1y ago

New Footage Shows Tesla On Autopilot Crashing Into Police Car After Alerting Driver 150 Times

www.carscoops.com New Footage Shows Tesla On Autopilot Crashing Into Police Car After Alerting Driver 150 Times

Six officers who were injured in the crash are suing Tesla despite the fact that the driver was allegedly impaired

New Footage Shows Tesla On Autopilot Crashing Into Police Car After Alerting Driver 150 Times::Six officers who were injured in the crash are suing Tesla despite the fact that the driver was allegedly impaired

165 comments

In fact, by the time the crash happens, it’s alerted the driver to pay more attention no less than 150 times over the course of about 45 minutes. Nevertheless, the system didn’t recognize a lack of engagement to the point that it shut down Autopilot
I blame the driver, but if the above is true there was a problem with the Tesla as well. The Tesla is intended to disengage and disable autopilot for the remainder of the drive after a small number of ignored alerts. If the car didn’t do that, there’s a bug in the Tesla software.
I think it’s more likely the driver used a trick to make the car think he was engaged when he was not. You can do things like put a water bottle wedged in the steering wheel to make the car think you have tugged on the steering wheel to prove you are engaged. (Don’t ask me how I know)
- The Tesla is intended to disengage and disable autopilot
  What about: slow down, pull up to the right, stop the car, THEN disengage?
  
  I think that's what it was supposed to do. I remember seeing a few videos about this.
  
  This is what it does already: https://youtu.be/oBIKikBmdN8
- After 3 alerts, it's off until you park. There are visual cues that precede the alert though and these do not count. I don't recall how many there are and for how long, but you start by seeing a message asking to have your hands on the wheel, then a blue line at the top, them the line starts pulsing ,then you've got an audio alert that is the first strike. Three strikes during the same drive and you need to park before using autopilot again.
  
  And those alerts don't come if you've overridden the system by putting a weight on the wheel or something.

I have a lot of trouble understanding how the NTSB (or whoever's ostensibly in charge of vetting tech like this) is allowing these not-quite self driving cars on the road. The technology doesn't seem mature enough to be safe yet, and as far as I can tell, nobody seems to have the authority or be willing to use that authority to make manufacturers step back until they can prove their systems can be integrated safely into traffic.
- It's just ADAS - essentially fancy cruise control. There are a number of autonomous vehicle companies who are carefully and successfully developing real self-driving technology, and Tesla should be censured and forbidden for labeling their assistance software as "full self-driving." It's damaging the real industry.
- That's similar to cruise control. Cruise control can be dangerous because someone could fall asleep (not having to manage your speed can afford up sleepiness) and the car wouldn't slow down.
  In my opinion, those options are all the driver's responsibility to know their own limit and understand that the tool is just a tool and you are responsible to making sure your driving is safe for others. Tesla autopilot adds a ton of safety features that avoid a lot of collisions based on lacking attention, sleepiness, and actively avoiding other drivers faults. But it's still just a tool and the driver is responsible of their own car and driving.
  
  The difference is that cruise control will maintain your speed, but 'autopilot' may avoid or slow down for obstacles. Maybe it avoids obstacles 90% of the time or 99% of the time. It apparently avoids obstacles enough that people can get lulled into a false sense of security, but once in a while it slams into the back of a stationary vehicle at highway speed.
  It's easy to say it's the driver's responsibility, and ultimately it is, of course, but in practice, a system that works almost all of the time but occasionally causally kills somebody is very dangerous indeed, and saying it's all the driver's fault isn't really realistic or fair.
  
  The problem with Tesla is that their entire marketing is based on "Our cars drives themselves".
- It's not "not-quite-self-driving" though, it's literal garbage. It's cruise control, lane assist and brake assist. The robot vision in use is horrible.
  There are Tesla engineers bad mouthing the system openly.
  Musk is a scammer and they need to issue an apology for all of the claims around autopilot, probably pay a great deal of money, and then change the name and advertising around it.
  Oh, and also this guy should never drive again.
- $$$ that's how.

This is stupid. Teslas can park themselves, they're not just on rails. It should be pulling over and putting the flashers on if a driver is unresponsive.
That being said, the driver knew this behavior, acted with wanton disregard for safe driving practices, and so the incident is the driver's fault and they should be held responsible for their actions. It's not the courts job to legislate.
It's actually the NTSB's job to regulate car safety so if they don't already have it congress needs to grant them the authority to regulate what AI behavior is acceptable/define safeguards against misbehaving AI.
- There's no way the headline is true. Zero percent. The car will literally do exactly what you stated if it goes too long without driver engagement and I've experienced it first hand.
  
  Evidently, he was aware enough to respond to the alerts, per the logs (as stated in the WSJ video that's in the article). It shows a good bit of the footage, too.
  Seems like they need something better for awareness checking than just gripping the wheel and checking where your eyes are pointed. And obviously better sensors for object recognition.
  
  The headline doesn't state that the warnings were consecutive.
  Perhaps the driver was just aware enough to keep squelching warnings and prevent the car from stopping altogether?
  I'll grant you, though, 150 warnings is still a little tough tough to believe...
- The driver is responsible for this accident, Tesla still should be liable imo for all the shady and outright misleading advertising around their so called "self driving". Compare Tesla's marketing to like GMs of Hyundai's, both of which essentially have parity with Teslas system in terms of actual features, and you'll see a big difference
- It should be pulling over and putting the flashers on if a driver is unresponsive.
  Yes. Actually, just stopping in the middle of the road with hazard lights would be sufficient.
  
  You say that yet a Tesla did exactly that, which caused some tailgaters to crash into the back of it, and everyone blamed the Tesla for causing an accident.
  https://theintercept.com/2023/01/10/tesla-crash-footage-autopilot/
- Sounds like the injured officers are suing. It's a civil case not criminal, so I'm not sure how much the court would actually be asked to legislate. I'd be interested to hear their arguments, though I'm sure part of their reasoning for suing Tesla over the driver is they have more money.

150 more warnings than a regular car would give, ultimately it's the driver's fault.
- Tesla actively markets their cars as ''the car drives itself''.
  
  Do we have any evidence from the driver stating that he didn't realize he was using a glorified cruise control similar to autopilot on an airplane?
  
  Source or stfu
- Yes, even in self driving cars the driving is expected to pay attention in case they need to take control in unexpected events
- If the driver was unresponsive in a normal car, it would stop.
  
  The driver was responding. If he didn't respond the car would have stopped.
  If this was a normal car he probably would have just crashed earlier.
  
  TIL cruise control doesn't exist

So if the guy behind the wheel died and couldn't react to the alerts then the car can't do a decision to just stop instead of crashing into a police car?
- He was reacting to alerts, complying to them by simply touching the steering wheel. He did that 150 times during that 45 minute trip ( not all the trip was on auto pilot).
  So if the guy died the car would of disengaged auto pilot (I'm not sure how this works).
  You can check the video in the article. It's quite informative .
  Edit
  I saw another video and it takes ~60 seconds after taking off your hand from the steering wheel for the car to safely come to a full stop.
  
  So the headline should be "drunk driver hits police car."
  
  TBH if you're not used to it the steering wheel check can warn frequently. It's checking for a small amount of torque on the wheel rather than actually holding it (as there are no pressure sensors) and that catches people out but the prompt says to put your hands on the wheel.. I could believe 150 times on a long journey.

Driver is definitely the one ultimately at fault here, but how is it that Tesla doesn’t perform an emergency stop in this situation - but just barrels into an obstacle?
Even my relatively ‘dumb’ car with adaptive cruise control handles this type of situation better than Tesla?!
- Your relatively 'dumb' car probably doesn't try to gauge distance exclusively by interpreting visual data from cameras.
  
  Wait, the Model X doesn’t have RADAR/LIDAR to supplement the cameras?
- I believe this is caused by the fog combined with flashing lights and upward/curved road. The Tesla autopilot system is super impressive in almost all situations but you can clearly see the limits in extreme situations. Here, the drunk driver is definitely at fault, I don't understand why they'd sue Tesla.
  
  I don't understand why they'd sue Tesla.
  Money. Tesla has much more money than the drunk.
  
  Because of Tesla's exaggerated advertising.
- Even my relatively ‘dumb’ car [...] handles [...] better than Tesla?!
  Not going to be the last time when you experience that :-)

Setting aside the driver issue, isn't this another case that could've been prevented with LIDAR?

You know what might work, program the car so that after the second unanswered "alert" the autopilot pulls the car over, or reduces speed and turns on the hazards. The third violation of this auto pilot is disabled for that car for a period of time.
- I drive a Ford Maverick that is equipped with adaptive cruise control, and if I were to get 3 "keep your hands on the wheel" notifications, it deactivates adaptive cruise until the vehicle is completely turned off and on again. It blew my mind to learn that Tesla doesn't do something similar.
  
  It does and did... He kept driving anyway. Drink drivers FTW.
  I presume AEB kicked in but all that can do is reduce the speed of inpact.. if you're determined to kill yourself there's not much the car can do.
- This is literally exactly how it works already. The driver must have been pulling on the steering wheel right before it gave him a strike. The system will warn you to pay attention for a few seconds before shutting down. Here’s a video: https://youtu.be/oBIKikBmdN8
  
  Ah, so its just people defeating the system
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/oBIKikBmdN8
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
  
  The system will warn you to pay attention
  ... and if we have learned anything from that incident, it is that the warnings have been worthless.
  The system can be tricked even by the worst drunkards! 150 times in a row.
  for a few seconds before shutting down.
  Few seconds are not enough. The crash was already unavoidable.
- They didn't say he didn't respond to the alerts. If you don't respond, autopilot turns off.

Poor ~~drunk~~ impaired driver falling victim to autonomous driving... Hopefully that driver lost their license.
- That doesn't drive the problem of autopilot not taking the right choices. What is the driver wasn't drunk, but they had a heart attack? What if someone put a roofie on their drink? What if the driver was diabetic or hypoglycemic and suffered a blood glucose fall? What if they had a stroke?
  Furthermore, what if the driver got drunk BECAUSE the car's AI was advertised as being able to drive for you? Think of false publicity.
  If your AI can't handle one simple case of a driver being unresponsive, that's negligence on the company's part.
  
  How could the company be negligent if someone gets drunk or has a heart attack and crashes their car? No company has a Level 5 autonomous vehicle where no human intervention is needed. Tesla is only Level 2. Mercedes has a Level 3 option (in extremely limited conditions). Waymo claims Level 4 but is geofenced.

Don't see how that's a Tesla problem... Drunk/high driver operating their car incorrectly.
- By driving it
  
  Tesla wasn't driving it, the drunk/high owner was.

Data from the Autopilot system shows that it recognized the stopped car 37 yards or 2.5 seconds before the crash.
Is the video slowed down? In the video, if you pause 2.5s before the crash, the stopped police car seems to be very close already. A (awake) human driver would've recognized the stopped police car from way more distance than that.
- I find that it can be hard to tell when a car ahead is stopped, maybe the visual system on the tesla has similar limitations. I think autopilot is controlled by the cameras alone but I'm not super up to date on tesla stuff. I would assume even a basic radar set up could tell something was stationary from quite far away.

This source keeps pushing tesla propaganda. There's always an angle trying to sell that it wasn't the tesla's fault

Officers injured at the scene are blaming and suing Tesla over the incident.
...
And the reality is that any vehicle on cruise control with an impaired driver behind the wheel would’ve likely hit the police car at a higher speed. Autopilot might be maligned for its name but drivers are ultimately responsible for the way they choose to pilot any car, including a Tesla.
I hope those officers got one of those "you don't pay if we don't win" lawyers. The responsibility ultimately resides with the driver and I'm not seeing them getting any money from Tesla.
- Well, in the end it's up to whether Tesla's ADAS is compliant with laws and regulations. If there really were 150 warnings by the ADAS without it disengaging, this might be an indicator of faulty software and therefore Tesla being at least partially at fault. It goes without saying that the driver is mostly to blame but an ADAS shouldn't just keep on driving when it senses that the driver is incapacitated.
  
  Also from the article:
  Data from the Autopilot system shows that it recognized the stopped car 37 yards or 2.5 seconds before the crash. Autopilot also slows the car down before disengaging altogether.

I'm not so sure disengaging autopilot because the driver's hands were not on the wheel while on a highway, is the best option. Engage hazard lights, remain in lane (or if able move to the slowest lane) and come to a stop. Surely that's the better way?
Just disengaging the autopilot seems like such a copout to me. Also the fact it disengaged right at the end "The driver was in control at the moment of the crash" just again feels like bad "self" driving. Especially when the so-called self-driving is able to come to a stop as part of its software in other situations.
Also if you cannot recognize an emergency vehicle (I wonder if this was a combination of the haze and the usually bright emergency lights saturating the image it was trying to analyse) it's again a sign you shouldn't be releasing this to the public. It's clearly just not ready.
Not taking any responsibility away from the human driver here. I just don't think the behaviour was good enough for software controlling a car used by the public.
Not to mention, of course, the reason for suing Tesla isn't because they think they're more liable. It's because they can actually get some money from them.
- The video is very thorough and goes into the hazy video caused by the flashing lights being one of the issues.
  
  That's not the main problem. It is more like an excuse. The main problem has been explained in the video right before that:
  Their radar is bad at recognizing immobile cars on the road. This means all objects. All obstacles on your road!
  The emergency vehicles just happen to be your most frequent kind of obstacles.
  The fallback to the camera is a bad excuse anyway, because radar is needed first to detect any obstacles. The cam will usually be later (=at closer distance) than the radar.
  The even better solution (Trigger warning: nerdy stuff incoming) is to always mix all results of all kinds of sensors at an early stage in the processing software. That's what european car makers do right from the beginning, but Tesla is way behind with their engineering. Their sensors still work indepently, and each does their own processing. So every shortcoming of one sensor creates a faulty detection result that has to be covered later (read: seconds later, not milliseconds) by other kinds of sensors.
  
  The question here is, could you see there was a reason to stop the car significantly (more than 3 seconds) before the autopilot did? If we can recognize it through the haze the autopilot must too.
  Moreover, it needs to now be extra good at spotting vehicles in bad lighting conditions because other sensors are removed on newer Teslas. It only has cameras to go on.

Hard to argue Tesla at fault when clearly the driver was impaired and at fault here.

It's also so misleading that Tesla use the word Autopilot for what is basically adaptive cruise control and lane assist

Tesla's are not safe.
- Tesla on autopilot/FSD is almost 4 times less likely to be involved in a crash than a human driven Tesla which even then is half as likely to end up in a accident compared to average car. You not liking Musk fortunelately doesn't change these facts.
  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.
  Source
  
  There is a bias here in the numbers. Teslas are expensive and not everyone is buying them. The lower accident rate can be explained by the different demographic driving the vehicle rather than Teslas being better. For exemple, younger people might be more likely to cause accident because of different factors and they are also less likely to buy a Tesla because they are so expensive. I dont have the numbers for this, but we should all be careful with the claims of Tesla on safety when they compared themself to the global average.
  
  So Tesla says. There is no independent verification of this data. It could all be bullshit.
  
  almost 4 times less likely to be involved in a crash than a human driven
  Not relevant at all here, when we are discussing occurences that seem so easily and obviously avoidable.
  (But it's nice to see that the Fanboi team is awake now)

i still think tesla did a poor job in conveying the limitations on the larger scale. they piggybacked waymo's capability and practice without matching it, which is probably why so many are over reliant. i've always been against mass-producing semi-autonomous vehicles to the general public. this is why.
and then this garbage is used to attack the general concept of autonomous vehicles, which may become a fantastic life-saver, because then it can safely drive these assholes around.

So self driving cars, are not so self driving... Huh, whodathunk it lol /s

I think Mercedes is the only car company that will accept blame for a self-driving or self-parking failure. That should tell you something.
- So few people will pay the value add-on that they may not need to.

It's what you get when you design places that require cars for everything

I hope the cops win. Autopilot allows for a driver to completely disengage their attention from the car in a way that's not possible with just cruise control.
There's no way you can drop a human in a life threatening critical situation with 2.5 seconds to make a decision and expect them to make reasonable decisions. Even stone cold sober, that's a lot to ask of a person when the car makes a critical mistake like this.
On cruise, the driver would still have to be aware that they were driving. With auto pilot, the driver had likely passed out and the car carried on it merry way.
- Because people can't pass out with just cruise control? He didn't have 2.5 seconds. According to the article he had 45 minutes of multiple warnings.
- No, autopilot does not allow for a driver to completely disengage their attention. That's what they want to get to but that's not where we are. You still have to drive the car, you still have to be in control.
  This is the driver's fault.
  I hope Tesla wins this one. We need to set a precedent for this, you can't be out here driving high, drunk or any type of impairment and just assume you can get around that by your cars technology.
  Granted I agree that the car should slow down, put hazards on and pull you off if you don't respond by a certain timeframe. There are a few brands that do that and it should be standard.

wtf I love Tesla now
- Tesla is the new MAGA hat.
- lol

It’s a douche bag trifecta
Tesla owner, driving drunk Cops, being cops Tesla, overselling their shitty car
I just hope that innocent bystander gets something from all three of them

165 comments