Category: Self Driving Roadkill

Good Luck Toronto

Self Driving Roadkill 33 Comments

Globe and Mail- Loblaw puts self-driving delivery trucks on Canadian roads for first time

The driverless vehicle is one of five that Canada’s largest grocer has on the roads across Toronto and surrounding suburbs, delivering products to its stores. In partnership with Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup Gatik, Loblaw has been testing the autonomous driving technology in Ontario since 2020, with a human “safety driver” on board. In August, the company began the next phase of its test – without the driver.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

Self Driving Roadkill 27 Comments

The most basic of driver reactions;

Automated emergency braking might sound like a technology that automatically brakes your car in an emergency. Logical, sure, but the AAA just released results of a test that it performed showing that relying on AEB isn’t as predictably safe as drivers might expect. Especially when moving at speeds above 40 mph, AEB’s full functionality dropped to worrying levels, the not-for-profit association said. This came as no surprise to us, as we performed a test of these systems three years ago and found them similarly lacking.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self Driving Overlords

Self Driving Roadkill Tech 17 Comments

There are bound to be hiccups.

On April 6, an autonomously driven truck fitted with technology by TuSimple Holdings Inc. suddenly veered left, cut across the I-10 highway in Tucson, Ariz., and slammed into a concrete barricade.

The accident, which regulators disclosed to the public in June after TuSimple filed a report on the incident, underscores concerns that the autonomous-trucking company is risking safety on public roads in a rush to deliver driverless trucks to market, according to independent analysts and more than a dozen of the company’s former employees. A TuSimple spokesman said safety is a top priority for the company and that nobody was injured in the accident. […]

The April incident involved a rig with a TuSimple driver and engineer aboard, and the company has repeatedly blamed the accident on human error. But details in the June regulatory disclosure, along with internal company documents, show what autonomous-driving-system specialists say are fundamental problems with the company’s technology.”

An internal TuSimple report on the mishap, viewed by The Wall Street Journal, said the semi-tractor truck abruptly veered left because a person in the cab hadn’t properly rebooted the autonomous driving system before engaging it, causing it to execute an outdated command. The left-turn command was 2 1/2 minutes old—an eternity in autonomous driving—and should have been erased from the system but wasn’t, the internal account said.

But researchers at Carnegie Mellon University said it was the autonomous-driving system that turned the wheel and that blaming the entire accident on human error is misleading. Common safeguards would have prevented the crash had they been in place, said the researchers, who have spent decades studying autonomous-driving systems.

Via Phantom Soapbox

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

Self Driving Roadkill 5 Comments

Group of Robotaxis All Shut Down at Same Moment

Photos shared on the San Francisco subreddit shows a number of Cruise cars seemingly blocking several lanes of a major thoroughfare “for a couple of hours,” according to the user who shared the images.

“It was a pretty surreal event,” one user commented. “Humans had to come and manually take the cars away.”

“They’re unionizing,” another joked.

h/t Raymond

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

Self Driving Roadkill Tech 20 Comments

On Aug. 26, 2020, a Nash County deputy and a trooper with the Highway Patrol were on the side of Highway 64 near mile marker 440 while responding to a previous crash when the Tesla slammed into the deputy’s cruiser, the Highway Patrol said. […] The Highway Patrol said the Tesla’s driver admitted he was watching a movie on his phone while the car was on auto-pilot when the collision occurred.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

CreepyJoeBiden Self Driving Roadkill 40 Comments

Buried deep within the massive infrastructure legislation recently signed by President Joe Biden is a little-noticed “safety” measure that will take effect in five years. Marketed to Congress as a benign tool to help prevent drunk driving, the measure will mandate that automobile manufacturers build into every car what amounts to a “vehicle kill switch.”

As has become standard for legislative mandates passed by Congress, this measure is disturbingly short on details. What we do know is that the “safety” device must “passively monitor the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle to accurately identify whether that driver may be impaired.”

Everything about this mandatory measure should set off red flares.

First, use of the word “passively” suggests the system will always be on and constantly monitoring the vehicle. Secondly, the system must connect to the vehicle’s operational controls, so as to disable the vehicle either before driving or during, when impairment is detected. Thirdly, it will be an “open” system, or at least one with a backdoor, meaning authorized (or unauthorized) third-parties can remotely access the system’s data at any time.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

Self Driving Roadkill Tech 19 Comments

This is key: When working as it should, Tesla’s smartphone unlocking system is a very convenient way of accessing your vehicle as you can simply verify your identity with your device and open the door without needing a physical key. But as system such as these always do have the propensity to go wrong, you’d be very well-advised to keep an alternative means of unlocking your vehicle with you at all times.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

Self Driving Roadkill Tech 31 Comments

You had one boob job: Three retrospective studies compared AI systems with the clinical decisions of the original radiologist, including 79,910 women, of whom 1878 had screen detected cancer or interval cancer within 12 months of screening. Thirty four (94%) of 36 AI systems evaluated in these studies were less accurate than a single radiologist, and all were less accurate than consensus of two or more radiologists.

From 2020 – Artificial Intelligence Makes Bad Medicine Even Worse

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self Driving Overlords

Self Driving Roadkill Tech 11 Comments

Car & Driver;

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has opened a preliminary evaluation into Tesla Autopilot systems and the ways this driver assistance technology works to “monitor, assist, and enforce the driver’s engagement with driving while Autopilot is in use.”

The reason for the preliminary evaluation is so that the agency can better understand the causes of 11 Tesla crashes that have happened since the start of 2018, a NHTSA spokesperson told Car and Driver in a statement. Seventeen injuries and one death are part of these 11 incidents. More Tesla crashes in which Autopilot was said to factor have happened, of course, but these are the 11 that NHTSA will look into to determine what the agency’s next steps should be regarding Tesla’s technology.

This subset of Tesla Autopilot crashes is important to NHTSA because they all involved cases where first responders were active, the agency said, “including some that crashed directly into the vehicles of first responders.” NHTSA told C/D that it confirmed that in all of these cases, the Tesla vehicles in question either had Autopilot or Traffic Aware Cruise Control engaged just prior to the crashes. Most of the incidents also happened after dark, the agency said, and “the crash scenes encountered included scene control measures such as first responder vehicle lights, flares, an illuminated arrow board, and road cones.”

Related.

h/t Raymond

We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars

Alternative Subsidy Self Driving Roadkill 35 Comments

The Tesla had been traveling from a cul-de-sac on Hammock Dunes Place when it failed to negotiate a curve, and ended up crashing into a tree and bursting into flames.
 
According to the station, the Tesla’s batteries continued to ignites despite the efforts of firefighters to extinguish the blaze. It took them four hours—and used 23,000 gallons of water—to finally douse the flames completely.

Both of the dead were in passenger seats.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

Alternative Subsidy Self Driving Roadkill Subsidy Fraud Boy 40 Comments

It’s a Tesla two-fer;

Police are investigating the fatal conflagration of a Tesla Model X that killed its owner and injured two others in an underground parking garage in Seoul.
 
The Model X crashed into the wall of the parking garage of an apartment complex in Yongsan District, central Seoul, then caught fire, on Wednesday. This led to the burning death of the car’s owner, who was in the passenger seat.
 
The driver, who escaped with injuries, claimed “the car suddenly got out of control,” raising the possibility of a sudden unintended acceleration as the cause of the accident, according to police.
 
It is unusual for a car slowly winding its way through a parking garage to suddenly smash into a wall and result in the death of a passenger. The police will ask the National Forensic Service to try to determine the cause of the accident.

h/t Raymond

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

Self Driving Roadkill Subsidy Fraud Boy 16 Comments

Humans are simply not good at passing off 80-plus percent of a task and then staying alert to monitor what’s going on, which is what Autopilot demands. Since Level 2 systems offer no failover capability and need a human to be ready to take over at any moment, if you’re not paying constant attention, the wreck we see here is precisely the kind of worst-case nightmare that can happen.
 
It’s not just me saying this; experts have long known about how shitty people are at “vigilance tasks” like these for decades. Imagine having a chauffeur that had been driving you for hours, and then sees something on the road he doesn’t feel like dealing with, so, he jumps into the back seat and tells you it’s your job to handle it now.
 
You’d fire that chauffeur. And yet that’s exactly what Autopilot is doing here.

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