Tesla has a history of using remote diagnostics to snitch on drivers instead of allowing investigators to do their job.
It’s a valid concern that your car manufacturer will use the interior cameras to blame a crime on you.
These automatic tagging features also bring to question the bias in algorithms. What does this mean for drivers with disabilities? Is it possible that a safe driver with ADHD or Turrets etc might be flagged as inattentive during an autopilot crash and therefore at fault?
This is a legit concern. There are many edge cases with humans.
I worked at a pizza place in high school. There was a delivery driver with cerebral paulsy who was constantly being accused of being drunk. Sometimes customers just called the cops on him. It was sad, he was a super nice young guy already on a short clock and he had to deal with that all the time.
> What does this mean for drivers with disabilities?
You mention ADHD and Turrets; a leg-disabled person (e.g. paralyzed waste down) can still drive just fine, special hand-operated equipment is installed to a car to allow the hands to take over for the foot pedals.
By design this driver may be looking down frequently at their controls (let's assume not everyone is a pro driver yet and knows them by heart) which could easily be misconstrued as looking down at a mobile phone, placing immediate bias against them on video before the facts of hand-controls are revealed in court.
> By design this driver may be looking down frequently at their controls
Actually not, for hand controls. No more than you look at the pedals. It goes into muscle memory just as much.
I have been a passenger with two different hand-control drivers. Both were as smooth as a driver using foot pedals. I once moved their car for one of them —- in a tiny town on a quiet street, for about 5 blocks at low speed. It was difficult for me — zero muscle memory and zero “feel” for the car. It does take some practice, I will give you that, but you never have to look at the lever, even as a noob.
Besides, I don't think there's any more comfort or lessened stakes to be had knowing that the driver that t-boned your kid was looking down at their prosthetic leg or custom controls instead of a smartphone. Or in the middle of an autistic break or epileptic fit or attention deficit fugue or narcoleptic episode.
Fine, the software's enum value of "EYES_DOWN" doesn't quite capture the domain of nuance of all the reasons eyes might be down. But it doesn't necessarily matter.
While I agree with the concern, I think there's almost zero chance that a neural net trained on people looking at phones would classify a driver looking at hand controls as that same thing. The neural net would more likely have another classification of "unknown attention", being unable to conclusively classify the driver's attention.
Is there any incentive for the drivers to not just tape over this camera? As far as I see this information will almost certainly only be used against you. But then again, perhaps taping over the camera will be used against you as well.
The OP is suggesting neuroatypical people might be flagged as being inattentive despite being attentive due to being underrepresented in the training set.
I think the question was asked with the implied addition 'What Tesla says won't matter in court.'
I don't agree with that though, for two reasons.
First, it will be harder for them to fight, meaning it will still be a source of bias even if the court isn't biased at all. Even if they can show it was a false flag, that is time and money others wouldn't have to spend. Potentially time and money of someone who was in a life altering crash.
Second, it would not be surprised that the court ends up being biased towards the manufacture and would give undue weight to them because they have the fancy algorithms and all the well payed lawyers.
> It’s a valid concern that your car manufacturer will use the interior cameras to blame a crime on you.
Don't see when they would ever be responsible for a crime legally, outside of being 'blamed' in dozens of national news headlines; the current legal landscape has continued to uphold that you are responsible for the car even when it's trying to drive itself.
Even with Navigate on Autopilot, you have to continuously apply force to the wheel to prevent it from nagging at the driver. The feature mentioned in the article would be used if regulation increased to require the car use a camera/similar system to determine if a driver is inattentive while autopilot is enabled.
"Your hands are just there for regulatory reasons"
Then turns around and blames you for acting like that's true when a known defect kills your wife
(aside: Why do you think Mobileye had the same tech as AP1 in multiple other cars but never turned it on continuously? Why do you think it was always limited to highway speeds and correcting a lack of input? Well that's because it can't tell an overhead sign from a stopped firetruck very well...)
Are we really then allowed to go back and go "well they had a nice disclaimer".
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It's funny really, because calling it Autopilot wasn't enough (spare me the airplane comparisons). Now there's a feature list called "Full Self Driving... capability"
Like, the term FSD is used as part of a label for a collection of features, of which NOT A SINGLE ONE is even a COMPONENT of self driving, because EVERY SINGLE ONE requires full time driver attention.
They're literally using the fact that theoretically, one day, the SENSORS MIGHT OVERLAP WITH WHAT FSD REQUIRES to sell it as... not FSD. FSD capability.
What a joke.
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Tesla has gotten away with homicide, and I guess we're ok with them continuing to.
The useless comparisons about "Tesla with AP is safer than Tesla without", show me the comparison that Tesla with AP is safer than AEB+LKA+ACC (pretty much AP, minus the party trick that lulls drivers into a false sense of security), and I'll show you a made up study.
Because that would be AP being exactly what it already is, minus the one mode where the driver is supposed to be a safety net for the computer. Where the driver already has responsibility to make sure it doesn't crash! It's literally like removing the ability to steer your bike with the training wheels, the training wheels are still there!
It's simple really, Tesla has put marketability of a safety feature, over the actual safety benefits, at the cost of human lives.
I agree that the marketing is misleading and unreasonable but I think the last part of your comment is going too far.
I drive a car without any of those features. I think my car's level of safety is acceptable. If AP can beat that level of safety, it's good enough. It's okay if AP isn't the absolute safest mode, just like it's okay if companies sell cars that "only" have a 4-star crash rating.
Exactly this. People are expecting car "autopilots" to exceed all human drivers in every situation, which is a completely silly place to move the goalpost to.
I see it more as an assistant that makes us all better drivers by letting us concentrate on stuff the computer can't do.
Even my Hyundai can drive automatically perfectly well at highway speeds and follow the road and even slow down with the traffic. This lets me relax behind the wheel and concentrate on other things than keeping the car in the lane.
I feel I'm a lot less tired and more anttentive when driving with an "autopilot", all the little micro-adjustments needed vex on my brain like nothing else.
I agree, but I interpret the argument as such: Tesla, by using language like "your hands are only there for regulatory reasons" makes no effort to dispel the myth to the driver that the car autopilot can exceed all human drivers in every situation. It aught to be on Tesla's head to instruct the driver that they are the safety net to the computer.
To use the aeroplane analogy that Tesla wants to market: the computer is the first officer in charge of flying the plane, the driver is the captain in charge of everything else.
Yea, the Tesla marketing team has gone a bit overboard and some people are taking their spiel as gospel.
On the other hand, event the new VW ID.3 can drive on regular roads, manage roundabouts and adjust speed according to speed signs, they're just not making a huge fuss about it.
No one is saying AP should be the safest thing ever, my comment certainly isn't saying that AP should be some sorr of super-human driver
The problem is AP is actively making itself less safe than it would be without marketing oriented features even with no additional strengths.
AP could the same collision avoidance and lane centering capabilities, but not allow the driver to engage them in "Autopilot" style. That's exactly what the AP1 hardware did in other cars.
AP would still avoid every accident it could before, but now additionally not kill people when it fails to uphold the very strongly implied (even if legally disclaimed) promises it's marketing and creator love to make.
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AP has a set of convenience features and safety features.
The convenience features all come with the disclaimer that the human must be attentive at all times while they're engaged.
And in cases where the human is not full engaged because they're placing too much trust in the convenience features, suddenly the convenience features are creating a less safe situation than if the driver did not have them at all, since the driver is now driving distracted.
The safety features cannot close the gap between a distracted driver and a non-distracted driver, that's why they're not seld-driving cars.
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Or to put it another way, good enough is good enough for the safety features. But "good enough" is actually the most dangerous level of the convenience features, since they lull operators into a false sense of security with deadly consequences.
That's why Google abandoned their equivalent project (which Elon spoke to them about before developing AP. Google's project was called... Autopilot).
It was demonstrated that giving drivers that sort of "good-enough" convenience feature would be encouraging distracted behavior. But that didn't stop Elon.
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In fact, thinking about it, how sad is that? Google used cameras in their vehicle in conjunction with AP features and proved that people would misuse the system.
Knowing that Elon was in contact with them about the program, isn't it such an odd coincidence that Elon has pushed back on driver monitoring?
It's almost like he knows exactly what it would reveal, but doesn't want to invite the trouble that comes with tracking such an inconvenient truth.
> The problem is AP is actively making itself less safe than it would be without marketing oriented features even with no additional strengths.
That's a shame but I'm not going to worry all that much about it killing people if it's still safer than a basic car.
> Or to put it another way, good enough is good enough for the safety features. But "good enough" is actually the most dangerous level of the convenience features, since they lull operators into a false sense of security with deadly consequences.
No. We were talking about the final level of safety after factoring in the hubris-caused danger. The level of safety before factoring in hubris was much better than "good enough".
> That's a shame but I'm not going to worry all that much about it killing people if it's still safer than a basic car.
This doesn't make sense unless you just like senesless death.
It can be safer than a basic car and not kill people.
Or it can be safer than a basic car and kill people for the sake of marketing.
Since like I said, AP should not leave you feeling rested, full attentiveness is required, more than usual. If you're operating under the assumption you can relax a little with it active like a co-pilot or watcher, you're following for it's most dangerous trap.
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Also you realize basic cars have been picking up the safety features for a while now right?
The Toyota Corolla, the baseline of basic cars, has had LKA for 3 or 4 years now? And will warn a drowsy driver in case of excessive interventions.
It's sad again, because if anything Tesla is poisoning the well on these features since they're lulling people who don't even have the cars into a false sense of security.
AP marketing makes it seem like it can make a drive more relaxing (with Tesla salespeople using that exact phrasing on a test drive mind you) when the moment it does that, it's making you less safe than if it wouldn't pretend to be capable of that.
Now when other manufacturers intentionally omit continuous lane centering, it seems like an omission of a convenience, not an omission of a dangerously misleading liability to the safety of its users.
If the car only saves 20 lives when it could have saved 70 lives, I don't care if you want to call that "killing people", I think that car is fine.
I don't "like senseless deaths" but I think it's acceptable if people like the former car better than the latter car and purchase more of it.
> If you're operating under the assumption you can relax a little with it active like a co-pilot or watcher, you're following for it's most dangerous trap.
If it's still safer than a car without those features even after falling into the trap then my reaction is a big shrug.
Here the car saves 100000 lives, but kills 5 people, when it could have just not killed the 5 people! And still saved the same 100000 lives!
That's a problem! To any normal person, that's a problem.
You're doing this weird math where actively murdering 5 people but saving 100000 is the same as just saving 99995, but it's not when the 5 murders were not a requirement to save 100000.
Maybe your confusion is thinking the safety features are the ones doing the killing when they're not? It's extra trimmings built on top of the safety features that are doing the killing.
In other words:
> If it's still safer than a car without those features even after falling into the trap then my reaction is a big shrug.
It's not safer! Because that sentence is about the convenience features are not the safety features!
LKA, AEB, Crash avoidance, those all operate separately of the convenience features! And it's not a guess about how the internals work either, Tesla literally sells things like "Navigate on Autopilot" separately.
It's really simple logic. The safety features save lives. The convenience features, by definition, cannot save lives that the safety ones didn't.
When a Tesla avoids hitting a car coming into it's path, it's not because Navigate with Autopilot was on, it's the Active Safety Features function:
But when a Tesla hits a stopped firetruck after Autopilot lulled the driver into thinking they wouldn't have to brake, the active safety features can't do anything! Because the convenience features are subject to the same limitations as the active safety features.
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That's the crux of the issue that you keep missing. No one is saying the active safety features should save more lives, they're saying the convenience features need to stop tricking people into driving distracted. Because those people sometimes die in accidents that wouldn't have happened if they didn't have them.
The safety features would still save the same number of people, just no one would die needless deaths in the name of marketing and looking cool.
> You're doing this weird math where actively murdering 5 people but saving 100000 is the same as just saving 99995, but it's not when the 5 murders were not a requirement to save 100000.
I don't see it that way.
It's a completely random set of people that die either way. And all the deaths basically boil down to "driving is dangerous". It's not one set of people being saved and a different one dying. It's all one group, so only the total number matters.
> It's not safer! Because that sentence is about the convenience features are not the safety features!
Your sentence was about that. My counterpoint was about more than that.
I'll reword my point without the word safer: If the risk reduction from the safety features is bigger than the risk increase from the convenience features, I think things are acceptable.
> The safety features save lives. The convenience features, by definition, cannot save lives that the safety ones didn't.
I wasn't trying to say the convenience features saved lives.
> No one is saying the active safety features should save more lives, they're saying the convenience features need to stop tricking people into driving distracted.
I'm the one saying that safety features need to save a certain number of lives. And that number is "enough to make up for the risk caused by the convenience features".
> Because those people sometimes die in accidents that wouldn't have happened if they didn't have them.
Eh, someone that's distracted could easily die in similar accident in a dumb car. To me it's all risk vs. risk. Nobody is getting murdered by the car as some kind of sick trade-off. It's not a trolley problem. It's just undoing some of the safety. But undoing the safety is acceptable, just like a car that had none of those safety features (and none of those convenience features) would also be acceptable.
> The safety features would still save the same number of people, just no one would die needless deaths in the name of marketing and looking cool.
If it was just marketing and looking cool that would be one thing. But it's also quite hard mentally to pay attention when everything is on auto. And it's a much nicer driving experience that's inherently dangerous no matter what the marketing says. So I don't think it's possible to have the convenience without the danger. You'd have to disable AP.
> It's all one group, so only the total number matters.
You're very alone in this line of thought.
If you save 100000 people _by murdering_ 5 people, it's unfortunate and a hard choice, but at least arguably good. Most people will be ok with this (this is pretty much how the world turns to some degree)
But if you save 100000 lives, then murder 5 victims. And those 5 victims were just murdered to murder tham, no one being saved was resting on it.
Most basically ethical people would consider that indefensible.
Maybe you're confusing this situation with the former, where lives are treated as fungible to save great numbers.
That can be tricky ethically, but at least the greater good is on your side. Here you're treating lives as fungible for the sake of it.
It's not really an admirable thing to lack the ability to see why that's wrong, so I implore you to dig a little deeper.
This isn't sacrificing people to help more people, it's helping people then sacrificing some people for fun.
If you talk someone down from a ledge do you now go around thinking you get to murder someone and it cancels out?
> If it was just marketing and looking cool that would be one thing. But it's also quite hard mentally to pay attention when everything is on auto. And it's a much nicer driving experience that's inherently dangerous no matter what the marketing says. So I don't think it's possible to have the convenience without the danger. You'd have to disable AP
This is literally what every comment in this entire thread by me has said. Maybe you finally get it.
Car without convenience features saves lives doesn't kill.
I basically agree with everything you said about saving some people and murdering others.
But "saving less people" is a totally different situation. If I donate some money to charity, and I'm asked to donate more money, it's okay for me to say no.
So the question is whether these features fall under "saving some people and killing others" or if they fall under "saving less people".
You believe it's the former, and I believe it's the latter.
Remember that even pure safety features are imperfect and they are subject to the butterfly effect. Anything you change about a car design will cause some shift in who dies while driving that car. You have to determine if there are really two separate risk groups, one sacrificed for the other, or if it's all really one risk group.
As a thought experiment, imagine we made a car that was all-around much safer, and then we let 14 year olds drive it. Well that actually happens, with mini-cars that have strict speed limits. (Usually they're legally not cars.) We could only allow normal licensed drivers to use them, and they'd be very safe! But then, purely for convenience, we let younger teenagers use them. Is that a moral abomination? Some of them are going to die. But I think it fits into the normal risk of driving, and as long as a 14 year old in one of those is safer than a normal driver in a normal car, I'm satisfied.
> So the question is whether these features fall under "saving some people and killing others" or if they fall under "saving less people".
There are separate sets of features that you can't just glue together, they're not even offered together, you have to pay separately for the second set.
One set saves people, one set kills people. The set that kills people, doesn't save people.
You think it's ok to sell the set that kills people because they have a set thats save people.
I know it's not ok to sell features that kill people and don't save anyone. It'd be one thing if it could save people, but it doesn't. The other set does that.
> You think it's ok to sell the set that kills people because they have a set thats save people.
Only if all three of the following are true:
A) they both affect the same risk factor (Just because they're "separate" features and sold separately doesn't make this false. And the way the autopilot is so intertwined with the others, I don't think it's really fair to say they are truly separate features. They build upon each other.)
B) it's impossible to run the dangerous one without the safety one
C) running both is safer than running neither
If you want to make cars safer, then you should be insisting that all cars be safer. The car that kills people because it lacks any of these electronics is just as bad.
To elaborate on (A), with these particular features I don't see the car as causing distinct people to die compared to who it's saving. It's not trading between different groups of people in any meaningful way. It's just a single number of how many people die per mile. With other features you could get into that moral dilemma. With these features I don't think it does.
I don't think it's going too far. There are certain features of a vehicle for which the manufacturer could be forgiven for using borderline deceptive marketing to move the product. Yet "Autopilot" that isn't capable of fully replacing a driver, is marketing doublespeak that has contributed to the deaths of Tesla motorists who ostensibly believed that "Autopilot" actually means autopilot.
Tesla & Co have used telemetry for PR to save face for their autopilot features, independent of the courts. If your car goes through a green light and gets T-Boned but the car flags you as being inattentive, it would be an interesting case, because without the data it would be clear that you were not at fault in any way.
> These automatic tagging features also bring to question the bias in algorithms. What does this mean for drivers with disabilities? Is it possible that a safe driver with ADHD or Turrets etc might be flagged as inattentive during an autopilot crash and therefore at fault?
I'm not understanding your point here, and you seem to contradict yourself a little bit.
A driver with a disability that makes them inattentive can't be a "safe driver." Having a disability that makes them inattentive, appearing inattentive, and getting into a crash (autopilot or not), seems to be a "three strikes and you're out" situation, IMO. You'll have a very hard time convincing me the person wasn't at fault in that situation.
Certain disabilities prevent people from driving cars safely. It's unfortunate, but it's just the way it is.
>A driver with a disability that makes them inattentive can't be a "safe driver."
A driver with a disability that makes a computer system classify them as an inattentive driver is not the same thing as a driver with a disability that makes them inattentive.
This could certainly cause the UI to falsely show alerts or refuse to enable the autopilot.
But when it comes to actually reviewing a case in an accident, you would want to review the actual footage, not just the metadata.
Looking at just the metadata is already problematic. For example, the “hands on wheel” metadata in a Tesla is based on angular force detected on the wheel, not actual hands on the wheel. Tesla will report that the driver didn’t touch the wheel in X seconds, when it would be more accurate to say the driver didn’t apply angular force, although their hands might have been resting on the wheel the whole time.
Safety is in the sum of all things, AKA performance. An ADD person may drive a car safely and we might not know why; what we do know is performance.
If an ADD person does then get into an accident, should they endure higher civil and criminal risk, regardless of prior performance and in light of their condition?
What do you mean by snitch? I think it's a perfectly valid reason to "snitch" if the driver was truly at fault.
There's some great reasons for driver-facing cameras- and if one of those trade-offs is that drivers are less likely to "get away" with causing a crash, then that's fine in my books.
Bias feels like a different argument entirely, though I do share your concern about it...
If the data could be used against you, you should also have access to the data so it could be used to support your case.
When there is asymmetric access to data, it's inherently unfair because the side with greater access will cherry-pick the data that supports their side.
For example, there might be some angle, some time window, some sensor, etc. that makes you look attentive, while a different angle/time/sensor might make you look inattentive.
So, turns out a driver is more likely to be snitched on if there's not a piece of tape covering the camera.
So, it's got a bias against people who don't cover the camera.
(Full disclosure: I have not yet covered mine. But one of the many reasons I do not install dash cams in my cars is that I am not interested in having evidence against me when I start shooting up other cars in traffic [1])
>What do you mean by snitch? I think it's a perfectly valid reason to "snitch" if the driver was truly at fault.
The driver is always truly at fault in the current legal environment. A driver can't just blame it on the car to escape liability. The comments here talking about the legal ramifications for these tags are misguided. For these tags to matter, there would need to be legislative changes to shift the liability to the autonomous system and that would likely only happen once we reach at least level 4 autonomy. Plus once we get to that point, whether the driver is paying attention or not shouldn't matter anyway.
> The driver is always truly at fault in the current legal environment.
That's...not entirely and exclusively true.
> A driver can't just blame it on the car to escape liability.
If it was provably due to a manufacturing defect that the driver could not reasonably have known about, I think you are wrong.
If a manufacturing defect is involved, then whether or not the driver is also liable, the manufacturer and every party in the chain of commerce (both upstream—such as suppliers of the defective component—and downstream from the vehicle manufacturer, such as dealers, etc., which are mostly irrelevant for Tesla) is liable.
You are right about the exception of a defective product. I should have included that disclaimer in my original comment. However defective is an important qualifier. Autopilot is not designed to be the primary driver of the car. A Tesla on Autopilot rear-ending another driver is no more defective than any other car on cruise control rear-ending someone. Autopilot would likely need to overrule human action to be considered defective. I was assuming that is an unlikely enough case to avoid mentioning it. Even if that did occur, that would be evident in other logs the car keeps so this attention monitor wouldn't be relevant.
Before you go all conspiracy theory, try reading the actual article. It's an opt-in and the data is not recorded nor uploaded to Tesla without an opt-in control.
We're like 300 yards down the slippery slope and gaining speed fast. Today's "It's opt-in and isn't being recorded" is tomorrow's "If you don't agree to allow us to use this video in any manner we deem fit, or if you leave 4G+ coverage for an excessive period of time, your car may not start".
Hah, if the main barrier to autopilot for cars is liability and insurance, passive biometric monitoring of the driver is certainly one way to shift liability around.
The real feature should just be a button that shifts insurance liability to Tesla for the period of the autopilot engagement and charges you a floating premium for it based on traffic conditions per mile/km while the autopilot is on.
The real problem is "free" auto pilot means people will use it often enough to make a catastrophe an actuarial inevitability, whereas if they have to pay to text while driving on autopilot, they're going to do it less, and live long enough to be killed by something else.
Hm... are you suggesting that Tesla's motivation here might be to develop a logging system to defend itself against liability claims by demonstrating that the driver was not paying attention, as opposed to a system to take measures at the time to prevent the crash?
I would regard doing the former, while not the latter, to be deeply unethical, as, at least in my book, motive matters.
I am not saying thet I expect Tesla to do so, but it is possible that the incentives could be to do just that: for example, if it turns out to be impractical to produce an effective warning and intervention system that is not regarded as too intrusive by its customers. Don't take that route, Tesla. Nothing but either true (not necessarily perfect) self-driving, or effective monitoring and intervention, is acceptable.
Not really, the system primarily exists for two reasons:
1) in case future regulation requires "monitoring if the driver is paying attention to the road"
and
2) for their robo-taxi service that might or might not come out within the next 5 years as Elon says (hint: it will not)
I own a Tesla and would love if this internal camera were to be available to Sentry mode/saved with dashcam footage (for insurance reasons, internal dashcams are great for strengthening the driver's case), but that's not possible currently.
Why? Did they suddenly engineer themselves into a new type of corporation that doesn't drop its ethics at the first opportunity?
I have nothing specifically against Tesla, but I fully expect them to simply do whatever if they are incentivised by the right profit structure. The "best" corporations have disappointed me in this manner, no shame on Tesla for existing, but that is what it will do, given the chance.
"Tesla" is not your human friend that you can talk to or appease in the hope that it won't do what is its nature. Talking into the void won't tame it.
> The real feature should just be a button that shifts insurance liability to Tesla for the period of the autopilot engagement and charges you a floating premium for it based on traffic conditions per mile/km while the autopilot is on.
well this seems inevitable now - the amount you pay out of pocket for body damage repairs depending on the machinations of high-speed-trading algorithms acting on the sensor data streaming out of your car. not just the price of autopilot fluctuates but every non-essential function distracting enough to influence the actuarial tables. want to listen to music? in this traffic? too expensive!
You mean that you'd have the choice between using autopilot as is (with you having the liability, not allowed to text) or switch to Tesla having the liability and be free to text?
That would require the system to be safe enough to text while using it.
If you mean that the feature should always be pay-to-use, that seems ridiculous. Why try to minimize the use of a driver assist feature?
A car you can drive drunk is the only meaningful definition of a self-driving car, imo.
I mean both, and specifically that driver assist should be pay to use to offset usage because it is likely higher net risk for a collision than a human. Free driver-assist has a "tragedy of the commons" problem, or a moral hazard, where there is no cost to over-using it and courting a collision event, so this overall risk can be reduced by metering its use.
Also, yes, the system should be safe enough to text while using it. That's what "self driving car" should mean. Another criteria would be that a person should be able to use it with a blood alcohol level higher than is legal today as well, and that it absolves people of an "impaired driving" charge.
There is a division between driver assist and full autonomous self driving, but these are features that could be pay per use based on relative actuarial risk.
To people who say you can't put a price on human life, clearly you do not have auto insurance?
> A car you can drive drunk is the only meaningful definition of a self-driving car, imo.
That's kind of a messy definition. A drunk person might start messing with the controls, and a car that is perfectly able to drive itself might not be able to handle that. You could fix that with a breathalyzer but it would be ridiculous if the difference between self-driving and not-self-driving is the presence of a breathalyzer.
So I would say something more like "drive from the passenger seat" or "drive while asleep".
Technically I would agree with you, but economically, why would anyone drive from the passenger seat, and almost nobody will look forward to sleeping on the road - but my drunk definition applies to everyone in the world who drinks wine, beer, or spirits.
A car you can drive drunk is the problem the tech solves, which is what makes it both viable, and provides success criteria instead of making it just about unreasonable hypothetical standards of perfect safety.
The entire ML and machine vision endeavour should be called what it is, a moonshot to create a drunk driving car.
> The real feature should just be a button that shifts insurance liability to Tesla for the period of the autopilot engagement and charges you a floating premium for it based on traffic conditions per mile/km while the autopilot is on.
No amount of money makes up for human lives. You can pay a premium of $1mil per mile, if the car end up smashing into a family car at 80mph because the system was fooled by a shadow or a reflection it's still a net negative
> No amount of money makes up for human lives. You can pay a premium of $1mil per mile, if the car end up smashing into a family car at 80mph because the system was fooled by a shadow or a reflection it's still a net negative
This is a metric human drivers fail to hit every single day.
There is some acceptable level of risk in shifting driving to a robot. How you draw that comparison and draw the line is tough. It's complicated greatly because the kinds of failures autopilot makes are significantly different from the kinds of failures humans make.
> This is a metric human drivers fail to hit every single day.
Yes exactly, and when they fuck up they suffer the consequences. Which if you were reckless will most likely be years in prison. You shouldn't be able to get away by paying money which is what the comment I replied to asks for.
You're not "getting away" with anything. You're paying someone else to do a job, and that other person writes software to do the job. They're the ones responsible for the software at that stage.
You can't "pay away" your responsibility for human lives like that.
You can point towards the anomymous software engineer you supposedly paid off your responsibility to.
But you're still the one that literally killed a family.
You'll realise there are some things you can't transfer responsibility from, when you're sitting behind the brains dripping off your window.
But at least all the people who have literally zero idea what you just went through, will tell you it's really Tesla's fault who wrote the software and they're responsible really. And there's no amount of money you can pay, to make you believe them.
There is no need to spend infinite resources. Look at the driver facing camera when the accident occurs. Either the driver was paying attention or he was doing something else.
It's a legal issue, not a technical issue.
We should delineate between resources (which has a fiat value) and fiat money. I agree that fiat money can't make up for a human life, since if money is destroyed, the remaining money supply increases in value through deflation and no actual resources are destroyed.
However I disagree that a human life can't be equated with resources. Would you destroy $10 billion of value/resources in the economy to save 1 person? I don't think that's worth it, because that $10 billion of value could've been food and medicine which can save thousands of people. This is really just the trolley problem. But the bigger you make the sum (if you don't agree at $10 billion, what about $1 trillion?), at some extreme point you're going to have to say "ok, one life isn't worth that much."
> Would you destroy $10 billion of value/resources in the economy to save 1 person?
You can spin any arguments by framing them in such ridiculous scenarios. My comment is obviously in the context of people able to pay money to get rid of their personal responsibilities.
I was just demonstrating the absurdity of your comment. Taking things to the limit to demonstrate the absurdity of absolutist statements like the one you made is a perfectly acceptable thing to do and is not "spin". You said "no amount of money" and I took that at face value. If that's not what you meant then that's fine, there's no disagreement between us.
From reading the many other replies to your comment, everyone else was left with the same impression by what you said.
It's quite simple. If you drive into a family, killing them, you will realise, as the brains are dripping down your window, that the insurance premium you paid, actually only affects the opinion of people who have literally no idea what you just did.
Trivially untrue since you can save one life for under $1000 but almost everyone with $1000 will keep it rather than save the life - revealing that $1000 is worth more than an arbitrary human life.
They have more detailed information elsewhere. They are generally trustworthy. Of course I boosted the cost (based on memory) a little, and literalized the value (the truth is that each additional mosquito net has a marginal reduction in the probability of a child contracting and then dying of malaria).
And it looks like I made two errors:
* I had a memory of an older model - the newer one makes it more expensive
* I misremembered the optimal strategy (it isn't anti-malaria, it's Deworm the World at $1003 / child under age 5 saved).
You clearly don't actually believe that, or there are a ton of activities you would stop doing. You wouldn't drive to work, because there is a chance you might kill someone while driving, and you only go to work for money, so why do it?
Comments on the site itself are pure gold as some are pointing out the various (mostly humorous) events that are not being actively tracked with their driver-facing camera. I will try to compile this list below:
I've actually seen drivers doing all 3 of these. The shaving (with an electric razor, obviously) I only saw once, but I frequently see women applying makeup and lipstick.
I have seen drivers in huge cargo trucks read the newspaper on the autobahn (the newspaper strategically positioned over the steering wheel, of course), or watch TV. Scary shit. One guy was very interested in his porn mag, one hand holding the mag the other hand "occupied" too, so he somehow steered with his knees.
One day I drove with a fellow student to some university event, and he suddenly at a red light took out an electric razor and started shaving. "Want me to take over and drive?" "Nah, you're not insured to drive this car" (true).
And the makeup thing too, seen that a lot of times, once even two ladies (driver and passenger) in the next car applying eye makeup at the same time, as if to make sure neither of them could watch the traffic.
But nothing beats the guy who was so deep down in his seat he was barely visible except for his feet on his dashboard. He apparently thought that being able to use the brake was optional on the autobahn. I can only hope that his car was one of the rare special fitted cars that had a hand operated break paddle, tho the car's steering column looked pretty regular from my POV.
I’d be careful reporting things to the American police. You may get the other person in a lot more trouble than they deserve depending on their skin color.
A couple of friends of mine prototyped a site dedicated to distracted drivers on I-5 in Seattle ala the Highway 17 Hall of Shame. It was just too easy. My favorite, though, and I still have the pic, was a guy, who I presume to be a solider, driving a military truck with a big ol' binder open on his lap.
Best I've seen was a woman with a laptop open, between her and her steering wheel. (Morning commute on I-90 in MA.) I honked at her enough to shame her into putting it away at least while I was near her.
I've seen someone bury her head in the passenger-side footwell while merging into traffic while making a turn onto a busy 4-lane city thoroughfare! (No, there was no passenger.) I had to brake to let her by.
DRIVER_VAPING would be dangerous for Tesla because it has a chance to obscure their camera's view of the driver, meaning they can't accurately blame known autopilot faults on driver inattention.
I really want to know what HEAD_TRUNC in the actual symbol list means. I totally read that as "head truncated," as in the Florida man who perished in a Tesla while watching Harry Potter.
Also, you could add more items like, DRIVER_ON_PASSENGER_TOP.
I suspect it means "head truncated from the camera's viewpoint", as in there is something blocking the top of the driver's face (a brimmed hat, for example) that prevents the camera from figuring out where they're looking.
I just assumed that Tesla is monitoring the driver to detect surprise.
I also assume that Tesla's awesome sauce onboard AI is running a simulation. For both the driver and other vehicles. Make predictions, gather actuals, continuously try to narrow the delta. Forward anything really weird up to the mother ship for detailed analysis.
Knowing when the driver is surprised would be a pretty good signal. If both the driver and the simulation are surprised, then the simulation could infer which events were way out of scope.
I have no reason, data, or insight for my conjecture.
It's just how I'd do it. And would account for why the onboard computer is so beefy.
I saw it on a highway. The driver had a 9 columns newspaper open on the steering wheel, hopefully hands on the wheel. Probably at least 130 km/h. It was before the web.
On a related note, I often wonder how many Tesla owners are aware that their cars take images/video from the external cameras and send them back to Tesla. This happens remotely at any time and you have no idea when or if it has happened.
I realize that this is still supposedly a “help us improve”/“data gathering” step, but I’m having trouble deciding how I feel about it.
Yes, of course, safer drivers (whether automatic or fleshy) is a great thing, but this still hits that deep-seeded paranoia level for me.
I mean, what if FaceID had been proven out the same way? The number of times I unlock my phone every day and the number of times I’m doing it somewhere that the government/my employer/my significant other/a random hacker would find objectionable or lucrative to exploit... That’s with just me there (or an ex, or a former employee or prospective employer, or someone I met at a bar who turns out to be on some list...).
Turn this back around to the car I’m driving and it’s honestly slightly terrifying for me. It could be the next evolution of those devices insurance companies want you to plug into your OBD port so they can monitor how quickly you accelerate, take turns, etc. Except now Tesla (and whomever they decide to sell it to) know that when that innocent-seeming accident happened you seemed to be looking down, so now you’re completely liable for damages.
With the good comes the bad, but I’m terrified of the bad and the good doesn’t seem that much better than the current.
Yea a friend only drives older cars without ODB to avoid tracking anything (he’s pretty paranoid). But I’ll resist buying a car with a driver facing camera as long as I can, I don’t care how much they discount insurance premiums if you get one, it’s not worth it.
But it solves your problem of getting any car with one. The only thing you might potentially lose out on is autopilot or whatever other manufactures call it, but it's probably going to be required by regulation anyways.
Privacy is already dead (or at least, on life support).
I'm personally not giving in easily, and certainly wouldn't buy a car with a camera I don't control pointed at my face. That is absurd to me.
However, most people just see this only as a safety issue. They're willing to compromise a lot of privacy for a little increase in safety.
That's not objectively wrong, but I disagree with it.
If I could audit my records, store everything locally, and be ensured there's no way to access this data without my consent, then I'd be more into the idea. But right now... I'm just going to keep my old Prius going for as long as I can.
>If I could audit my records, store everything locally, and be ensured there's no way to access this data without my consent, then I'd be more into the idea. But right now... I'm just going to keep my old Prius going for as long as I can.
This really seems like the right way to go about it. If all Tesla sees are those pre-defined flags (EYES_OPEN, HEAD_DOWN, etc.) then I would consider the tradeoff worthwhile.
With an unrestricted video stream, car manufacturers can & will use that data to determine your insurance rate, whether your are using the car for personal vs. rideshare purposes, etc.
I talk to myself, a lot. And I talk to others as well. How is this not a privacy concern? I also look sad, or look happy. I really don't want anyone to be able to sell me things based on the days I smile the most.
Do Teslas (or other cars) phone home and report where they've been? (DriveNow BMWs, which are technically rentals, do that, so they have that capability.) Have you driven anywhere where -- if you were to run for office -- you wouldn't want the public to know? Or, how would you change your behavior and places you visited if you knew you were "being watched"?
I think detecting when a driver is falling asleep could be an amazing safety feature. You would need privacy guarantees about where camera data is going, but I think it would be worth the tradeoff.
Not even close in terms of complexity. I used many of the "Driver Drowsiness" detection from Toyota, BMW and MBenz on my previous cars. They always had false positives, inconsistent and pretty rudimentary. What you're implying is akin to saying Nokia/Ericsson/Palm had smartphones before the iPhone 1 came along. Therefore the iPhone is a non-event. ️
The "hacker" mentioned in this article discovered these detection labels on the Model 3/Y "selfie" camera:
BLINDED
DARK
EYES_CLOSED
EYES_DOWN
EYES_NOMINAL
EYES_UP
HEAD_DOWN
HEAD_TRUNC
LOOKING_LEFT
LOOKING_RIGHT
PHONE_USE
SUNGLASSES_EYES_LIKELY_NOMINAL
SUNGLASSES_LIKELY_EYES_DOWN
Maybe I'm missing something. But it seems like an apples to oranges in comparison to me. Correct me if I am wrong, but Comma.ai's driving monitoring feature is currently the only one in production that is comparable.
Hmm, "HEAD_TRUNC" presumably means out of the frame, but given we're talking about hurtling pieces of metal, it conjures up nastier images for me somehow.
False positives are a minor annoyance. False negatives are potentially catastrophic. So for this kinds of systems it makes sense to skew towards false positives. It is always a tradeoff.
They were definitely annoying alright. Even the collision detection on our previous MBenz SUV would go off at certain roads that were perfectly clear of obstacles.
Since OTA is not a thing on most cars. This becomes a permanent problem that a dealership cannot fix. Even if they wanted too.
With a Tesla (only one in the industry AFAIK), you can submit a bug report at the exact location via voice and a future software update might address it.
Open Pilot's driver monitoring could be improved. After the last update I got a ton of false positives when driving at night. Nighttime would make driver monitoring more difficult, but it's also when people are more likely to be distracted.
How did you try them? I thought they were hidden deep down away behind the OEM layers?
I have tried their the demo systems at several occasions, (they have been developong them in 20y) but not comma.ai's.
For example they calculate the opening speed of your eyelid with high precision, the gaze direction output is within a few degrees of error. You can almost cover your complete face and it will still track your head pose with extreme precision. The list of outputs are long. Pupils, glasses, faceid, blinks (velocity, duration), drowsiness /, perclose, the 3d geometry of the head, facemasks, gender, and a lotbof aggregatet values.
Open Pilot can't use your blindspot cameras or any other additional sensors in your car. If I try to merge into another lane, and someone is in my blind spot, Open Pilot will try (and will crash my car).
Super Cruise and Smart Eye don't have this problem.
And yes, I have an Open Pilot for my Lexus RX 450h.
I thought the topic of this thread was driver monitoring and driver drowsiness detection?
What you're describing is the entire semi-automated driving system + driver monitoring feature. Another Apple to Oranges comparison...
It's obvious to anyone familiar with Open Pilot that it can't access OEM blindspot cameras since it only uses the Comma Two smartphone cameras and hooks into CANBUS. So I am not really sure what point you're trying to make here.
Seeing machines and Smart Eye are DMS (driver monitoring systems). They have only acces to 1 camera in these cars and outputs details of the driver (gaze direction, head pose, eyelid etc.). What and how the outputs are used for are up to the OEM.
You are asserting with no idea whatsoever, or relevance really given you're apparently ignoring that I was answering a very specific comment.
> What you're implying is akin to saying Nokia/Ericsson/Palm had smartphones before the iPhone 1 came along. Therefore the iPhone is a non-event. ️
One, it really is not, there's nothing impressive-looking so far. Two, tesla's record of "game changing" is mostly "game changing marketing", and while you should absolutely feel free to give them all the benefit of every doubt, I really don't feel so inclined.
> The "hacker" mentioned in this article discovered these detection labels on the Model 3/Y "selfie" camera:
These are just events it might be able to generate, it tells you nothing about how well the events are detected and how the consumer of those events integrates them.
What do you think exactly, that other manufacturers just get a magical yes/no blob?
> You are asserting with no idea whatsoever, or relevance really given you're apparently ignoring that I was answering a very specific comment.
I am directly addressing your comment about "DMS/DAM". How is that not relevant?
> One, it really is not, there's nothing impressive-looking so far.
What is impressive to you? That's what the critics said when the iPhone 1 was announced. That's what many also said about electric cars. Funny how the metrics (sales/safety) played out on that one.
> These are just events it might be able to generate, it tells you nothing about how well the events are detected and how the consumer of those events integrates them.
The fact that it can detect those events using a specialized redundant NPU hardware is a far cry from "Driver drowsiness detection" and "DMS/DAM" from "14 years ago". Hence, an apple to oranges comparison.
> What do you think exactly, that other manufacturers just get a magical yes/no blob?
It's interesting you ask that, because they mostly are binary logic if you look at the ECU firmware. Some "Driver drowsiness detection" (MBenz) systems will also just beep at random intervals after driving non-stop for 1 hour. But they still market them as being able to "detect" drowsiness.
George Hotz talked about this many times. They also don't have any firmware code signing whatsoever (esp Toyota) which presents a security risk.
Out of curiosity, which of the DMS/DAM systems do you have experience with?
There are a lot of features that are, in and of themselves, really great, but I would not use until the privacy and data sharing issues are resolved. This is unfortunately a growing problem that many device manufacturers and software makers are making worse.
The don't buy it argument has never held up. Look at phones, the options for a removable battery, sd card slot, 3.5mm jack are all gone on all but the most primitive/weird models of phones.
If the general public goes against your preference then your preference will no longer be an option. For cars this likely means that the only way to get a car that isn't spyware/ad tech will be buying an old car before this happened. That option eventually becomes more and more difficult until you give up and accept whatever the corporations are pushing.
This is a problem of society zeroing in on the most convenient technology. You still today are not forced to buy a phone nor a car, but if you want any chance of making a living more than 5 miles away from your home (well, depending on how far you can walk or bike) you need both a cell phone for receiving work-related communication and a car for getting to/from work on time. The problem is that 99%+ of society sees that receiving cooler, better tech (like a faster phone or a more efficient car) is a worthy tradeoff for the issues that only <%1 of consumers aren't happy with.
I'd like technical progress to be in service of the user and all their rights, not of corporations that apparently value covering their asses above creating value for their clients. Legal measures ensuring the ability in all situations to physically turn off privacy-invading features, plus the right to repair and tinker, would be a good start. Forcing free software would be even better.
You absolutely have the right to use the power of your wallet to try to force those changes. However, again, the vast majority of consumers have voted with their wallets and they do not care for the same set of features that you care about. The vast majority feel that it would make the product experience significantly worse. What use do I have for a headphone jack when I have AirPods? What use do I have for a replaceable battery when it would make my device thicker, heavier, and much less pleasant to use?
It’s a good thing indefatigable contrarians like you don’t get to drive product decisions.
I somewhat agree its a good thing that all tech is not driven by complaints but the problem is virtually every single phone is the same thing. When changes something and you don't like it, you better get used to it because next year every single android phone will have the same change because they all target the mass market unless you look at ultra budget android go phones.
The AirPods might be really nice and not nearly as problematic as the initial reactions predicted but they are still massively more expensive than wired headphones and made a huge collection of existing working headphones obsolete.
There’s an easy solution if you don’t like it: put a piece of tape over the lens. I’m not sure what y’all are doing in your cars but if you like to get wild then by all means do so, just take precautions.
Operating a motor vehicle on public roads is just about the most compelling reason one should have to sacrifice privacy like this.
People have, on the whole, emphatically demonstrated their complete inability to drive responsibly. ~40k deaths, hundreds of thousands of serious injuries, and nearly a trillion dollars in costs every year. Overwhelmingly due to driver error and negligence.
But given Tesla's history of skirting other legal rules, and their history of releasing driver data from autopilot accidents, I would expect the opt-out to operate more as "we record anyway and then delete it after the fact if you opt out and we don't need the data to protect Tesla."
~85% of cars have EDR (event data recorders) which are always recording locally.
NHTSA requires cars with EDRs to record 15 specific attributes. They’ve also considered making EDRs mandatory, but basically didn’t bother since the vast majority of cars already have them.
You need an EDR to implement ADAS features, and some of those are becoming mandatory.
What data did they release from any accident? If you're going to keep spamming the comments of this thread with claims that Tesla releases the data it collects, you need to support those claims.
Tesla has never released the data from an accident. They only release their assessment of the data to authorities and authorities have decided whether to communicate that to the public.
> The driver had received several visual and one audible hands-on warning earlier in the drive and the driver’s hands were not detected on the wheel for six seconds prior to the collision. The driver had about five seconds and 150 meters of unobstructed view of the concrete divider with the crushed crash attenuator, but the vehicle logs show that no action was taken.
This is from March 30 2018 (the accident occurred on March 23). The NTSB and Tesla dissolved the commitment to investigate in parallel as a consequence of this premature release of data in an attempt to exonerate themselves.
Tesla absolutely intentionally released log data on their own.
EDIT: "If you're going to keep spamming the comments of this thread" This was both unnecessary and untrue. With this comment, I'm up to a grand total of two comments in this entire article's discussion thread.
Last I checked, releasing a summary of selective data points from a vehicle's recording device is...releasing data.
Tesla may not release all of the data (and it's clear from their selection of data that they do not), but they definitely do release some data.
Indeed, Tesla's release of data is worse than nothing, because they only release data that slanders the deceased drivers when autopilot was the cause of the crashes in all cases.
So having worked in the space of driving facing cameras here are my 2 cents.
- Why use it?
If you have the car driving autonomous and you want the driver to take over, you need to know if they are able to take over or not (sleeping)
- Placement
The placement of the camera needs to be well below the head, otherwise you will not be able to fully see the eyes and also not be able to tell if a person has it's eyes open or not. This is more true for Asian people.
The placement of this camera shows a lot of the inside of the car compared with other OEMs. This is an interesting feat and could for example be used if you see the temp in the car incrase during parking you might want to turn on the AC if a child or animal is left in the car.
Driver monitoring is most important at night, when the camera Tesla included can't see anything in the cabin. I bet Tesla is kicking themselves for not putting an IR camera + LED in, like the front facing camera on Comma.ai.
This is creepy. I don't want more electronics keeping eyes on me.
In fact I don't want to be driving at all. Bring on the full-on self-driving car.
I don't have a car though as I live in a city where I don't really need one (or could even park it if I wanted to). But in some countries you can't do without one sadly.
> It also keeps track of whether the driver is paying attention to the road. Unique to Super Cruise is that it does this not by requiring the driver to keep his hands or touch the steering wheel, but by tracking the driver’s eyes and head position.
> Despite being capable of handling the car on its own, Super Cruise will not work unless it detects the driver is paying attention to the road. In Cadillac’s case, that doesn’t mean necessarily having the hands on the steering wheel, but keeping the eyes looking forward.
I love that the car is capturing this data. I would imagine Tesla engineers on the analysis side of this data are thinking "holy shit, look how much time our drivers are spending not paying attention at all, we need to do something about this."
They need this data for regulatory reasons, anyway. At some point they need confidence to say how people are really (ab)using their self-driving tech.
> Those grayboxes probably already take more lives than they save on airplanes, and will be orders of magnitude worse on cars.
All evidence so far point in the opposite direction. Airplanes are different, you have a highly trained pilot that has strict requirements for flight. Outperforming your avg human is far easier.
What your evidence that these system cause more harm then good?
> What your evidence that these system cause more harm then good?
I have stopped following the accident investigations a few years ago, but that was the (very evident) trend. Most accidents tend to happen at the hand-over from the machine to the pilots when some problem appears. Among those it's very common that the both the machines and the manual procedures deal correctly with the problem, but the pilots have no chance of selecting the correct procedures. (The MAX-8 may have changed that picture all by itself, as I said, I stopped following them.)
And, yes, airplanes are different. You have pilots that are trained on getting hand-over in a bad situation, and usually have minutes to decide what to do. Car problems must be solved in a second or two, and the drivers never see a bad situation before it happens on real life.
For context, a camera monitoring the driver for attention isn't anything new or specific to Tesla. Many cars from other makes are already doing this, and they tout it as a feature of their driver assist systems.
It's not pitch black inside of the vehicle. The giant LCD puts out some light. There are reflections from your headlights (bouncing off what's in front of you). There are street lights. There are other vehicle headlights. Your eyes have to see stuff for you to drive, so there must be photons hitting your face, and some of those get reflected.
The external cameras have excellent low light sensitivity. If the internal camera is anything like those, I think it'll work fine at night.
Why do other people use illuminated IR cameras then? Aren't they looking for decent gaze direction detection, etc.?
Isn't it unsafe to drive with a ton of light from the giant LCD, etc.? I would have though they would dim that and/or have a night mode with inverted UI colors.
Have you looked at footage from Tesla cameras at night? They have higher dynamic range than the human eye and they're very sensitive. They can see stars.
The LCD changes its brightness automatically. It also changes from light to dark mode (inverted UI colors) based on the time of day. Still an LCD showing black will leak some light, and as I said those cameras are pretty damn sensitive.
The high end trim Forester already has this. I assume a lot of cars do. Is there anything particularly special Tesla offers other than also taking your data for themselves?
One of the reasons I would love to have autopilot is because I have a history of dozing off at the wheel. Never so much where I've had an accident, but bad enough where I've scared myself badly.
I don't want autopilot so I can actually sleep at the wheel, I want it in case I do. I'd vastly prefer if the car noticed I was inattentive that it notified me. My feeling is for long drives this would be a safety feature, but I'm concerned that the way it's built it will my worst driving behaviors instead of helping compensate for them.
> I don't want autopilot so I can actually sleep at the wheel, I want it in case I do.
You should never get behind the wheel if there's a chance you'll fall asleep! You shouldn't be driving. Period. This is incredibly dangerous and puts innocent people at risk.
No technology should compensate for this. We don't design technology to help drivers under the influence feel better about their driving.
Please don't get behind the wheel if you're drowsy.
One time I was driving between cities at 2am for unavoidable reasons, and was drowsy. At one point my brain interpreted the shifting red taillights in front of me as a game of Tetris. That's when I knew it was too dangerous to continue so I pulled over (rest stop was close by) and took a 15 minute nap. I found that powernaps like this are really effective at energizing me past browning out and letting me finish the drive safely.
Measures like opening windows in the middle of winter, playing loud music, pinching, etc. stop working eventually and a nap really is the only way out.
You need discipline to avoid inattentive driving more than advanced technology. You know roughly when you will get tired from driving: plan around that. Technology won't save you from poor judgement.
I do agree, power-naps are amazing to help you regain focus. One time I was driving and it was almost dawn, and I was desperately trying to force myself to reach the next town so I could get a room. I realized I probably wouldn't even make it that far and pulled over at the next rest stop and slept for 30 minutes. I woke up feeling more well-rested than I had any right to be.
When you start having micro-sleep episodes (your attention/memory has inexplicable gaps), or start experiencing sensory hallucinations, it's well past the time for you to rest.
Resting eyes for long blinks is my main memory of drives I shoulda died on. Mostly around 4am on deserted country roads I knew well.
Good news is I would only have killed myself. But honestly there is a reason young people have more car accidents, they make bad fucking choices. I was nothing but lucky!
> Please don't get behind the wheel if you're drowsy.
I know two people with the issue that GP is talking about, and it's not what you're talking about.
They're perfectly alert when they get behind the wheel. They get drowsy on longer drives like 1hr+, which is why any time we do road trips I drive for them. And all that 'pull over and take a power nap' bullshit doesn't work. It's not grounded in any science to start with. I know both have tried coffee, breaks, stopping and taking a walk, etc. Of all those things, they said taking a nap is actually the worst because when they wake up they feel even more tired.
So their choices are: have someone else drive them, don't drive beyond a 1hr distance range, or deal with the drowsiness. You can imagine how sometimes life just forces them into #3 even though both are keenly aware of their issue and do their best to mitigate it.
Tech to detect when they phase out and save their life is absolutely the correct way to go.
If it's dangerous for you to drive, don't drive. It's as simple as that. If you can't stay alert enough for more than an hour, don't drive for more than an hour.
If people think that #3 is acceptable, they should never be allowed to drive a car, for everyone else's protection.
That's not how real life works. It's dangerous for everyone to drive and in the future manual driving will be as legal as riding horses on highways is today.
People do potentially deadly risk reward calculus all the time. And of all potentially deadly things that people regularly do to crack down on, this one would have a pretty huge negative ROI for society. This issue impacts a non-trivial percentage of the population. You can't tell them all to change jobs or move their houses to be within whatever travel time limit. This purist notion of 'they should never be allowed to drive a car, for everyone else's protection' crumbles at the most trivial examination when you consider that you're talking about leaving millions of people jobless or in significantly worse quality of life conditions, while also completely reshuffling the housing markets and zoning. And even then, sometimes events will come up that force them to take that chance regardless, such as family emergencies.
Rather than this purist isolated-logic bullshit that would probably crash the economy if seriously enforced because you have absolutely failed to consider the first and second order effects of what you're suggesting, we actually have a viable tech solution instead.
I'm going to guess that most people who share this viewpoint are either high income earners living in a bubble who don't know what real life is like for most of the population, or are logical purists looking at this issue in isolation and not accounting for what life is like for most of the population. Life for most of the population is working paycheck to paycheck at whatever job you can get in order to make ends meet and keep your kids fed, and living in whatever housing you can get that doesn't make it impossible to get enough sleep to physically keep living due to long commute times. Being prevented from driving would absolutely destroy most affected families. You're going to do a lot more damage to society by preventing all those affected from driving than by doing nothing and letting it contribute to a small percentage of the road toll, which in itself is an insignificant percentage of the total death toll. Which is why every country on the planet has done nothing more drastic than awareness campaigns, despite being aware of this issue.
Really, this is where this entire discussion becomes moot. Fatigue and microsleep as a cause of road fatalities are a well studied issue that every developed nation is aware of and has done the calculus on. And not a single one of them decided to ban those affected from driving, because the calculus of that policy results in a massive net COST, not gain. And that calculus shifts even further now that we have fairly cheap car technology available to mitigate the issue. When you think through all this, the only conclusion is 'ban affected people from driving' is moronic and does significantly more harm than good.
tl;dr: you'll save more lives by replacing a single coal power plant with renewable energy than by implementing your policy. And you won't destroy the lives of millions of people and potentially crash the economy in the process. And there's already a viable solution on market that mitigates it almost entirely anyway. Pick your battles.
The fact that this comment is a plethora of words trying to win an argument how falling asleep at the wheel shouldn't be considered unsafe is incredible.
That's an ungenerous reading of the comment. They would agree that falling asleep at the wheel is unsafe.
We've designed a system, however, that is set up such that it's bound to happen sometimes. Not everyone can call in to work and tell their boss "sorry, I slept badly last night, I'm not coming in" or order a $60 Uber to get somewhere on a whim. Moralizing at people is just virtue signaling.
In one paragraph you've conveyed my point better than I could across multiple comments. This is the heart of what I was getting at.
This, and the fact that the HN demographic, mostly being techies, seem to be a bit disconnected from what real life looks like to 80%+ of the population of the world. A few instances per year of not coming in to work due to poor sleep or having to order Uber wouldn't just inconvenicence them - it would completely destroy their lives along with their children/families. People are doing what they need to do to survive and look after their loved ones.
In an earlier life, I worked in the trucking industry. If you refused to drive anytime you were fatigued, you would not be successful in the industry (one reason I am very glad to not be doing that anymore; it's also one of the most dangerous occupations out there, partly for that reason). I think that lots of the people here have never worked a non-privileged job in their lives.
I've seen the results of this first-hand when a big rig about 10 car lengths ahead of me on I-5 abruptly began moving from the right lane through the center median and into the lanes of oncoming traffic.
He slammed into a pickup truck and killed that truck's occupant.
I had to be called in as a witness of the incident by the victim and trucking company's attorneys.
I think there's a strong difference between (rightfully so) blaming the companies that force this environment and the people who are just trying to make a living safely.
I've only been in the full-time tech industry for about 3.5 years.
Before then I was working hourly jobs to make ends meet, including working half time or more while studying full-time in college, working during high school, etc. This so I could pay rent and tuition with minimal, if any, aid.
I couldn't even afford a car until after graduating from university.
I was walking or taking public transportation everywhere prior to finally getting a car.
I won't disagree that people in SV can be snobby but let's not jump to conclusions here.
I think this discussion is becoming rather pointless for the overall discourse about this singular topic, so I'll just leave with this.
>Having climbed from societal rock-bottom to a decent position in the tech industry, my mind is constantly blown by the fact that the average techie thinks their life is anything like what the vast majority of this planet are dealing with.
I'm not sure what your point is supposed to be, here? You say that I, and other like-minded people, are just "average techies" despite literally just explaining that some of us too had our own challenges.
I think it's okay to admit that nearly everybody has had their share of challenging backgrounds. Some people's privileges are the other's disadvantages and so on. That much is obvious.
But aside from that. Backgrounds aside.
Driving when you know you have a constant issue of falling asleep, getting drowsy, all of the above is unsafe. Even if you have priorities that you place above your own health/well-being, the problem with having those issues and still choosing to drive is that you are now deciding how others will be affected by your decision.
The moment you begin endangering other people's lives is the same moment that backgrounds, poorly-disadvantaged or not, become meaningless.
Because I highly doubt some victim's family is going to be impressed that you or someone else knowingly chose to drive repeatedly while acknowledging they would not be fully aware of what they were doing just because of working conditions.
Humanity has a pretty substantial record of doing "unsafe" for the betterment of themselves, mankind, or just for giggles. The risks are well-known to themselves, who are you to suggest that they cannot manage those risks?
Some people manage it their entire lives, while others do not. However, I'd trust someone driving who is well aware of their boundaries over someone who is not aware, any day.
My wife fell asleep at the wheel once, I just reached over and kept the wheel straight while trying to wake her up. I hope cars can do that in the future, for those times that I'm not there. And for the record, she's one of those that has never fallen asleep before or gotten drowsy at the wheel.
> Having climbed from societal rock-bottom to a decent position in the tech industry
I've done this as well. I've gone to war, I've seen things you likely can't imagine without a bunch of CGI and special effects. Most of the tech world has no idea what "rock bottom" even means except through the view of Hollywood, and even that doesn't look all that bad from that angle.
> The moment you begin endangering other people's lives is the same moment that backgrounds, poorly-disadvantaged or not, become meaningless.
Spoken life someone who never had to decide between rolling the 0.000001% chance dice on driving to work tired, and their kids going hungry or potentially getting taken away if they lose their job. People do what they need to do to survive and take care of their loved ones. People will absolutely risk their lives and those of others in order to protect their kids at all cost, even when facing much worse odds. That's a constant in life. No amount of moral posturing will change that. I'm not saying their actions are 'right', just saying they're an inevitable outcome of the society we have built.
Efficiently demonstrating my point - some people on HN live in a bubble of privilege and have no idea what real life is like for the vast majority of the population.
I'm just curious, with all the moral posturing - realistically, what would you suggest that people do when after a long shift at a blue collar job they realize they might be too tired to safely drive home. Do they sleep at their workplace? How does that transition into them needing to be back at work, showered, dressed, etc. by 9am the next morning? What are the actual logistics of this concept here?
And how do you reconcile all this moral posturing and the impact of banning drivers who experience this (up to 50% of the entire population of developed nations by some polling) vs. the fact that we now have a pretty cheap car technology that turns that 0.000001% dice roll into a 1e-20 one.
What if the person you kill is also a human being with a family and problems? Should they get a say in what you think is an acceptable risk?
Or should we just treat everybody we don't know as obviously spoiled people who live in a bubble of privilege, have nothing to lose, have never missed a meal, love no one and have no one who depends on them, and only have an opinion on what you do in order to feel superior to you and to humiliate you?
It's not quite a direct comparison, but in law there is a 'heat of passion' defence which affords leniency for crimes committed when e.g. a parent walks in on their child being harmed and murders the assailant.
The reason this defence (and a line of other similar) exist is because as society we have accepted the fact that people will act in self interest, self protection, and above all protection of their children. No amount of education or indoctrination overrides that. (Fun fact, in some countries, escaping from jail is not illegal/punishable - assuming you don't commit other crimes in the act. Because, once again, we as society recognise that it's human nature to seek freedom and it cannot be overriden, therefore punishing it achieves nothing.
Ultimately it doesn't matter if you think a parent driving to work tired is acceptable or not, because we already know that they absolutely will. The only question is how do you mitigate the damage of driving to work tired, and whether your mitigation strategy is a net benefit or net loss to society.
'Make it compulsory for cars to detect sleeping/unconscious/seizing/microsleeping driver and pull over' is an infinitely better strategy in every regard imaginable compared to 'ban up to 50% of the population from driving'. And note that only one of those 4 situations would be avoidable with a ban, the other 3 can strike at any time with no warning or history.
If you can't drive safely; you can't drive. There is no middle ground. You may think it's fine to take a risk for yourself based on your costs/benefits, but it's definitely not fine to take a risk for others.
I agree that moralizing doesn't help, and that we should fully take into account "realities". But that also means you can't just assume autopilot will help you - it could very well be that having autopilot will end up making people to fall asleep at the wheel more often, and therefore increase the chance of accidents or severity of the accidents. We know for a fact that it does involve some trade off (see those people misusing autopilot and getting into accidents), and we simply don't know autopilot provides better safety overall.
There has been enough indirect evidence to suggest advanced driver assist without a significant driver monitoring is dangerous (Google's report of their employees doing other things, the fatal accident of Uber's self-driving vehicle, various fatal and non-fatal accidents of Tesla autopilot due to misuse), but there's been no systematic study and we don't have enough public data to suggest it's one way or another.
I think the difference here is that some places have easy access to public transportation while most places in the US do not. People that live in one situation don't realize that people live in the other and how different it makes life. I've lived across the US and it has been vastly different.
I grew up in Southern California where one time my car broke down and my 20 minute commute (mostly highway) turned into a 2hr bus ride while my car was in the shop. Once I was an hour late to work because the bus came and went before it was scheduled for that stop. I've lived in a rural town in the south where no public transportation even existed. There wasn't even a way for most people to walk into town because there weren't even sidewalks. A few people biked, but it was pretty well known that if you weren't on a $5k bike riding in the nice area of town you had a DUI and were riding your kid's bike to get to work. I would have had to walk along a highway (a 30 minute walk) just to get to the store (I saw people doing this too). I've been in the Bay and NYC where busses have to wait at stops and there is light rail. Now I live in a city where I rarely drive my car and using my bike is easier to get around. These situations are very different and frankly I don't think people understand this.
The problem is that most of the US doesn't have infrastructure to relieve people of the choice between driving and being safe because they have to maintain their job. In many places there aren't even enough population density to make this economically feasible (aka profitable or net even). Someone was mentioning that technology can't solve this problem, but frankly this seems like the exact problem autonomous vehicles solve. Light rail is great, but it isn't a practical technology for most of the country.
This purist notion of 'they should never be allowed to drive a car, for everyone else's protection' crumbles at the most trivial examination when you consider that you're talking about leaving millions of people jobless or in significantly worse quality of life conditions
You contend that there are millions of people who knowingly drive while tired enough to fall asleep at the wheel and with a history of doing so?
If so, I contend that your argument is contrived and your claim is unrealistic. Most people do not and would not drive while so tired that they knew they were likely to fall asleep while doing so. For a start, such a pattern of behaviour would be suicidal. Statistically, there would be far more nasty accidents due to tiredness than actually happen.
In reality, only a tiny proportion of people drive while so tired that they might actually fall asleep at the wheel. Not only doing that but knowingly doing it when you have a history of dropping off while driving is utterly inexcusable.
>According to the National Sleep Foundation, about half of U.S. adult drivers admit to consistently getting behind the wheel while feeling drowsy. About 20% admit to falling asleep behind the wheel at some point in the past year – with more than 40% admitting this has happened at least once in their driving careers.
Wow so if you maximize economic growth at the cost of setting up a system that regularly requires a high degree of easily avoidable risk, then later you can use the "you're destroying the economy" argument to prevent any reasonable response that would lower that risk. That seems like a very irresponsible way of managing a system.
This is a matter of degree. The start of this thread wasn't about someone who was driving home at the end of a long day at work and feeling a little tired. It was about someone who, by their own admission, had a history of dozing off at the wheel, and wanted to knowingly continue driving while unfit to do so.
If we're being brutally objective here, road accidents are extremely expensive in purely economic terms. Obviously there could be a loss of productivity for anyone directly involved who was injured. But then you also need to expend considerable resources to clear the accident site and fully reopen the road. While you're doing that, you might be delaying many people due to congestion in the area of the accident. Then there is the cost of caring for anyone wounded, repairing any physical damage done to public infrastructure, and repairing or replacing any other vehicles that were involved and any cargo they were carrying. And of course, in the worst case, you have the profound effects of losing people entirely under such tragic circumstances, which involve not just losing anything they would have contributed for the rest of their lives, but also the consequences for their family and friends, their employers or clients, and anyone else who depended on them economically right down to the place on the corner where they stopped to buy a coffee each morning on the way into the office.
So even if we're only trying to avoid the most catastrophic cases such as someone actually falling asleep and causing a multi-vehicle pile-up on a major road, and even if we err on the side of caution and take many thousands of drivers off the road who are at significant risk of causing such an accident but in reality would not have done so, it's still not clear cut that the economic hit would be greater than the harm prevented.
For those who like hard data, I can't immediately offer you any, but as a very rough guide, here in the UK (where we already have lower per-capita road deaths than most of the world) I have seen arguments made about local road improvement schemes that suggested a seven-figure cost to save a single life would be economically justified. It's not hard to believe if you consider that a fatal accident can close a road for several hours, leaving thousands of vehicles stranded, and involving dozens of emergency responders and all of the equipment and vehicles they need, in addition to the injury, death and damage caused to anyone directly involved.
> You should never get behind the wheel if there's a chance you'll fall asleep!
I would say anyone that feels drowsy has a change of falling asleep. So 50% of the population should regularly not get behind the wheel, by GC's standard.
One of the reasons I would love to have autopilot is because I have a history of dozing off at the wheel. Never so much where I've had an accident, but bad enough where I've scared myself badly.
This was followed by arguing for the safety feature in case it happened again.
> Most people do not and would not drive while so tired that they knew they were likely to fall asleep while doing so
For most people, the other option is to stop driving to work and then be jobless and eventually homeless, make their kids go hungry, or go bankrupt. You guys seriously seem to be completely disconnected from what reality looks like for 80%+ of the population.
> In reality, only a tiny proportion of people drive while so tired that they might actually fall asleep at the wheel
You have no idea how microsleep works. It does not involve 'knowingly driving while tired enough to fall asleep'. This single statement makes it clear that you're expressing some pretty strong and sure-sounding opinions on a subject that you know nothing about. You (as in specifically you) could be experiencing microsleep on a regular basis and never even know it.
And even when talking about the other cause - fatigued driving, are you suggesting that people come in to work late after every night they had poor sleep? I mean that would actually be a decent policy if not for the fact that a handful of instances of that in a year would get most people fired? Are you suggesting that someone shouldn't drive home after a long shift? (do they like, sleep at their workplace? have you thought through this?). And we're back to my first point - I don't think you understand what life is like for the majority of the population who live paycheck to paycheck and work any job that they can get just to survive and keep their kids fed.
As someone enjoying the 'privilege' of working in tech and having flexible hours and being able to arbitrarily work from home and having enough savings to take a 6 month long sabbatical without any financial strain, I can see where you might be coming from. As someone who spent the first half of their life working blue collar jobs and having a panic attack over an unexpected 300 dollar expense which literally meant I spent 2 weeks eating nothing but pasta, I'm pretty sure you either never knew or have forgotten what life is like for most people out there. Yeah for you and I being banned from driving is just a mild inconvenience and 'sigh, now I have to use Uber for all travel'. For most people, it's a life and family destroying sentence.
Exactly. I live in the US in a relatively typical suburb and the vast majority of people here don't really have an option on whether or not they drive. Our public transit is lacking, jobs are inflexible with WFH, and the majority of housing located close to where jobs are clustered is exorbitantly expensive.
The issue is also compounded if you work a blue collar job where it's likely that you aren't even commuting to the same place every day and need to haul tools with you.
It's really easy for people to make blanket statements that you shouldn't drive if you have a history of being tired at the wheel, but the reality is that a large portion of our population doesn't have an option.
Not a history of being tired. A history of falling asleep. That’s completely different and knowing that you regularly fall asleep at the wheel is akin to murdering someone that doesn’t deserve it. If only the driver died then I wouldn’t care at all but too often others die that don’t deserve it.
For most people, the other option is to stop driving to work and then be jobless, make their kids go hungry, or go bankrupt. You guys seriously seem to be completely disconnected from what reality looks like for 80%+ of the population.
You keep writing as if this is a normal problem that everyone faces. If it were, and if everyone or even a moderate proportion of drivers were doing what you seem to be arguing is essential, then population numbers would be falling rapidly due to all the fatal accidents. As far as I can see, however, you haven't actually provided any data to back up your repeated claims about how widespread this problem is and how much damage would be caused if the relevant drivers stopped driving when they were unsafe.
You have no idea how microsleep works.
Susceptibility to microsleep is usually a result of failing to sufficient good quality sleep normally, an underlying medical problem, or both. Common conditions like obstructive sleep apnoea can be tested for. Effective treatments like CPAP machines exist. Given that OSA can have other serious health effects as well as causing the unusual tiredness that becomes a danger if you're doing something like driving or operating heavy machinery, investigation and treatment of potential sleep disorders is definitely recommended.
Of course if you simply don't get enough hours of sleep regularly, if you don't sleep well because you do things like drinking excessive amounts of alcohol in the evening, you can go to bed earlier, cut down on the booze, etc.
You (as in specifically you) could be experiencing microsleep on a regular basis and never even know it.
Given that there are many warning signs of microsleeps, one of which is being very tired all the time, and given that the subject of this thread is people driving when they know they're so tired they might fall asleep and having a history of scares caused by falling asleep at the wheel, I don't see that your attempt to make this personal has any relevance to the debate.
> For most people, the other option is to stop driving to work and then be jobless and eventually homeless, make their kids go hungry, or go bankrupt.
You say that as if there weren't any other options. You have public transport and you can share a car (and expenses) with someone who has your same destination.
> For most people, it's a life and family destroying sentence.
Dying in a car accident is literally a death sentence and has worse implications for your family.
> You say that as if there weren't any other options. You have public transport and you can share a car (and expenses) with someone who has your same destination.
So, how does this work, exactly? So you set up carpooling with a coworker. And then one day you don't sleep well. Luckily enough, they're there to pick you up so you don't have to drive! ...but what happens when it's your turn to drive? You tell them, whoops, I'm tired today, so you're going to have to drive and get your spouse to change their plans so that you have access to a car? Or maybe they're always the one driving... what happens on days that they're tired? They cancel and you both have to find your own way via public transit?
Like what are the specific logistics here, accounting for failure modes? Does it amount to "spend $100 on Uber on days after a mediocre night's sleep"?
A very large number of people in the US have access to no public transit whatsoever - and as for sharing a car... that’s what they’re likely doing with their partner. One person uses it to go to work while the other is at home, probably caring for their children.
A very large number of people in the US have access to no public transit whatsoever - and as for sharing a car... that’s what they’re likely doing with their partner. One person uses it to go to work while the other is at home, probably caring for their children.
How do all these hopelessly trapped families ever take their kids to things like medical appointments?
If so, there’s something of a sliding scale. Most of them take their car - their single car, that serves the whole family. When it breaks down, they lean on friends, family, and neighbors for help.
Those without a vehicle in the first place... don’t. I live in a town of <15k people today, and grew up about thirty miles outside of it. I graduated high school in the early 2000s - many of my classmates didn’t see a doctor unless they had a medical emergency.
It seems like there is a large disconnect between your perception and the reality of life for much of America.
Yes, it was a genuine question. I'm a Brit, and clearly the culture around driving is different in many ways on our side of the Atlantic.
Some of the earlier discussion here has apparently been mostly people talking at cross-purposes and didn't turn out to be very enlightening. However, it does seem that at least some people here really are trying to defend something that I think most people would consider unconscionable where I come from. The arguments have essentially been that people there have no realistic choice but to rely on theirs cars, even if driving them is obviously dangerous, or they literally can't live a normal life and support their families properly.
This raised a lot of questions for me that single-car or car-free households face all the time over here, like how you get the kids to school or anyone who isn't the driver to important appointments like medical ones. I was surprised that your response was more-or-less "you don't", but then in the context of medical appointments there is again a very different culture here to yours. It would be similarly unconscionable for most of us in the UK to bring a child into the world and not then make sure they get all of their check-ups and vaccinations at the right times, and you'd have to try very hard to find a situation where a parent without access to a car couldn't still make those provisions for their child in some realistic way. From comments by yourself and others here, I conclude that this is not necessarily the case in the US, or at least in significant parts of it.
In my experience, there’s even something of an inverse correlation between vehicle ownership and wealth. If you’re able to own a reliable vehicle, you tend to only own one. If you’re limited to buy-here-pay-here lots and such, families tend to have three or four in various states of repair.
You've never had a bad night's sleep? Never had to make a longish unexpected trip because of a family emergency? Never had to work 2 jobs to make ends meet?
In this case, if the person isn't able to get disability b/c of their condition, I can't fault them for doing what they need to survive. I don't like that it puts others at risk, and hope they are taking steps to reduce the risk. Detection technology that alerts them seems like a step in the right direction.
You've never had a bad night's sleep? Never had to make a longish unexpected trip because of a family emergency? Never had to work 2 jobs to make ends meet?
I've had to do all of those things. At some times in my life, I've had the first and last for an extended period. To my knowledge, I have never as a result driven in a condition that made me unsafe behind the wheel, though.
Yours is another comment that talks about people doing what they need to do to survive, which is an ironic characterisation given we're talking about behaviour that is borderline suicidal.
If you have done those things, then you've accepted some increased risk of falling asleep, just like most of us have at one time or another. We're human and can't say for certain that falling asleep is impossible (or some other medical event won't happen).
We live with that risk, and some others have to live with more risk because of their circumstances. I'm more reacting to all the posts that no one should ever drive at all with even the slightest risk that they'll fall asleep, which is just an unrealistic ideal for most of us.
You know they let some people drive who have extremely bad eyesight--bad enough that that they can't read road signs? Yet they are allowed to drive, because not driving makes participation in our economy next to impossible.
If you have done those things, then you've accepted some increased risk of falling asleep, just like most of us have at one time or another.
Comments like this are side-tracking the discussion. The original premise wasn't that sometimes everyone is a bit more alert or tired than others. It was someone who knew very well that they had a history of falling asleep at the wheel and wanted to continue driving apparently knowing it was likely to happen again.
We're human and can't say for certain that falling asleep is impossible (or some other medical event won't happen).
Of course not. But normal people with a healthy lifestyle don't just randomly fall asleep at the wheel in the absence of a serious (but perhaps undiagnosed) medical condition. The way a lot of the comments in this thread are defending driving while tired, you'd think millions of people could all just doze off without any warning or awareness that they were at unusually high risk.
You know they let some people drive who have extremely bad eyesight--bad enough that that they can't read road signs?
In my country, such poor vision would (if not properly corrected) immediately disqualify you from holding a driving licence. This is a policy that I entirely agree with, so we apparently come from very different perspectives here.
Then you pay for a taxi, bus, or some other mode of transportation unless you're prepared to pay both financially and emotionally for any incident you wind up causing. Both for yourself and everyone else affected.
It's really not that complicated. Stop making choices for other people that could cause them to wind up injured or killed. Because yes, that is in fact what you're saying to do here.
> You contend that there are millions of people who knowingly drive while tired enough to fall asleep at the wheel and with a history of doing so?
Yes? There are even millions of people who drive drunk every year, which is a far more conscious choice to endanger other people than someone driving home after long, late shift.
15 million people work a night shift. If 10% of them drive home drowsy one night per year, you're already at millions.
No one is saying driving is a right. They are saying that if you want to have a job you need a car (in some areas of America). Even moreso if you want a job that pays above minimum wage. The problem is that there is a high pressure to put people in these situations, where the consequence for them has a large impact on their life if they don't put themselves in the risky situation.
> If it's dangerous for you to drive, don't drive. It's as simple as that.
You've never lived in the States, have you? The absolute vast majority of anything in the States is inaccessible without a car. If you live in a city, sure, you might get by with public transport (almost universally very bad in the States). Anywhere outside the city center? Good luck getting anywhere without a car.
Life can't just 'force' you into #3. It's still a choice you are making. If it is between you not being able to make a meeting on time or a cyclist getting killed because you fell asleep then I hope we can agree the negatives far outweigh the positives.
If you can't stay awake for an hour that must be very challenging but I don't think you should be driving at all for longer distances. At least not on a road you share with other people!
This is such a bad take. If a system can help prevent accidents due to drowsiness, it's a net positive. There are plenty of reasons to be drowsy and still have to show up to work/commute:
Maybe you have a newborn at home, and...
Got a bad sleep.
Or were woken up by a fire alarm.
Or maybe you're just drowsy in the mornings, like me!
I used to have a real easy 35 minute drive to work, on a single, straight road with a few sets of lights.
I probably nodded off a bit while driving at least once a month, if not more. Especially at a set of lights.
While this technology can help prevent some percentage of accidents under the existing regime, it will likely lead to some population of drivers putting more faith in the technology and becoming more reckless.
It's hard to say if there will be more or fewer accidents as this becomes prevalent. I'm wary of it by default given the already prevalent incidence of DUI and sleepy driving. Those individuals seem likely to use this as an excuse or crutch. I'd be happy to be surprised.
I have the unfortunate ability to be wide awake when I leave and then suddenly be tired. I often have to stop on even 1-2 hour drives. But I recognize when I am tired and am know for just pulling over to nap even if I have passengers. Sleep driving is like drunk driving.
Would you accept that response as the reasoning of a judge after an incident?
I wouldn't. I'd consider it criminal negligence to get behind the wheel of a car at times when it's impossible to make a suitable effort to drive such equipment.
It's not acceptable to hop into a car drunk, either.
The effects aren't really that much different between the two, response-time wise.
The problem is, that like drunk driving, the person making the call doesn't always have the experience to know when they are impaired, or how close they are to falling asleep.
I've driven the family from Northern Califorina to Sourthern California quite a few times, many of them overnight. It took one instance of actually falling asleep at the wheel for a few seconds to realize "oh, that's the difference between tired and falling asleep at the wheel."
I definitely recognize it now and never let it happen now (stopping and sleeping, trading out for someone else to drive, etc), but the point is I didn't think I was close to that level previously. Experience is something that we can't expect all people to have and exhibit the wisdom of, and unfortunately some things learned through experience are much harder (or nearly impossible) to teach without doing, and for dangerous things that's a problem for normal people.
As a much much more extreme example, I've heard that's why Navy Seal training keeps candidates up and physically and mentally exhausted for days at a time. Partly to see who can handle the pressure, and partly so they have experienced that condition before and understand it in themselves and others.
The problem is, that like drunk driving, the person making the call doesn't always have the experience to know when they are impaired, or how close they are to falling asleep.
Then they can follow the same rule as for overtaking: if in doubt, don't. It's not complicated. There is no way you are tired enough to be actually falling asleep without realising you're far too tired to be driving safely. It's not as if it's a close thing where one minute you're alert and driving responsibly and the next minute you're out. Anyone who can't make that determination reliably is demonstrably unfit to be in charge of a vehicle and should hand in their licence.
Have you ever dozed off on the road? I ask because unless you've experienced it, it would probably catch you completely off guard as well. Sometimes the part of your brain that would normally make you aware that you're falling asleep is the first to go. I think this happens more while driving because you think you're concentrating on driving but really your brain is shutting off bit by bit until you're finally at a point where you're basically a mindless zombie. It's happened to me before and it absolutely caught me off guard.
The thing is, to be susceptible to that kind of effect, a normal adult -- meaning one without an underlying medical condition -- would already have to be very short of good quality sleep and/or doing foolish things like driving for several hours at night without taking a break. It is not normal to be susceptible to just dozing off at the wheel without realising like that. If you are in that position, you should be aware of it, and should not be driving; you have just explained exactly why.
The kinds of medical conditions that do make sudden dozing off normal for a few unfortunate people are grounds for refusing to issue a driving licence to those people in most places, for reasons that should hopefully be obvious.
These are pretty absolute terms you're talking in with little corresponding evidence.
Monotonous activities frequently make people drowsy. This is not some medical condition, it is a common occurrence. Driving is often an acutely monotonous activity.
I know a huge number of people that get drowsy while reading books. Do they all suffer from the same "condition"?
We weren't talking about merely being drowsy. We were talking about having a pattern of falling asleep at the wheel, and knowingly continuing to drive while unfit for that reason. It's right there in the top comment that started the thread.
That is not where the context of this thread is. My comment clearly changed it to how sometimes it can be hard to know, and how experiencing it once can be useful to knowing what that feeling it. You responded to it. The context at this point is not about repeating that, you're mixing your threads, and likely arguing against points people are not making but you think they are because of that mistake.
Even if that is the case, my point stands. It is not normal to go from being a little tired to being so tired that you can actually fall asleep at the wheel just like that. I've done my share of long drives, including overnights across most of my country on occasion. If you're going to do something like that, you need to plan the journey sensibly, take plenty of breaks, make sure you got extra rest before you leave. Don't they teach this sort of stuff in basic driver training where you are?
> It is not normal to go from being a little tired to being so tired that you can actually fall asleep at the wheel just like that.
The point is that it isn't "just like that", but not everyone has experience with passing out from being tired while trying to continue doing something they were actively trying trying to concentrate on.
> If you're going to do something like that, you need to plan the journey sensibly, take plenty of breaks, make sure you got extra rest before you leave. Don't they teach this sort of stuff in basic driver training where you are?
Obviously not well enough, or I had forgotten some of it in the almost decade between taking the classes and actually experiencing it for the first time. And to be clear, I thought I was being cautious, it was definitely not my first time making that trip, and I didn't think I was so tired I would lose consciousness, and yet one second I was fine, and the next second (to my consciousness) I noticed I was halfway across the center divider. I didn't feel any more tired than I had on a a prior trip, yet, the conclusion is obvious, that level of tiredness feeling might lead to that outcome, therefore it was no longer acceptable.
So, here's the thing, prior to that situation I thought I was being responsible, and had years of experience to go by that indicated I could drive in that state. All it takes is once occurrence to let you know that what you thought as fine was not.
What exactly was a I supposed to obviously know from that beforehand? It's nice if you've always been able to know the correct level to stop at, or perhaps you stop far earlier than strictly needed, which is fine. You would never know if you stopped with plenty of attentive time left you could drive, but better safe than sorry.
All I see this meaning is that different people have different thresholds for this, and all I was saying originally is that I wish there was a way for us to impart this experience better during driver training, so people knew what the warning signs are better, in case their internal calibration was too far on the dangerous side initially, like mine was.
> There is no way you are tired enough to be actually falling asleep without realising you're far too tired to be driving safely.
Except I was, and I did. And now I can recognize the signs that weren't obvious before, so I don't anymore. You're saying there's no way, and I'm giving you a concrete example of an instance.
> It's not as if it's a close thing where one minute you're alert and driving responsibly and the next minute you're out.
There's a huge range between "alert" and "asleep". I'm tired after a long day, yet I can drive responsibly. Even a the point where I could lay down and easily go to sleep if I chose to, I'm fine to drive for quite a while after that (preferred sleep time is not necessarily the same as responsible driving time, there are many factors that go into it).
> Anyone who can't make that determination reliably is demonstrably unfit to be in charge of a vehicle and should hand in their licence.
So, have you been in that situation? Or just always stopped before you got to that point? Or not even driven over a long enough period to be in that situation? You haven't even presented any anecdotal evidence, you've just made assertions that what I said I personally experienced can't be how I described it (and implied I was demonstrably unfit to drive at the point I said this happened to me).
I've been driving for decades, and I've had many of the problems other comments have mentioned that make life tough, and yet to my knowledge I have never fallen asleep at the wheel or caused any sort of accident. There certainly have been a few times when I was expecting to drive but clearly wasn't fit to and had to make other arrangements.
And, in the gentlest possible way, if you were unable to recognise that you were so tired that you were likely to fall asleep while driving and make another choice, you were demonstrably unfit to drive at that time. It might have been understandable, particularly if you were young and inexperienced, but you still shouldn't have driven at that time and your actions were still irresponsible and dangerous.
Anyway, I think I'm done with this discussion. There are several posters here who are literally arguing that it's OK to drive knowing that they are severely impaired and have a much greater risk than any normal person would of injuring or killing someone. I can't argue rationally against such an irresponsible and selfish position, and my blood pressure has probably gone through the roof reading all of these comments and thinking of all the people who would disagree with them but can't because they're dead.
> There certainly have been a few times when I was expecting to drive but clearly wasn't fit to and had to make other arrangements.
My example (and experience) wasn't about starting to drive. It was about being 4 hours into a 7-8 hour drive. The slow degradation of attention while sitting in a static position while watching static scenery go by for hours at a time.
> And, in the gentlest possible way, if you were unable to recognize that you were so tired that you were likely to fall asleep while driving and make another choice, you were demonstrably unfit to drive at that time.
Part of being unfit is sometimes not easily recognizing you're unfit. If you start in a perfectly fine shape, but degrade slowly over time, it can be hard to note the exact moment when things have gotten to a point where you should stop. And the whole point of my post was that recognizing this point, especially if it's over time and a slow degradation, can be hard if you've never experienced it before.
> I can't argue rationally against such an irresponsible and selfish position
Well, I don't think the people in this little corner of the discussion it are arguing that. People definitely shouldn't drive while impaired. I just think we should also consider, and see if there's a way to help, people that don't have enough experience to know when they're flirting with that state, for whatever reason it may be. Hopefully that at least some people here aren't arguing for allowing impaired people to drive is some consolation and reduces your stress at least a little. :/
It's not as cut and dry as drinking and driving. A lot of times people who fall asleep on the road feel completely fine, until the moment they start falling asleep, and at this point their brain could be too asleep to tell it's falling asleep. I've dozed off on the road before and I can tell you, it's like someone just pressed the power button on my brain.
Car fatigue is real. The only way I avoid it is to be constantly scanning by moving my eyes around - side mirror, rear mirror, speed gauge, back to the road. Delay(5s). Repeat. It can happen to the best of us and when you realise it’s safer to pull to the side of the road. Unlike a DUI this neither voluntary nor reckless unless you ignore the warning signs and keep on driving.
It is drilled into us that we should stop every 2 hours regardless of how we feel. You cannot trust yourself to judge as by definition your judgment is impaired when tired, it's best to just stop and grab a free tea/coffee if you find one of their setups or even just pull over to rest your eyes or walk around your car for a couple of minutes to reset.
We have similar public information campaigns in the UK as well: take a break at least every two hours and more frequently if you're driving under more draining conditions; if you're starting to feel tired then pull over as soon as possible, have a caffeinated drink and maybe take a short nap; and so on. At certain times of year, the big displays on major roads even display "don't drive tired" and "take a break" reminders.
> The only way I avoid it is to be constantly scanning by moving my eyes around - side mirror, rear mirror, speed gauge, back to the road. Delay(5s). Repeat.
I'd add an occasional glance at the horizon too , if you're on a long trip. You can make it a game if you're driving a new route (guess which mountain is closest to the road you're on) Frequently changing focal distance helps a lot to prevent eye fatigue.
Not defending the GP but there are plenty of occasions where it’s unavoidable for some people to drive tired. Like families with young children and where adults don’t have the luxury of working from home nor good public transport links. Are they supposed to book a day off every time their child doesn’t sleep?
But there are also measures one can take to mitigate tiredness while driving: winding the window down or turning the AC down, putting energising music on, stopping mid-journey and taking a break, etc.
There are also medical conditions one can have where they can fall asleep even when not tired. However I believe you’re denied a licence if you do suffer from any of them so this might well be a moot point.
Monotony can make you drowsy, regardless of how healthy you are or how much sleep you've had. And when this happens, it can catch you unawares even if you're looking for it.
That’s a truism that doesn’t add anything. You know when you’re tired, and when a comfy warm enclosure might make you fall asleep. In such situations driving like that is as bad as driving drunk.
IMO your statement is the truism that isn't adding anything. Obviously people that might fall asleep shouldn't drive. But this is a matter of degree. Everyone might fall asleep and it's a risk everyone will eventually take even in a small degree.
Some people are always somewhat tired (eg sleep apnea or CFS), some people aren't tired when they start driving but become impaired at some point. Some people might have an undiagnosed condition that contributes.
There's no reason to not celebrate a simple advancement that might save people from a disaster.
This is it. I don't understand why this isn't higher up in the discussion.
Do you check whether your brakes work every time before setting off? Do you check whether your wheels are attached properly every time before setting off? There are a million things that could break on your car. They're just very unlikely to happen.
Pilots/maintenance crew for planes checks that kind of stuff for virtually every flight. We accept this small risk with cars. In return we get an enormous increase in efficiency. If everyone had to do a 5 minute check on their car every time before setting off, then that would be a lot of productive time spent on it.
not surprisingly that the "holier-than-thou" purists' arguments in this thread sound the same as the typical conservative argument against contraception - "by decreasing the weight of consequences it will encourage vice behaviour", and not surprisingly that these style arguments just outright fail in real life.
I disagree wholeheartedly. This technology empowers people to make stupid decisions and rationalize them.
We never had people deliberately sleeping in cars (with pillows!) before autopilot was a thing. If the kinds of people prone to make these types of decisions come to trust technology to save them, we're going to wind up in a worse spot than before the technology existed.
People will rely on the tech to save them when it was never meant for that.
> You should never get behind the wheel if there's a chance you'll fall asleep!
I don't know about the upthread commenter or how common a thing it is for him/her. But this isn't feasible advice. It is never possible to drive perfectly safely, it's just not. Everyone makes mistakes in cars, and preventing them needs to be a defense in depth treatment and not an impossible prohibition like this.
Saying "people sometimes drive tired" (goodness knows I have) leads to "maybe a driver-facing camera might save lives".
Saying "You should never drive tired!" is just a recipe for blaming the driver and fixing nothing.
Unfortunately, if the poster lives in the US, there's a really high chance that laws have prevented suitable non-car transportation from being available.
There's a few places where one can live daily life without cars: a subset of really huge cities, some downtown areas of mid size cities. But usually we highly restrict housing from existing in such places, and we strict zoning prevents mixing of residential and commercial in areas that did not have it before these restrictions became prevalent in the last century.
> You should never get behind the wheel if there's a chance you'll fall asleep!
So, I should never drive? Not OP, but I experience the same thing. Driving just makes me tired. I've tried running A/C at full cold, caffeine, loud music, audiobooks, etc. Nothing helps. The strange thing is, outside of driving I don't get tired or want to fall asleep except at bedtime. I don't drive when I'm drowsy. Driving make me drowsy. The bad thing about it is I usually don't realize that I'm getting sleepy until after I've dozed off once. Then I've got to keep myself awake long enough to get to the next rest stop. 20 minute nap and I'm good to go for another few hours.
> The bad thing about it is I usually don't realize that I'm getting sleepy until after I've dozed off once.
I'm not trying to be rude, but this sounds reckless. You absolutely should not be driving while you have this issue. Also, consider that you may have a sleep disorder.
I appreciate that this sucks if you live in an environment that requires you to drive, but you are way too blasé about something that runs a decent risk of killing someone, and is absolutely not normal.
no but the comment that this comment is replying to is not a normal case of a drowsy driver - it is definitely not normal to not know you are drowsy until you already fall asleep, and that is wildly dangerous
Uhh- the thing about not knowing you're sleepy until you fall asleep is not normal. The other discussion in this thread about whether or not its morally OK to drive drowsy does not apply to your situation. Definitely do not drive until you've had a sleep study done and been cleared by a doctor. The usual situation that is being discussed in this thread is where you are already tired and drowsy and decide to drive because you don't have a choice. Your situation sounds like a different medical condition of some sort, and (not a lawyer but) the fact that you are aware of this condition might mean you'd still be guilty of the same crime as someone who decided to drive when drowsy and fell asleep before causing an accident.
Get a sleep study done! You may be surprised, and even without insurance, the at home sleep studies aren't too pricey (pro tip, you can usually plug in the unit to your computer and dumb a copy of the raw data before you return it to your dr)
This sort of technology would be great, even if the data never leaves the user's account, is never farmed by Tesla, and is never used by the autopilot.
Imagine if the parent poster falls asleep at the wheel and does injure or kill someone. They could point to the fact that it's never happened before, but if the court can subpoena Tesla to get data that indicates this guy dozes off with some regularity (and can see indications that he knew about it), then he's going to face a harsher sentence, possibly even bumping it up from involuntary manslaughter to second degree murder if they can argue that it was extremely reckless disregard.
As a daily cyclist who has experienced many close calls over the years at the hands of inattentive, impatient, or unaware drivers, I would love to believe that this world is coming. But unless insurance companies can actually go to work on predicting how accident-prone a person is based on this kind of data, and raising premiums accordingly, I don't know if it will make much difference in terms of actually changing behaviour.
Like, there should already be a lot of this kind of data out there to nail drivers to the wall post-crash, and you just don't really see it happening. Even when someone is killed, everyone involved basically shrugs, says it was a fluke, and tells the family they should get over it and move on (watch for the phrase "came out of nowhere" as a sign that everyone involved has checked out of a particular case).
And how much will consumers accept a car that tattles on them about their bad behaviour? People already lose their minds over provably-effective external automated enforcement measures which rely on plate reading like red light cams and average speed cams.
The court will very likely not have to subpoena anything. Tesla has a history of publicly putting all blame on the driver when Autopilot once again kills a person by driving them into a divider or a stationary truck. They will go out of their way to show and twist the driver's harvested data to their advantage.
While I on the whole agree, there are some cases where its unavoidable. You could be coming home late from work, and you can't power nap in the car park there as the lock the gates, so you need to drive to a location where its safe to park and nap. Its admittedly an edge case, but its not unlikely by any stretch of the imagination.
Please don't get behind the wheel if you're drowsy.
You're shouting at a wall.
People think "drowsy" isn't a problem, the same way they think that texting and driving isn't a problem because they saw someone jump backwards in slow motion in The Matrix.
Drowsy driving is no better than buzzed driving, which legally is drunk driving.
Some people don't have that privilege. Ever known someone that works two jobs trying to make ends meet? You don't have a choice except to drive home from work.
Ever known someone that works two jobs trying to make ends meet? You don't have a choice except to drive home from work.
And will it be easier to make those ends meet when you are dead, or paralysed, or locked up because you left someone else dead or paralysed?
The arguments that a few people are making here, as if not driving while so tired you might fall asleep would cause some devastating loss to society and herald the end of life as we know it, are just silly. Only a very small number of drivers would be affected, because fortunately most people aren't so irresponsible in the first place. And given the extremely high likelihood of those few drivers getting themselves and, worse, possibly many other people injured or dead, with all the negative consequences that will imply, it still doesn't make sense from a greater good perspective.
>And will it be easier to make those ends meet when you are dead, or paralysed, or locked up because you left someone else dead or paralysed?
Oftentimes for people forced to work 2, 3, 4 or more jobs just to survive, these are also acceptable "solutions" to the problem. The risk analysis comes down to [low chance of dying now driving impaired] versus [medium chance of dying later, homeless/starving after losing job(s)].
I once arrived at work with blood all over my face, neck, and hands from biting my lips to stay awake.
Autopilot is so far, far, far out of reach for most people working multiple jobs that it's really a non-issue not worth debating for a long time, but the technology behind it would be a literal lifesaver if it were more widely available to the unfortunately large population of people that are forced to drive regardless of mental state in order to survive and/or provide for their families and/or other circumstances "out of their control".
Very few people get behind the wheel thinking "I'm so tired I might die on the ride home", they think "it's just down the street, I can't wait to get home and pass out". Many times people feel totally fine when they get behind the wheel but don't start to feel tired till part way through the ride. You're holding people to a standard that doesn't jive with reality.
Not a realistic option for daily life in the U.S. and often not even possible if you work late hours. Ride sharing is way too expensive to use every day.
I would argue that a car is totally a privilege that is above that of finding other means of transportation. I couldn't even afford one until I graduated college and was working full-time.
Before then I walked if I had to, sometimes over a mile depending on the destination, or took public transportation.
Living somewhere where you don't need a car is the privilege, at least in the US. I'd have to walk 2 miles to get to public transit, and that includes crossing a pedestrian unfriendly major road.
You can try to emigrate to a richer country, you can try to reduce your expenses, you move in with relatives, you can sleep in the car. These are all terrible choices but endangering other people is also a choice.
> what a stunningly pretentious and ignorant thing to say.
It's not. We're talking about people's lives.
I've felt tired before and you know what I do? I nap in the parking lot. Because the remote chance I kill or maim myself or someone else is not worth the momentary discomfort. It's not fun, and sometimes people harass you, but it's far better than driving drowsy.
> reasons to be tired and drive: rotating shiftwork, working multiple jobs, caring for a newborn, caring for the sick.
None of that is an excuse to get behind a many thousand pound piece of equipment and not be able to control it.
> "You should never get behind the wheel if there's a chance you'll fall asleep!" is an absurd thing to say.
I stand behind my assertion and hope you'll come around.
> None of that is an excuse to get behind a many thousand pound piece of equipment and not be able to control it.
The choice many people are presented with is: Get in car while tired vs miss a day of work and get fired.
That's it. They have no option of public transportation, walking, no other option. It is pretty obvious what action people are going to choose. So the solution here is to make sure that people aren't put into that position. We could talk about autonomous vehicles, work from home, flex hours, etc. But the fact is that when you present people with this choice you should expect them to choose driving while tired. This does not mean that it is safe or what they should do. This is not condoning the action. This is just saying that we should expect people to make that choice.
> I've felt tired before and you know what I do? I nap in the parking lot.
and this is exactly my point. you think being tired is exceptional, something you just "nap" and solve. you have clearly never been exhausted for months on end. I have. I have nodded off on highways, and worked with people that fell asleep at stoplights. not everyone gets to have 9 hours of sleep and then work 8 hours in a chair.
> None of that is an excuse to get behind a many thousand pound piece of equipment and not be able to control it.
i'm glad youre so concerned about public safety, but those people are probably more concerned about eating and paying rent (or their infant, or dying parent, etc).
> I stand behind my assertion and hope you'll come around.
this isnt about me or my opinion. there are literal millions of people that simply cannot do what you propose (and millions more that will not because they dont share your opinion in the grayer areas), despite your objection that "None of that is an excuse". you seem to be confused about what options people have.
I agree -- it seems like many of the responders here are unaware of just how much privilege they have. (Or maybe they're just not in the US.)
You can't just take a nap you need to pick a child up or the boss expects you at the next shift or you'll end up with DSS/Police at your door, or unemployed.
Is this right? No, of course not, but it's reality.
Hell, many people are driving vehicles that are very unsafe, which also poses a risk to others, for the same reason -- they have no choice.
Having children is a choice, and sometimes people back themselves into untenable situations. You can't use children as an excuse to put the lives of others at risk. Realize what you're saying here.
People driving cars they can't afford to upkeep are also risking themselves and others.
Yes, it sucks. I empathize. I shouldn't be throwing stones. But if I'm a juror on a vehicular homicide case I'm not going to think less of deaths that were caused because the defendant had children to take to school. It would be more compelling than a DUI case, but it doesn't bring people back to life.
Almost no one should have children then, as very few of us have sufficient resources to guarantee we can support a child for 18+ years. Just having a child in the car is distracting and puts others at risk, but we accept that. And once the child is there, and it becomes a struggle to meet the schedule, then what? Give them up?
Obviously this line of thought has devolved pretty far from the original point as someone who can afford a car with driver drowsiness detection can probably afford to make different choices. It's just the idea that no one should ever drive when they have even a slight risk of falling asleep seems quite unrealistic, at least in the US.
Personally, I can find myself a bit tired by the end of the day. I've never felt at risk of falling asleep while driving, but I'm human, so can't say with certainty that it will never happen. Maybe a driver aid will lull some into driving when they know they shouldn't, but I still think it will be a net win (just like seat belts).
Don't try to normalize this behavior or generate sympathy for these idiots. People like you make my blood boil. I have had multiple family members almost killed (one suffered horrific brain damage) because of drunk/drowsy drivers. Seriously, screw you, bigly.
>this isnt about me or my opinion. there are literal millions of people that simply cannot do what you propose
What so we're in some kind of hunger games now? "I have to kill your family so that I can feed mine"?.
Some options: Stay home, stay hungry, get fired, take a lower paying job, go on welfare, go live in the jungle if you have to, Just.. don't kill my family.
> "You should never get behind the wheel if there's a chance you'll fall asleep!" is an absurd thing to say.
No it isn't? We expect drivers to be able to react to situations that can arise when your driving a ton of metal and plastic. 24 hours w/o sleep is equivalent to having a BAC ~0.1%; well above the legal limit. Sure; most people aren't staying up 24 hours and going for a cross-country road trip, but you need to be aware of what affect is has on your ability to operate (https://www.cdc.gov/sleep/about_sleep/drowsy_driving.html)
Unless we first institute livable wages with sane working hours and paid commute time along with free childcare.
So that survival does not demand that people abuse their bodies with lack of sleep.
agreeing that externalities like house work, parenting, commuting exist, have cost, and need to be considered in a viable economy could be a great step.
I totally agree; there should never be a situation where an individual is required to put their life and limb on the line to provide for their families.
It still does not justify placing the life and limbs of all other people on the road in jeopardy.
But that's the system we've put in place, and people have to live within it. They have to provide for their families, and that may end up placing them or those around them at risk.
What? You have provided a long list of reasons not to drive. It's the law and a moral requirement that you don't go out and kill other people or yourself due to incapacitation.
People drive with varying levels of alertness, yes. But if there is a reasonable, foreseeable chance you might FALL ASLEEP, then no, of course you ABSOLUTELY should not be driving and I'm sad but not surprised that this needs to be pointed out.
If you're for some reason drunk and one of these reasons to drive comes up, does the logic still apply? I'd say not. So why would it apply to being tired?
what a stunningly pretentious and ignorant thing to say.
It is not, and just to be absolutely clear, none of the scenarios you mentioned justifies doing it either.
Driving while tired is comparable in effect to driving while impaired by alcohol or drugs or while distracted by devices such as phones. It can easily cause sufficient delay in reaction or error in judgement to lead to a serious accident that was entirely avoidable.
Driving while tired enough to actually fall asleep is a matter of life and death. Unless you are literally doing so in order to avoid an imminent and even greater likelihood of death -- and if you are, then I humbly suggest that it is extremely unlikely that you are truly in danger of falling asleep at the wheel yourself anyway -- you are risking the lives of everyone around you, as well as your own, and you should be treated accordingly in the eyes of the law for their benefit as well as your own. In my country, that would potentially mean multiple years in jail, a driving ban and being forced to take an extended test to demonstrate your competence again before being allowed back behind the wheel. And that's if you were lucky and got pulled over before you caused an actual accident.
The 'you shouldn't be driving' commenters are people who are are either living in a privileged high-income bubble and don't understand what real life is like for most of the population, or are logical purists thinking about this issue in isolation without considering what real life is like for most of the population. Neither of those demographics has considered that their 'you shouldn't be driving, period' policy would cause a lot more damage than it would mitigate, when considered at a societal scale.
The fact that this kind of policy would do net negative damage is trivial to arrive at, and is exactly why no country has ever stopped people with this issue from driving even though the issue itself is well known. The 'shouldn't be driving' mindset is tunnel visioning and swatting a fly in your house with a nuclear missile.
The fact that anyone going against that viewpoint is getting downvoted makes it pretty clear that HN is trending towards reddit where downvotes have become an 'I disagree' button. It's been pretty sad watching this trend play out over the last couple of years.
Exactly how have you established what the commenters have or haven't considered? To me, its silly to make this about class or economic status. Also, this is not just a made up "policy" . Its the law (well, in most countries). If you want to relax the laws so that drowsy/reckless driving is accepted, you are welcome to present an actual argument.
FWIW, I'm pretty sure "5 hours of mountain biking", having post-ride food with buddies then driving home isn't considered a medical condition. Mostly just doing something physically tiring and having a full stomach, plus being in a monotonous 1-2 hour drive is a recipe for sleep. Thus my comment below about taking a nap and having company on the return trip.
I agree - the problem with a lot of the replies to your comment is that everyone’s mental image of what you mean by “history of dozing off at the wheel” differs. I would guess that most drivers, and certainly every doctor who drives has “nodded off” at least once in their life. And you’re right, most of these situations are not indicative of a medical condition.
I think it’s true that every driver should take responsibility for their own internal state, and do whatever they can to ensure they don’t drive in an impaired state, whether that’s just getting enough sleep, avoiding alcohol or certain meds, or being prepared to pull off the road and nap.
I've done drives where for various reasons it's difficult to stay as alert as I'd like to.
FWIW - I normally have some kind of insomnia and take long time to fall asleep; but if I'm that tired, I can pull up into gas station or Tim Horton's (it's a Canadian thing:) and have a 30min power nap immediately. It's the only time I CAN have a power nap, but it works wonders.
I fully 100% support the general notion expressed here that if we find outselves in a risky position as a driver, we should do something to mitigate that risk. I don't think "don't drive" is always in every circumstance a achievable recourse though, so a power nap can mitigate risk significantly.
They have good medicines for narcolepsy nowadays. Modafinil is an extremely good stimulant that reduces accidental sleeping like this significantly. They can also look at their sleep and see if there is an underlying issue that can be fixed.
That other comment was posted after my reply, and your original comment said nothing about falling sleep after strenuous activity or large meals, so my comment still stands as a response to what you originally posted.
Mostly just doing something physically tiring and having a full stomach, plus being in a monotonous 1-2 hour drive is a recipe for sleep.
What you are describing still suggests an underlying medical condition or extreme indifference to the safety of others. I was being generous and assuming you were not deliberately being indifferent to the well-being other drivers.
It's not normal to fall asleep driving after only a few hours of strenuous activity followed by food.
> That other comment was posted after my reply, and your original comment said nothing about falling sleep after strenuous activity or large meals, so my comment still stands as a response to what you originally posted.
You made a bunch of assumptions based on a small comment. I didn't say I have narcolepsy or regularly fall asleep at the wheel.
> What you are describing still suggests an underlying medical condition or extreme indifference to the safety of others.
I find it fascinating that people feel they are capable of coming up with a medical diagnosis for a random person over the internet based on a few vague comments.
You need you driver license for your job, without you will lose everything.
You already know that this is not something the doctor can easily help you with (e.g. caused by overwork or because you already visited the doctor).
Sure it's kinda wrong, but most people would just continue driving, especially in countries with no good social net where permanently losing your job can easily lead to it really messing up your live (no health insurance, losing you home, not being able to care for your kids properly, maybe even starvation).
But in many places it doesn't. Or is basically unusable for all kinds of reasons (e.g. you having night shift, being a woman and no security at all in public transport).
Furthermore public transport doesn't fix the problem of losing the job for all people.
There are enough jobs where you normally will never drive but you need a driver license for "emergencies" (whatever that means is job dependent).
I just wanted to chime in and say that you’re right. Lots of people have no experience outside of big cities, so they don’t know how bad it is. Cars are a necessity in many places in the US; perhaps even most.
Uber didn’t come to the St Louis “surrounding area” for some time, and even when they did, it was hard to find a driver.
Have you tried to address this issue? This seems like a huge safety concern and you're actively choosing to put others in harms way by continuing to drive.
Yes. Mostly I just learned to recognize when I'm getting tired and pull over and take a nap which is a massive help. Also, it's pretty uncommon for me to drive solo anymore so it's far less of an issue.
Oddly, it was a bigger issue when I was younger. It hasn't happened to me in quite a few years, but the awareness of it has lingered, thus my desire to take extra precautions.
>Also, it's pretty uncommon for me to drive solo anymore so it's far less of an issue.
There's almost nothing a person in another seat can do if you are asleep, even if they realize that in time (and that's a huge assumption). Speaking as someone who has unhealthy interest at failures, disasters, and their root causes, this type of attitude is super common, and always leads to disasters. Please seek medical attention before you killed somebody and yourself. You can't rely on self-control.
Indeed. In a fail-safer world maybe an original use for driver monitoring and autopilot would be to move the vehicle to a safe spot to stop and perform alerting.
I agree. If this is something like e.g. narcolepsy, you should see a doctor. There are a few low-risk prescriptions worth looking into.
When I used to pull 18 hour days, I would also notice myself getting tired behind the wheel, but never fully falling asleep. My low-tech solution to this was to set an alarm for 10 minutes after I started driving and setting the alarm volume to max. Then, the alarm would go off in the middle of my drive, usually surprising me and jolting me awake since I'm obviously not paying attention to the time. Then, snoozing the alarm would make it go away for another 10 minutes, and so on until I made it home. This is probably not the perfect solution but it worked for me. Obviously the better long term solution is to a) not do 18 hour days and b) address what is making you so sleepy and stop it from happening.
It's hard to imagine that you were alert enough to safely drive even with the alarm. I'd urge anyone in a similar situation to stay off the roads; your ability to work 18 hour days is less important than the safety of everyone on the road.
Yeah, what helped me is that on those nights I elected to avoid the highway and only take city roads, so lots of traffic, red lights, stop lights, etc. that allowed me to drive slowly. The downside is that sitting at stop lights made me sleepier, hence the alarms.
Avoiding highways was what saved me I think; a mistake at 20mph is far less expensive than a mistake at 80mph. But certainly you're right; the obvious answer is to avoid driving or as another commenter said, carpool!
The one thing I hate about most cars' active lane keep systems is that if you fall asleep and don't grip the steering wheel for a while, it does the most UNSAFE thing possible, which is to beep a few times and then disable itself, which would mean that you crash, 100% of the time. Yet other lane keep systems disable themselves below 40mph which means you crash as soon as the car slows down to that speed.
What it should do is continue to aggressively lane keep, switch on emergency flashers, and sound progressively louder alarms until you wake up, but NEVER stop lane keeping, even as the car slows down below 40mph. It should lane keep all the way down to 0 and keep sounding the alarms.
What does Tesla do if you actually fall asleep and ignore the warnings?
The hazard lights go on, the car will slow down, and eventually pull over to the side of the road while Autopilot is disabled for the rest of the trip. Though the "disabled for rest of the trip" bit can be trivially worked around by shutting down and powering back on, this seems to be better than what you mentioned in immediately shutting down the system while still driving.
That's awesome, at least the hazard lights and pulling over to the side of the road, sounds infinitely more safe than any other lane keep system I've seen.
I was involved in a major car accident that totaled my new vehicle due to falling asleep at the wheel on a highway. Obviously it scared me enough that I'll never fall asleep in a car again, but it was due to sleep deprivation from being up many hours irresponsibly the night before.
If you're falling asleep often at the wheel I would recommend you tell your primary. He'll likely refer you to a sleep doctor. I didn't have major symptoms, but after a recommendation from my primary I discovered I have a bad case of sleep apnea.
If you're falling asleep at the wheel often (and btw, you're doing the right thing by pulling over and napping) you should go to a sleep doctor. You might not be getting a proper amount of sleep, for whatever reason, and they might be able to help.
I fell asleep once and only hit tall grass... No damages luckily. I hope that they would stop mowing the side of highways (it is good for slowing you down)
I replied in another comment, but it was never super frequent, and hasn't happened to me in years. Just like it sounds like with you, the fear of it happening again has lingered.
Bjørn Nyland on YouTube drives a lot of different EVs in Norway, and one of the thing he tests is the Lane Assist/Autopilot/driver assist disengagement behaviour if there is no response from the driver.
It seems like some cars will actually try to kill you - they'll beep a bit and try to alert you, then if you don't respond the autopilot will simply disengage. And drive off the road or into whatever.
The better ones (such as the new Polestar) go to great efforts to try and alert you (noise, flashing lights, tugging on seatbelt tensioner) then will finally activate hazard lights, slow down gradually, and pull over safely.
No it won't do that directly. Even if it is longer then a blink. And the reason for that is false positives. It is _very_ hard to see the difference between a person looking down and when the person is closing the eye.
The system usally have an EXTENDED_EYE_CLOSURE signal that is triggered after a certain time (together with a quality value of this signal). So not directly, but yes, close too.
But it is still tricky. What happens if you start blinking and then the camera get covered. Should it warn? It can not always warn if it loses tracking.
How should it warn? Disturbing the driver can actually cause accidents.
> One of the reasons I would love to have autopilot is because I have a history of dozing off at the wheel. Never so much where I've had an accident, but bad enough where I've scared myself badly.
This is pretty selfish. If you're falling asleep at the wheel enough that you want Tesla's Autopilot to save you, you have a problem.
I've seen Tesla cars do absolutely insane maneuvers on the freeway that no sober driver would ever consider doing, only to find out that the person behind the wheel is asleep or doing another task other than driving.
It's not a solution (you really shouldn't drive when you're sleepy) but a great many modern cars will warn you if you slowly quit your lane without having used your blinkers first, which is typically what happens when someone get sleepy while driving (slowly drifting out of your lane on the highway). My wife's little Toyota CH-R does just that: it tries to correct the car's trajectory, does give feedback both through vibration (in the steering wheel) and through an audio signal.
I think it's more realistic to settle for that kind of features than to wait for a real 100% complete autopilot.
If you have to drive despite this, you probably should ensure to have a supply of caffeine in the car (e.g. caffeine gums, instant coffee, maybe energy drinks) and take a sufficient dose before driving [https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/motr/can-a-caffein...]
You might also be able to get a prescription for modafinil, which might be even more effective.
The first road trip we took with our Tesla Model S was from the SF Bay Area to Lompoc, CA, to see a SpaceX launch. (Seeing ANY rocket launch in person is a highly encouraged activity by the way!). The timing of it allowed us to drive there, see the launch, and drive back the same day, but getting home pretty late.
Getting into the bay area, it was dark, and I was damn tired. Had this been a long trip of some kind, I'd have at least pulled over and done a power nap, but I foolishly decided to press on, since we were less than 30 minutes from home and bed.
I'd been using autopilot for most of the trip, closely supervising it of course.
Suddenly I was awakened by the frantic, loud beeping that you get when you don't keep some minor torque on the steering wheel for a while.
It scared the hell out of me and my family in the car.
With their help, we were able to make it home safely.
Your specific use case is valid, but the other commenters are also correct. Autopilot still needs to be supervised, and one should NOT be driving while extremely drowsy.
In my many decades of driving, and countless long trips, this is the first time I've fallen asleep, and I've always done the right thing and (at a minimum) taken power naps as needed.
But circumstances conspired and I did the wrong thing.
I'm not claiming that Autopilot saved our lives or anything; I would almost certainly have been woken up by the rumble strips when the car drifted out of the lane.
To those who might argue that using Tesla Autopilot might tend to cause people to take bigger relevant risks: that's possible, but it's been a godsend for us. Using it doesn't make me, personally, any less attentive of a driver. Indeed, I'm quite a bit more alert to the important things than without it.
In Germany, there are quite a few cars with "Emergency Assist" technology. There are different variants of it, in my VW Touran it works like this: When the car is in ACC/lane assist mode (similar to Autopilot), it will detect when there is no steering wheel input for a while. First it beeps, then it will brake a few times to "wake you up". Still no input? Then it will brake to a complete stop and turn on the warning lights. In more recent incarnations the car will park at the side of the road.
It is great for medical emergencies (stroke/seizure) but of course you should not rely on it and drive without paying attention to the road.
I am one of those drivers that on long distance drives will occasionally view a bridge in my rear view mirror and cannot recall passing under it.
Hence for me the system is insurance for the time where I am truly distracted. When I use my 3's driving feature on local roads I find I am more attentive as I am constantly looking for situations I think should confuse it but then I realize I am overthinking the situation far more often than not.
While I love to drive I do look forward to the day anyone can just hop in and ask to be taken somewhere and safely
Auto manufacturers are approaching Adaptive Cruise Control in a manner that intermingles the two: GM "Super Cruise", Ford's upcoming "CoPilot 360 Active", etc.
In my opinion, these two features are very related. In order to have a reasonably low false positive, the sleep detection must be reasonably lenient. In turn, this means the vehicle must be able to (most of the time) tolerate a few seconds of inattentive driving.
I'm also looking forward to getting autopilot at some point to address situations where I feel pretty drowsy. While yes, the correct thing to do is to not drive, to pull over, and so forth, reality doesn't always allow for those things and it would be nice to have autopilot as a driver aid.
When I fall asleep at the wheel, I do it looking straight ahead with my eyes open; it freaks my wife out. My wife never lets me drive the long stretches unless we're talking the entire time. I don't think Tesla will help me here.
Yes, head, eye, eyelid, glasses and facemask trackers do exist now in cars. BMW, GM etc. Face recognition, speak detection (who is speaking) and drowsiness is coming very soon as far as I know.
The car will know when you changed driver last time etc.
Then the Autopilot should never be a thing people can enable at will. It should be something automatic like automatic-braking in case of imminent accident. And in such scenarios it should be MUCH louder than just beeping about while you doze off after 20h of not getting enough sleep.
And if it happens say 3 times in a short amount of time, it should just ull you over.
The _joke_ was that it mentions "DARK" as a method of detecting whether somebody is damaging a vehicle:
> CEO Elon Musk said that it would be used to prevent people
> from vandalizing cars when they are being driven
> automatically on Tesla’s upcoming self-driving robotaxi
> network.
The _joke_ was that if removed from context, somebody could insinuate that they are measuring whether people are black to detect if they are likely to damage a vehicle.
Not just people. Institutions, processes, and algorithms.
I can easily see an insurance company claiming the driver to be at fault based on retrieved car telemetry, which in turn was erroneous because the machine-learning algorithm was trained on certain faces. There was a flagged HN submission about Twitter consistently centering image previews on whiter faces recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24530968 .
It was a joke, not a real call-out. I was just making the point that as programmers we should be careful about naming things in code, because one day they might be taken out of context.
I don't understand what you mean when you say "it" was a joke, but also the point you were making was not a joke. What is "it" if not the point being made by the comment?
I think I see what you're saying - but the replies didn't accuse you of thinking it referenced black people. They disagreed that it is an example of something which is likely enough to be misinterpreted that it should have had a different name.
I thought that the implication of a connection between persons identified as "DARK" and vehicle damage had enough potential to be misinterpreted (either accidentally or maliciously).
It was just a throwaway comment that people have taken quite seriously.
Eh, it is yet another reason for me not to own a Tesla. There seriously needs to be a bigger outcry against this. There is no benefit to the user. Your ( supposedly ) car actively works against you and your interests ( even if that interest is to be a stupid person who applies make up during driving ). Seriously, why is there a need to be cameras everywhere? And why do they need to watch me blink?
It’s a valid concern that your car manufacturer will use the interior cameras to blame a crime on you.
These automatic tagging features also bring to question the bias in algorithms. What does this mean for drivers with disabilities? Is it possible that a safe driver with ADHD or Turrets etc might be flagged as inattentive during an autopilot crash and therefore at fault?