ABG:
NHTSA head says Tesla Autopilot investigation outcome could be announced soon
Acting administrator hints at the outcome in only the broadest of terms
https://www.autoblog.com/2023/08/24...nvestigation-outcome-could-be-announced-soon/
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) will resolve its two-year investigation into Tesla Autopilot and could make a public announcement soon, the agency's acting head told Reuters.
"We'll get to a resolution (of the Tesla probe)," Acting NHTSA Administrator Ann Carlson told Reuters in an interview at the agency's headquarters.
Speaking broadly of advanced driver assistance systems, she said, "It's really important that drivers pay attention. It's also really important that driver monitoring systems take into account that humans over-trust technology."
She declined to discuss how the Tesla investigation might be resolved, but added "hopefully you'll hear something relatively soon." Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The agency is investigating the performance of Autopilot after identifying more than a dozen crashes in which Tesla vehicles struck stopped emergency vehicles. It is also investigating whether Tesla vehicles adequately ensure drivers are paying attention when using the driver assistance system.
In June 2022, NHTSA upgraded the probe into 830,000 Tesla vehicles it first opened in August 2021 to an engineering analysis — a required step before it could potentially demand a recall. Last month, NHTSA sought updated responses and current data from Tesla in the probe. . . .
NHTSA has said previously that evidence raised questions about the effectiveness of Tesla's alert strategy, which seeks to compel driver attention.
The agency said in 2022 nine of 11 vehicles in prior crashes exhibited no driver engagement, or visual or chime alerts, until the last minute preceding a collision, while four showed no visual or chime alerts at all during the final Autopilot use cycle.
In addition to over-trusting technology, humans who aren't mentally and/or physically engaged in a task for an extended period of time will let their attention wander and/or zone out. Which is why, to take one example, the designers of interstates started to add otherwise unneeded curves to them when they'd previously made them straight (there's a 70 mile section of I-80 in western Iowa without a single curve); with the driver having essentially no need to react to any change in the situation for an extended period of time, they slipped into a state that in the driver ed. films I had to watch in my teens was described in a doom-laden voice as "HIGHWAY HYPNOSIS".
Another example I remember reading was from one of the earliest examples of human factors research, much of which was first carried out in the second world war. In his history of Operational Research in the RAF's Coastal Command ("O.R. in World War 2 - Operational Research against the U-Boat*", written in 1946 but only allowed to be publicly released in 1973. Operational Research is the British term, it's known as Operations Research in the U.S.), C.H. Waddington mentioned that from observing them they established a maximum time for a radar observer to monitor the radar screen before someone else would replace him. I forget what the exact length of time was, but it was somewhere in the 15-30 minute range. These anti-submarine flights lasted hours, and most of the time nothing was detected; most crews never saw a U-boat for their entire flying career. All the radar observer had to look at was the radar 'beam' trace endlessly circling the CRT for hours on end, so it's no surprise that people would get distracted or mentally disengage without even realizing that they were doing so, and miss actual targets. Just imagine one person staring at the test pattern on a TV (I may be dating myself) for hours a day, on numerous days over a period of a year or more in the hope that it will change just once in a small way, and consider how likely it would be that you'd notice it.
*On the off chance that anyone's interested:
https://www.amazon.com/Operational-Research-World-Histories-science/dp/023615463X
Also see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_research
