Oils4AsphaultOnly said:
GRA said:
To sum up, there are no surprises - the problems re Level 2 systems generally and A/P specifically have all been previously identified, and NHTSA needs to get off its butt, write and enforce some regs that will prevent further repetitions of what are wholly foreseeable causes of accidents.
what about their call for an employer distracted driving policy?
The NTSB is a joke. This hearing was just a form of self-aggrandizement. Half of their recommendations are ignored, because they're pointless and fruitless. The more safeguards you design, the more idiotic the humans become. Mr. Huang is prima facie evidence number 1. Knowing that it's illegal to use a cell phone while driving, AND knowing that AP had trouble with the washed out lane lines in the past, he STILL CHOSE TO BE ON HIS PHONE at the time of his accident.
It's not the responsibility of any company to protect idiots from themselves.
Tell that to our legal system, which often considers it the responsibility of companies to protect idiots from themselves when technically possible (as in this case), and even more importantly, to protect others from the consequences of their idiocy. So tell me, do you think it would be okay to remove trigger guards and safeties from guns?
If the recent fatal accident involving a Tesla which killed two occupants in another car proves to have occurred while the Tesla was on A/P, you don't think the heirs of those people will sue Tesla and almost certainly win a huge judgement, if Tesla is dumb enough to take this to court?
How about toy safety - children can often be idiots who will put anything in their mouths and otherwise misuse toys in ways that will often lead to foreseeable failure and injury or death. Are you saying that the CPSC is also a joke for forcing the removal of products which can be dangerous if misused from the market, especially if the misuse is foreseeable (as in this case)? Especially when the product both encourages and enables such misuse, as all driver-assistance systems do? If other companies do design or re-design their product provide such protection, but a particular company making a similar product chooses not to despite having the same information available to them, and that misuse subsequently leads to injury or death, you don't think there's any legal or moral liability for that company?
As to the reason so many that many of NTSB's recommendations are ignored or implementation delayed for years, the reason is simple - they are only concerned with improving safety, and lack regulatory power so aren't subject to the political pressure, usually driven by money concerns, that regulatory agencies like the NHTSA are. Which is why, just as a for instance, we were unable to find the wreckage of Malaysian Air MH 370 and find the black boxes that would give us a better idea of what happened because we couldn't track it outside of radar range, despite having the technical capability to do so in real time for over a decade, which is when the NTSB first made the recommendation to require that capability (after a similar occurrence). So why wasn't the NTSB's common-sense recommendation implemented? The airlines didn't want to foot the bill for the upgrades.
It often takes years, sometimes decades, and usually one or more repetitions of an easily preventable and very public accident and subsequent public outrage, for the politicians to overcome their dependence on money from big corporations and force the regulators to take action (instead of pressuring them not to). Even so, if the retrofit/redesign is big and expensive enough, the industry/product involved
will usually be given years before full compliance is necessary.
That's not the case here - Tesla could require hands-on the wheel at all times with a simple software update, like the ones they do all the time for far less important reasons like cutesy Easter Eggs. In the longer term, as has been amply demonstrated in both scientifically conducted experiments and numerous You-Tube videos, hands-on detection alone is inadequate to prevent misuse of L2/L3 systems, and the best available tech currently is via eye monitoring, alone or in combination with hands-on. As Tesla has cameras that monitor the entire area outside the car, adding one inside to monitor the driver along with the appropriate software is certainly well within their capability, and should be required going forward for all L2/L3 systems and as a mandatory safety retrofit via recall, at least until something better comes along.
Finally, as they now have Navigate on A/P, Tesla has absolutely no excuse for not preventing A/P from being used on roads where the system is known to be incapable of coping, which they should have been doing from the start. The safest roads in the country are grade-separated, divided, limited-access freeways. We know that A/P and competitor systems remain incapable of dealing well with cross-traffic, which is typically encountered on all other types of roads, so until such systems can demonstrate they can handle the much less complex conditions on freeways better than humans can (like not rear-ending stopped emergency vehicles with their lights flashing, which any alert human driver could avoid), they should be prohibited from being used anywhere other than freeways. This is the approach recommended by the NTSB and consumer organizations, and is simple common-sense. What credible argument can any company make against it, especially if they aren't required to and refuse to provide data to an unbiased authority which can check and validate any claims they make for improved safety there or elsewhere, as is also a recommendation of the NTSB and other consumer organizations?
Alternatively, a company can choose to ignore all that and proceed as before, with the near certainty that a public who is already leery of autonomous cars will react with outrage and demand that they be restricted from use or completely prohibited given further such accidents, a call that politicians will fail to heed and act on at their peril, but which will set back the advent of AVs for years. The immediate response to the Elaine Hirschberg fatal accident was a case in point, and the negative backlash, when it comes, will only be more violent.