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

(www.reuters.com)
410 points jjulius | 5 comments | 18 Oct 24 16:01 UTC | HN request time: 0.867s | source
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rKarpinski ◴[19 Oct 24 17:08 UTC] No.41889014[source]▶
'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.

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Retric ◴[19 Oct 24 17:14 UTC] No.41889049[source]▶
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.

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potato3732842 ◴[19 Oct 24 18:44 UTC] No.41889710[source]▶
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.

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1. Retric ◴[19 Oct 24 20:19 UTC] No.41890469[source]▶
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

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2. potato3732842 ◴[19 Oct 24 22:49 UTC] No.41891388[source]▶
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.

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3. ◴[19 Oct 24 22:52 UTC] No.41891405[source]▶
4. Retric ◴[20 Oct 24 00:02 UTC] No.41891810[source]▶
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...

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5. Arn_Thor ◴[20 Oct 24 07:05 UTC] No.41893502{3}[source]▶
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.