Oi, Elon: You Musk sort out your Autopilot! Tesla loyalists tell of code crashes, near-misses

We mght be able to have fairly safe autonomous cars now

Unfortunately the rest of us would have to be banned from the roads and pavements...

Hardly surprising

Any software engineer worth their salt could tell you the immense difficulty of capturing analogue data, modelling it, and translating that model via a set of rules into an action. And repeating that continuously in real time. The more variables and ambiguity that are present in the input, the more likely it is to screw up in the output. In a 2 ton vehicle going at 70mph along a road with other traffic, that could be positively fatal.

I wouldn't trust any autonomous mode unless it requires an alert and attentive human being at the wheel and forces their attention. At least that way the human can veto or correct the car's actions.

This isn't exclusive to Tesla. Any autonomous vehicle that claims it can drive itself in limited, or unlimited circumstances still requires oversight. Otherwise it will do something dumb and/or dangerous and there will be no human paying attention to stop it.

Tesla needs to pair up with Captcha and stream the camera view in real time, then website users can identify traffic lights, cross walks, bicycles etc.. to show that they are not a robot and to supplement the AI. What a world!

Adds a new dimension to "my software just crashed".

Efficiently and stylishly leading you to one of life's off-ramps.

One thing AI might be better at: believing Road Closed signs. We have a road closure on the corner next to us. Before they get there drivers have to pass two Road Closed Ahead signs. Just now the latest bright spark - Land Rover pulling a trailer loaded with one of those big round hay bales - stopped just outside the hose when the actual closure came into view. Then pulled ahead until he could see round the corner that it really was closed. Then started snaking back until he managed to turn in my drive like all the other bastards who don't believe it's closed.

I want them to channel Spike Milligan and change the sign to read "We told you it was closed".

Hmmmm....

2018-05-31: Thorfinnsson's Take on Tesla: The Stock Is Going To Zero

Don't know what happened but in May Tesla looked like a company not unready to implode. Did anything change?

The company did not respond to a request for comment.

Odd, considering the story is all about a request for comment :-)

I used to say: "Eat the rich"

Seems, we won't need to bother.

They seem to have self-selected themselves for extinction.

Electric NASCAR racing

Engine start

Full throttle

Left

Left

Left

Left

.......

I solved it..

Got an e-bike.

Not just paranoia

"The car biz has plenty of ardent fans who love the idea of beta testing buggy code at high speeds and reflexively characterize critics as trolls or short sellers of Tesla stock. There are of course people who highlight Autopilot problems with an eye toward investment, as can be seen from this tweet."

Whilst there is plenty of fanboi seen in Tesla owners, it should be noted that there are a number of forums and even websites, setup for the sole purpose of shorting Tesla. They aim to find stories or news items involving Tesla and attempt to find and publicise any negative aspects that can be used to pull down Tesla's share price. It is bizarre that some people seem to be spending a disproportionate amount of time and effort into shorting this one company Whilst Musk and his fanbois may seem paranoid, there is some validity to their claims.

Windows on Warships

Reminds me of El Reg comments on "Windows for Warships" regarding inopportune BSODs and reboots for updates.

Which reminds me of "The Heart of Gold" and in the middle of an attack, the ship's defensive systems shut down to make Dent Arthur Dent a cup of tea.

A few months ago someone shared with me a thread on Twitter containing anecdotes from someone claiming to be a Tesla engineer. If the contents of it are true then I am not in the least bit surprised that the Autopilot software is a bit pants.

https://mobile.twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376

All hearsay, mind you.

We don’t like hearing about any accidents in our cars

You know that was a threat, right?

Used to have an exercycle

I used to have an exercycle that had small metalic panels on the grips. Through these it could sense my heart rate and other data.

Last month I was at the quacks and they had a 1/2"x1/2"x2" block that she put on my finger during the consult. It measured heart rate, blood oxygen and one or two other things, displayed on a small screen on the device itself.

Tesla could fit some of these types of sensors to the wheel. And they could easily make it look nice and make the visual design a 'feature' of the steering wheel.

There's also tech that tracks a person's eye movements, which may also be fitted (I assume those who wish to buy Tesla cars don't have any qualms about intrusions into their personal space).

Of course, since the general public believe (after decades of movies and TV watching) that "auto pilot" means "fully automatic pilot", perhaps the quickest and easiest thing Tesla could do is stop using that term.

Hopefully sometime real soon a government will man up and start issuing very hefty fines, especially if the person in the driver's seat of the car could be seen to NOT be reasonably attentive for long periods of time. A second here and there is usually OK. 20% of your brain going to a conversation with a reasonably attentive passenger is fine (they'll hopefully spot things you miss), but taking your eyes off the road for more than 2 seconds is bad.

Companies who provide touch screens to replace the physical controls on climate/stereo systems should also be fined automatically when one of their cars is 'at fault' in an accident. I can adjust all of these things by reaching in the general area till I contact part of the system, then moving my hand left/right/up/etc depending on what I first hit to get the control I want.

Too much tech!(?)

Tesla's are just loaded down with gizmos. I look at anything past the basics of a being a manual motor car as one more thing that can break and will be expensive/impossible to repair. Elon had said after finally getting the X to market that putting too many widgets on a car was a bad thing and really slowed them down. He then had that part of his brain chemically removed and built the 3. Sandy Munro praised the tech on the 3 as world class, but I think he may have missed the downside that all of that tech wasn't required to make a car that can get from point A to point B, the parts of the car that he took Tesla to task for being sub standard and heavy.

If you can't change lanes on the motorway, you shouldn't be driving the car. If you can't make decisions on what lane you should be in, you shouldn't be driving the car. If you don't have time to drive to your destination, you should take a taxi or train not rely on an "autopilot" to drive your car while you bang away on your laptop or mobile. It's still a long way out before automating cars is going to be viable. Because the roads are rather free-form in comparison to trains, trams and trollies, there are more variable's to contend with. Even commercial aircraft travel in "lanes" and are kept spaced out by controllers. It's not like one going the other way is going to have a puncture and jump the center divider into oncoming traffic. Check out the Russian dash cam videos on YouTube for all of the things that will make you want to be paying constant attention to the road and not nodding off while the car is doing a bunch of it for you.

In the first world, we are getting to a point like NAS (Nerve Attenuation Syndrome) as depicted in the movie "Johnny Nemonic". We train ourselves to be bored when all of our attention isn't being occupied by something tickling every sense we have. If an automatic car is only doing "some" of the driving, we may be worse off than when we are fully engaged and doing everything. It could be an all or nothing argument in the end. That doesn't say that blind spot detectors, backup cameras, closing rate meters and other sorts of assistance gear isn't useful. I too hate it when some shmuck pulls into my blind spot and just paces me on the motorway and if I could see better and have some alarms when I'm reversing, that would be great. I just don't want the car taking the driving decisions away from me until it can do it better than I can all of the time in every probable scenario and reasonably well in many edge cases. I also want the option of not installing updates automatically and being able to skip the odd "feature upgrade" update or portion of update. I'd rather wait a few days and read the boards to see if anybody has been bricked in some fashion.

Navigation is hard. Damned hard.

I am just going to put this out there. 5 years ago, I though that they would have mastered self driving and navigation by now. But trying to get a car to stay in a lane at 100km/hr without intervention from the driver in a world that was NEVER meant or designed for it to happen turns out the be hard. Very hard. Now I am thinking that it will truly be another 10 years or longer before they have truly mastered it. So while you can slam them because your expectation (and EM's ego) kind of ginned up the idea that it should be better than it is, Self driving and navigation are damned good compared to 5 years ago. Yes, I wanted flying cars by 2020, too, but I am not slamming the auto industry for not getting us there (yet).