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Comment by ModernMech | Hacker News Reader

I really thought the breaks would have been slammed on Tesla's shipping of autonomous car software after the incident where the guy was decapitated by a tractor trailer.

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The question is whether overall the technology makes Tesla drivers more safe. They’ve shown data that drivers with the autopilot features enabled are safer than those who do not have it on.

While you can dispute the data, it’s not as simple as “car makes one type of mistake”, “feature should be banned”.

At that time the system was merely lane keep with adaptive cruise control. Any system would have had a similar result at that time.

should have had emergency auto-brake. As I understand it the radar either didn’t see the trailer or filtered it out as stationary - camera was unable to distinguish white steel from white sky - should have been a wake up call that current tech doesn’t have the sensory bandwidth to know if something is blocking the road.

Not any system. My recollection of that specific event was that is was due to the bright white tractor trailer not being picked up by the Tesla's camera. A system built with an orthogonal sensor could have picked up the trailer despite the camera missing it (e.g. a LIDAR). Proper fusion of those streams would have avoided the issue, and that person would be alive, or at least not dead because of Tesla's poorly engineered system.

To clarify, any adaptive cruise system in deployment at that time.

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