US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

> The collision happened because the sun was in the Tesla driver's eyes, so the Tesla driver was not charged, said Raul Garcia, public information officer for the department.

Am I missing something or is this the gross miscarriage of justice that it sounds like? The driver could afford a $40k vehicle but not $20 polarized shades from Amazon? Negligence is negligence.

You know what they say, if you want to kill someone in the US, do it in a car.

I have no idea what the conditions were like for this incident, but I’ve blown through a 4-way stop sign when the sun was setting. There’s only so much sunglasses can do.

Crash Course: If You Want to Get Away With Murder Buy a Car Woodrow Phoenix

Not to mention that when you can't see, you slow down? Does the self-driving system do that sufficiently in low visibility? Clearly not if it hit a pedestrian with enough force to kill them.

The article mentions that Tesla's only use cameras in their system and Musk believes they are enough, because humans only use their eyes. Well firstly, don't you want self-driving systems to be better than humans? Secondly, humans don't just respond to visual cues as a computer would. We also hear and respond to feelings, like the sudden surge of anxiety or fear as our visibility is suddenly reduced at high speed.

If environmental factors incapacitate you, should you not slow down or stop?

The Tesla knows when it's cameras and blinded by sun and act accordingly or tells the human to take over.

You shouldn't be on the road then? If you can't see, you should slow down. If you can't handle driving in given conditions safely for everyone involved, you should slow down or stop. If everybody would drive like you, there'd be a whole lot more death on the roads.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ If I can't see because of rain, hail, intense sun reflections, frost re-forming on my windshield, etc. then I pull over and put my flashers on until the problem subsides. Should I have kept the 4700 lb vehicle in fifth gear at 55 mph without the ability to see in front of me in each of these instances? I submit that I should not have and that I did the right thing.

I would think one relevant factor is that human vision is different than and in some ways significantly better than cameras.

I think one of the reasons they focus only on vision is basically the entire transportation infra is designed using human eyes a primary way to channel information.

Useful information for driving are communicated through images in form of road signs, traffic signals etc.

Negligence is negligence but people tend to view vehicle collisions as "accidents", as in random occurrences dealt by the hand of fate completely outside of anyone's control. As such, there is a chronic failure to charge motorists with negligence, even when they have killed someone.

If you end up in court, just ask for a jury and you'll be okay. I'm pretty sure this guy didnt even go to court, sounds like it got prosecutor's discretion.

Unfortunately there is also an AI training problem embedded in this. As Mobileye says, there are a lot of driver decisions that are common, but wrong. The famous example is rolling stops, but also failing to slow down for conditions is really common.

It wouldn't shock me if they don't have nearly enough training samples of people slowing appropriately for visibility with eyes, much less slowing for the somewhat different limitations of cameras.

Expect when it doesn't actually do that, I guess? Like when this pedestrian was killed?

I dunno, knowing the exact relative velocity of the car in front of you seems like it could be useful and is something humans can’t do very well.

I’ve always wanted a car that shows my speed and the relative speed (+/-) of the car in front of me. My car’s cruise control can maintain a set distance so obviously it’s capable of it but it doesn’t show it.

Yet so much more YOU could have done, don’t you think?

We are "designed" (via evolution) to perceive and understand the environment around us. The signage is designed to be easily readable for us.

The models that drive these cars clearly either have some more evolution to do or for us to design the world more to their liking.

Yes, officer, this one right here.

> There’s only so much sunglasses can do.

For everything else, you have brakes.

In the US it seems you'd do it with a gun, but in Germany it's cars.

There was this elderly driver who mowed down a family in a bike lane waiting to cross the road in Berlin, driving over the barriers between the bike lane and the car lane because the cars in the car lane were too slow. Released without conviction - it was an unforeseeable accident.

If we were able to know when a neural net is failing to categorize something, wouldn’t we get AGI for free?

Yes. I was talking why Tesla choose to use vision. Since they can't control designing the transport infra to their liking at least for now.

Yeah, I have a couple of mirrors placed around my car that reflect light into my face so that I can get out of running into someone. Tbh I understand why they do this. Someone on HN explained it to me: Yield to gross tonnage. So I just drive where I want. If other people die, that’s on them: the graveyards are full of people with the right of way, as people say.

I know right? Once I got something in my eye so I couldn't see at all, but I decided that since I couldn't do anything about it the best thing was to keep driving. I killed a few pedestrians but... eh, what was I going to do?

Negligence is the failure to act with the level of care that a reasonable person would exercise in a similar situation; if a reasonable person likely would have done the things that led to that person’s death, they’re not guilty of negligence.

Your license should be suspended. If conditions don't allow you to see things like that, you slow down until you can. If you still can't, then you need to pull over and wait until conditions make it safe to drive again.

Gross.

That sounds like the justice system living up to its ideals. If the 12 jurors know they would have done the same in your situation, as would their family and friends, then they can't in good conscience convict you for negligence.

I'm genuinely not sure what the answer is.

When you're driving directly in the direction of a setting sun, polarized sunglasses won't help you at all. That's what sun visors are for, but they won't always work if you're short, and can block too much of the environment if you're too tall.

The only truly safe answer is really to pull to the side of the road and wait for the sun to set. But in my life I've never seen anybody do that ever, and it would absolutely wreck traffic with little jams all over the city that would cascade.

It sounds like the kind of narcissism that perverts justice. People understand things they could see themselves doing, don't understand things that they can't see themselves doing, and disregard the law entirely. It makes non-doctors and non-engineers incapable of judging doctors and engineers, rich people incapable of judging poor people, and poor people incapable of judging rich people.

It's just a variation of letting off the defendant that looks like your kid, or brutalizing someone whose victim looks like your kid, it's no ideal of justice.

No, polarized sunglasses work fine. I drive into a setting sun probably once a week to no incident.

That doesn't make any sense to me.

First of all, polarization is irrelevant when looking at the sun. It only affects light that is reflected off things like other cars' windows, or water on the street. In fact, it's often recommended not to use polarized sunglasses while driving because you can miss wet or icy patches on the road.

Secondly, standard sunglasses don't let you look directly at the sun, even a setting one. The sun is still dangerously bright.

I’m not looking directly at the sun I am looking at the road. Either way it makes a big difference and you don’t get much black ice here in sunny southern california.

But the scenario we're talking about is when the sun is just a few degrees away from the road. It's still entering your eyeball directly. It's still literally blinding, so I just... don't understand how you can do that? Like, I certainly can't. Sunglasses -- polarized or otherwise -- don't make the slightest difference. It's why sun visors exist.

Also, I'm assuming you get rain in SoCal at least sometimes, that then mostly dries up but not completely? Or leaking fire hydrants and so forth? It's the unexpected wet patches.

If your car is maintaining speed of the car in front then the car in front is going speed that is showing on your speedometer.

When we get rain in socal its a deluge. The first couple months of 2024 we had more rain than seattle. That being said there is a big difference wearing sunglasses and not. Actually I was in a parking garage today and thought of this very thread, because the sun was shining on the cement ground through the side and was literally blinding. To my naked eye it was like a blown out photograph, just pure light on the ground. I put the sunglasses on that were around my neck and what do you know. Not only did the glare go down it went down to the point I could now make out the little half rainbow streaks the cement pavers added to the floor. Same thing happens on our cement highways or when you get bad glare off of someones relatively freshly waxed car. I had a period of two weeks where I lost my polarized glasses and it was like I was disabled going outside in the day; I had to squint to even stand it because of how many white painted or cement surfaces we have here in socal. I grew up in the midwest where I did not really own sunglasses at all fwiw. Here it is mandatory for the amount of unclouded sunlight coupled with the usually white or light grey surface treatment on a lot of things.

Yes, that’s true, but I don’t see how that relates to my comment at all.

I said the relative speed. If the car is going the same speed as me then the relative speed is 0mph. I want to see that when I’m not using cruise control.

I can agree with you in many cases. But for convicting someone due to negligence, they have to, by definition, have conducted themselves in a way that competent people engaged in that activity wouldn't usually. If all drivers drive a certain way, even if it's dangerous, then you're not negligent by the standards of the law for driving that same way.

You're confusing three things here.

Yes, sunglasses are necessary because the white cement is blinding. That situation is literally what sunglasses are for.

But polarized sunglasses are no better than regular sunglasses in this regard. Polarization does nothing extra for rough surfaces like cement.

And you're talking entirely about reflected sunlight, which is what sunglasses are designed for.

But the topic was direct sunlight straight into your eyeball while driving, and sunglasses provide no help or safety here. Polarized or not.

That's not a reason to only use vision.