Tesla removed a Chinese term for "self-driving" from its China website after a driver in Beijing who crashed in
"autopilot" mode complained that the car maker overplayed the function's capability and misled buyers.
Nah, I think I read about that back when it happened (side rails to keep cars from going under trucks, that is). Must be a slow news day.
Let's propose instead, that all autos should have big posts sticking up on the corner like a four-poster bed, that'd do the same thing, right? or is it only a good idea if somebody else is paying for it?
It's interesting that American truckers have invested some money in under-trailer aero skirts in order to save a few bucks on fuel.
Certainly a reasonable amount of structure behind the skirts wouldn't add a lot to the cost of the skirts.
... BUT, whether the structure was sturdy enough to bounce the car off with little damage to the truck, or even if the structure were designed to dissipate substantial energy, say by decelerating the car in the width of the trailer, that crash would not have been survivable either way, witness the damage from the tree.
One point is that skirts may have made to trailer more visible so that the automated system could have avoided the crash.
apart from the color of the sky, I understood that there was a type of proximity sensor which did not scan high enough above the ground to see the trailer. It would have seen/detected a skirt extending close to the ground.
Bill
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"Why not the best?"
Jimmy Carter
That's my point. The sensor may have ignored higher items assuming that they were signboards. The sensor should have reacted to a skirt that extended close to the ground. Either a light skirt for aerodynamic advantage or a substantial skirt for protection.
Bill
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"Why not the best?"
Jimmy Carter
That presumes that the sensor could "see" the undercarriage section of the truck at all. Sensor field of view and obstructions might have also played a part.
TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
Sideskirts or the lack thereof are not the issue. The "autopilot" system was being used in manner for which it was not designed (which was keeping the car between the lines on a limited access highway and not rear-ending the car in front of it). It was not equipped to recognize and manage traffic controls and intersections. Otherwise it would have seen the tractor/rig the second before it saw the gap under the billboard it thought it could drive under and said, "Hey I'm doing 70 and there is crossing traffic immediately in front of me, should I be worried about this?" IRstuff points that out in the second post of this thread.
Another novel idea, rather than lowering everything that the car might run into so it can see it, would be to raise the sensor's height to say, maybe the level at which things won't decapitate you if you try to drive under them. But that's the trouble with relying on a camera and some proximity sensors to paint a picture of a dynamic environment precisely enough that you can navigate a car at speed through it. The LIDAR approach is much more robust (and expensive, and complicated).
Any car that I am ceding authority for decision making to had better be able to tell a semi-truck from a billboard from a Sasquatch without any special modifications to those things.
If you look at the number of cars with burned out lights, and extend that to self driving cars, where the owner would not have replaced a defective camera, then I would expect this might happen more often.
On the other hand, if self driving cars either won't self drive, or just will not move for a defective camera, then a one off event is nothing but a computer glitch.
Just reboot the car and replace the passenger.
The debate on if you trust a self driving car over a human driven car, is the same question if you trust the driver of your car pool.
A bigger debate is who gets the ticket for careless driving?
Why is the government responsible for this? How about the lobbyists? What is to stop a trucking firm from installing this on their own, rules or now rules?
Would a skirt have prevented this fatality? Did the car even brake?
Cost will stop a trucking firm from doing this on their own. Margins are slim in that business and if there is no economic payback to do something, and no rule dictating that "thou shalt", it doesn't get done because then one would be at a cost disadvantage to one's competitors who aren't doing it, either.
I have my doubts that such a structure would actually stand up to being hit by a car at 70 mph. I think they're mostly meant to reduce the chance of pedestrians and bicyclists being run over in city traffic.
Rear under-ride protection on box trailers needs work, too. Better designs are available, but they're not mandated, so they don't get used.
Just going by the Yahoo column, no surprises that he was speeding and not minding the guidance of the car. He had demonstrated as much on his Youtube videos.
This does bother me:
The NTSB report disclosed that the Tesla Model S uses a proprietary system to record a vehicle's speed and other data, which authorities cannot access with the commercial tools used to access information from event data recorders in most other cars. For that reason, the NTSB said it "had to rely on Tesla to provide the data in engineering units using proprietary manufacturer software."
Not possible to collect vehicle data on a Tesla without going to the factory? Do these things not have a CANBUS port? Can the NTSB validate the data that Tesla provided?
That's not a problem unique to Tesla. Part of the Toyota throttle cable farrago was that only Toyota could access the detailed data, from memory. The USA could usefully introduce legislation making the content of vehicle black boxes accessible to others.
Cheers
Greg Locock
New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376
That's unlikely to happen in the current Congress and administration; the companies would merely cry, "Burdensome regulation!" and the pols would scurry away.
Besides, accessibility is only part of it. There would need to be a general protocol, which would require a standard. There would need to be some assurance that the hardware could survive crashes that it currently would not, etc. The end result would be an orange box ala airplane recorders, which is not cheap.
TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
