Tesla on autopilot rear ends motorcycle on freeway, killing rider

I always think it&#x27;s weird how instead of just improving public transit, we&#x27;ve all become fixated on self driving vehicles. Good transit would mean most people don&#x27;t need to operate a vehicle while having a plethora of other benefits like combating climate change and more efficient land use (if you live in a suburb, take note of the sheer amount land dedicated to parking; it&#x27;s often more land than the store for retail).<p>The problem is kind of similar to people who insist on some overly complicated microservice architecture when a monolith would be a much better fit. I actually hope that self driving technology stagnates, at least until we can start designing cities for people and not just cars.<p>I live near where the accident occurred and there is definitely sufficient population to support alternatives to driving.

I just spent a few hours on my Honda riding back from LA. I made it to a mile away from my apartment without incident only to watch a Tesla turn the wrong way onto the one-way street I was on. The driver was either using malfunctioning FSD or made a mistake as they immediately pulled up to the passenger-side curb.<p>I&#x27;ll be steering well clear of these things in the future.

I don&#x27;t get this autopilot scam - if you don&#x27;t enjoy driving, take the bus&#x2F;train and do this planet a favor!

&quot;Full Self Crashing&quot;.<p>What will it take before we indict Musk for reckless endangerment, and for fraud? What will it take for the NTSB and FTC to issue a recall, and require Tesla to openly refund all the money collected for it?

What matters is the ratio of autopilot vs human driver accidents. And in that area, the highly cherry-picked and curated test results from Tesla sound absolutely convincing!<p>Actually, scratch that: what matter is that the autopilot sounds cool and high tech. Given that, who cares about the casualties?

As a biker myself, I was always taught that when riding a bike you are responsible for your own safety. This means you should always be taking in as much information as you can in order to make escape plans in the event of something unexpected. Getting rear-ended like this is an absolute nightmare scenario. Even though the relative velocity between the vehicles is small, even the slightest bump to your back wheel will almost certainly cause you to hit the tarmac[1], and often on a freeway you have limited escape routes because you may not be able to change lanes safely and if a car comes up behind you fast you may not be able to accelerate away from them.<p>Autopilot (as I understand it) is a lane-following dynamic cruise control so should have detected the bike and slowed down on approach. Human beings have a weakness in their stereoscopic vision where because their eyes are not far apart they can’t accurately tell the speed of a narrow object (like a bike) if it’s travelling towards or away from them. It seems like this should not be a problem with a car (because you can put the cameras on either side of the vehicle for example), but I wonder whether Teslas detectors or software have weaknesses with narrow objects.<p>[1] And even though with good gear you can skid along the road relatively safely, other cars are bound to hit you.

As someone who&#x27;s more likely to cycle somewhere than to drive, I wish there was as much attention paid every time a human-piloted car did something like this. It happens much more frequently than most folks realize. I used to follow &quot;bicycle&quot; news stories in a news aggregation app, but had to stop because my timeline was filled with &quot;bicyclist killed by driver&quot; stories. There was almost always at least one every day.<p>I&#x27;m by no means a fan of self-driving cars, but despite tragedies like this one, I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if overall they&#x27;re much safer than human pilots even for cyclists.

Oh dear. It&#x27;s getting really hard for anyone to defend this contraption. Perhaps that explains the silence from the Tesla autopilot crowd shocked by the news of this yet another collision from an unsafe piece of &#x27;safety critical&#x27; software.<p>Both Autopilot and FSD (Fools Self Driving) needs to be investigated urgently.

&gt; The car&#x27;s autopilot was on at the time of the crash, UHP said.<p>I wonder whether the UHP pulled data from the car to verify this, or just took the driver&#x27;s word for it.

what makes it so hard for &quot;self driving&quot; cars to avoid frontal collusions?

But it&#x27;s supposed to automatically drive itself safely with &quot;AutoPilot&quot;, no?

“Autopilot was on” doesn’t mean self driving, it’s a driving assist feature that requires human attention just like in other cars.

To me it seems there&#x27;s more to this story. The crash happened at 1:10 am on a highway in Utah. I imagine there was no traffic at that time. Most likely there were only this motorcycle and the Tesla, and at most a few other cars over a good stretch of highway. When there&#x27;s no traffic, motorcycles tend to go faster than cars. A Tesla on autopilot either respects the speed limit (factory setting), or it can be programmed by the owner to allow a bit above, just like the regular traffic flow. Let&#x27;s say 10 mph above speed limit. It seems quite unlikely the motorcycle was doing less than that speed, so how exactly did the Tesla rear-end the motorcycle? Also, how did the driver of the Tesla &quot;not see&quot; the motorcycle? You drive on a highway with the headlights on, there&#x27;s a motorcycle in front of you with taillight on, how can you not see it?<p>I can see some possibilities: - reduced visibility because of fog, or some other reasons - the motorcycle rider was driving under the influence, and made some sudden move that the Tesla autopilot was not trained to predict (e.g. aggressive cutting in front of the vehicle) - somewhat similar: the motorcycle rider lost control of his own vehicle for whatever reasons, and the Tesla rear-ended them while they were skidding on the pavement - the Tesla owner had overridden the autopilot speed limit factory setting by 20 mph more - Tesla was not on autopilot at all, and the owner is simply lying; maybe the owner was DUI - a case of road rage: the biker did something, the Tesla guy honked, the thing escalated, maybe both were a bit inebriated, and the Tesla guy rear-ends the biker not with the intention to kill, but just to &quot;teach the guy a lesson&quot;<p>I&#x27;m not trying to say Tesla is not at fault. In the first 4 cases I listed, Tesla is clearly culpable.<p>I just simply doubt the story is &quot;biker riding normally, and suddenly a speeding Tesla rear-ends and kills him out of the blue&quot;. At 1:10 am on a nearly empty highway.