and driver monitoring.
>> now tesla has a big screen on the center console and i would find it natural to see the navigation when im not driving. BUT all other aspects of driving were not that far from normal ... turns out people do all sorts of dumb stuff with or without AP
>> this took me less than 15 mins of googling and i was baffled by how something so stupid could go past even the most bare bone peer review . and then i found about "The Advanced Vehicle Technology Consortium (AVT)"https://agelab.mit.edu/avt the sponsor of some of the co-authors . Which curiously has major car companies and suppliers listed as partners except for tesla . i dont have the inside info on how money changes hands in academia ... but the whole thing looks pretty bad
personally i am biased towards Tesla (aka tesla fanboy) . But i feel there is enough wrong here to justify my case that this was a academia sponsored hit piece not to different from climate change deniers or tobacco companies.
Your comment on the AVT... I have no idea, or no horse in the race, but Tesla is also famously averse to avoiding or pushing back against industry bodies, up to and including the NTSB (I know that's not an "industry body"), but I think there's more to be confirmed there before we think "legacy auto trying to beat down upstart". Was Tesla invited to the Consortium?
So you have no issue with the sample size being so small and exclusively comming from older models of Tesla's s and X lineup . Making a claim about Tesla as a whole today.
the sample size of the study which the paper was originally based on only had 25 teslas (model s and x from 2016-19 era). Before jumping into the analysis or the methods or techniques used to parse the data. I think it is important to acknowledge that the sample size is hilariously small and represents a very small % of teslas current AP harware software stack.
It's either that or they have to be hyper-attentive, constantly on the ready to catch a dumb mistake that the autopilot might make, which would be more stressful than just driving it yourself.
"Researchers studying glance data from 290 human-initiated Autopilot disengagement epochs found drivers may become inattentive when using partially automated driving systems."
Next up, researchers discover that people like ice cream.
I think your brain just turns off since it doesn't have to manage the task anymore. I mean keeping your brain engaged, for example when your spouse or someone says don't be a backseat driver is stressful and you really have no control over it. So I imagine if autopilot is good enough I would definitely relax. The issue with that is you have to be quick enough intervene if the car goes off the rails.
Mercedes and other added such functions from beginning , because the risk is obvious. Tesla deliberately didn’t use them, to deliver a false freedom during driving . This is not a technical glitch , it’s marketing and cost saving vs. safety
people complain about, for example, people looking at the road slightly less often when using FSD. but people are out to lunch when i point out that i see every other driver on the road craning their neck over a smartphone. people point out that FSD crashed into things. but they are out to lunch when i point out that people crash into a hundred things every day because they are looking at their smart phones, doing their makeup or drinking alcohol. its just a flaccid argument that people are being endangered because they might misinterpret the unmistakable warnings and reminders in teslas self driving system, thinking it could do more than it does. when i can go to an average american bar at last call and not see a swarm of people stumbling into their cars -- or when i can look at other drivers and see 1/4 of them staring at their phones rather than 1/3 -- then i might worry about it. if you have a shred of intellectual honesty, you will campaign against things that actually endanger drivers rather than something that not only is relatively safe but gets safer with every year and stands to save countless lives if it works.
People using smartphones while driving are absolutely distracted. Whether they think they are capable of managing that distraction (and how well that perception actually maps to reality), the distraction is understood and explicit.
In contrast, one of the challenges with FSD is that the driver often acts as though there's no distraction at all, and that their inattention to the road (apropos of detecting 'attentiveness') is a non-issue "because the car is driving and paying attention".
That's what this study is about - that markers that Tesla and other manufacturers are using to measure attentiveness may not be particularly accurate.
there is no study, including this one, that supports what you are saying. one of the challenges is that the driver often, "often" where is this often coming from? do you sit in with drivers and watch them? they often do this. you are completely making that up.
lex fridman, who is directly involved in this study, has said that people using FSD are actually more attentive when the car is driving itself. he said it on one of his recent podcasts. this is why "water is wet" is so unbelievably annoying. the truth gets stamped out because people want to believe their own rhetoric rather than meticulously confirm their beliefs with science. this study is shoddy as hell but it aligns with what tesla detractors want to believe so it goes totally unchallenged.
This sounds like risk compensation[1]. Improved driver assist makes people feel safer, and thus they pay less attention. I don't know if that research is actually sound, but it sounds plausible.
That's the goal of autonomous vehicles. Not autopilot. Surprisingly, not "full self driving" either. In both of those you have to be fully alert because the car can do something very dumb any moment.
FSD and autopilot on highways are still bad enough that sober people are mostly going to be paying attention. I think this approach is doomed though, there is going to be a dangerous time where it's too good to pay sustained attention but not good enough that you don't have to pay attention. the way Cruise and Waymo are doing it seems much much safer.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 241 ms ] threadhttps://www.debate.org/opinions/is-water-wet
Precisely. I said this before and now this study supports my previous points even further [0]. Using the wheel to monitor driver attention is not even close to good enough to determine if the driver is paying attention or not. Comma.ai seems to be able to implement eye-tracking for their driver monitoring system.
I'm quite surprised that Tesla continues to lack such a system to monitor the drivers eyes on the road when they are behind the wheel especially when the user is using autopilot or not.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28208921
You're this close to getting my point
I'm not sure if it's documented anywhere but I think the 2021 Tesla models do this [1]. That said, I'm not sure if this is enough - this is the same issue Google faced which led them to believe they had to go L4 of bust.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/27/22457430/tesla-in-car-cam...
How is a regular Joe supposed to know?
But I think we all know this problem hasn't materialized in crash data, because if it did, that's what we'd be talking about. Instead it's just more FUD about the names of features, some of which are explicitly not yet delivered.
It absolutely did.
Why we're not talking about it is another issue.
https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2020/02/25/ntsb-teslas-a...
The lack of that data is why, despite years, hundreds of thousands of vehicles, and millions upon millions of miles driven, people are still blaming the names of features.
It's time to move on. Over 100 people die in the US per day in traffic accidents. How many years need to pass before a handful of anecdotes and speculation doesn't pass as valid criticism?
There is statistics, and then there is addressing obvious design flaws. The latter is worth doing a lot more than the former.
The answer is yes [1].
>It's time to move on
That time will be when the self-driving cars can safely elf-drive -- which is not now.
[1]https://www.natlawreview.com/article/dangers-driverless-cars
Natlawreview links to Carsurance which links to https://www.govtech.com/fs/first-driverless-car-crash-study-...
I'm not the one making a claim that self-driving cars are safer. The burden of proof is on whoever does.
https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
Here are your damning statistics: self-driving cars have a higher rate of accidents and fatalities per mile driven than human-driven cars [1].
[1]https://www.natlawreview.com/article/dangers-driverless-cars
Because before regulators told them to fix it, Tesla believed the driver only needed to be checked on every _quarter hour_.
Perhaps we shouldn't expect that of people? If you've taken the vast burden of driving off their minds, we should accept that human nature means they'll stop paying attention to driving.
That, however, explicitly implies that automation needs to be much better before it can be used.
You are surprised for no cause. Tesla uses exactly that system.
https://www.notateslaapp.com/software-updates/version/2021.4...
https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/565/tesla-rolling-out-driv...
I was expecting this to be more advanced than Comma.ai, but after seeing this, I'm even more disappointed with Tesla. What if the driver is using autopilot when they are driving at night? It appears that there is no night vision in the car cabin cameras of this system. [0]
That means that it can't determine the driver's attentiveness when you are driving in the night; the most dangerous time to drive. Therefore, this system is unreliable and very dangerous and it already can be fooled. I'm afraid that this implementation is still not good or safe enough to use.
[0] https://insideevs.com/news/529788/tesla-driver-monitoring-ca...
not sure what that has to do with me explaining that the system the commenter was requesting is in fact implemented.
The system that you showed to me ‘as evidence’ may qualify as ‘basic eye tracking’ but it does not qualify as ‘safe’ when the tester in the video not only tricked it easily (just like the wheel torque tricks) but it can’t track the drivers attention at night; most dangerous time to drive, even with autopilot or FSD on.
Once again, I’m surprised that this so-called driver monitoring system came from Tesla given that it is still unreliable.
Parent comment's purely unsubstantiated hypothesizing?
Ask them, or find out yourself. The search engine is that way.
I will respond with sources to claims made with sources.
>We can test this hypothesis by looking at fatalities per mile driven, aaaaaaaand humans are still better drivers at this point.
What makes you think humans are better based on fatalities per mile driven? Is that just a guess or do you have any sources?
As I said, I respond with sources to comments that cite theirs.
All you can really say is that you _feel_ more attentive.
Because Tesla requires people to do that, as there are no guarantees that the autopilot won't [1].
[1] https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2020/02/25/ntsb-teslas-a...
This is pure speculation, but it feels like humans have a very robust model to determine when something is about to go wrong (i.e. this car is about to crash into an obstacle). If it takes less attention to determine that the car steers correctly as opposed to steering the car, this would leave more attention available to, for example, monitor other cars behavior.
Maybe other people aren’t like that, but I certainly am. I find myself wishing there was an FSD-like depiction of what’s going on in the driver’s brain, to answer the “you _are_ planning to stop eventually, right?” question.
There is a lot of research explaining why it's true, particularly when it comes to piloting airplanes.
The TL;DR is that doing something with your hands, involving touch, engages more of your brain.
>This is pure speculation, but it feels like humans have a very robust model to determine when something is about to go wrong
Yes, this is pure speculation, and also incorrect.
Again, if you were to look things up instead of speculating, you'd quickly find plenty of information.
Knowing where the tires are going is also important, like in that case where a Tesla accelerated into a highway divider.
Yup. Legacy. Humans are legacy equipment, required up until very recently. Constant forward-looking may seem beneficial since most things come at you from the front. You might think they are the most important class of problems because you're forced to focus on them constantly.
However, when you're on the 9's tail of problems you encounter on the road, very few of them are things approaching you from the front. Many of them are unexpected things on your sides, rears, and blind spot.
The implication of alot of these comments that assisted drivers HAVE to pay full attention to all minutae of driving just as if they were driving is really debased from the reality of self-driving i experience.
In terms of statistics right now AP is 4x safer than average human per mile travelled.
>very few of them are things approaching you from the front.
Yeah, most of them are stationary, like that highway divider that Tesla's autopilot crashed into, killing the driver.
Most things are approaching you from the front in driver's frame of reference.
And the autopilot still sucks at detecting them.
The driver was doing 68 in a 55 around a corner while playing "Three Kingdoms" on his phone and crashed 10 seconds after engaging autopilot (not FSD).
Using that as your basis of reasoning about AP safety is self-delusion. Watch some FSD beta 10 videos.
Irresponsible driving is irresponsible driving.
Because the profile of the average autopilot useris: poor, overworked, young, inexperienced driver, driving a 10 year old Honda civic without any active safety features?
Yeah, that's a fair comparison.
Also, citation needed.
My father has driven through a switchback mountain path without markings, during hailstorm, and wasn't always sober. On a car that has hasn't seen a mechanic in years.
Autopilot doesn't even work in those conditions, it gets all it's miles on a straight highway in good weather.
You play the game on easy mode, you get a better score.
Attempting to characterize the system through describing its exceptions is not really accurate.
The question isn’t if people reading a book are capable of using auto pilot safely, the question is if people can supervise level 3 self driving systems or if they need to evaluated assuming generally inattentive drivers.
Counterintuitively, the less people have been paying attention when AP is engaged the closer it is to being a level 4 system. Aka if people are catching 90% of potentially fatal mistakes then in level 4 it would be 10x as deadly. Alternatively, if their catching 10% of potentially fatal mistakes it would be almost as safe as a level 4 system.
Finally someone in the thread points out that we are pretending that the agreement "you are responsible for intervening at a moments' notice to avoid a crash" is anything but a cover-your-ass legal fiction. This is like allowing an airline to pass off responsibility for engine failure to it's customer.
It should not be legally valid unless we can prove that this method actually works. It's not just the driver's life at stake, it's also pedestrians and other people around them that did not get a 'choice'
Visual behavior pattern changes are a microbenchmark that may not even be measuring attention at all. Regardless, the pattern changes don't seem to increase crash risk as compared to not using Autopilot in any study that I'm aware of.
If there is data supporting a claim that Autopilot actually increases crashes, I would be curious to see it. "A Tesla crashed on Autopilot once" is just an anecdote; humans crash cars constantly, and the question is whether Autopilot results in greater or fewer crashes.
Source please.
Also a comparison with autopilot-off miles in Teslas would be necessary here to control for Tesla owners not being representative of average driver in the US.
Poor young overworked mininum wage job drivers aren't driving Teslas.
Nor is Tesla with autopilot off comparable to 1999 Honda Civic in terms of safety.
More food for thought https://www.herrmanandherrman.com/blog/what-does-new-data-re...
Also a comparison with autopilot-off miles in Teslas would be necessary here to control for Tesla owners not being representative of average driver in the US.
Luckily, they also release crash rates for Autopilot-off miles, as per your desire; Autopilot-on beats Autopilot-off by about 2x. Disabling all active safety features is of course even worse, losing to Autopilot by roughly 4x — although still beating the national average handily, since as you hypothesized, Tesla cars and drivers tend to not be similar to 1999 Honda cars and drivers.
Quarter-by-quarter breakdowns: https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
You then argue that self-assessment is inaccurate. You're right, but it just doesn't seem relevant.
On fully rested, deep sleep days, I can drop the tetronimoes at 1.5 to 1.6 pieces per second (pps), while, sleep deprived states (4-5 hours), no matter how hard I try (and it "feels" like I'm performing very fast) drops to 1.2-1.3 pps.
There's also a bit of a qualitative measure on how difficult it was to sustain focus for the 1 minute to 1.5 minutes that gives me an idea of my ability to focus and perform.
One thing that I find interesting is how i can see the differences in my performance through the day, as i hit a lull in the afternoon, and come back in the early evening.
This honestly sounds exactly why it's a bad thing. It's not just cars to worry about ahead of you.
Have you never driven anywhere that people didn't just spontaneously cross the road outside of a crosswalk? Especially at night? Not wearing anything remotely reflective or easy to see?
I've seen this happen on the freeway too. Guy wearing beige/dark green jacket, tan pants who should not have been there, yet was being dangerous to any drivers out on the road. Broad daylight. If I hadn't been looking ahead I would've missed him and at least thankfully in my scenario he didn't enter my lane.
While it's extremely important to (as my dad labeled it) "drive for other drivers" (as in, observe cars in your surroundings and anticipate any dumb actions they may make), that does not mean you should take focus off everything else, not least of which things you'd see by "staring forward" as much as possible.
If I had something like autopilot my car might've stopped like theirs did.
Honestly that's a terrible argument.
We haven't reached any kind of semblance that Autopilot or similar systems are capable of that.
Not only that, but it's meant as a supplement; it's not one or the other. We're simply not there yet, and may never be.
Oh, I was not suggesting that AP would more intelligent overall than humans, rather the vision stack might (or might not) be more sensitive to such pedestrian/background contrast at night than human eyes, simply due to the sensory differences.
That should be the question.
"MIT study shows folks drive 5MPH faster with seatbelts on" - doesn't mean we should get rid of seatbelts if overall damage and accidents / injury rates are reduced.
Im serious - do the study. Put someone in a 6 hour drive or simulator for an SF to LA drive or something, one in a car with tesla's drivers aids one without. Then have something happen (sudden braking / someone cutting in front of you etc) on drive in half of the trips.
Who crashes? The "inattentive" tesla driver? Or the other driver.
Based on my own observation, there are drivers in regular cars texting, looking up directions, playing with their phone maybe for music? I've seen people putting on makeup, sitting at a light for 5 minutes on their phone (when it is green) etc. I've seen people drift out of their lanes crazily. These are folks in normal cars. I've seen folks speeding and swerving in and out of traffic, some without using blinkers etc.
The question you ask is completely different and thus, not brought into the article.
So if attentiveness is measured as “staring at the license plate in front of me”, my attentiveness went down. But I felt safer since I was looking hundreds of yards down the road for situations I might have to handle or avoid, at a longer timescale.
I do think that it is very easy for me to spend longer looking at a screen or button when the autopilot is driving for me, since there is no immediate penalty (lane line, rumble strips, etc) for looking away.
I've always had the opposite problem, if I'm not maintaining situational awareness to the horizon, I'll inevitably fall asleep after an hour or two out of sheer boredom. I prefer to drive long distances in manual-transmission vehicles (there's more to do!), and commercial vehicles with loads requiring careful management of engine RPM are even better. Those I can drive for 10-12 hours in a day without issue. I never saw myself as anything other than an ordinary driver.
In my case, a Tesla autopilot is the worst possible compromise. It removes enough attention requirements that it feels much harder to stay attentive, but without automating the process completely. Other people I've talked to that operate large pieces of mechanical equipment have often said similar things about automation that it's best to either be a) fully manual or b) fully automated for some duration of time.
I was taught to do this while driving. It was a basic lesson in "Driver's Ed".
Making it a habit though is a different thing. For me that was easier because it was one of the things that pro racers mentioned they did as well.
That is certainly a key to avoiding accidents. Others would be always keeping a safe distance between you and the cars in front of you and what's going on behind and around you.
I made a habit when I first started driving to always stay focused on the task of driving. I almost never turn on the radio or play music. That's because I want to hear what's going on around me.
The best advice I ever got was from a California Highway Patrol officer who told me "Drive like everyone is trying to crash into you".
Where I live now almost everywhere I drive it's on curvy two lane mountain roads. Most have a 55mph limit with curve signs as low as 25mph. We also have deer by the thousands here, and they forage at night. You really have to pay attention to just to stay on the road and not hit deer.
There is no way I'd trust a Tesla to drive me around here (or anywhere for that matter).
That advice (for cyclists) was also in one of Neal Stephenson's early novels, Zodiac... I've found it useful. Now I just get annoyed when drivers insist on yielding to pedestrians and cyclists when they don't need to, it would be faster if they didn't and they aren't blocking any other traffic. The driver feels like they've helped, I guess, but the pedestrians are not safer.
You have to compare the worst Tesla drivers to the worst drivers in regular vehicles. Average Tesla drivers to average drivers of regular vehicles, etc.
And I'm not sure a simulator is the best comparison.
Then, there's http://www.trb.org/Publications/Blurbs/171327.aspx, but I haven't given them my address. (https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/271664/1-s2.0-S000145751...)
I rode a commuter bus for years and saw the exact same thing you describe, and no one would seriously suggest 50-75% of drivers are (equivalently) drunk.
Or drunk driving isn’t as dangerous as previously thought.
Or there’s many more drunk drivers than previously thought.
I don’t necessarily agree with either of those, but the point is there are many possible explanations and we should be careful about jumping to conclusions.
A better way of refuting those claims is to find flaws in their methodology
Inebriated is much different. They are less likely to notice something in the first place because their senses are deadened. If they do notice, their full attention while intoxicated is much less as is their ability to rationally make decisions. There’s no way to un-distract if something gains.
With texting and driving there are other major daily hassles. A common scenario for me as I walk my dog is that I no longer assume a car will yield on a crosswalk - even the ones with a stop sign or a signal. May be the impact is that few people bike or walk? Or walk elsewhere like a trail or a park instead of sidewalk and neighborhoods? End of the day, it’s about what we want as a society. If we decide that people should be allowed to focus on their phone, we have to start redesigning the streets now.
Not just as a pedestrian, even as a driver I don’t assume I can go in green light anymore. People seem to miss red lights on the regular now
I'd also guess most people are not constantly on their phones as they are checking notifications/texts and that kind of thing, so you get more of an on-and-off effect rather than just being consistently drunk for the entire duration.
Not that it makes the practice any better, but it does seem like a complicating factor when trying to frame the problem in terms of drunk driving.
I think this ignores the fact that people can’t actually pay attention to more than one thing at a time, generally. Meaning, they aren’t simultaneously looking at their phone and being vigilant of “weirdness” That switching overhead from one focus to the other may be enough to delay reactions to cause accidents.
So while they’re not offline, the sensory input cycle is slowed enough to be much less useful.
Yep. About 10 years ago, I took a bus from Boston to Hartford and I spent most of my time looking down into cars along the highway.
Aside from drivers looking at their phones, I saw people block their entire field of view by unwrapping burgers and lifting them up to eat, fixing their clothing, makeup, etc.
I suppose you'd have to compare against only manual driving in good conditions to make a fair comparison. Not sure that data exists anywhere.
Shouldn't Tesla create that data - research the issue - before giving people autopilot?
Its findings were that drivers paid more attention before engagement and after engagement than when AP was engaged.
> That should be the question.
Why should that be the question? If the feature is dangerous, removing it will improve safety. If there are more dangerous features, we can remove those too.
In medicine there is a concept of measuring disease-oriented outcomes instead of patient-oriented outcomes, because it's easier to show an intervention affects the disease-oriented outcomes, and much harder to show a change in patient-oriented outcomes.
So for example, a disease-oriented ourcome for hip-replacement surgery would be "range of movement after 2 weeks", patient-oriented might be "can go up a flight of stairs"
The analogy here seems relevant.
That's bullshit.
I'm sure it's safe to assume both crash more than very attentive drivers, which is the only question that matters when it comes to Tesla's autopilot.
What you're really asking is "who'd you rather have smash into you, someone in a Tesla using autopilot, or someone texting on their phone while driving?
No. That is NOT the question... because... Autopilot and FSD software suite users are required to remain attentive and ready to intervene in case o a software failure (often seen in many YouTube videos). But because they obviously, become inattentive, Autopilot usage is actually much more dangerous than having the drivers drive their cars by themselves.
It creates complacency because the moment a driver physically removes feet from the pedals and hands from the steering wheel, his or her mind cannot maintain focus on two things at the same time.
What are those two things an Autopilot user needs to perform simultaneously? First is watching the car's surroundings, the traffic around the vehicle. Second is watching and trying to understand software behavior in those constantly changing traffic situations.
No average Joe, college kid, grandma or grandpa is capable of focusing on two things at the same time in constant life and death environment.
Airplane pilots are not average Joes and they are constantly trained to understand flying Autopilot software limitations and capabilities in a lot less stressful and busy traffic environments, two of their main job requirements being discipline and responsibility. That is not the case with the average driver on the road.
Let's agree that a normal driver without autopilot (ND) is mostly attentive, with occasional attention lapses (frequency depending on the individual).
That same normal driver according to MIT, is less attentive when using an autopilot system - let's call this autopilot distraction (AD).
However, the Autopilot system, despite its weaknesses, likely offers some extra safety benefit (ASB) - especially if it can somewhat counteract the attention lapses that a normal driver would have.
So the question becomes, does the autopilot's marginal benefit outweigh the autopilot distraction?
Is: ND > (ND - AD + ASB)?
However, determining this would be difficult without real-world testing. In the real world, the factor which matters most is whether accidents happen (kind of the Overall Survival of this experiment) - which is why testing the real-world accident rate is important - and is ultimately the important question.
But the fallacy stands in the numbers where Autopilot “safety report” is presented by Tesla and compared to average drivers performances.
Why a fallacy? Because the human driver drives everywhere, at any time, in any weather conditions and on all drivable roads. The Autopilot goes on and off based on how drivable the environment is by the Autopilot system detection done by the sensors involved. In addition to that, up to this point, almost all of its errors where caught and corrected by its users, so no one could actually estimate what would happen if Autopilot owners would let the software do the driving for 100%, same thing the humans do.
Also, once disconnected from the driving system (feet off the pedals and hands off the steering wheel) the driver would need up to 20 seconds (or even more) to reconnect and fully understand what the car does and what the traffic around is like. That is a recipe for disaster while every second the situation changes inside and outside the car.
Based on my own observation, Tesla drivers, despite being supposedly inattentive, catch a fair number of errors in autopilot. So they are part of the system.
That factor (human involvement, even if imperfect) coupled with the overall safety of the tesla approach (which includes safety benefits in a whole range of areas) may mean that despite this supposed "expose" of the "inattentive" driver the system is safer overall.
One thing folks "exposing" tesla drivers seem to assume is that non-tesla drivers are very good drivers. They are not. It's takes minutes looking into cars to see this. I was just next to a non-tesla road rager who nearly caused three accidents trying to get at this truck.
If places like MIT did some more actual studies on system effectiveness I'd be REALLY curious at fatality rates etc for folks driving Teslas in a normal way, yes, in driving in ANY kind of weather.
Same thing with emergency vehicle accidents which made the news. How many first responder fatalities were caused by Tesla's vs non Tesla vehicle? It could turn out that many / most are caused by inattentive gas powered no auto-pilot cars that are the ones actually killing first responders.
> Autopilot creates a false sense of safety, as long as the people that payed for it and are eventually using it, are (by their own standards that made them buy it) not good at driving and not interested to get better at it.
Or... there are people that are good attentive drivers who buy it as a driver aid - to minimise tiredness on long journeys?
> But the fallacy stands in the numbers where Autopilot “safety report” is presented by Tesla and compared to average drivers performances.
Yes, the methodology of the safety report is probably flawed, but that's a totally different subject.
> Also, once disconnected from the driving system (feet off the pedals and hands off the steering wheel)
...which isn't how Autopilot currently works - you are asked to maintain contact with the steering wheel and have to prove it by providing torque on the wheel every few seconds. (Yes,
> the driver would need up to 20 seconds (or even more) to reconnect and fully understand what the car does and what the traffic around is like. That is a recipe for disaster while every second the situation changes inside and outside the car.
...really, just... what?
a) where does this (frankly ludicrous) 20 seconds statistic come from? b) you're not accounting for (the many?) people who might not be actively driving when Autopilot is functioning (that's the point, of course) but are still watching the road, mirrors, maintaining situational awareness, etc.
LOL. Of course they are!
I’m not sure whats stopping them. It can be done locally to avoid privacy concerns.
It also has better UX than the weird wheel touch sensors on some vehicles where you have to be touching the wheel at all times when activated (I haven’t decided if that make sense as a requirement, leaning towards no).
Cars already come with microphones for voice commands.
Like I said it could be local and isolated.
But I guess the days when academic study (time, funds, energies, raw intellect) was spent on more pressing issues are behind us and we'd have to deal with these types of studies going forward. I'm so looking forward to the MIT study that finds that most of HN comments are not read.
>> the only significant conclusion this paper had was a driver was more than 22% likely to look at the "down and center stack" when on AP
>> the paper was based on data found on this https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8751968 paper author by none other than my favourite podcaster D Lex Friedman . the study is conducted on 25 cars all either model S/X from 2016-2019 AKA pre fsd hardware and driver monitoring.
>> now tesla has a big screen on the center console and i would find it natural to see the navigation when im not driving. BUT all other aspects of driving were not that far from normal ... turns out people do all sorts of dumb stuff with or without AP
>> this took me less than 15 mins of googling and i was baffled by how something so stupid could go past even the most bare bone peer review . and then i found about "The Advanced Vehicle Technology Consortium (AVT)"https://agelab.mit.edu/avt the sponsor of some of the co-authors . Which curiously has major car companies and suppliers listed as partners except for tesla . i dont have the inside info on how money changes hands in academia ... but the whole thing looks pretty bad
personally i am biased towards Tesla (aka tesla fanboy) . But i feel there is enough wrong here to justify my case that this was a academia sponsored hit piece not to different from climate change deniers or tobacco companies.
Next up, researchers discover that people like ice cream.
In contrast, one of the challenges with FSD is that the driver often acts as though there's no distraction at all, and that their inattention to the road (apropos of detecting 'attentiveness') is a non-issue "because the car is driving and paying attention".
That's what this study is about - that markers that Tesla and other manufacturers are using to measure attentiveness may not be particularly accurate.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation
FSD and autopilot on highways are still bad enough that sober people are mostly going to be paying attention. I think this approach is doomed though, there is going to be a dangerous time where it's too good to pay sustained attention but not good enough that you don't have to pay attention. the way Cruise and Waymo are doing it seems much much safer.