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Comment by mcguire | Hacker News Reader

"The lawsuit claims Tesla’s autopilot system has been linked to at least 12 crashes in the United States involving first responders working active scenes with flashing lights.

"“Upon research, what we have discovered is, this is happening all over the country. In fact, the government has just recently, talking about in the last 30-60 days, has requested of Tesla to turn over information regarding every crash that has occurred involving the Tesla on autopilot that also involves police officers, because apparently the defect that exists is when the police lights are flashing it makes the Tesla on autopilot not detect the vehicle,” said attorney Tony Buzbee in an interview with KPRC 2."

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There is a huge disclaimer that you must agree to when you purchase a Tesla vehicle before you drive it off the lot. One of the first things it says is:

> Warning: Traffic-Aware Cruise Control can not detect all objects and may not brake/ decelerate for stationary vehicles, especially in situations when you are driving over 50 mph (80 km/h) and a vehicle you are following moves out of your driving path and a stationary vehicle or object is in front of you instead. Always pay attention to the road ahead and stay prepared to take immediate corrective action. Depending on Traffic-Aware Cruise Control to avoid a collision can result in serious injury or death. In addition, Traffic-Aware Cruise Control may react to vehicles or objects that either do not exist or are not in the lane of travel, causing Model X to slow down unnecessarily or inappropriately.

Commentary: as a Tesla M3 owner, I'm aware of this and can confirm. When a vehicle is completely stationary in the lane in front of you traffic aware cruise control might not see it as an obstruction. TACC uses _changes_ in the image sent from the various cameras to determine whether you have open road in front of you or a vehicle or other obstruction. If there is zero movement TACC will sometimes not be able to tell there is an obstruction.

I'm having a difficult time processing that last statement. The fact that the car is moving will cause the stationary object in front to be changing relative to the car. Although I'm sure that statement refers to an object changing in relation to the background. But even then the object should still be changing relative to the background due to parallax effect.

But my bigger issue is that with multiple cameras, a 3D model of the entire environment should be built up. So that the model the car computer has should include any stationary object in front. Does this just not happen (i.e., do traffic assist implementations, including Tesla's, not actually build a 3D model of the environment from stereo camera vision?)

I'm not a Tesla engineer so I don't know all the details, but this video shows some testing on this subject: https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-research-group-autopilot-cra...

Can you show me where the cops clicked "I Agree" before they got run over? The manufacturer of a product has a legal responsibility not only to the customer (which may or may not be able to modified by an EUA) but also to reasonably foreseeable third parties.

The plaintiffs still have the burden to prove their case. They're going to have to find qualified and persuasive experts to explain what's wrong with Autopilot. And, Tesla gets to bring in whoever they want to explain why Autopilot is safer than sleeping, and bring in Musk to testify that it's so safe he has his mom use it.

In the end, the jury will be asked something along the lines of: "Was the Model-X unreasonably dangerous and defective?" "Were plaintiffs' injuries reasonably foreseeable to Tesla?"

If I was the plaintiffs' attorney, my theme would be: "Tesla is awesome. Autopilot is way cool. However, let's be real - it's not ready for prime time, Tesla knew it, they knew they were overhyping it, but they shipped anyway because Elon Musk."

"What about stationary cars on the road?"

"What about them? Write a ticket and we will improve this in a future sprint."

"But..."

"We have no time for buts."

That seems ... sub-optimal.

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