Tesla Autopilot Crashes into Motorcycle Riders - Why?
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited in threads on motorcycle safety, Tesla's sensor choices and autonomous vehicles as a well-made explanation of the failure mode.
What it is
FortNine looks at why Tesla Autopilot has rear-ended motorcyclists, speculating that the vision system misreads motorcycle taillights as a distant car. It argues that radar and other sensors would help.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2022 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends L0stLink · 2022-10 · on “Why Tesla removed radar and ultrasonic sensors [video]”
There is a great argument for having ultrasonic sensors and radar in a recent video by Rayan from FortNine discussing two fatal accidents involving tesla autopilot [this video]
Cites dharmab · 2022-10 · on “New motorcycle lighting design could save lives”
It may be a contributing factor to recent cases where Tesla Autopilot rear ended motorcycles at night. Thus video has a visualization: [this video] One of these crashes was right by my home, where I rode to work nearly every day prepandemic.
Cites ultrarunner · 2023-09 · on “California governor vetoes bill to require human operators in autonomous trucks”
I don't really have anything to back this up, so take it with a massive gain of salt, but I seem to keep seeing discussion of Teslas hitting bikes (both cyclists and motorcycles). Most of it centers around there being enough doubt about whether Autopilot was being used, or whether the driver was actually monitoring like they should have been, or whether the cyclist "should" have been in the road, etc, as to "count" as being less safe. I can only imagine that there are impassioned interpretations of the data going multiple directions. A Verge article [0] has some discussion on this with regard to a motorcyclist that follows this pattern, and FortNine also covers this in a characteristically w
Cites kibitzor · 2024-04 · on “Tesla driver arrested for homicide after running over motorcyclist on Autopilot”
Related video "Tesla Autopilot Crashes into Motorcycle Riders - Why?"[0], summarized to: vision used by Tesla seems to process motorcycles differently, and may be incorrectly "assuming" the closer spaced brake lights on a motorcycle is actually a far away car. More details on the homicide here[1], which shows the crash happened during daylight hours and the bike resembles a sport bike. This is a different condition than my referenced video (night collisions with cruiser-style motorcycles), but I suspect similar incorrect assumptions by Tesla vision happened. [0] [this video] [1] [LINK]