California accuses Tesla of false advertising over Autopilot The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) last month filed two complaints against Tesla alleging that the car marker violated state law by misrepresenting that its vehicles can drive autonomously. The complaints [1, 2] [PDF] were filed with the Golden State' Office of Administrative Hearings (OAH) and allege that the …
1 second at highway speeds is around 100 feet. Close your eyes for a full second on the road an you could kill someone, likely yourself. If I have a full second to spot a road hazard I can avoid it, most of the time. I still have a few aches and scars from the rest.
What I can say is that the statistic as quoted is meaningless, and delivered in a intentionally misleading way. Blending all those kick outs without context means we lose sight of the real problem cases, where the car SHOULD have either been able to react to the situation or SHOULD have spotted something and warned the driver sooner. Instead they want to hide all the cases where the threat didn't appear until the last moment, leaving no time for a human or robotic driver to react, in with the legit screw ups like ramming an abutment or their ongoing war on emergency and repair vehicles. That's a transparent play to pump up numbers that may not be nearly bad enough to justify restrictions on the technology.
While I expect their suit may succeed on other arguments, Tesla's engineers will slap that one down in court. They will have a much harder time with the misleading claims they made, the ones they failed to correct, and the failure to deliver on the promises they made to customers who's money they had already created.
" If I have a full second to spot a road hazard I can avoid it, most of the time."
Really exceptional.
The generally accepted mean (end to end) driver reaction time is about 1.5 seconds, assuming that the driver is already mentally engaged in the task of driving. However, in the Level 2 scenario the driver is specifically not engaged with the task of driving as it has been delegated to the automaton. Consequently, the automaton handing over one second before impact is always much too late except as a weasel manoeuvre on the part of the vendor to avoid liability.
Less than 1 sec is not 1 sec . Lets give Tesla the benefit of the doubt and say 0.75 secs av.
Reaction time is 0.25 secs
Unfortunately you have to rotate the wheel a long way to avoid anything , say 100ms
Lets say you instantly turn the car 10 degrees. At 20m/s you will move sideways 3.5m/s. In 0.75-0.25-0.2 secs you have moved sideways 1.4m.
Good news: Only your passenger and the fireman standing behind the fire truck dies. Unless your door handles stay locked in and you burn to death too.
A self-driving car is nothing but a robot following a set of instructions. Ideally all such robots are roped off so that nobody gets within their operating envelope, where the robot is liable to suddenly (and unpredictably) murder any hapless living thing within reach. That’s the way all other robots are operated — for darn good reason.
Oh well, Musk got to enjoy murdering a certain number of Tesla customers. That’s an important “take-away” from this unfortunate spectacle!
'People driving RVs have gone to the bathroom while cruise control was on = people are idiots'
I don't doubt that's true, but a link to a source would be nice.
But I agree, people are in general idiots, myself included.
However, one (or more) incident(s) of personal stupidity is not the same as corporate irresponsibility.
Tesla know what they are peddling, and they know people will die as a result of their lies.
Not the toilet but make a cuppa good enough for you ?
Pleading guilty to careless and reckless driving, Spencer Smith, a retired librarian, stunned magistrates by saying she had been confused by what cruise control actually meant.
“I thought it was like an autopilot that you get on airplanes,” she said.
“I turned it on at what I thought was a sensible 40mph, then stepped away from the driver seat into the back of the motorhome to make a cup of tea.
“I presumed that cruise control worked with the sat nav to negotiate the roads safely. Imagine my surprise when no sooner had I flicked the switch on the kettle that we hit a tree at 40mph. Luckily I was unhurt because I was thrown on to the sofa.
https://www.suffolkgazette.com/motorhome-crash/
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