Self-driving cars are often marketed as safer than human drivers, but new data suggests that may not always be the case.

Citing data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), Electrek reports that Tesla disclosed five new crashes involving its robotaxi fleet in Austin. The new data raises concerns about how safe Tesla’s systems really are compared to the average driver.

The incidents included a collision with a fixed object at 17 miles per hour, a crash with a bus while the Tesla vehicle was stopped, a crash with a truck at four miles per hour, and two cases where Tesla vehicles backed into fixed objects at low speeds.

  • ageedizzle@piefed.ca
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    21 hours ago

    He’s right in that if current AI models were genuinely intelligent in the way humans are then cameras would be enough to achieve at least human level droving skills. The problem of course is that AI models are not nearly at that level yet

    • CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      Also the Human brain is still on par with some of the worlds best supercomputers, I doubt a Tesla has that much onboard processing power.

      • ageedizzle@piefed.ca
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        5 hours ago

        Good point. Though I’ve heard some of these self driving cars connect remotely to a person to help drive when the AI doesnt know what to do, so I guess it’s conceivable that the car could connect to the cloud. That would be super error prone though. Connectivity issues cloud brick your car.

    • T156@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      Even if they were, would it not be better to give the car better senses?

      Humans don’t have LIDAR because we can’t just hook something into a human’s brain and have it work. If you can do that with a self-driving car, why cut it down to human senses?

    • kameecoding@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      I am a Human and there were occasions where I couldn’t tell if it’s an obstacle on the road or a weird shadow…

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
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        1 hour ago

        And, we humans have built-in binocular vision that we’ve been training for at least 1.5 decades by the time we’re allowed to drive.

        Also, think about what you do in that situation where there’s a weird shadow. Slow down, sure. But, also move our heads up and down, side to side, trying to use that powerful binocular vision to get different angles on that strange shadow. How many front-facing cameras does Tesla have. Maybe 3, and one of those is mounted on the bumper? In theory, 3 cameras could give it 3 different “viewpoints” for binocular vision. But, that’s not as good as a human driver who can shift their eyes around to multiple points to examine a situation. And, if one of those 3 cameras is obscured (say the one on the bumper) you’re down to basic binocular vision without even the ability to take a look from a different angle.

        Plus, we have evidence that Tesla isn’t even able to use its cameras to achieve binocular vision. If it worked, it shouldn’t have fallen for the Wile E. Coyote trick.

      • ageedizzle@piefed.ca
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        12 hours ago

        Yes. In theory cameras should be enough to get you up to human level driving competence but even that is a low bar.

        • NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ@lemmy.world
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          3 hours ago

          I feel like camera only could theoretically pass human performance, but that hinges entirely on AI models that do not currently exist, and that those models, when they do exist, being capable of running inside of a damn car.