NHTSA still doesn’t get it and Tesla doesn’t want to
Bloomberg article — https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-07/tesla-orders-could-foreshadow-formal-probe-former-official-says
Blomberg’s article shows several extremely disturbing issues:
- NHTSA still doesn’t understand that while Tesla is the most egregious, virtually every AV maker will have the exact same issues and cause thousands of avoidable and needless deaths. (LiDAR aside) The use of public shadow and safety driving for most of development and testing means humans in and outside the vehicles are Guinea pigs. Six people have died so far due to this. As these companies move into learning thousands of accidents scenarios, which have to be run thousands of times each to train them, what do you think that will result in? Tesla is more egregious because they are pushing harder to meet a bogus deadline of having L4 this year and L5 next year. This means they are trying to experience all roadways not limited areas like pretty much everyone else is doing. And they don’t use LiDAR.
- Tesla has a 24 second delay to notify the driver if they are not paying attention. Cruise has 4 seconds. At 50mph a car goes 1,760 feet. One third of a mile. In 4 seconds, it goes 293 feet. Or a football field. How much can happen in that time and duration? Make sure to think about that laterally where there is no median, no barrier and opposing traffic goes the same speed which double all of this effectively. Why isn’t this time less especially for Tesla? Because they don’t want the safety driver to take over so they can test the full thread of the system driving the vehicle. They cannot update the system and improve it if they do not test the intention and execution of the system through entire threads. Again, what will this mean in accident scenarios?
Of course, all of this is a complete waste of time, money and lives. Public shadow and safety driving can never create a true autonomous vehicle. This means the lives that would be saved will no be. And due to safety driving and accident scenario training the process will kill thousands of people needlessly.
It is impossible to drive the one trillion miles or spend over $300B to stumble and restumble on all the scenarios necessary to complete the effort. In addition, the process harms people for no reason. This occurs two ways. The first is through handover or fall back. A process that cannot be made safe for most complex scenarios, by any monitoring and notification system, because they cannot provide the time to regain proper situational awareness and do the right thing the right way, especially in time critical scenarios. The other dangerous area is training the systems to handle accident scenarios. In order do that AV makers will have to run thousands of accident scenarios thousands of times. that will cause thousands of injuries and deaths. The solution is aerospace/DoD simulation technology and systems/safety engineering. (Not gaming engine-based systems as they have significant real-time and model fidelity flaws in complex scenarios).
Please find more information on this in my articles below
Using the Real World is better than Proper Simulation for Autonomous Vehicle Development — NONSENSE
NHTSA saved children from going to school in autonomous shuttles and leaves them in danger everywhere else
Tesla is exposing Autonomous Vehicle Industry’s avoidably Dangerous and Impossible Engineering Approach
The Hype of Geofencing for Autonomous Vehicles
SAE Autonomous Vehicle Engineering Magazine-End Public Shadow Driving
My name is Michael DeKort — I am a former system engineer, engineering and program manager for Lockheed Martin. I worked in aircraft simulation, the software engineering manager for all of NORAD, the Aegis Weapon System, and on C4ISR for DHS.
Key Autonomous Vehicle Industry Participation
- Lead — SAE On-Road Autonomous Driving SAE Model & Simulation Task Force
- Member SAE ORAD Verification and Validation Task Force
- Expert — DIN/SAE International Alliance for Mobility Testing & Standardization (IAMTS) group to create sensor simulation specs
- Stakeholder for UL4600 — Creating AV Safety Guidelines
- Member of the IEEE Artificial Intelligence & Autonomous Systems Policy Committee (AI&ASPC)
- Presented the IEEE Barus Ethics Award for Post 9/11 Efforts
My company is Dactle
