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Comment by oxygen0211 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, totally, although their reasoning that they must ignore stationary objects to avoid too many false positives sounds pretty reasonable to me.

Also, on the other hand not being able to recognize that your car is about to slam into a stopped emergency vehicle is also a giant gaping flaw on the driver's side.

Disclaimer to put my last statement into perspective: I have absolutely no relation to Tesla except for being a potential future customer. However I am driving a decent stretch daily and get to experience first person many stupid things people do in their cars due to ignorance/not paying attention/whatever, also I often use the adaptive cruise control of my Audi which shows me quite some false positives and restrictions (such as not letting itself deactivate below 15mph, heck, even deactivating itself without previous notification)

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"their reasoning that they must ignore stationary objects to avoid too many false positives sounds pretty reasonable to me"

I don't understand your logic. Stationary objects either are rare, and wouldn't trigger too many false positives, or they aren't, and the car should be prepared for them.

"Stationary objects either are rare"

I think the problem with this is to set them into the correct context. Around the road (and thus in the visible field of the sensors) you have A LOT of stationary objects such as houses, trees, traffic signs, roadside objects, parked cars, ... I think there is probably a big challenge determining which of these objects might be in the way and how to correctly ract to them.

Just as an example: Considering the situation the article and enhancing it a bit with guessings, it would have been the right decision to either stop or change lanes (depending on the road). However, if the car decides to change lanes and there is traffic on the other lane, we are in the same trouble of an accident due to autopilot again. Also, if autopilot decides to change lanes (or something similar in the category of "driving around") on a one-lane road (maybe even with missing lane marks), we might end up in oncoming traffic. Or what happens if the system falsely applies the decision to break in a turn with roadside objects (think of a 90° turn with a house in the corner). If the car falsely applies an emergency break here, our hypothetical car might be the one smashed into. Also, how do you set the thresholds for "stationary". If it is set too low, we might not stop infront of a stationary object until it is too late, if we set it too hight, we might stop way too early, say, in a traffic jam, again being the ones provoking accidents or more traffic jam due to unforseen heavy breaking.

Yes, the problem is difficult and hasn't been solved yet. Knowing that, Tesla should have figured out how to safely disengage autopilot and transfer control back to the driver before selling this feature (an autopilot in a plane, for example, can alert the humans in the cockpit way in advance of upcoming problems, and has incredibly annoying ways to get their attention, if needed)

I saw a tv program about self-driving cars a couple of years ago where the programmers said they would have it ready for major roads in a couple of years, but their human factors engineer said "a couple of decades", precisely because they realised humans would always be needed, and that the problem of transferring control back to humans while riding on the road hadn't been solved.

I'm inferring from the article the problem is spatial/temporal resolution of the _radar_ currently being used for speed sensing for adaptive cruise control. There are lots of objects that are stationary and near to the road but not in the path of the vehicle (road signs, overhead signs).

But how should fully automated driving without lidar ever work then? To me it sounds like the first supplier of a small and affordable lidar system will make a lot of money and everyone not using it will lose out.

Of course, this needs to be fixed in one way or the other to achieve fully autonomous cars, as many others like destinguishing red traffic lights from other red lights. But that's why nobody calls it fully autonomous yet.

What always boggles me about such news is that people rely so much on these systems and apparently people drift away that they even don't notice an f*ing big red fire truck standing in their way. I often drive with dynamic cruise control (radar based, only keeping distance, breaking and speeding up, no steering), but I am in many situations in which I think "I need full control here" and temporarily disable it. Also, there are many situations where I don't use it in the first place because I know the way it functions is bringing downsides, such as driving on multi-lane roads (read: german Autobahn) since it will hold exactly that much distance to the car infront of me that every idiot will cut in, causing cruise control to decelerate to leave a bigger gap, rinse, repeat.

> What always boggles me about such news is that people rely so much on these systems and apparently people drift away that they even don't notice an f*ing big red fire truck standing in their way. I often drive with dynamic cruise control (radar based, only keeping distance, breaking and speeding up, no steering), but I am in many situations in which I think "I need full control here" and temporarily disable it.

Maybe you're not a typical case?

FWIW, I consider myself a pretty decent focussed driver, yet when I hired a car with dynamic cruise control a few months back, I was shocked how much losing responsibility for part of the driving experience --the gears, acceleration, and braking, obvs-- helped me to relax too much, and lose a little bit of focus. I was still steering, and it wasn't like there were even any near misses... but I just felt my attention wander too many times for comfort.

Might be I'm not the typical user of this, probably also because as a software engineer I know how much guesswork and unsolved questions lies in these systems.

Of course, I also notice that my focus changes a bit, but it still stays on the traffic around me and I would consider it rather improbable that I would oversee a stopped vehicle infront of me, not to mention a fire truck on a mission.

Maybe it's also that I'm driving daily in and out of Stuttgart, one of the main traffic spots in southern Germany. There's a lot of cars and ignorant driving, especially in dense traffic or jams. Plus we have a rediculous amount of roundabouts in the meantime and there are a lot of people that decide to either push into the smalles gaps, shooting in from your side and forcing you to do heavy breaking or other people approaching an empty roundabout, doing a needles near-full stop, accelerate, just to decellerate again, almost coming to another near-full stop to get around the corner (never understand the thinking behind this :-| ). I don't trust adaptive cruise control in either of these situations.

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