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

'Pedestrian' in this context seems pretty misleading

"Two vehicles collided on the freeway, blocking the left lane. A Toyota 4Runner stopped, and two people got out to help with traffic control. A red Tesla Model Y then hit the 4Runner and one of the people who exited from it. "

edit: Parent article was changed... I was referring to the title of the NPR article.

More clarity may change people’s opinion of the accident, but IMO pedestrian meaningfully represents someone who is limited to human locomotion and lacks any sort of protection in a collision.

Which seems like a reasonable description of the type of failure involved in the final few seconds before impact.

That is the correct use of pedestrian as a noun.

Sometimes using a word correctly is still confusing because it’s used in a different context 90% of the time.

I think parent commenter emphasized the context.

Leaving out context that would otherwise change the interpretation of most or targeted people is the main way to misled those people without technically lying.

> Pedestrian' in this context seems pretty misleading

What's misleading? The full quote:

"A red Tesla Model Y then hit the 4Runner and one of the people who exited from it. A 71-year-old woman from Mesa, Arizona, was pronounced dead at the scene."

If you exit a vehicle, and are on foot, you are a pedestrian.

I wouldn't expect FSD's object recognition system to treat a human who has just exited a car differently than a human walking across a crosswalk. A human on foot is a human on foot.

However, from the sound of it, the object recognition system didn't even see the 4Runner, much less a person, so perhaps there's a more fundamental problem with it?

Perhaps this is something that lidar or radar, if the car had them, would have helped the OR system to see.

I mean it's the literal language they use in the report[1]. Personally, would much prefer a publication to be technically correct, a person on foot on a motorway is referred to as a pedestrian, that is the name for that.

[1]https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2024/INOA-PE24031-23232.pdf

By a stricter definition, a pedestrian is one who travels by foot. Of course, they are walking, but they’re traveling via their car, so by some interpretations you wouldn’t call them a pedestrian. You could call them a “motorist” or a “stranded vehicle occupant”.

For understanding the accident it does seem meaningful that they were motorists that got out of their car on a highway and not pedestrians at a street crossing. (Still inexcusable of course, but changes the context)

The description has me wondering if this was definitely a case where FSD was being used. There have been other cases in the past where drivers had an accident and claimed they were using autopilot when they actually were not.

I don't know for sure, but I would think that the car could detect a collision. I also don't know for sure, but I would think that FSD would stop once a collision has been detected.

Did the article say the Tesla didn't stop after the collision?

Cars and drivers ideally shouldn't hit people who exited their vehicles after an accident on a highway. Identifying and avoiding hazards is part of driving.

> FSD would stop once a collision has been detected.

Fun fact, at least until very recently, if not even to this moment, AEB (emergency braking) is not a part of FSD.

As far as I am aware, pes doesn't carry an inherent meaning of travel. Pedestrian just means foot on, they don't need to be moving, they're just not in carriage. As an aside, distinguishing a person's mode of presence is precisely what reports aim to capture.

(I also do tend to avoid this level of pedantry, the points here are all well taken to be clear. I do think the original poster was fine in their comment, I was just sayin' - but this isn't a cross I would die on :))

> There have been other cases in the past where drivers had an accident and claimed they were using autopilot when they actually were not.

Wouldn’t this be protocoled by the event data recorder?

If it hit the vehicle and then hit one of the people who had exited the vehicle with enough force for it to result in a fatality, it sounds like it might not have applied any braking.

Of course, that depends on the speed it was traveling at to begin with.

Omitting that the pedestrian was on a freeway meaningfully mis-represents the situation.

> There have been other cases in the past where drivers had an accident and claimed they were using autopilot when they actually were not.

If that were the case here, there wouldn't be a government probe, right? It would be a normal "multi car pileup with a fatality" and added to statistics.

With the strong incentive on the part of both the driver and Tesla to lie about this, there should strong regulations around event data recorders [1] for self driving systems, and huge penalties for violating those. A search across that site doesn't return a hit for the word "retention" but it's gotta be expressed in some way there.

1. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-49/subtitle-B/chapter-V/p...

This sort of framing you're engaging in is exactly what the person you're replying to is complaining about.

Yeah, the person who got hit was technically a pedestrian but just using that word with no other context doesn't covey that it was a pedestrian on a limited access highway vs somewhere pedestrians are allowed and expected. Without additional explanation people assume normalcy and think that the pedestrian was crossing a city street or something pedestrians do all the time and are expected to do all the time when that is very much not what happened here.

Tesla's were famously poor at detecting partial lane obstructions for a long time. I wonder if that's what happened here.

Dealing with people on freeways is the kind of edge case humans aren’t good at but self driving cars have zero excuses. It’s a common enough situation that someone will exit a vehicle after a collision to make it a very predictable edge case.

Remember all of the bad press Uber got when a pedestrian was struck and killed walking their bike across the middle of a street at night? People are going to be on limited access freeways and these systems need to be able to deal with it. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54175359

That's why he said misleading rather than an outright lie. He is not disputing that it is techincally correct to refer to the deceased as a pedestrian, but this scenario (someone out of their car on a freeway) is not what is going to spring to the mind of someone just reading the headline.

People walking on freeways may be rare from the perspective of an individual driver but not a self driving system operating on millions of vehicles.

What does that have to do with the original article's misleading title?

I don’t think it’s misleading. It’s a tile not some hundred word description of what exactly happened.

Calling them motorists would definitely be misleading by comparison. Using the simple “fatal crash” of the linked title implies the other people might in be responsible which is misleading.

Using accident but saying Tesla was at fault could open them up to liability and therefore isn’t an option.

> I don’t think it’s misleading. It’s a tile not some hundred word description of what exactly happened.

"Pedestrian killed on freeway" instead of "pedestrian killed" doesn't take 100 words and doesn't give the impression Tesla's are mowing people down on crosswalks (although that's a feature to get clicks, not a bug).

Without context that implies the pedestrians shouldn’t have been on the freeway.

It’s not an issue for Tesla, but it does imply bad things about the victims.

A title of "U.S. to probe Tesla's 'Full Self-Driving' system after pedestrian killed on freeway" would in no way imply bad things about the pedestrian who was killed.

I'd make the argument that people are very good at dealing with random things that shouldn't be on freeways as long as they don't coincide with blinding sun or other visual impairment.

Tesla had a long standing issue detecting partial lane obstructions. I wonder if the logic around that has anything to do with this.

I believe AEB can trigger even while FSD is active. Certainly I have seen the forward collision warning trigger during FSD.

It was my first assumption when I was read pedestrian on freeway in someone’s comment without context. Possibly due to Uber self driving fatality.

Stranded motorists who exit their vehicle, construction workers, first responders, tow truck drivers, etc are the most common victims but that’s not the association I had.

17 percent of pedestrian fatalities occur on freeways. Considering how rarely pedestrians are on freeways that suggests to me people aren’t very good at noticing them in time to stop / avoid them.

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2022/06/09/why-20-of-pedestrians...

Why? I would hope we all expect pedestrian detection (and object detection in general) to be just as good on a freeway as on a city street? It seems the Tesla barreled full-speed into an accident ahead of it. I would call it insane but that would be anthropomorphizing it.

That, and/or freeway speeds make the situation inherently more dangerous. When the traffic flows freeway speeds are fine but if a freeway-speed car has to handle a stationary object…problem.

No, you’re not allowed to hit pedestrians on the freeway either.

There are many reasons why a pedestrian might be on the freeway. It’s not common but I see it at least once a month and I drive extra carefully when I do, moving over if I can and slowing down.