Tesla Model S waffling

[JST]

Momentum is a bitch?

[rumatt]

Maybe.

But don't forget, "with its roof was sheared off."

[clyde]

Originally Posted by JST

Momentum is a bitch?

Originally Posted by rumatt

Maybe.

But don't forget, "with its roof was sheared off."

I've been wondering about that, too. "Couple hundred yards," call it 600 feet? Autopilot didn't bring the car to a stop immediately after the roof went missing? How badly damaged does the car have to be or what kind of unexpected event does the car have to go through for the car to know to shut it down?

Tesla may be very lucky their car only killed it's own inattentive driver and not a pack of innocent bystanders. This time.

[ZBB]

Teslarati has an article including a pic of the car afterwards…

The same article also mentions a witness that noted he passed her shortly before the accident -- and she was going 85. So if he was ~90+, then he had a lot of momentum…

http://www.teslarati.com/witnesses-d...esla-accident/


I have to believe that Tesla will be making some changes to the current autopilot settings. I'd expect some things like:
- Much shorter time before the "keep your hands on the wheel" warning goes into braking/stop mode. Currently its well over a minute. Perhaps it needs to be more like 10 seconds?
- A failsafe / emergency braking mode when it loses a feed from one type of sensor. The camera is up by the rear-view mirror -- so when the roof was sheered off, the car would have noticed the end of the camera feed and should have gone into emergency braking mode. Wouldn't have saved the driver, but could have stopped the car much shorter than 600 feet…
- Future hardware may need to have a driver attentiveness monitoring -- perhaps some sort of eye tracking to see if the driver is monitoring?

[JST]

But what do you mean "shut it down?"

I guarantee that as soon as the car lost contact with the (roof mounted) MobilEye camera the drivers assistance systems were disabled. I've seen my car do this with far less serious failures.

That probably also means that regenerative braking was disabled; this suite of systems are all interconnected. ABS, traction control, and steering assist probably all went away, too.

So at that point, the car was free-wheeling. If the drivers (dead)foot was on the accelerator, it may actually have sped up. But none of the electronics would have been intervening to make it do anything. In other words, it was behaving just like a 57 Chevy with the roof lopped off and a dead man at the wheel.

Figure 70 mph...how long does it take to roll to a stop? It takes 200ish feet if you're braking hard, so 800 plus feet sounds totally reasonable.

[ZBB]

I didn't say "shut it down" -- I said "failsafe / emergency braking" mode. That's different than just disabling. It means actively braking the car to a stop. Perhaps it needs more than just the loss of a sensor -- perhaps a g-sensor abrupt input would be needed also…

I agree that with momentum and no active braking that the car stopped in a reasonable distance. I'm thinking what could the technology do in a situation like this?

The other side of things… I've long been a bit skittish whenever I'm passing a semi trailer -- the height of the side rails and open space underneath is concerning, especially when somewhat boxed in -- what if the truck changes lanes into me?

[JST]

I was mostly responding to Clyde. The thing is, some non-trivial amount of processing for the autopilot is done by the MobilEye unit. It's sort of like HAL--how do you want the car to behave when you take half its brain away?

This is such an edge case accident in terms of how it impacted the car that I don't know that there are many changes you need to make to the cars behavior to deal with it. Yes, emergency braking might have been the right choice here, but how many accidents are there going to be where some percentage of the sensors suddenly are disabled but the car keeps moving and the driver is dead?

I'd generally rather have the car not do something like slamming on the brakes in response to loss of sensor input.

[JST]

Also, my guess is that Tesla will be making changes, but that it won't have final say in what those changes are. I think NHTSA is going to have a lot to say.

[Josh (PA)]

The momentum arguement loses validity though when you consider the amount of energy dissipated during the shearing off process.

The whole thing reads as an unfortunate Darwin Award story.

[clyde]

A regular person in a regular car should be able to see something, process that s/he must stop immediately, move foot to the brake and come to a controlled and complete stop in well under 600 feet. Almost certainly less than 500 feet and that includes a full second of "processing time."

It is nearly inconceivable to me that with how smart the S is supposed to be that it could possibly lose its top and not recognize it as a catastrophic event and shut itself down immediately unless the damage prevented the car from stopping itself. Either of those scenarios are foreseeable events that any law talking guy from Hollywood Downstairs Law School (conveniently located On the ground level below Hollywood Upstairs Medical School) would spring a major league boner over the idea of signing a victim's relative.

Further, how fucking dare Tesla conduct a "beta test" with slovenly halfwits whose only qualification to "beta test" a system with such significant safety implications on public roads is the ability to pay the price of admission? And then when one of those halfwits uses the system as any moron knows exactly how people will use it, they blame the halfwit in their initial public statement? Okay, that's business and Tesla is as scumbag as any other for profit enterprise. Fuck them, but the Tesla apologists? Fuck them with glowing hot pokers.