2 dead in Tesla accident "Noone wasdrivingthe car" 15

[MartinLe]

https://www.click2houston.com/news/...er-fiery-tesla-crash-in-spring-officials-say/

“no one was driving” the fully-electric 2019 Tesla when the accident happened. There was a person in the passenger seat of the front of the car and in the rear passenger seat of the car.

the vehicle was traveling at a high speed when it failed to negotiate a cul-de-sac turn, ran off the road and hit the tree.

The brother-in-law of one of the victims said relatives watched the car burn for four hours as authorities tried to tap out the flames.

Authorities said they used 32,000 gallons of water to extinguish the flames because the vehicle’s batteries kept reigniting. At one point, Herman said, deputies had to call Tesla to ask them how to put out the fire in the battery.

 

[JohnRBaker]

Heinlein almost got it right in 'The Roads Must Roll', except in his case, the 'roads' were still the network, just without any vehicles whatsoever:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-'Product Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[drawoh]

Spartan5,

I agree with you.

If I design a robot car and I am responsible for any accidents it causes, it does not become a possession. I do not want that robot in your garage with the door closed. I do not want you opening the hood. Robot cars will be a service, not a consumer product.

Robot cars will be easier to implement if they have an exclusive right of way, but there is no practical way to implement this for a functional transport system. Even without human drivers, there will be all sorts of unpredictable object out there on the road including pedestrians, pets, and Bambi and Bullwinkle. The robots simply will have to cope with this.

Can robots replace human drivers in all road transportation scenarios? I don't think so.

--
JHG

 

[drawoh]

Hey! Time is money!

Also I don't see self-driving / autonomous vehicles being tolerated by Ultra Type A's, either.

If I design and build robots cars and I am legally responsible for any accidents they cause, there will not be a "drive like a lunatic" setting. Type[ ]A personalities will not enjoy following my cars in traffic.

A benefit of available robot cars is all the crappy drivers out there. Either they don't want to drive, or the courts have ordered them to not drive. Vast swathes of the USA and Canada are constructed around a population that owns cars. The robots will take these people shopping and to and from work. The rest of us will be safer.

Robots don't have to be safer than humans. If the robots are safer than a fiftieth percentile driver, we can use them to make the streets safer.

--
JHG

 

[BrianPetersen]

That ride-sharing model might work for some people, but it won't work for me, and I suspect it won't work for a lot of people.

My vehicles always contain various odds and ends that might or might not be used on a day-to-day basis. My work vehicle contains, for example, a hard-hat, a couple sets of safety glasses, random earplugs, steel-toe boots, an orange construction vest, business cards, various security passes that I need to get onto a number of different job sites, etc. I ain't loading all that stuff into a rental driverless taxi to go where I need to go, unloading ALL of it at the job site, waiting for another driverless taxi at the end of whatever I need to do there, loading it ALL back in, etc etc multiple times per day!

Besides which ... people are pigs. A driverless taxi is going to be filled with McDonalds wrappers and other detritus and is going to smell bad, whether that's due to what the previous renter ate, or smoked, or wore, or ... emitted.

 

[drawoh]

...

Besides which ... people are pigs. A driverless taxi is going to be filled with McDonalds wrappers and other detritus and is going to smell bad, whether that's due to what the previous renter ate, or smoked, or wore, or ... emitted.

If you are running a fleet of robots, cleaning them will be part of your logistics, along with keeping a list of people you refuse to transport. Uber tracks this, do they not?

My brother drives a truck and I belong to a ski club that uses luxury buses for their day and weekend trips. If you owned an expensive commercial vehicle, wouldn't you want a responsible grown[‑]up keeping an eye on how the public is interacting with them. If your vehicle must be accompanied by a trusted employee, just what is the robot accomplishing?

--
JHG

 

[Tomfh]

the question never asked is " why the merry Eff do we need self driving cars?" Where is the demand?

It could potentially make cars safer. Human drivers crash a lot. We’re not really designed to pay close attention to rather monotonous tasks for hours at a time.

 

[SnTMan]

" why the merry Eff do we need self driving cars?" Where is the demand?

It seems to me like one of those top-down demand situations rather than bottom up

The problem with sloppy work is that the supply FAR EXCEEDS the demand

 

[Spartan5]

Besides which ... people are pigs. A driverless taxi is going to be filled with McDonalds wrappers and other detritus and is going to smell bad, whether that's due to what the previous renter ate, or smoked, or wore, or ... emitted.

The gig economy (and cameras) will take care of that too.

as for your specific situation, this won’t replace all the cars. But with the right system in place, many people will opt out of ownership (capital costs, maintenance costs, insurance costs, and storage costs go bye bye). Hundreds of square miles of parking could be recovered too.

 

[dik]

Someone in advertising will push the issue and pretty soon everyone will want self-driving vehicles... ask Musk.

Rather than think climate change and the corona virus as science, think of it as the wrath of God. Feel any better?

-Dik

 

[MartinLe]

The real interest in full autonomous driving comes from saving on truck drivers wages, and possible quicker long hauls due to less pauses etc.

 

[RedSnake]

Well there are driver assists functions for trucks today, which has a much higher security level then Teslas one camera system.
And that can be developed to autonomous driving, if needed and approved.
Actually there is for ordinary cars too.

Best Regards A

“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.“
Albert Einstein

 

[LionelHutz]

Besides which ... people are pigs. A driverless taxi is going to be filled with McDonalds wrappers and other detritus and is going to smell bad, whether that's due to what the previous renter ate, or smoked, or wore, or ... emitted.

Agreed.

 

[SnTMan]

Yeah, the problem with public transportation is, you know, the public

The problem with sloppy work is that the supply FAR EXCEEDS the demand

 

[drawoh]

SnTMan,

I take the transit here in Toronto, and it is pretty clean. I don't know how much work is required to keep it clean.

--
JHG

 

[RedSnake]

All places I have been to in Europe that have subways or rail we usually take them get around, can't say I can remember any that was particularly dirty or scrappy some where old but that was it.
Can't seem to remember any cleaners either.

BR A

“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.“
Albert Einstein

 

[BoilingCrude]

We will need to create liquid nitrogen fire trucks, although when the freeze is over the fire will start again.

 

[TugboatEng]

Drawoh, you are fortunate to live in a region with a very homogenous population. As things diversify your public transportation will become less and less tolerable.

 

[verymadmac]

Robots don't have to be safer than humans. If the robots are safer than a fiftieth percentile driver, we can use them to make the streets safer.

That only applies if we can establish all failure modes, and being a complex engineering system that is a big if. There is no point having no crashes for ten years if on the eleven year something causes them all to drive off a cliff.

 

[GregLocock]

That's what FMEAs are for.

Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

 

[drawoh]

TugboatEng,

Homogenous?

Toronto?

Try again. Toronto is wildly not homogenous. I am a chapter chair of my professional association. My crude guess is that a third of my members are East Indian. There are lots of Chinese and blacks. White people like me are a minority. I have a friend who is African and who speaks English with a Parisian accent. I have met a Chinese who had a Cockney accent, and I know another one who grew up in the West Indies. People in arts associations here complain about excessive whiteness, but that is in arts associations, not engineering technology. We hold a big Caribana festival every year on our August long weekend. This has been going on a long time. I worked as an inspector in a factory in the seventies, where the day shift was Brazilian Portuguese, and the night shift was Jamaican and Korean. The Canadian government is heavily into multiculturalism.

A very long time ago, I was working on the election campaign of a local Conservative politician. Another campaign worker had a history of working with extreme right[‑]wing, racist groups. He complained that non[‑]whites all were taking engineering and science courses, and that they would soon be in control of all our industry. He of course, was starting a law course. This was kind of a positive way to be a racist asshole.

Toronto is an older city by North American standards, and there are lots of apartment buildings and densely packed older houses that place lots of people in walking distance of transit stops. I wonder if robot taxis are a solution for people scattered out in the suburbs.

--
JHG