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
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)
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.
Like an orange?
Balancing an orange on the steering wheel?
These days it’ll detect that and shut down anyway.
I’ve had my hand misdetected as a ‘defeat device’ once.
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.
A lot of modern cruise control systems will match the speed of the car in front of you and stop if they stop. They’ll also keep the car in the current lane. And even without cruise control, most modern cars will stop if a pedestrian steps onto the road.
It’s frustrating that Tesla’s system can’t detect a stationary police car in the middle of the road… but at the same time apparently that’s quite a difficult thing to do and it’s not unique to Tesla.
It’s honestly not too much to ask a driver to step on the brakes if there’s a cop car stopped on the road.
It’s actually not that hard to do, but Tesla is not willing to spend the necessary time and resources to solve the hard problems.
Actually it’s absolutely realistic and fair. I don’t like Musk, or Tesla for that matter. But they make it pretty damn clear that you’re 100% responsible for the vehicle when using that feature. Anyone who assumes they don’t need to pay attention is a moron and should be held responsible. If a 747 autopilot system starts telling the pilot to take control of the plane and they don’t… we wouldn’t blame the manufacturer, we’d blame the shitty pilot that didn’t do their job.
I can’t wait to get smacked by a Tesla beta tester and have everyone debate whether the car or the driver is responsible for my innards being spread across 4 lanes. Progress!
If the driver gets lulled into a false sense of security by a convenience system like this and the automation fails, it’s one thing to blame the driver, and that may or may not be fair depending on how much trust you place in the average driver’s competence, but the (hypothetical) victim is still dead, and who we decide to blame won’t make one iota of difference to that.
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
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I turned off the “lane assist” in our Mazda because it kept steering me back toward obstacles I was trying to avoid, like cyclists, oversized loads, potholes, etc. I don’t know why anyone thought that was a good idea.
But try buying a car without those features now…sigh.
Use your turn signal to indicate your direction change and it won’t do that.
If you’re swerving to avoid a sudden obstacle you reasonably may not have the foresight or reaction to flip on a signal. The car still needs to not force you back on collision course.
That’s a good point, and is probably why they designed it so that if you swerve hard, lane assist shuts off. It only nudges you back to the middle of the lane if you are gently drifting to a side, so it only works in situations where your turn signal can be used to avoid it. Or you can just disable it if you drive a BMW or otherwise can’t use turn signals.
Even moving over slightly in the lane to avoid a pothole triggers it; it doesn’t seem like a turn signal should be necessary in that situation. Instead the situation seems to be that I’m seeing the pothole and altering the car’s course gently to avoid it, and I get close to the line and it freaks out.
I guess if I drove right up to the obstacle then swerved, it wouldn’t do it…but I was always taught swerving was a last-resort thing, best to drive as smoothly as possible. (This was my dad’s argument, and I said, “Uh, SOMEONE taught me to not swerve unless it was necessary…” (him). He laughed.
I agree. More regulation may be necessary, but it isn’t a cure-all. It can’t be relied upon to prevent people from being stupid.
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
Here is a video from 2016 where Tesla claims that “the car drives itself”.
Sadly, Tesla has no such technology.
Where I live you can right now go to Tesla’s website and buy a car with “Full Self-Driving Capability” with a small print that includes the disclaimer that it doesn’t make the vehicle autonomous, for whatever that’s worth…
FSD is a paid feature that i assume was not being used during the accident, autopilot was being usedAh I see, now that you’ve been proven wrong you’re pretending you asked a different question.
You admit that Tesla advertises a “Full Self-Driving Capability” feature, which is basically what the person you said “source or stfu” to.
Whether or not the feature was used in this instance is not what we’re discussing here.
We can have this discussion if you’re feeling like you’re up for it in good-faith, I think both are true that people are overall terrible at the activity of driving so more driver aids are overall better, but also current driver aids are very limited and drivers are not necessarily great at understanding and working within those limits.
They’re not the only ones, but Tesla is really the worst offender at overstating their cars’ capabilities and setting people up for failure - like in this case.
Yes you’re right
What was used in this accident had nothing to do with my question and yes it looks like tesla advertisement is misleading
It’s literally called autopilot
There’s this sweet new website called Google. Try using that before you throat Musk.
Oh I tried, since I am so bad at googling please provide the source
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.”
Was he drunk? The article seems to use the fact that the car nagged him 150 times as evidence that he was impaired.
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.
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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?
No, they were too expensive for Musk
Holy shit… This is worse than I thought
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Calling a Tesla an “M3” is extremely confusing.
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.
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.
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The problem with this is what if the car thinks there’s a barrier in front of you but there isn’t? People are arguing that these systems are too intrusive while also arguing that they don’t go far enough to take control away from drivers.
This situation happened because a drunk driver ran into police cars, something that has been happening for as long as cars have existed.
They didn’t say he didn’t respond to the alerts. If you don’t respond, autopilot turns off.
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
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.
Right
It was on autopilot, so technically the drunk wasn’t driving it. But he is the one responsible.
Autopilot doesn’t work that way, the drunk should have known that when he wasn’t drunk and not tried to use it that way.
It’s like the old shaggy dog story about the guy driving a camper, setting the cruise control, then going into the back to make lunch.
That’s not the fault of the cruise control.
Thanks for the ELI5 that I wasn’t aware of needing.
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.
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
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.
