Tesla Self Crashing Car has First Fatality

[markz]

Few things I have noticed about drivers in general.

The obvious one, like this Tesla driver, is that most drivers dont even shoulder check. I got run into an open grassy median by a veteran plated vehicle with an old grey haired man driving. Absolutely clueless that geezer was!

Also all the obvious ones we are all aware of...
A) Drivers wait for a distance of a mile between vehicles to turn, backing up traffic.

B) When drivers parallel park, the great majority back up rather then drive head first in.
Which on a busy single lane road, backs up traffic.

C) Drivers run yellow-red lights, especially turning lights to sometimes not even save a minute.

D) Drivers in a through-lane merge will stop, backing up traffic.

E) Drivers turning right rarely look rightwards as they are looking left at moving traffic. I think this is the most common type of pedestrian/bicycle accident. Now with bike lanes this confuses the driver even more, but they are suppose to yield to bike lane on the right.

F) Drivers will slow down on a divided roadway to see the emergency vehicles on the opposite side. They will also slow down when a vehicle is on their side but on the shoulder or even in the ditch. This is a major issue for traffic backing up.

The list goes on and on and on and on. But with automation, all these really stupid drivers on the roads there will be less of a burden on our roadways when this technology can become fool proof. I just hope we can keep our old non-tech vehicles and drive them like they are meant to be driven. I am not keen on spending loads of cash for techy automobiles. I like my 1970's bush mudding truck or my 1990's Jeep Cherokee. Easy and cheap parts to find. All these new vehicles with their heated mirrors, automatic rear hatch lift are just more options that can and will fail.

 

[Dauntless]

Still not sure what a shoulder check has to do with a car hitting a truck that turned in front of it.

Run yellow lights? They speed up and run red lights trying to beat the cross traffic that is pulling into the intersection. Parallel parking while backing up is the most effective way to get into that tight parking spot. The people who go forward are often popping out again trying to line the car up.

I'm wondering what will happen when a guy gets a DUI while a "Passenger" in a self driving car. And will he be allowed to be a "Passenger" while his license is suspended?

So tonight I stepped into the crosswalk once the light had turned green. Here comes a fast moving vehicle that wants to turn right while I'm corresponding with the #2 lane. I scramble out farther but he's going so fast he swerved out to the #1 lane. I always look for the driver, his head wass turned the other way, not looking where he was going. My throat is sore from the yell I let out. Lucky his window was down or the next yell everyone else heard would have been me going through his windshield. He skidded to a stop right through the spot I'd just lept out of. Why is it people like him have to act so put out and say "Well exccuuuuuuuuuuusssee MEEEEEEEE!!!!" ???? Oh, don't mind me, you just almost smashed my legs.

And seeing as how he's coming around a corner with a building and I'm not in his path until he swerves wildly, what are the chances any automatic braking would have kicked in at some point before he hit me? What sort of rap will the builder of the car take in that situation?

i can imagine this will happen, but would you want to live in a world like that ?

LOL. Luddite detected

Oh, sure, we have a future where the car can drive to work without you, the factory can build without you, why in the world would you silly humans think that the modern age won't go an just fine without all of you?

(Been dyin' for a place for this.)

 

[markz]

In a statement, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said preliminary reports indicated that the crash occurred when a tractor-trailer made a left turn in front of the Tesla, and the car failed to apply the brakes.

Yes my bad I read that article wrong or assumed what someone commented on, I was under the impression the car was changing lanes and the lane detection failed, but it was the truck that changed lanes in front of the Tesla. Still a dumb move for Tesla driver. Any sensible normal safe driver could anticipate what was about to happen. Its not like the truck can change lanes on a dime. But we dont know the whole story without video evidence.

I never drive beside or behind any big rigs. Blind spot or not, EVER! I just dont want no rock chips on my windshield. It has happened to me where people change lanes into me and ME being aware of my sorroundings can safely evade an accident. This is just a case of the driver of the Tesla not paying attention.

Better the Tesla driver die then hurt anyone else for his not paying attention while operating a deadly 2 ton weapon.

 

[Chalo]

Self driving cars will continue to improve in sensory input and processing speed.

Humans will not improve at the rate self driving cars will evolve, and self driving cars are already in a comparable range.

isn't this akin to stating that in the future artificial intelligence will be smarter than human beings ?

i can imagine this will happen, but would you want to live in a world like that ?

Up until around World War II, a computer was a person who did arithmetic calculations for his job. I argue that many specific tasks are now performed by machines which do them much better that human beings do.

It looks to me like the beta version of self-driving cars is already safer than human drivers, with lots of room for improvement. Among those improvements will be increasing road capacity while reducing speeds, noise, and specific energy consumption at the same time, through more coordinated movements and reduced following distances.

 

[The fingers]

Every self-driving car should have warning signs like those on driver training cars. :x

 

[Harold in CR]

The car was doing 90 MPH, it least 20 MPH above the max limit on any 4 lane hwy. The trucker said the guy was not looking at the road, but, watching a video or something. All this is on Yahoo news today, IF we can believe that.

 

[Chalo]

Every self-driving car should have warning signs like those on driver training cars. :x

"Warning: This car is slow, patient, and predictable."

 

[ulrichw]

A couple of problems I see with self-driving cars:

The first, which this incident illustrates well, IMO, is that while self-driving cars will probably quite easily surpass average drivers from a safety perspective (maybe they already have?), they will have accidents in different circumstances than a human would. That's going to be pretty hard to swallow - people will say "how could the computer have missed that?", etc. Basically, people have a huge aversion to being killed by machines.

This means that the bar will be quite a bit higher for self-driving cars than it is for human drivers.

The second is that relying on the human as a backup driver is also a doomed prospect. Unlike computers, humans are easily distracted. As soon as the auto-pilots are 80% or more effective, drivers are called on so few times that they'll quickly become complacent. It's very hard for a human to do a job where most of the time they're sitting around doing nothing and once in a rare while, they're called upon to make a split-second decision.

I think this makes it nearly an all-or-nothing proposition. Maybe a solution is to have segments of road where fully autonomous is allowed, and other segments where humans must drive - that way at least humans will be required to be 100% on task while they're involved.

 

[Dauntless]

http://money.cnn.com/2016/07/12/technology/tesla-autopilot-accident/index.html