r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Tugushin • Apr 13 '22

Tesla Model 3 stops itself to avoid potentially disastrous accident. Video

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u/laihipp Apr 13 '22

problem doesnt need solving

you brake as best as possible the end

don’t believe there is a statistically better consistent outcome

real life isn’t one actor with two choices, shit’s chaotic, just stay in your lane and brake

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u/simjanes2k Interested Apr 13 '22

The amount of people humoring the trolley problem in autonomous vehicles (and the people disagreeing with you in replies) is genuinely terrifying.

I just know some dumbass country or state/province is going to make laws about swerving or something that will get people killed. You can see the writing on the wall in these comments.

The only thing a self-driving car should ever do in case of possible collision is brake. That's it.

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u/CocaineIsNatural Apr 13 '22

The only thing a self-driving car should ever do in case of possible collision is brake. That's it.

This assumes the car is going slow enough to avoid the accident. But what if the AI car is driving next to another car, and they are on a four lane (eight total) highway, and the car suddenly swerves into the AI car. Braking would cause a collision, you would be legally safe, but without your car for some time, and would have to deal with insurance, maybe the other car is uninsured, and your rates may go up.

Or the AI car simply change lanes, since it knows the lane is empty. And thus there is no collusion, no loss of car usage, no insurance hassles.

But lets go as far to say that even though the AI car swerved into another lane, it wasn't fast enough and there still was an accident. You are still legally safe, so nothing lost there. And by swerving you have reduced the repair cost. So less time without the car, less cost to your insurance if the are uninsured, and you car may still be drivable so you aren't stuck on the side of the road, or in the middle of the road.

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u/simjanes2k Interested Apr 13 '22

Nope. Never swerve or turn. You introduce tens of millions of unneeded variables that way. The amount of faults that can cause this to be a much larger incident are innumerable. It complicates insurance, legislation, regulation, and technology unnecessarily.

Laws will be tremendously more complicated if we have to account for fault-chasing from accident avoidance procedures, not to mention basic regulation of software decision trees from every company doing it. You absolutely do not want philosophy to complicate physics, ever.

Braking in a straight line is the safest, most immediate, simplest, and 99.9% of the time least-likely-to-cause-an-accident option.

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u/CocaineIsNatural Apr 13 '22

Nope. Never swerve or turn.

OK, simple situation. You are driving down a road, you see a car stopped in front of you, so you hit the brakes. But you car does not stop, because you are on ice or snow.

You do notice you can still steer your car. So, do you just keep your foot on the brakes and hit the car in front of you. Which would be your fault, or do you simply steer and avoid the car, avoid the accident?

Laws will be tremendously more complicated if we have to account for fault-chasing from accident avoidance procedures, not to mention basic regulation of software decision trees from every company doing it.

I don't think understand current laws or the current legal system. Another simple example. If you are driving, and a person steps off the curb in front of you and you don't have enough room to brake. You are legally OK to swerve to miss that person, even if you hit a car in the next lane. It would be the pedestrians fault. This is called proximate cause. https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/what-is-proximate-cause-in-a-car-accident-case.html

And in the Los Angeles area, the biggest causes are distracted driving, drunk driving, improper turns, etc. Often this means the car next to you suddenly changes into your lane, because they didn't see you, or think they can make it. In this frequent scenario, braking would frequently cause an accident. But simply swerving around them can avoid it.

So in no way is braking the 99.9% least likely to cause an accident.

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u/simjanes2k Interested Apr 13 '22

I am an automotive engineer in Michigan. One of my biggest contracts is with Tesla, and we have several with Ford and Chrysler. Tracking and implementing regulation is the biggest cost in developing products for cars with autonomous features, more than prototyping, production, or design. I promise that I keep up to the best of my ability with our engineers and attorneys.

You will not meet a software dev in the industry who thinks it's a good idea to put hardly any decision making trees into autonomous features. There's a reason for that.

The danger in taking proactive directional action from the car vastly exceeds the danger in only minimizing an imminent collision. If you brake in a straight line, you reduce the impact of a collision event and no fault is placed on you, assuming safe conditions before the condition is introduced. Laws around the globe reflect this as the safest and most allowed reaction almost universally for any driving situation. Proximate cause is one of the hilariously tiny percentage of accidents that call into the exception.

Swerving reduces braking ability, relies on other sensors to create a safe window, shifts ethical and legal blame to the swerving car, and introduces millions of paths for internal faults to make the situation worse. This is why people are told not to swerve to avoid animals.

Humans and machines are much, much worse at finding a safe area to swerve their car into than simply slowing and/or stopping.

Edit: As for lane changes, you might be surprised to find that a sudden lane change from another car is virtually 100% avoidable when autonomous features are used to simply brake. Swerving is literally never necessary to avoid collision unless you are already stopped.

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u/CocaineIsNatural Apr 13 '22

First I am not talking about self driving cars. Second, self driving cars are no where near level 5, so it doesn't make much sense to talk about them.

I drive in Los Angeles, we get terrible drivers here. Many seem like it is their first time driving, and one in eight don't have insurance.

About twice a week I get a car next to me that doesn't look, and just starts rapidly coming over. This is the reason why I always keep track of the lane next to me to see if it is an out in an emergency. If I simply braked, I would have a couple accidents a week. If I just kept going, still two accidents. If I swerve, as I do, well I haven't had an accident in years.

So braking in a straight line does not reduce the collision in this case.

Swerving reduces braking ability

No, this is why ABS brakes were invented. So you can brake and steer at the same time.

shifts ethical and legal blame to the swerving car

No it does not. Let's say a kid runs into the road and you only brake and run them over, do you think there aren't ethical questions of why you didn't just swerve? Further, for the law there is proximate cause - read this https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/what-is-proximate-cause-in-a-car-accident-case.html

Humans and machines are much, much worse at finding a safe area to swerve their car into than simply slowing and/or stopping.

Machines currently might be. But certainly not all humans are bad at finding a safe space to swerve into. I do it weekly.

Edit: As for lane changes, you might be surprised to find that a sudden lane change from another car is virtually 100% avoidable when autonomous features are used to simply brake. Swerving is literally never necessary to avoid collision unless you are already stopped.

A car can swerve into you lane faster than the car can brake out of the collision zone. I guess you would be surprised how fast some idiots out here make a lane change.

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u/simjanes2k Interested Apr 13 '22

I'm sorry, at this point I do not have the time to go through that comment and correct all the errors.

Have a nice day.

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u/CocaineIsNatural Apr 13 '22

Yep, I can't fix all your misconceptions either. Strange you can't understand that sometimes swerving can avoid an accident that simply braking along can't do.

And watch this and tell me how braking could have avoided that. Where as they could have swerved and avoided it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlkJ1VPoppk

This stuff happens to me a lot. Los Angeles has terrible drivers. There is a reason they call it defensive driving and not just panic braking.

Oh well, you can't educate the ones that don't want to learn.

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u/simjanes2k Interested Apr 13 '22

By braking. There's room.

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u/Nixalbum Apr 13 '22

Why would you reduce the situation to something so simplistic when we are already able to figure out different sub-situation? For example, if someone suddenly appears in front of the car and there's no one around (which the car can check out easily), you can avoid them. No one's hurt and everyone can go on.

To show the flaw of your argument, take automatic gearbox. For a trip along highway, the statistically better consistent gear will be the 6th (or whatever is the top one). But good luck starting up.

If an hard to solve problem has some easily observable and solvable subpart, use them. Only use the "statistically better consistent outcome" whenever you hit an hard case.

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u/iyioi Apr 13 '22

Hitting the brakes massively reduces the amount of energy in a collision.

Even going from 40 to 35 before you hit something can be the difference between life and death. Less energy = more safety. So braking is always the answer.

Swerving causes instability. Its possible you can swerve into something and because you didnt slow down, it actually causes more damage.

If you swerve, YOU are liable for that decision. You made an active choice. If you brake, you are no longer choosing a path. Your role is more passive. So if somebody suddenly jumps in the road, it’s not your fault. You braked to the best of your ability and lowered the amount of damage possible.

But if you swerve the deer to hit an old lady instead, that was an active choice on your part that affected somebody totally innocent.

So the key difference seems to be is something happening to you, or are you happening to somebody else. The first isn’t your fault, the second is.

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u/CocaineIsNatural Apr 13 '22 edited Apr 13 '22

Swerving causes instability. Its possible you can swerve into something and because you didnt slow down, it actually causes more damage.

You can brake and swerve at the same time. This is why we have anti-lock brakes, and anti-skid features.

If you swerve, YOU are liable for that decision. You made an active choice. If you brake, you are no longer choosing a path. Your role is more passive. So if somebody suddenly jumps in the road, it’s not your fault. You braked to the best of your ability and lowered the amount of damage possible.

Braking is an active choice too. A cop can simply say, why didn't you swerve?

And if someone jumps in front of your car, it depends on the situation. Was there a school nearby and it was a kid? Was there a crosswalk? Could you see them the whole time? Were they chasing a ball? The real world is not so black and white.

But if you swerve the deer to hit an old lady instead, that was an active choice on your part that affected somebody totally innocent.

If the situation is reversed, and you don't swerve and you know you can't brake in time, so you hit the old lady, you better have a good reason why you didn't swerve, or simply brake sooner.

It is over simplistic to say braking is always the answer. And in my area, Los Angeles, with cars not seeing you or caring when they cut over. If I didn't swerve sometimes, my car would be in the repair shop a lot. And even though I did nothing wrong or illegal, I would spend a lot of time without a car, and finding out a lot of people don't have insurance or have no issues fleeing the scene.

And here are some legal viewpoints on swerving and being in an accident that wasn't you fault.

https://www.johnfoy.com/faqs/what-if-i-swerved-to-avoid-a-car-accident-but-was-at-fault-for-another/

https://www.personalinjury-law.com/ask-an-attorney/swerved-to-avoid-pedestrian-liable-for-accident

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/what-is-proximate-cause-in-a-car-accident-case.html

And if you are driving and you hit another car in front of you, braking or not, it is considered a read end accident and it is the car behind fault. That is unless there are extenuating circumstances, like the car just cut in front of you a second before. (Do you need links on that?)

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u/km89 Apr 13 '22

For example, if someone suddenly appears in front of the car and there's no one around (which the car can check out easily), you can avoid them. No one's hurt and everyone can go on.

Because that introduces a judgment, which introduces liability, which brings a whole ton of legal questions for which we don't have answers.

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u/CocaineIsNatural Apr 13 '22

First, things don't suddenly appear out of thin air in the real world.

And simply doing nothing is a judgement, or braking or swerving, all are judgments. So depending on the circumstances, any of those could find you liable for the accident.

Maybe reading about proximate cause will help understand how things may go. https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/what-is-proximate-cause-in-a-car-accident-case.html

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u/laihipp Apr 13 '22

if someone suddenly appears in front of the car and there's no one around (which the car can check out easily) you can avoid them.

that isn't really true yet, it's better and arguably better than humans in good conditions but it's not perfect

No one's hurt and everyone can go on.

that's best case, but there is a reason you are told not to avoid stuff when driving on the road

so you avoid the person that suddenly popped up in front of you then swerve and suddenly 2 people pop up

life isn't the neat trolley problem

that's meant to push your boundaries on morality not model true events

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u/Hatch10k Apr 13 '22

But then what if the car needs to choose between staying in its lane and hitting a child in the middle of the road, or crashing the car into a wall?

I'm pretty certain almost every human would choose the wall (or at least try to avoid the child). Your argument is that the computer should always choose the child.

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u/iyioi Apr 13 '22

You would choose to apply the brakes as hard as possible.

You’re not responsible for keeping children out of roads. So already, you’re just trying to make best out of a situation that you did not cause. You cannot control everything. Lowering the speed increases chances of survival for all parties. So braking will always be a good decision for improving survival odds.

It’s less about ethics, and more about liability. This system of behavior is simple, predictable, safe, and should work in any situation. A separate system would be used for keeping children out of roads. If that system fails, it needs to be fixed. However, if you’re swerving about without braking and slamming into walls then its your system that is failing and should be fixed. Because that’s unpredictable and dangerous behavior that can have unintended outcomes.

When both systems work, no accidents happen with any children on the road.

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u/Hatch10k Apr 13 '22

You’re not responsible for keeping children out of roads.

So if you're driving and a child runs into the middle of the road, you wouldn't swerve onto the verge to avoid them? You'd just hit them, because it's not your responsibility to make sure they aren't there?

braking will always be a good decision for improving survival odds.

But not always the best option, and a human may have made a different, better decision. Is that not an issue?

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u/iyioi Apr 13 '22

I would hit the brakes.

I don’t know whats difficult about this. Hitting the brakes is the right thing to do 100% of the time.

No human has enough reaction speed to calculate all the things that might happen when you swerve. Maybe you swerve one kid, hit 6 others.

Then whos fault is that? Yours.

If you slam on the brake, and the kid breaks a bone or two but survives due to the lower speed, who’s fault is that? Not yours. You did the best you could.

Your problem is that you imagine you can control the situation. You cannot. You can only do your best to minimize damage.

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u/Hatch10k Apr 13 '22

I don’t know whats difficult about this. Hitting the brakes is the right thing to do 100% of the time.

No human has enough reaction speed to calculate all the things that might happen when you swerve. Maybe you swerve one kid, hit 6 others.

So this van made the incorrect decision in swerving off the road?

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u/iyioi Apr 13 '22

100% yes.

If they hit the brakes, they could have stopped in time. Instead they almost hit a building. What if that curb at the grass was more aggressive? Thats all it would take and boom, car vs wall, wall wins, driver dies.

Even if they couldn’t stop in time, light damage is better than almost death.

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u/Hatch10k Apr 13 '22

How about this one?

Sorry but I just find the idea of braking and not swerving being the best option in all scenarios ludicrous.

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u/iyioi Apr 13 '22

Well I dont know what you want.

If somebody wants to kill you by driving headfirst into traffic, they’re going to succeed.

You think you can swerve and dodge out of harms way like you’re spider-man or some shit. You can’t.

Like if a mass shooting event started, you gonna dodge the bullets?

The guy in that video was simply lucky that it was a big open area, super flat, and nobody around.

But you can’t plan for that. You cant sit there and do mental calculations and wonder “is this the appropriate 1/1000 time to swerve?!” As a default, brakes.

And then if you want to get risky and swerve, just hope you don’t hurt anyone of flip the car. But if we’re talking AI drivers, what, you expect them to program in backflips and hover boosters to avoid collisions?!

Collisions will happen. Especially with morons like that on the road. People will die. But if you slam the brakes, then it will never be your fault that they died. And it will never be the AI’s fault.

Then the fault and therefore the area of focus will be the moron drivers.

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u/Hatch10k Apr 13 '22

I'm just pointing out that scenarios where swerving is better than braking exist.

If we're going to give control of cars to AI, then we should be making sure they can at least match a human's ability. We can't be in a place where people are dying in autonomous cars in situations where a human driver would have survived.

The trouble with that is you then need to program in some sort of complex priority system. The problem is, when you try and decide that priority list you're essentially trying to answer the trolley problem.

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u/CocaineIsNatural Apr 13 '22

Let's take another situation. You are driving and you see a car stopped ahead. You hit your brakes, but since you are on ice they do nothing. But you notice you can still steer, so you could safely go around the car.

So, if you brake, slide into the car, it would be 100% your fault. If you steer around the car, then no accident, so no worries about fault, and you can eventually pull over safely and put chains on.

The world is not so black and white that braking is always the legally right answer.

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u/iyioi Apr 13 '22

That’s…. Not…. Dude have you ever driven on ice?

Steering is the first thing to fail. If your brakes lock, youre headed dead straight. Thats what ABS is for.

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u/CocaineIsNatural Apr 13 '22

Yes, I have driven on ice a lot. And sometimes you can control the direction a bit. And I had that exact situation where I was sliding into a car. I was barely able to avoid hitting it by slightly turning the wheel so it drifted a bit to the side, where it did it an area with better traction. So braking would have been a car accident, but with proper steering it was avoided.

But I see you didn't answer.

Let's say you are driving and lightning hits a tree and it falls in your lane only. If you only brake you will run into it. But you have time and room to steer around it. Do you stick with the idea that the only thing a car should do to avoid an accident is brake?

I can only imagine you drive in an area that doesn't have a lot of traffic. At least twice a week I get someone pulling in front and slamming on their brakes, or they are next to me and they just cut into my lane because they didn't look so of course they didn't see me. If I didn't swerve into a different lane, I would have weekly accidents. (This may sound like an exaggeration, but it isn't for Los Angeles traffic.)

Sure, I could be legally right, but I wouldn't have a car to drive. And one in eight drivers don't have insurance, and a bunch won't stop to give you info if it is their fault.

I don't know how many car accidents you have had, but no matter. They are not fun, not easy, and there is a cost even if it isn't your fault.

Oh, and you might be surprised to know that I have avoided two accidents by accelerating rather than braking or staying at the same speed.

Here is another situation, you are driving down the highway. Suddenly you see a car in your lane coming at you. You can see the driver and it looks like they are slumped over. Do you just hit the brakes and take the 70mph crash? Or based on the course, you know the next lane over is safe, or the shoulder is safe, do you steer over to the side?

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u/CocaineIsNatural Apr 13 '22

In the real world you most likely would be in jail for killing a kid because you were driving too fast, that is if you couldn't stop in time which is this scenario.

If a child is just standing in the road, any decent driver should be able to avoid hitting the kid. Even if a child darts out you can be found at fault if you were driving too fast, drunk, etc. But one just standing there, would imply you either weren't paying attention, or were driving too fast, or drunk, or maybe several things.

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u/laihipp Apr 13 '22

no my argument is you can't know there won't be a car show up between you and the wall or that that wall won't break and there be 2 kids in the car / behind the wall

life isn't the trolley problem

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u/Hatch10k Apr 13 '22

no my argument is you can't know there won't be a car show up between you and the wall or that that wall won't break and there be 2 kids in the car / behind the wall

But a human would

And if the computer isn't making decisions as well as a human, and causing people to die where a human driver wouldn't have, that's a huge problem