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Comment by Maxburn | Hacker News Reader

As a human I find dealing with going around emergency vehicles at night is a bit troublesome. The emergency lights are overwhelming and obscure your vision from other things, like some worker near the vehicle. Also the human distraction that is target fixation can sink your attention on the emergency scene and distract you from checking your lane to see if it's clear. I don't think this situation is limited to tesla...

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Humans don't have a systemic difficulty avoiding emergency vehicles. Teslas do.

I believe your anecdote, but it's uncommom. Colliding with parked emergency vehicles is extremely rare, almost non-existent.

Source: working in auto insurance

Humans do have a problem with this. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=police+car+hit+...

That's besides the point though. There's still a human that's able to react to new situations (albeit very slowly) on the road. Teslas apparently can't do that very well. The question is: how do we fix this? And is this potential for regulation? For me personally, this is one of my biggest hangups with these new technologies: they're black boxes. We don't know how they work, and they change all the time. Companies can get most of the general cases correct, but as for the panoply of edge cases, how do we approach them? How should insurance companies approach them? Whose at fault here, who pays who?

There's just so many unanswered questions with automated driving that a lot of people don't really want to solve, they just want the technology out there and we'll worry about the edge cases later...as in, we'll worry about it when people start dying. "Move fast and break things", that retarded shit. I hate it. This SV frat programmer mentality is now bleeding over into automobiles, an industry that does indeed need to be shaken up, but not when it's at the expense of lives.

Treating driving software like it's a fucking web application that can be fixed later is malicious negligence.

Much like elevators, computers are fundamentally better at controlling the system than humans. I assume you ride in computer controlled elevators? Do you understand that they were at one point controlled by humans manually? Did you know that there was a transition period where the computer control elevator was not as safe as it is now? In 50 years the idea of letting a 85 year old or a person walking directly out of a bar control a four thousand pound machine moving at 60 miles an hour will seem insane.

Funfact: all elevators have a safety system invented by Mr. Otis, which haven't changed much since.

So your comparison doesn't make sense.

You are talking about the brake for if the cable breaks. I'm talking about the control system that prevents the doors opening while it is moving, opening in between floors, shutting down if there is a problem, etc.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevator#Manual_controls

Those doors have also safety systems. Formerly, the circuitry to open the door was closed only, when the cabin was in floor level. Opening and closing required constant push of the push button.

(Have some history in elevation control, because we made some standards in the industry.)

Yes. Talk to any police or first responder, they have training to cover this. For this and some other reasons is why police often approach stopped vehicles from the passenger side, further off the road and shielded from oncoming traffic by the vehicles.

> Talk to any police or first responder, they have training to cover this.

That has no bearing on how common these types of collisions are. The original issue is whether Teslas are more likely to crash into a parked emergency vehicle than a human.

The training has a better explanation: while "number of collisions per mile driven" is vanishingly small, "percentage of law-enforcement deaths as a result of collisions" is very high. Out of the ~1,200 LEOs killed between 2000 and 2008, about half were due to collisions[1].

That alone tells you how such collisions can be rare, but still a top-of-mind issue for law enforcement.

1. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00187208187861...

I guess that means sharks frequently bite humans[1], dogs regularly befriend cheetahs[2], and people often hit the jackpot when they play slot machines[3].

(YouTube search results are not useful data about national trends, and YouTube would be intensely boring if they were.)

1. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=shark+bite

2. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=dog+cheetah+fri...

3. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=slot+machine+ja...

Slot machine Jackpots are much more common than Teslas hitting parked cars. If that is what you mean by frequent, then yes.

Is it possible that you are looking at the “wrong” Alice of data? These type of accidents are for sure very uncommon compared to any other accidents just by the ratio of vehicles on the road.

I wonder if you could look at accidents that involved a stationary police vehicle. I’d be curious if it’s still very uncommon.

Anyway, I heard that so many times from cops directly. Squad cars in the night are like magnets for drunk drivers.

If you watch a squad car pulled over you will notice they are at an angle so that the driver and get out of the far side of the car. That way when someone hits the car, the car protects them from the other car.

That tells us nothing about the prevalence of such collisions. A single incident can cause an update to a training manual.

> I wonder if you could look at accidents that involved a stationary police vehicle. I’d be curious if it’s still very uncommon.

Accidents involving any emergency vehicle traveling at any speed (including very fast through traffic) are less than 25,000/year in the US.

As I mentioned in another comment, humans drive more than 3 trillion miles per year in the US, so the rate at which Teslas are hitting stationary police vehicles even if they have only ever done it once would be much higher than the rate at which humans do.

> Colliding with parked emergency vehicles is extremely rare, almost non-existent.

Maybe, but the very first thing i was taught for how to work a MVA was that under no circumstances were you allowed to walk between parked emergency vehicles, because fenders are just a very blunt pair of shears at knee height that will happily amputate you when some dingus rear-ends the parked squad car.

Source: EMT

It isn't, but humans generally recognize emergency vehicles and know to slow way down. They might not find the correct path, but at slow speeds accidents are not deadly, plus there is a lot more time to respond.

Note that I said generally recognize and not always. Humans are bad drivers and never should be in control of a car. (which is why I'm so in favor of mass transit)

FWIW those blinding LED light bars have ambient light sensors & night time dimming support, but the department has to enable it. If you feel they are as truly blinding, message your department and explain that as a driver they are so blinding you are concerned one day an officer will be hit by a car that could not see them through the glare.

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