Tell HN: Tesla rear-ended me on autopilot, no one will investigate
Yesterday I was stopped at a red light on a highway and a Tesla Model S rear ended me at high speed, twice! There were two impacts somehow. It was a 4-car pileup and my car was destroyed.
The driver said she was using Autopilot, that an OTA update had had a problem earlier in the day, and that she had actually had the same kind of collision on Autopilot previously!
I talked with the NTSB who said that they won't investigate because no one was killed.
I talked with the NHTSA who said that they can't take a complaint: only the driver can file a complaint and they will only investigate if they "see a trend".
This seems like a serious issue that someone should be looking at. Does anyone have any idea about how to get this actually investigated to see if it was another Autopilot failure?
416 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 281 ms ] threadLook at what it took to get acknowledgement that Pintos had a problem.
"You can see here how" a journalist is choosing to investigate a possibly promising lead while their profession continues to be misunderstood.
Not like they could get information from OP, and then make a FOIA request of the two departments OP mentioned to identify similar reports and write the facts up in an article for us to read, understand and decide for ourselves if it's an issue. That's good journalism: give the facts and let the public make opinions, not the current system which gives the opinions and let the public make up the facts. Just like this post, deciding it's a wide spread issue and the comments agreeing it is without any evidence.
And there is almost never any follow-up on this stuff.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/26/tesla_labor_law/
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Tesla has been ordered to correct its unlawful labor practices, and its supremo Elon Musk must delete a related tweet from three years ago.
....
The decision also directs self-styled "Technoking" Musk to delete a May 20, 2018 tweet.
> Here is the tweet BTW:
"Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union. Could do so tmrw if they wanted. But why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing? Our safety record is 2X better than when plant was UAW & everybody already gets healthcare."
The ruling directs the vehicle maker to offer to rehire plaintiff and former employee Richard Ortiz and pay him lost wages, and to strike unlawful disciplinary information from the record of both Ortiz and another employee, Jose Moran.
---
The issue is the follow-up and background doesn't get covered.
In their defense, Telsa points out that Ortiz was fired for dishonesty and lying to an investigator. That being a union supporter was not related (they claim) and that the person making the decision to fire Ortiz was ALSO a union supporter and they consistently fired folks for dishonesty. I'm not saying this is accurate, but it gets ZERO coverage.
Employees had taken Pratt's workday (HR type system) photo from a work/business sytem to use it to harass Pratt (claimed Pratt). The NLRB said this shouldn't be investigated but should be "a discussion between two employees". Who knows what's true, but the constant one sided stories are BORING. And many employees DO put things on company systems and DO expect company to avoid having others take them and use them in facebook and other posts without their permission.
So she continued to use it? That's insane.
It's worrying that there are tons of videos on YouTube reviewing Tesla's Autopilot and FSD where the cars do something incredibly scary and dangerous, and the drivers just laugh it off, go "well, it's a beta!" and continue using it instead of turning off the feature that almost got them into a car accident. I don't want to share the road with drivers who think dangerous driving is a funny game.
Still pretty frustrated nobody has regulated “self driving” cars off the market yet. If you’re testing it with a driver and a copilot that’s fine, but putting it in the hands of customers and using “it’s a beta” to hide behind should not be legal.
Yes, it's a bit distressing having myself and the people I care about be treated as NPCs to some Tesla owners as they beta test their new toys on public roadways.
Sooner or later, these technologies are either public-ready or they aren't. If Tesla autopilot isn't public-ready, I agree it shouldn't be on the road, but I suddenly realize I have no idea by what criteria the system was cleared for public-access roads.
To me, that'd just mean one company, the one with the beta label, has higher standards.
I said this pre-COVID, and COVID has now cemented this idea, we will not accept any level of risk at all... None.
If it is not perfectly safe everything should be banned, locked down, or otherwise prohibited by law
I fault Tesla for having a mess of badly named options, and for putting beta stuff out on the roads for sure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs0iwz3NEC0&t=2s
The fact that you promote this absolute recklessness and demand users turn off safety features that may, net net save lives is depressing.
Finally, folks get very confused between things like autopilot and other features (autosteer beta with FSD visualization) etc. I think some teslas now even show a message warning that cruise control will not brake in some cases? Anyone have that.
I've been following the unintended acceleration claims around tesla's as well. Most seem pretty bogus.
For what its worth here is data we currently have from Tesla:
"In the 2nd quarter, we recorded one crash for every 4.41 million miles driven in which drivers were using Autopilot technology (Autosteer and active safety features). For drivers who were not using Autopilot technology (no Autosteer and active safety features), we recorded one crash for every 1.2 million miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 484,000 miles."
So you want to go to a 10x increase in crashes. (1 per 484 vs 1 per 4M). I realize this is nt one to one, but even outside of this we are seeing maybe a 2x improvement (if your normalize for road conditions etc).
Nission Maxima had something like 68 deaths per million registered vehicle years. Will be interesting to see how this comes out for Teslas.
Tesla is not being transparent enough with their data for us to know anything.
My expectation would be that Suburu WRX / Infinit Q50 / Elantra GT type drivers are crashing more than folks using autopilot? Maybe ban them first?
Anyways, we should in a few years get some NHTSA data on this, though there is some speculation that given their approach towards tesla if its possible they will delay it and stop updating vehicle model statistics if its favorable towards Tesla.
https://medium.com/@MidwesternHedgi/teslas-driver-fatality-r...
IIHS reports are publicly available [1] and the numbers there don't match what's in the article at all. Large/very large luxury vehicles have an overall fatality rate of 16-21, ranging from 0 to 60 depending on model. The overall average for all vehicles is 36. The Audi A6 for example, is reported as having 0 fatalities in the article, while in the report the actual number is 16.
The other source used, tesladeaths.com, lists a ton of accidents where AP was not deemed responsible. It actually states the real number if you pay attention - 10 confirmed deaths in the lifetime of Tesla as of 2021 - yet somehow the article claims 11 deaths up to 2016.
[1] https://www.iihs.org/api/datastoredocument/status-report/pdf...
What people can credibly claim, because Tesla's stats are entirely loaded and biased, is that any claim AP is safer than humans is just that, a claim. Because AP will (usually) disengage in situations where it won't do well, something humans can't.
The closest you could come (maybe, who knows, because Tesla hordes the raw data like Gollum, despite their "commitment to corporate transparency") is:
"In optimal and safe driving conditions, AP may be safer than human drivers, and in less optimal conditions, uh, we don't know, because it turns off. And we won't count those miles against AP."
Tesla should actually, if they have the courage of their convictions, show how many miles are driven where AP/FSD would refuse to engage.
Do you know that, or do you suspect that?
> how many miles are driven where AP/FSD would refuse to engage
I've used FSD for the vast majority of the nearly 40k miles on my 2017 Tesla model S. Highways, boulevards, side streets, even dirt roads on occasion.
It's a powerful but subtle tool. Used correctly, I have absolutely no doubt that has made my driving experience safer and less stressful.
It definitely requires an engaged, alert driver.
Where I suspect you and I agree is the impact of Musk's language and claims around the technology.
If he would fully shut the hell up about it, I think it's quite likely that there would be way less ill will toward the product.
I realize that may still, to some, be "suspect", not "known", so yes, if you're asking, "Is there public or leaked internal documentation saying 'we realize these stats are misleading and don't care'", then no, there's not.
And this is actually quite intriguing: even if Tesla was 10x safer, it would be extremely difficult for them to prove it. Because they'd have to do a multi-year feature freeze on Autopilot etc. while collecting data.
See in total, Tesla has sold around 2 million cars. Comparable cars have a fatal accident rate of around 10 per 1 million vehicle years. So the target for Tesla with the current number of cars is to have less than 2 fatalities per year, on average. To show with statistical significance that you have achieved that, you would need data for around 5 years without doing any changes. Maybe only 3 or 4 years given that the number of Tesla's keeps increasing, but still.
Really, it's only when you're doing 10 million cars per year, like Volkswagen or Toyota, that you can make statistically meaningful statements about safety while also updating your car's software frequently.
FSD is something people are _encouraged_ to use, not _discourage_.
This is an entirely disingenuous take.
And Tesla's stats have been, _repeatedly_, shown to be entirely disingenuous.
Human drivers don't have a "disengage" mode, other than pulling off the road, when conditions are "suboptimal". AP disengages. FSD disengages. And suboptimal conditions are, surprise, surprise, the conditions in which more incidents occur. So the whole "AP is safer because when it's safe to use AP it's safer" circuituous reasoning, and every stat Tesla publishes, while withholding as much information from the public as it can (while touting their "corporate transparency is a core value" spiel), should safely be thrown in the trash.
In my experience, that warning about not braking occurs when you are in TACC mode but are pressing on the accelerator to go temporarily faster than the set speed.
Fortunately, removal of radar will reduce the frequency of phantom braking, so hopefully this habit will fade.
So they must wait until lots of people get killed by autopilot / FSD in order for your incident (and many others) to be investigated?
The scary thing is that it is beta quality software on safety critical systems and not only the drivers know it, they use it as an excuse to cover them not paying attention on the road. Was driver monitoring even switched on at the time?
As I have said before, this software without proper driver monitoring and autopilot / FSD turned on puts the driver and many others on the road at risk.
At this point, this is more like Teslas on LSD rather than FSD judging from the bugs from many YouTube videos and social media posts of all of this.
Oh dear.
The entire NTSB (which covers trains, planes and automobiles) has 400 employees. They only get pulled into fatal accidents because they only have that much manpower.
And God forbid if they post a dashcam video to YouTube. Then they'll get hit with comments like this with a sincere straight face:
> "FSD didn't try to kill you. More like you're trying to get FSD killed by publishing this video."
Well its proving to be a great excuse when she runs into people with her car. Sounds like a win for her
Or she just lied to deflect blame for her clearly at-fault collision. I genuinely don't understand why this story is getting so much play here. It's like people read "Tesla" and completely lose their mind.
Literally thousands of these accidents occur every day. This is a routine a collision as one can imagine, and there is basically zero evidence for a system failure here at all. It's One Unreliable Anecdote. And it's generated 300+ comments and counting? Come on HN, do better.
To go after Tesla for defective FSD over any individual accident takes a litigant who is more concerned with making a point and/or harming Tesla than cost effectiveness.
They have a process: claims adjuster looks at the police report, looks at the wreckage, proposes a payment, closes the file. Anything else would be extra work on their part and not required or probably even encouraged.
As an individual we don´t have bargaining power vs stupid automotive choices. But insurance companies have in their best interests to make sure somebody else will pay.
Unless it "absolves" Tesla.
Remember, this is the company that when someone died, put out actual PRESS RELEASES to say "Not the car's fault. In fact it warned him before the collision that he was inattentive."
They neglected to mention it triggered ONE steering wheel warning... FOURTEEN MINUTES before the collision.
Even your example is problematic. "FSD/AP isn't at fault/didn't cause the collision/near miss, because it wasn't engaged..."
... because the driver had to take emergency action to avert FSD/AP's behavior.
They got taken to task for that, when investigatory boards started asking "just how long before that collision was FSD/AP disengaged, and was it disengaged by hard manual braking, etc.?"
Last time this happened in a similar situation, the driver went to a third-party technician that was able to extract the log data, and it proved the same thing that Tesla was claiming. The driver was full-on pressing accelerator instead of the braking pedal.[0]
Raw log data is present in that link, so it isn't just another "he said one thing, they said another thing" situation. But the driver in question was indeed fighting to death claiming their innocence, even thought the initial accident was already raising eyebrows of most people familiar with autopilot.
It also helps that NHTSA has already investigated such claims before[1], so they looked into hundreds of cases that were claiming Autopilot suddenly accelerating and causing crashes. NHTSA discovered that not a single one happened due to autopilot, but due to the driver misapplying acceleration and braking pedal.
0. https://insideevs.com/news/496305/valet-crashes-tesla-data-r...
1. https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2020/INCLA-DP20001-6158.PDF
Yes, people are often bad drivers. But it doesn’t follow that we must ignore the faults of any self driving technology just because regular drivers crash too. If Tesla is pushing out updates that make their own super fans comment on the cars doing unsafe and erratic things, that’s something we should look into.
GP is asserting that FSD is significantly less safe than previously known, and only driver intervention is preventing FSD from killing more people. Personally I’ve heard way too many “FSD regularly tries to drive into that bridge pillar” for me to believe an assertion that FSD is safer than drivers without significant evidence.
Second, we’re talking about a case where even Tesla owners acknowledge that an update made their cars noticeably less safe. Even in cases where FSD is better than human drivers, which I don’t think is the case yet, we should be quite concerned about the possibility of software updates making vehicles less safe.
As a user of Autopilot, it's absolutely insane to me that anyone would blame Autopilot for a wreck. It's like a "smart" cruise control, except unlike cruise control, it gives you all sorts of warnings about your role as the driver and will shut itself off if it thinks you're not paying attention. Any one blaming Autopilot for a Tesla wreck is either trying to sensationalize, or is just completely inept or lying.
Many many people paid $1000+ for the promise of Full Self-Driving that doesn't exist. People definitely care about the Autopilot feature a lot more than you.
> It's like a "smart" cruise control
Except they call it Autopilot! You can't call something Autopilot and then blame people for expecting the car to drive itself.
Call it lane assist or cruise control plus or something.
One warning. Fourteen minutes prior to the incident. That part wasn't in the press release.
The Summon feature is the same.
Marketing copy: "Use Summon in a car park to bring your vehicle to you while dealing with a fussy child" (literal quote).
Disclaimer: "Do not use Summon while distracted."
There's apparently a giant Chinese wall between Marketing and Legal at Tesla, because it's far from the only example. Another, that's still present in some Tesla videos, and has been there for years:
> The driver is only in the seat for legal reasons. The car is driving itself.
My money is OP is a short
It would be likely cheaper to buy a whole new car every year for five years than to take Tesla to court.
That's...not how it works.
Anyone injured as a result of a defective product has a claim against the manufacturer and anyone else in the chain of commerce. You don't have to sue someone else and let them sue the manufacturer.
(You can, but you don't have to, and its a complicated tactical consideration as to whether it is optimal in any particular case, further complicated by the fact that you can also sue everyone who might be liable at once, instead of picking and choosing who is best to sue.)
If you want to go for the giant settlement from Tesla, that's a different lawsuit, much higher-risk, much more expensive and much higher reward (financially, media attention and changing behavior).
lol good luck with that
Tesla should of course improve its autopilot technology but I don't see how they're responsible for the crash.
That said, I recall hearing some stuff in the early Tesla days about how the cars could drive themselves. Summoning, auto parking, and some hints at what we now know as Full Self Driving.
Aside from that, I don't recall much marketing hype around Autopilot. It has a bullet point on the Model 3 website, and some details on the naming of related features and what they do, but that's about it. None of it seems like "hype".
Here's the full description of Autopilot:
> Autopilot enables your car to steer, accelerate and brake automatically within its lane.
That's it.
In the car's user manual it makes it very clear what the feature does and what your responsibilities are as a driver. They don't make it out as some sort of magical feature.
You're correct about what's in the fine print. But this Musk fellow is effectively Tesla's salesman in chief, and has quite a following on the Internet.
> The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-hardware...
But in real life, adaptive cruise control is being used all the time, and no good driver that I know trusts it with their life or their insurance.
> The driver said she was using Autopilot, that an OTA update had had a problem earlier in the day, and that she had actually had the same kind of collision on Autopilot previously!
Autopilot might be an absolute dumpster fire, but what you are describing is similar to an adaptive cruise control failure and the liability is still with the driver. She rear ended you while you were at a red light, make sure that her insurance pays and that's it. If she wishes to sue Tesla she can obviously do so.
How was the driver supposed to know that the previous issue was not some rare fluke?
Tesla is recklessly rolling out software, and amazingly has pushed off the liability to the drivers willing to try it. Sadly we are all part of the beta, like it or not, if there are are Teslas driving around on public streets.
I'm mostly shocked that insurance rates have not skyrocketed for FSD beta testers.
If truly Teslas with FSD are causing more accidents than another car then yes at some point some government body will investigate but they won't care about a single incident with only material damages.
I do too on a non-Tesla. I've seen differing behaviors not just due to updates but due to the time of day!
I bet some sort of auto accident lawyer would salivate at the idea of suing a trillion dollar company.
If you want to get autopilot in general invesitgated and you think that's not happening enough based on your experience, because the thresholds used by agencies skip investigation when it is warranted, you should direct your complaints to Congress, especially your members and those on the relevant committees.
This will probably not, even in the case where it is part of triggering action, get your accident invesitgated differently, but if your concern is general safety that's probably not important.
If you really want your accident investigated more thoroughly, you’ll probably have to do it yourself by gathering enough initial evidence to find an attorney willing to pursue it as a defective product liability case against Tesla. This may be complicated somewhat by dealing with the existing insurance companies involved in handling claims out of the accident, but that's probably a small part of the involved challenge. On the other hand, your personal potential financial upside is higher in this case, though the likelihood of recovery may not be good.
Possible scenario B: The driver of the Tesla has misrepresented or misunderstood the facts of the situation.
Possible scenario C: The driver of the Tesla doesn't know that she should take her foot off the accelerator pedal when using Autopilot.
I suppose any of these (or several other) scenarios are at least possible. I'd probably apply Hanlon's razor here before anything else.
Until fairly recently, I believe that the RADAR, which used to be in all their cars, would have detected the stationary object (me) and applied braking force to at least reduce the impact.
Now, though, Tesla has stopped installing RADARs in their cars and apparently also disabled existing RADAR in cars that have it (because they all are using the same camera-only software).
If this has also removed the ability to detect stationary objects and the corresponding emergency braking functionality, this is a really serious problem and needs to be addressed, perhaps with a recall to require installation of RADAR in all the new cars and re-enabling of it.
In stop and go traffic, the car in front of you is visible to the camera at all times.
In this case, my car may not have been acquired by the camera before it was already stationary, in which case it might have been ignored, causing the accident.
It is the other way around. They've stopped using RADAR because RADAR has too many false reflections at speed and it was causing learning issues in the ML dataset. The vision based position detection is better (could argue about weather and visibility here, but it is irrelevant to this convo). Reliance on RADAR was causing it to hit stopped objects, because it was relying on radar data that was already too jittery and had to be ignored.
Regardless of the RADAR issue, the driver is responsible for the vehicle at all times. If someone hits you using cruise control they remain at fault.
That'd be relevant if they didn't call it autopilot. If they called it lane assist or cruise control plus or something then I'd agree.
Tesla is at major fault for implying that the Teslas can drive themselves, even if the driver is also at fault.
Words matter. You'd need real evidence to convince me that Tesla calling the system "Autopilot" hasn't significantly contributed to crashes.
Reality check: There are videos shown Tesla drivers sleeping in the car, or using the car from the back sit, so we have proof that a subset of Tesla users are using autopilot as "it drives itself and only laws forced Tesla to add those warnings". This videos are reality, no conspiracy, no subjectivity, no fake stats... some idiots are believing the marketing and some other idiots are still defending that marketing.
That doesn't follow. Some people are definitely being idiots, but the marketing doesn't say that it's okay to do those things, so they're not "believing the marketing" by doing so.
These often use RADAR, have worked for years, and are routinely tested by international agencies such as the IIHS.
See, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJgUiZgX5rE
Teslas at least used to do this too:
https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/performance-of-pedestrian-c...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJJfn2tO5fo
If Teslas no longer have this functionality, is a serious problem that needs to be corrected. That could mean reprogramming existing cameras or adding a sensor if the system really did rely on the now-removed RADAR.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/06/why-emergency-braking-s...
> But while there's obviously room for improvement, the reality is that the behavior of Tesla's driver assistance technology here isn't that different from that of competing systems from other carmakers. As surprising as it might seem, most of the driver-assistance systems on the roads today are simply not designed to prevent a crash in this kind of situation.
> Sam Abuelsamid, an industry analyst at Navigant and former automotive engineer, tells Ars that it's "pretty much universal" that "vehicles are programmed to ignore stationary objects at higher speeds."
Here's one with BMW owners asking about it: https://g20.bimmerpost.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1738458
Here's a review of Cadillac's SuperCruise: https://www.thedrive.com/tech/14830/i-wrote-this-in-a-superc...
> Related: All these types of semi-autonomous systems have a hard time identifying stationary cars—vehicles in stopped traffic on the highway, for example—as "targets" to avoid. Coming over a crest at 70 mph, I pick up the stopped traffic ahead of me far before the system does. I even give the system an extra second or two to identify that we're hurtling towards stopped traffic, but have to initiate braking. However, it's very likely that even at that speed, the car could have made the stop before an impact.
And the feature you're thinking of, AEB and its limitations are here: https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a24511826/safety-featu...
> If traveling above 20 mph, the Volvo will not decelerate, according to its maker.
> No car in our test could avoid a collision beyond 30 mph, and as we neared that upper limit, the Tesla and the Subaru provided no warning or braking.
It makes no sense to give up entirely when an application of brakes would reduce damage.
In the case of this accident, the vehicle not only didn't apply brakes but continued to accelerate after it hit me (the double hit).
This may or may not have been operator error, but the driver says she was on autopilot, that there was an OTA update issue, and that it has happened before. This all seems to suggest an investigation is appropriate and necessary.
You're mad, I get it, but you need to take this up with the driver (who claims she had a failed OTA update, which caused her to wreck, AND THEN DROVE AND WRECKED AGAIN) whose insurance will take it up with Tesla. It isn't your job to figure out why the car did it.
The only point here is that you were hit by an inattentive driver who didn't maintain control of her vehicle twice in one day. She put you in danger and your life at risk, and you're blaming the car.
They can do this because the radar measures the relative speed of objects via dopler shift, and you know the speed of your own vehicle. Anything which has the same speed as you have but goes in the other direction is most likely stationary. (Or moving perpendicular to you. The velocity difference is vectorial, but dopler can only observe the component along the observation vector, and civilian radars have terrible angular resolution.)
In short: nobody ever used radar to stop cars from hitting stationary objects. This is not a Tesla specific thing.
(Spare me the low effort comment about how everyone should be prepared for the car in front of them to stop instantly because it hit something, statistically nobody drives like that)
Edit: I misinterpreted the OP about it being an four car pileup.
If the other driver decides to randomly brake in the middle of the road (as some Teslas have been known to do), it's not necessarily the person behind's fault.
This is infantile circular logic. It makes for great internet feel good points an little else.
What the other car was doing absolutely matters. Plenty of people have brake checked their way into an accident and wound up paying for it because there were witnesses.
>It is always the driver's responsibility to maintain enough distance that they can safely respond to any action taken by the vehicle ahead
Citation please. I'm particularly interested in one that backs up the word that you thought was important enough to italicize.
My state places no specific requirement for following distance upon drivers. The state driver's manual states a suggested minimum of two seconds.
I spot checked two other states and their drivers' manuals advise similar (one advised three seconds, one advised a variable number depending on speed), neither said anything about being able to account for anything the car in front of you does.
For better or worse neither your fantasy of how people ought to act nor the letter of the law is reflective of how the overwhelming majority of the human population operators motor vehicles or expects others to. Is it ideal? Probably not. But it's a decent balance between being somewhat prepared for the expected traffic oddities, leaving margin for some subset of the unexpected and efficient use of road space.
I'm sure this will be an unpopular comment because there is no shortage of people here who think humans adhere to laws the way a network switch adheres to its configuration but the reality is that there is not perfect alignment between how reasonable traffic participants behave and the letter of the law.
You're basically arguing that almost everyone else is unreasonable. That's going to be a very uphill argument.
Also there's no reason to hide behind "I think that some of us would argue". You clearly hold this opinion. Ask yourself why you have reservations about owning it.
>People who do not maintain sufficient stopping distance
Who defines "sufficient" because the consensus based on the observed behavior of typical traffic seems to be that "sufficient" is a few seconds where possible but always less than whatever the comments section on the internet thinks it should be
>American driving experience
The American driving experience is not particularly remarkable compared (except maybe in its low cost) compared to other developed nations. All of which are pretty tame compared to developing nations
I'm not asking you to like the way people drive. I'm just asking you to not assess traffic incidents based on the reality of how people drive and not the farcical assumption that most participants are following or can be expected to be following whatever rules are on paper.
Accidents with Tesla (many of those that make the press) are often caused by not being accustomed to the car's acceleration.
There is Chill mode that decreases max acceleration, but I wouldn't expect the driver who manages to get into 2 accidents with a same car to read a manual
People called out bs on it instantly, as it would make no sense for autopilot to suddenly accelerate inside a garage until the crash, but the driver defended himself to death.
Only for the formal investigation to happen and confirm that the driver did it himself by fully pressing on the acceleration pedal instead of the braking pedal without any autopilot engagement, and was just trying to shift blame. And no, it wasn't just Tesla's legal team claiming that. The guy went to a third-party service that could decode the blackbox data from the car (again, that was his own technician, not requested by Tesla or anything), and the evidence clearly showed that the driver pressed the accelerator full-on. The raw log that is relevant to the situation is included in the link as well, in case someone wants to see it with their eyes.
Almost every single article I've seen that features bizarre accidents like this ended up being bs, and I am seeing the "accidentally pushed the accelerator instead of the braking pedal" vibes here as well. Will be eagerly awaiting for the results of the investigation before I make my own judgement though. Note: I am not claiming that autopilot is infallible, and there were indeed some legitimate incidents a while ago. But this specific one in the OP? Yeah, I call bs.
It also helps that NHTSA has already investigated such claims before[1], so they looked into hundreds of cases that were claiming Autopilot suddenly accelerating and causing crashes, and they discovered that not a single one happened due to autopilot, but due to the driver misapplying acceleration and braking pedal. Direct quote from their investigation summary (emphasis mine):
>After reviewing the available data, ODI has not identified evidence that would support opening a defect investigation into SUA in the subject vehicles. In every instance in which event data was available for review by ODI, the evidence shows that SUA crashes in the complaints cited by the petitioner have been caused by pedal misapplication. There is no evidence of any fault in the accelerator pedal assemblies, motor control systems, or brake systems that has contributed to any of the cited incidents. There is no evidence of a design factor contributing to increased likelihood of pedal misapplication.
0. https://insideevs.com/news/496305/valet-crashes-tesla-data-r...
1. https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2020/INCLA-DP20001-6158.PDF
You're just adding the word "conspiracy" to imply blaming the car is insane.
You skipped "Possible scenario D: It's the car's fault, and the NTSB and NHTSA didn't respond due to a lack of interest, an incompetent person handling the complaint by the OP, the OP not being able to communicate what happened well enough, or a procedure at the agencies which requires the driver to make a complaint rather than an observer or a victim."
Be careful, a lot car crash lawyers just want an easy pay day by hounding the insurance companies. Make sure your lawyer is on the same page as you.
1) how high of a speed, exactly?
2) it rear ended you twice? as in it smacked into you, decided that wasn't enough and either waited for you to pull forward or for the cars to separate and then accelerated into you again? if it actually did this, this is downright comical. i'd wager the driver was involved in the second collision though. (which should be considered a failure of the system nonetheless, as driver+autopilot operate as a single system, where if the state of the system leaves the bewildered driver manually accelerating the car into a collision, that is still a degenerate state!)
Imagine if you were rear ended by a Toyota and the driver said "it was on cruise control, shrug." Would you talk to NTSB or NHTSA about that? Probably not.
The only scenario I can imagine that'd warrant investigation is if the driver were completely unable to override Autopilot. Similar investigations have been started by NTSB when Toyota had issues with their cruise control systems several years ago.
You can have a similar argument for: if I'm drunk while driving that's my choice; if I don't cause any accidents, it should be none of anybody's business that I'm drunk.
You see, it doesn't work like that.
If Autopilot poses a significant risk to other road users, then an investigation is warranted.
People would be less upset with the drunk driver and more with the beer manufacture if they had been imbibing "alcohol free beer" which actually was not alcohol free.
Most other systems are far less clear, IMO.
Please don't propagate myths about "Tesla doesn't make it clear that you have to be in control of the vehicle."
My AP has many times disengaged because despite paying attention to the driving I wasn't putting enough torque on the wheel to convince AP that actually had my hands on the wheel.
You could fault their methods but NTSB is doing just that: waiting for a trend to emerge that would warrant such an investigation.
I'm not suggesting that Tesla's design is not the cause but if the driver were lying in order to shift blame, then NTSB would end up wasting their resources investigating it.
There was a traffic accident. There are a variety of "automated" driving features in modern cars: Auto-park, cruise control, auto-pilot. Any one of these features could, under "less than ideal" circumstances, cause an accident that doesn't warrant contacting national authorities. Well before any regulatory body is going to do anything, private insurance would. They're going to investigate in an effort to determine fault and facts. Was autopilot to blame, or did the user spill a cup of coffee in the passenger's seat that caused them to take their eyes off the road, etc.
The idea that a national regulatory body is going to start looking into a single car crash seems great until you start thinking about the expense that would create for the taxpayers. Bureaucracy just isn't built to be agile, for better or worse.
Similarly, if you drive drunk and don't cause an accident, nobody will know. This doesn't make it legal, and nobody is trying to argue a point even tangentially similar to that. This is a straw man, and a rather obvious one. There is no national group that would ever investigate a drunk driving crash (assuming that was the only relevant information in the case). That's a local law enforcement issue.
TL;dr- The feds don't care about a sample size of 1 fender bender with no fatalities.
An automated driving system that can offer to function while incapacitated without the operater even being informed that there is any problem, is a different problem from an operator that neglected to press the brake pedal. The brake pedal itself and the rest of the braking system is absolutely required to meet a whole bunch of fitness standards.
Except there's no evidence that it does. I drive a Tesla. I've seen AP brake hard in circumstances where a distracted driver would have failed to notice. The system works. It does not work perfectly. But all it has to do to make that "if" clause false is work better than drivers do, and that's a very low bar.
Tesla themselves publish data on this, and cars get in fewer accidents with AP engaged. (So then the unskewers jump in and argue about how that's not apples and oranges, and we all end up in circles of nuance and no one changes their opinion. But it doesn't matter what opinions are because facts are all that matter here, and what facts exist say AP is safer than driving.)
> Except there's no evidence that it does.
It sounds like you two are talking past one another.
I don't believe op is presenting evidence that it does. Instead, they are saying that there is at least one antidote (TFA) and that someone (presumably a government agency) should investigate it.
Second: I think you're being too charitable. I think it's abundantly clear that grandparent believes that there is a "significant risk to other road users", and that this single data point confirms it. And clearly it doesn't.
I mean... there are two million of these cars on the street now, and all but a tiny handful of early Roadsters and S's have full featured autopilot. If there was a significant safety signal in all that data somewhere it would be very clear against the noise background now, and it isn't.
That's not true at all, and you know it. Consider the extremes: if autopilot got in zero accidents over these however many million miles of travel, you'd have to admit it was safe to use, right? If it got in 10x as many accidents as the median vehicle, we'd all agree it was a deathtrap. There's value in those numbers. Well, the truth is somewhere in between, it gets in 4x fewer accidents (I think) than the median car. That still sounds good to me.
You're just nitpicking. You're taking a genuine truth (that the variables aren't independent because "miles travelled with AP" aren't randomly sampled) and trying to use it to throw out the whole data set. Probably because you don't like what it says.
But you can't do that. The antidote to incomplete or confounded analysis is better analysis. And no one has that. And I argue that if there was a signal there that says what you want ("Tesla AP is unsafe") that it would be visible given the number of cars on the road. And it's not.
Stop nitpicking and get data, basically. The time for nitpicking is when you don't have data.
Meanwhile, I do have this one datum about how OTA updates caused a couple of accidents (see OP's story.) You cannot just dismiss it because it doesn't agree with a larger trend, if that larger trend is undetectable in the data.
It's a 9x reduction relative to median vehicle and 4x vs. non-AP Teslas! I mean, go read it: https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
You're just making stuff up. That's not a weak signal at all, and you know it. The argument you should be making is that it's a confounded signal. But that requires a level of sophistication that you aren't supplying (nor is anyone else). Which is exactly why I mentioned way upthread that these digressions were so tiresome.
There's literally no data in the world that will satisfy you, just admit it. Yours is an argument from priors only, to the extent that one anecdote ("A Tesla hit me!") is enough to outweigh a report like that.
This is false, or at very best misleading, considering that Tesla's Autopilot is responsible for more than 10 fatalities. Or in other words, Tesla's AP has killed more people than the entire rest of the domestic auto industry's smart cruise control features. Combined. (And Tesla's "safety" data conspicuously fails to mention any of these fatalities.)
And that doesn't even include all the times that AP ran into stationary emergency vehicles, or the many slow-moving accidents in parking lots, or the many near-misses that were avoided because the other driver was able to avoid the suicidal Tesla in time.
Who's being misleading here?
Unless you're now claiming that FSD is just a version of smart cruise control?
But if you mean vanilla cruise control, people die using that every day.
The fact that Tesla fans can't grasp the concept that Tesla is (a) not perfect and (b) deliberately endangering people's lives for profit is unfortunately not shocking any more, but it doesn't mean the rest of us have to put up with that schadenfreude.
It does not, if you use it as Tesla tells you to use it - paying attention to the road at all times and with your hands on the wheel. If you don't do that, Autopilot is probably still better than distracted driving - over the years I sometimes would catch myself drifting off in my thoughts as I was driving to the point where I wasn't even sure how I drove my car for the past few seconds. I bet this happens to others, too, and often. Between that and even semi-autonomous Autopilot, Autopilot seems like a safer choice, and it'll only get better from here on out, though I don't think we're anywhere near real "FSD" where you'd be able to read a newspaper as the car drives itself.
Why shouldn’t the driver be responsible for accidents in the car they’re driving at the current level of driver assist technology?
There's no reason that TACC shouldn't be able to handle the basic job of not running into the car in front of it in the vast majority of circumstances.
Edit: Updated wording to make it less confusing. From system to whoever created the self driving tech.
> ... at some point in time along the technological advancement of self driving technology we'll have to stop blaming ourselves.
No we don't. We built it, so we're responsible for it and the consequences associated with its operation, regardless of how well it's engineered or how smart we think we are.
That's my point. The company that built the self driving technology should be held responsible. If you're not driving you're not responsible, that's how it works when somebody else is driving your car as well so why would it be any different if that somebody else is code? It seems like a good way to align the incentives to create a safe system. You could claim that at this point in time you still have to pay attention and take control when necessary, the issue I have with that argument is that we already have research showing us that the context switch results in a delay that's too long to be really useful in practice.
If your toaster blows up and kills someone a solid case against the maker of toasterb
If you buy a chainsaw, you can trust it has certain safety features. If you buy a children’s toy, you can trust it doesn’t use lead paint, etc.
Those aren’t features you, as a consumer, have to explicitly test for before using them.
Similarly, I think society will demand that cars behave as cars, and not as projectiles. If a manufacturer claims a car has auto-pilot, but that auto-pilot has a tendency to rear end other cars, the manufacturer should carry at least some blame.
I think that should be true even if they explicitly mention that problem in the instruction manual. Certainly in the EU, whatever you buy, you can assume it is “fit for its purpose”.
To continue your analogy Chainsaw manufacturers include clear instructions, and directions to use safety PPE.. if a operator of the chainsaw fails to follow the instructions, or where the PPE and chops their leg off the manufacturer is not liable.. Hell even if they did follow the instructions and chop their leg off it would be unlikely the manufacturer would be liable.
Yes...
We already have examples of this with machinery that is automated. The Humans in charge of these automated machines are responsible for monitoring them, and have things like emergency shut downs, and various other safety protocols to shut them down when (not if When) they do unexpected things.
Machines are machines, they fuck up. The manufacturers are not held liable because the know these types of abnormal conditions exist they is why they have the safety protocols and human minders.
An example of this is the auto manufacturer i believe in TN or TX that did not train the operators properly on the safe way to operate, and lock out a machine, this failure to train lead to human injury. The manufacturer of the robot was not liable, the company that failed to train the human staff was.
Your example on the other hand is not relevant to the situation at hand, it misconstructs the problem. The machine required trained operators to operate the machine, driving a car requires a trained operator but that is where the similarities stop. You don't need any additional training to operate autopilot. If someone without a license sits behind the steering wheel they're at fault cause they're not supposed to drive the car in the first place, this would be an analogous situation. Yours, as pointed out, is not.
Let us not forget my original argument. Where I said that this is the current legal situation, I just think that this will change in the future if autonomous actions (driving or other behaviors) keep improving. I believe we have reached a point where it's not necessarily clear anymore who is in the wrong. Not in a legal sense, the law tends to run after the facts. More in a moral sense.
Tesla's own marketing disagrees with this. Here's what Tesla says they mean when they say "Autopilot" and "Full Self-Driving":
> The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-hardware...
I can speculate from people sleeping when driving Teslas that there are some drivers that interpret the marketing and documentation contradiction as "the laws forced Tesla to add this warnings in the documentation, Elon said autopilot is OK".
1 marketing message" Autopilot works and stupid politics forces us to release it with this tons of boilerplate warnings and having to pay attention"
2 the actual disclaimers the car will show you
this drivers chose to believe 1, this is obvious that marketing is undermining the reality, so IMO Elon and his marketing should be criminally responsible for undermining their own official message.
“Product liability is the area of law in which manufacturers, distributors, suppliers, retailers, and others who make products available to the public are held responsible for the injuries those products cause.”
A specific example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escola_v._Coca-Cola_Bottling_C.... : somebody uses a soda bottle as intended, gets hurt, and wins a case against the manufacturer of the bottle.
If you don’t follow instructions, that still can happen, but it will be harder to argue that a problem originated with the manufacturer.
But yeah, they shouldn’t call it that.
I drive a Tesla Model 3, but I have sufficient grey matter to understand that AutoPilot, in spite of its name, is SAE level 2 (see above reference). If the car is involved in an impact either something hit me, or I hit something - no blame attaches to the computer, because I’m still in charge. Given the current state of the art, I’m perfectly happy with that and bloody livid at anybody who is dumb enough to buy/lease and drive one of these amazing machines without being constantly and totally aware of their limitations.
Hard disagree.
This is the same as identity theft, where it becomes your responsibility instead of a failure on the part of the bank to protect your account, and the burden gets shifted entirely onto the consumer.
Relevant Michell and Webb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E
If Tesla sells a SAE Level 2 lane following / accident avoidance feature which should be able to stop and avoid rear end collisions, yet it causes rear end collisions, they must be liable for that failure. They can't just write words and shift all liability onto the consumer for the software failing to work properly. Nice try though.
And I don't care if the consumer technically agreed to that. If someone smacks into me with Autopilot enabled, I never consented to that technology and didn't give up my rights to sue Tesla.
Also, how is the bank supposed to protect your account if you give your login information away to a criminal? There are a non-negligible amount of cases where the consumer compromises their accounts themselves. The responsibility lies on both. The burden often isn’t placed on the consumer either. Merchants are often the ones that pay the highest price.
In the video there it says:
"THE PERSON IN THE SEAT IS ONLY THERE FOR LEGAL REASONS.
HE IS NOT DOING ANYTHING. THE CAR IS DRIVING ITSELF."
Total lie unless they are psycopaths and would be willing to run it with no one in the seat if not for legal reasons. In other words unless they were willing to murder if murder were legal--the video is from 2018 or maybe even earlier, where we know they were nowhere near ready for driverless.
On top of that it greatly mislead people about how soon it would be, and how far along they were. Buyers who they were charging like $9,000 to at the time.
It's usually conveniently omitted from the story.
You bought a car, it promised functionality, it did not deliver and endangered another human/their property.
This is the fault of the manufacturer.
Here are some examples of non-autonomous driving cases where the manufacturer made a false promise: Volvo lawsuit: https://www.motorbiscuit.com/volvo-owners-seeking-class-acti...
Toyota recall after lawsuit https://www.industryweek.com/the-economy/article/21959153/to...
Chevy lawsuit: https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/consumer-pro...
It is my sincere hope that we can enjoy Elon's persona without just letting Tesla off the hook of being a car company. Or really, a company.
It is supposed to be super-self-driving... it has to count for something.
1. In an industrial plant, equipment needs to be fitted with guards and other protective measures, even if it's arguable that sticking your hand into an exposed rotating mechanism, or grabbing a live electrical circuit, is your fault. If someone's hurt, and there's an investigation, the factory will be cited for not having the proper guards. From what I've read, this is one of the things that we now take for granted, but was hard won through labor activism resulting in a dramatic reduction in workplace deaths.
2. The European approach, where they assign "fault" for a crash, but at the same time investigate how the infrastructure can be redesigned to make the crash less likely.
Yes I would hope that a regulatory body investigates the OP's crash. At the same time, I've read some comments in HN that Tesla drivers hover their foot over the accelerator in case of "ghost" braking. Naturally this is anecdotal. Still, the driver could have mistakenly stepped on the wrong pedal.
Plaintiff can collect 40% of his damages from D1, etc. Some states will allow Plaintiff to collect 96% from D2, and give D2 the right to collect the other defendants' proportionate share from them.
The difference is that safety improvements to Autopilot can scale. Patch the software or upgrade the hardware to fix the root cause of this collision and future collisions can be avoided!
Likely explanation for two impacts during a rear-end pileup:
1. Tesla rear-ends your car.
2. Another car rear-ends the Tesla, propelling it forward and hitting your car a second time.
This would override AEB / TACC on any vehicle I own, radar or not.