Tesla Was Kicked Off Fatal Crash Probe by NTSB

Re:Tesla Was Kicked Off Fatal Crash Probe by NTSB by eridius on Thursday April 12, 2018 @01:56PM (#16823288)

You're making the assumption here that it's only recording when the hands are on the wheel. Presumably it also records when the hands are off the wheel. So if the crash happened at (to completely make up a timestamp) 13:24:01.123, and the latest log entry says at 13:24:01.108 the hands were off the wheel, that would be good reason to say that the driver did not have their hands on the wheel at the time of the crash.

Of course, I don't actually know what the logs look like, but I'd rather err on the side of assuming that the designers of a real-time system for monitoring something related to driver safety took into account the idea that, when the car is involved a severe crash, they should have as much accurate data recorded as possible rather than leaving it sitting around for ages in un-flushed caches.

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Re:Tesla Was Kicked Off Fatal Crash Probe by NTSB by whyever on Thursday April 12, 2018 @02:07PM (#16823404)

A driver of a Tesla car has mentioned in this thread that the car sometimes doesn't register the hands on the wheel.

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Re:Tesla Was Kicked Off Fatal Crash Probe by NTSB by eridius on Thursday April 12, 2018 @04:00PM (#16824414)

Sure, but I would expect the logs to have more information than just the boolean "are there hands?", e.g. maybe containing the actual sensor data that was used to determine if there were hands.

The car should be conservative about the threshold it uses for the sensors in determining if there are hands (because it would rather err on the side of telling someone to put their hands back on, than err on the side of thinking someone has their hands on when they don't), but engineers analyzing the logs after a crash wouldn't have to use that same threshold when trying to determine if the driver was in control of the car at the time of the crash.

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Re:Tesla Was Kicked Off Fatal Crash Probe by NTSB by oh_sigh on Thursday April 12, 2018 @06:23PM (#16825483)

It might not be 100%, but it is probably safe to assume that their hands weren't on the wheel because they went head first into a concrete wall.

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Re:Tesla Was Kicked Off Fatal Crash Probe by NTSB by developerdanny on Thursday April 12, 2018 @02:38PM (#16823685)

That's anecdotal information.

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Re:Tesla Was Kicked Off Fatal Crash Probe by NTSB by criddell on Thursday April 12, 2018 @02:50PM (#16823797)

And Tesla is claiming otherwise. The driver in this thread likely has nothing to gain or lose by saying that, other than maybe the resale value of his car might be hurt. Tesla has a lot of reasons to be deceptive here.

Plus, it's a pretty common complaint in Tesla forums.

On the other hand, this is effectively an admission by Tesla that there are serious problems with the autopilot system. It should never guide the car into a barrier, no matter where the driver's hands are.

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Re:Tesla Was Kicked Off Fatal Crash Probe by NTSB by jmulho on Thursday April 12, 2018 @02:59PM (#16823876)

I believe it. Do you?

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Re:Tesla Was Kicked Off Fatal Crash Probe by NTSB by jacquesm on Thursday April 12, 2018 @02:11PM (#16823444)

With the note that Tesla's 'hands on wheel' detection is pretty flaky.

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Re:Tesla Was Kicked Off Fatal Crash Probe by NTSB by phjesusthatguy3 on Thursday April 12, 2018 @02:37PM (#16823677)

$DEITY help us all if murderous robots can absolve themselves of responsibility after 15 hundredths of a second.

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