Lot of news about a Tesla that smashed into a tree

[Workingman]

The car that hit a tree and burst into flames killing two was a Tesla 2019 Model S, not a Kia, Volvo or VW deflection vehicle. Those are the facts as things stand.

Somehow the "impossible" happened and we will only know the truth when the inquest is completed.

[Suff]

There is not one bit of evidence that AP was engaged and functioning when this vehicle crashed. In fact there is extensive evidence that this vehicle was operating in a way which was totally incompatible with the Autopilot installed on a 2019 Model. S.

Yet there continues to be an absolute certainty that AP was enabled. Why? Because there was nobody in the drivers seat.

Occams razor. On one hand we are asked to believe that AP acted in a way it is explicitly programmed not to and in a way which it is programmed to be impossible for that version of the vehicle as it left the factory.

Alternately, the driver was being an idiot, left the drivers seat and tried to engage AP and when it would not engage killed both occupants and caused a serious fire by ripping the front off the vehicle and crushing a foot off the battery length.

I know, having followed Tesla technology for some time now, which side of the razor I fall on. The Press, since about late 2018, tend's to fall on the other side and are about 95% wrong.

Points to remember, Tesla doesn't advertise. TeslaQ made billions out of selling Tesla as a failing company, then lost even more billions when it did not.

This colours everything you read in the media and from industry "analists"

[cromwell]

Slightly OT but do you think all the technology being bunged on modern cars is to ready us for self driving cars?
I like an automatic but increasingly now it seems that manufacturers put them at the top of the range, which means that they come with:-
"Infotainment"
A touchscreen controlling just about everything, even the heating and AC.
Lane departure warning / Lane keep assist
Autonomous breaking
Adaptive cruise control
Blind spot warning
Tyre pressure warning system
Seat belt warning
Sat nav
Eco driving style assistance
Voice control of some features
etc, etc, etc

I'm not against all tech. Parking sensors and reversing cameras are great ideas.
But I'd like a basic, reliable automatic. I don't want or need 99% of the tech on offer but it seems I must have it.

[Workingman]

Ah, someone at last talking sense about car technology - and tech in general.

This stuff in not needed by 99% of us for 99% of the time yet the techno-geeks deem it necessary as they usher us into Wall-E world.

Driving is a complicated exercise, yet relatively easy, and by taking an active part the brain is kept in good condition by processing all the variables involved in getting us from A to B. We have five (known) senses for a reason and they have served us well over millions of years. They got us to where we are today. Dull them, as were are now doing, and we might as well not exist in our current form. We would become nothing more than an extension of "the chips" and controlled by them - they will make our decisions for us. We become just another cog in the Internet of things.

[Suff]

Slightly OT but do you think all the technology being bunged on modern cars is to ready us for self driving cars?

Yes technology is moving to a single screen. Although they still have stalks, etc, Electric vehicles have no gears, some, like Tesla, support 1 pedal driving where if you lift the foot, it goes into energy recovery mode and it is highly effective.

Some vehicles, like my Uncle's Peugeot, insist on lane keeping, blind spot warning etc.

In a Tesla you can simply turn all this off and drive the vehicle. In some other vehicles too. In fact the more that these features get bundled into an AI suite, the more you turn off with one disabling action.

One of my issues with Level 5 automation is this. Once the vehicle starts fully driving for you, there is no actual way in which you can then expect the passenger to take over. Because the passenger may have never learned to drive. So the concepts being shared by the authorities are flawed.

The whole subject is a total minefield of misconceptions, poor judgement, bad products and slapdash delivery (Uber), which can get people killed without the driver doing anything wrong.

Once Tesla woke up to the reality of what a driving AI need to do they designed and manufactured their own "supercomputer". Then they stuck the AI on it and found it still doesn't drive easily. When they looked at why, they realised they needed a monster parallel supercomputer to read all the possible scenario's from the data being collected by the cars on the road, label it (automatically) and feed it back to the AI as viable training data. Also they realised it would take 8 camera's working in 360 degree 4D resolution to be able to emulate a human with Mk1 eyeballs and 3 mirrors. 4D? 3D + time. In other words labelling full motion 360Deg video as training material. Rather than a bunch of pictures.

Could you imaging learning to drive by being shown a bunch of pictures, in the classroom, then being told to get in the car and drive they way you were told?

The most amazing thing of all is that it is happening at all.

It is hardly surprising that every time something might have gone wrong, with a system this complex, it gets negative press.

[Suff]

Just to put some reality to the news about a Tesla burning out of control for 4 hours.

Palmer Buck, fire chief for The Woodlands Township Fire Department, said the Tesla fire was an example of how “we need to keep up with technology” in regard to both rescuing people possibly trapped in the new electric vehicles or merely putting out possible fires from the vehicle’s intensive battery package.


Buck also said contrary to some reports in the media, the Tesla involved in the April 17 fire did not burn out of control for four hours.

“With respect to the fire fight, unfortunately, those rumors grew out way of control. It did not take us four hours to put out the blaze. Our guys got there and put down the fire within two to three minutes, enough to see the vehicle had occupants,”

Buck said of inaccurate claims the vehicle burned for hours. “After that, it was simply cooling the car as the batteries continued to have a chain reaction due to damage.”

“We could not tear it apart or move it around to get ‘final extinguishment’ because the fact that we had two bodies in there and it was then an investigation-slash-crime scene,”

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/neighb ... 113029.php

When reading ANY article about how a Tesla crashed. The phrase "handle with care" is a good watchphrase.

[Workingman]

It's amazing that we can drive at all with just a brain and five senses!

And as each day passes millions more of us become less able to do practical things.

[sarc]
"Siri, put the kettle on"
"Sorry Frank it needs filling up"
"OK Siri I have managed to find the instruction book and got it filled, now please turn it on"

"Frank, Alexa here, your fridge says that you are running out of sugar snap peas, do you want me to add them to your online shopping list?"
"Please, Alexa"
"Also you have had the butter for over five days, you really should bin it"
[/sarc]

The popularity of 'making stuff' or 'repairing stuff' programmes is surely an indication of how useless we are becoming. People are amazed or astounded at a button being sewn on or bread being made by hand.

We are losing the plot. 'I Robot' world is upon us.

Some will dream of reaching the stars, others will dream of being able to dress themselves without velcro or elastic being involved.

[Suff]

There is a world of difference between expectations and actual reality.

So much so that Tesla had to go back to the drawing board more than once after having announced that it was "easy" and a "done deal". There were clear reasons why Waymo chose to use hugely expensive LIDAR sensors and then geomapped every route the car would take. Essentially the Waymo software is a smart chimp that can't deal with the real world. For instance an unprotected left turn. A waymo Level 5 Taxi (only in geofenced Phoenix since 2016), will not try to take an unprotected left turn. What we call filtered or unfiltered. It will go miles out of its way or leave people on the other side of the road from their destination.

Waymo has not solved this problem since 2016 and even though the car already knows that the turn is filtered or not through the geomapping, it still can't make the turn.

Tesla has had to resolve these problems and Tesla has finally realised what we, humans, do. That is, simply, we watch the road in 4D and take action based upon evolving situations. 4D you say. Yep, 3D vision over time. Think of a 3D movie, it is actually 4D, it is 3D vision for a period of time. That is what we do. Now to get a computer to do it. 30fps per camera.

Then we also have up to 3 mirrors in the car. To replicate this tesla's have 8 camera's. 30fps *8 is one hell of a lot of frames of data to label, identity and feed back to a driving AI as reliable training instructions. Humans do this automatically because we have spent 17 years learning to do this before they will let us behind a wheel. AI, initially for driving, was like a 3 year old. Tesla reached about a 10 year old with the current level of FSD. Now it needs to give it the training and experience to take it from 10 to 17 when it is "mature" enough to sit a test.

In order to do this, Tesla has had to create a monster training computer which can take data from 8 camera's from 1m vehicles and recognise edge cases, label them and create additional info as training data for the driving AI. That monster training computer is an AI, specifically created to train AI programs to drive.

When Google wanted to create a game playing AI, they spent 3 years writing the code for the AI, the Intelligence Logic if you will. During that 3 years they recorded session data with human and artificial players. When the software was complete and tested it took 3 DAYS for the AI to ingest the training data and start playing at a very high level. Humans could still beat it, but every time it was beaten it became even harder to beat next time.

This is what is happening with AI driving.

In-between starting to write this and losing it because of PC replacement issues (windows activation etc....), I was reading up on the so called "Tesla accidents". I noticed two things.

The first was that every driver who had an accident, who did not get killed, was convicted of varying offenses from driving without due care and attention to dangerous driving. This is because it quite specifically says you must be alert, aware and in control of the vehicle when using Autopilot. Because it is level 2 and not really in charge of the vehicle. In fact it is like when you take someone out to teach them to drive, you must be more aware than the person who is actually driving the vehicle except that with Autopilot it is like being in a dual control vehicle.

The second thing I noticed was that Tesla's have an issue. In fact not just Tesla's, but every AI vehicle today. There is one edge case which causes a problem. It is when the vehicle in front moves out of the lane, your vehicle starts to accelerate to meet the set speed, only to find that there is an obstruction in the road, which is why the vehicle in front moved out of the lane. In this case, depending on the angle of the vehicles, the visible and radar sensors were conflicting. Radar could not really see the obstacle but vision could. It set up a conflict which blocked the automatic safety systems from slamming on the brakes.

In every case I can find (and there are not many for 1m Tesla vehicles on the road), it seems that the vehicle had between 3 and 4 seconds from the lane clearing to impact. Which means the vehicle in front did an extremely late avoidance and the vehicle following behind had very little reaction time. This happens with humans and almost always results in an accident unless the person has very fast reactions.

Tesla has finally decided how to deal with this. They are ditching the radar and going with Human senses. Pure vision. This removes the conflict and allows the safety systems to react. Every other driving AI system is using blended sensors, setting the scenario for exactly this conflict.

This is where we are in AI self driving today. The circus chimp who has almost everything done for them and the 10 year old. It is hardly surprising that people have accidents and get killed when they treat these things as if they a are fully trained and certified driver.

There is video out there as to what happens when you switch on GM supercruise on a road which is not geomapped. The thing goes crazy, tries to drive off the road, ignores traffic lights and, essentially, reacts like a toddler. That is the same abuse as sitting in the passenger seat of a Tesla whilst the uncertified Juvenile drives the car.

[cromwell]

Well, stupid is as stupid does. You can't educate pork as they used to say.

With all the tech loaded cars, it's not that i object to the tech per se. If others want it I have no problem with it; and certainly a self driving taxi to a pub would be a boon for many, not least the pub owners.

But it's the lack of choice that I have. If I want x, then I must have a,d,c,d and e as well.

Many years ago US car manufacturers had an options list. You want an auto? Tick. Metallic paint? Tick. Air con? Tick.
And you got wht you wanted, not what the manufacturers decided that you were going to have.

[Workingman]

Many thousands of words cannot alter the fact that self-drive vehicles are a solution to a problem that does not exist, and an expensive one at that.

Being blind in one eye I do not have true 3D, but I can get from A to B safely, and in my own city and the neighbouring ones I do not need SATNAV. I can consult a map, and then only for the last mile or so, sometimes. I can also deviate from my route at any time on a whim - no reprogramming necessary.

The tech is very clever, no doubt about that, but for me and millions of other drivers a major point of having the car is to drive it. It is an enjoyable experience. In fact I have yet to meet a driver who likes being a passenger, especially if sat in the front.