alt Hacker NewsNot really a fair comparison between Tesla's autopilot and Waymo though. You'd have to compare Tesla's Robotaxi but I believe they have been running for a far shorter period and I'm not sure how much data is out yet or how reliable it would be at this stage. The Robotaxi runs I believe a different version of autopilot meant to not have a human driver and has a lot more work that goes into making sure it's highly tested in the area it is being deployed. Whereas the Tesla Autopilot I believe can work in pretty much any area, so it may have more potential issues that come up.
Also a common thing I see happening with the Tesla Autopilot for an accident is that it's often not the fault of the autopilot. It's often the fault of the human driver who takes over last second. Naturally the driver will lie or not even realize they were the problem as they may have had auto pilot active 1 second before the crash. I think it's that natural human instinct when you see something happening to crap the wheel or hit the pedal in that "oh shit" kind of reflex. And that sometimes causes the driver to make a mistake.
I actually was in a crash with a person driving a Tesla vehicle where I think this was the cause. 3 lane highway, they were in the center lane, I was in the left lane, transport truck in the right lane. The transport truck slightly drift towards the edge of their lane and the Tesla driver freaked out and over corrected their steering wheel to the left and came swerving into my lane and was losing control of their car between both lanes until they suddenly slammed on their brakes in front of me. I gotta say, the Tesla brakes combined with the regenerative braking have some impressive stopping power. Unfortunately that also meant they stopped way faster and so suddenly that I hit their rear a bit. I got very lucky that insurance ruled in my favour and had them 100% at fault.
Apologies for the tangent, just trying to illustrate a point via a personal story of how even when the system is working well and keeping the driver safe, they can still make a human-like overreaction which overrides the autopilot and leads to a crash.
I get pretty annoyed when I see news articles with the headlines "Tesla crashed while auto pilot activated", but then there has yet to be an investigation and we actually don't know whether autopilot was in fact active or not yet. It's a clickbait style headline that I think makes people more hesitant about the progress of Waymo and Robotaxi vehicles.
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> It's often the fault of the human driver who takes over last second.
Per The Guardian:
“Two years prior, the NHTSA had flagged something strange – something suspicious. In a separate report, it documented 16 cases in which Tesla vehicles crashed into stationary emergency vehicles. In each, autopilot disengaged “less than one second before impact” – far too little time for the driver to react. Critics warn that this behaviour could allow Tesla to argue in court that autopilot was not active at the moment of impact, potentially dodging responsibility. […]”
“The real surprise came after [Mark Rober’s] experiment. Fred Lambert, who writes for the blog Electrek, pointed out the same autopilot disengagement that the NHTSA had documented. “Autopilot appears to automatically disengage a fraction of a second before the impact as the crash becomes inevitable,” Lambert noted.”
I kinda feel like "It's often the fault of the human driver who takes over last second" means it is still Autopilot's fault. It either needed to alert and hand-off control to the user well before the situation got bad- or stick with control. Getting into a bad situation and just handing off control is the worst possible way to do things. The human needs time to update their situational awareness, the Tesla needs to explain what is causing its concern to the human, etc. If it can't do that effectively- and quickly enough in the pre-accident moments- then it needs to not be used at all because it is more dangerous than just a human driving on their own. 20 years ago I did robot-human driving collaboration experiments for the US Army and I can tell you based on our experiments this is a really hard problem, but those experiments are why Tesla's entire approach has seemed suspect to me from the beginning.
It's either functional or not, this sort of half-assed system is the worst of all worlds. And I say this as someone who has routinely trusted his family in a Waymo. But I think that the Tesla approach is much more dangerous.