Xiaomi Car with Driver Assistance Crashes, Three Reported Dead

> Aesthetic minimalism?

Also cost reduction. Save pennies cost lives.

My fancy new car has push to open doors and monitors the surroundings so it won't open if it detects a car or bicycle moving in the direction of the door. Could be handy.

But it's also designed reasonably. The lever you push to open can be pulled twice to open mechanically. There's no secret lever somewhere nobody knows about. Two different sales people told us to push or pull twice to open.

>Or just ban non-mechanical interior releases? Whats the justification for electronic releases?

For frameless windows. The door needs to retract the window before you open it, otherwise you might damage the window.

You might have child safety locks engaged on the rear doors by default. If you don’t have small children, you might be able to find a switch or setting to turn that feature off.

A lady in my neighborhood has crashed two different Teslas. Both times she rear ended somebody, judging from the damages. Some people can crash anything.

I think you're leaning a bit too hard on the wording here. If we're going randomly speculate based on tenuous reasoning like this, allow me to present the fact that such licensing regime does exist in China, so it's likely that Xiaomi did comply with it, rather than openly flouting the law.

https://www.all-about-industries.com/china-is-massively-prom...

> good weather

I always see this argument but it seems like they did fine through the recent SF storms https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/waymo-robotaxis-storm... Most of the US has non-freezing weather for most of the year, so aside from avoiding heavy rain, snow, and ice I’m not sure what more you want.

> straight roads

SF might have mostly straight roads, but it has complicated intersections, bed drivers, cyclists, double parked cars, etc.

Waymo would do fine in any major city most of the year under most conditions.

Better to self drive in some places than no places.

Waymo can indeed drive through rain and snow on narrow unmarked streets, as well as traffic jams and navigate obscure construction works with cyclists.

Other than snow, it does all of those things in SF. They do snow testing in Tahoe and Michigan, not to mention the former testing in NYC.

https://www.cbtnews.com/iseecars-study-reveals-tesla-tops-fa...

Fatal accidents rate too

Volvo is known for actually caring about real-world safety, not just what the tests happen to test. Or, I guess, what looks good on the feature checklist.

Volvo sort of prides themselves on safety, including "smart" widgets.

2003 Blind Spot Information System (BLIS): BLIS uses cameras or radars to detect other cars approaching your car.

2008 City Safety: Emergency braking system using laser to detect, it helps reduce the risk of rear-end collisions at low speeds

2010 Pedestrian detection with full auto brake: Using radar and camera, this system warns the driver if somebody steps out in front of the car, and brakes by itself if the driver fails to do so.

2016 Connected safety: use the cloud to share critical data between vehicles, alerting the driver about slippery road sections or vehicles that have activated their hazard lights.

2018 Oncoming mitigation by braking: A Volvo car driving in a built-up highway with digitally rendered signs depicting oncoming mitigation by braking.

If an oncoming vehicle veers into your lane and a collision is unavoidable, this feature can help reduce your vehicle's speed to mitigate the force of the collision

2023 Lidar: Based on high-performance sensors, Lidar technology is key for creating safe autonomous cars. It helps autonomous cars detect other cars, pedestrians and cyclists

2023 Driver Understanding System: 2-camera system can detect if the driver is distracted, sleepy or even intoxicated. If needed, the system will activate a protective shield and take appropriate countermeasures to preserve safety margins.

The study can't be trusted. Just look at the article: "The study is based on QuoteWizard by LendingTree insurance inquiries from Jan. 1, 2024, through Dec. 31, 2024".

An interesting tidbit is that FSD is almost guaranteed to turn off before any accident occurs. Last I looked, the data was not available to see how long after FSD deactivation the accident occurred.

Note: I have an older Tesla, and actually quite like it. I don't have FSD, but I do have enhanced autopilot (EAP) and like it as well. That said, it is very easy to believe that people ignore the road for longer than they should with FSD/EAP turned on.

The grandparent comment also didn't mention the split between FSD miles/non-FSD miles. It is possible that FSD is so good, that every Tesla driver becomes useless when they are required to drive for themselves, and that is what drives the higher accident rate.

You only have a certain amount of traction budget to accelerate. You can spend that budget on trying to stop, you can spend that budget on turning. Spending it on both can end up with you losing grip and having less traction overall to achieve your goal. A modern car's computer will assist with trying to keep traction on the road so can be good to try to do both if you're not 100% sure what to do.

But also, turning often means you're going to enter another lane of traffic with potentially other cars/people/obstacles in there. So blindly swerving can sometimes end up with a much worse collision.

I'm not going to say you should always do X or you should always do Y or always do X + Y. There's a lot of situational conditions on that. But only kind of turning and only kind of stopping is probably not going to work.

I would say any activity that demands focus would have the same pattern, anyone who has driven a car, rode a bike, etc. should be able to tell that it takes a while for you to get into focused mode if you let it drift even for a short while.

It's much more pronounced if you've ever raced a car on a track, rode a fast bike on tricky paths, or even go-karts, if your mind wander for a split second it takes a few seconds of active focusing to get back to the baseline where you enter "flow" again with the activity.

Expecting drivers who let a machine control their machine, getting out of the control feedback loop, to be able to regain focused control over split second decisions is just absurd to me.

The problem is the accident distribution is really skewed, with a small fraction of drivers contributing most accidents. That means the majority drive a lot better than average, and would likely not put up with a regression in accident rates from what might be a "better than average" system but still not as good as human. I know I wouldn't, I pay attention, never had an accident in 30 years, tried a few FSD implementations including Tesla's and they scared the bejesus out of me.

The nature of each failure matters as much as the frequency of failure. The way in which accidents humans get into occur is vastly different from the way in which self driving car accidents occur, even if the end result is pixel for pixel same. Blame, compensation, "peace of mind" of the involved are all affected by this, so it matters a lot.

The solution to this is self driving cars reaching critical mass through some other means[1]. Because then it will become the new normal before anyone realises it.

Personally, I think taxis are going to be the thing that takes them to critical mass regardless of all safety considerations. The driving force behind this will be the fact that in some countries humans driving taxis will soon be economically infeasible, at the prices people can afford. Then, if you agree that Uber et.al are far too entrenched in society for people to just forget about it, you can imagine waymo, robotaxi, etc, picking up.

[1] the "true" solution is to train it to get into the kind of accidents humans get in to, and try to "shape its uncertainty", but this is hard and of course infeasible with real world experiments. Recently, simulations have become extraordinarily better (due to generative models) for robotic/self driving tasks, so there is a slim chance this might change.

I don't know if humans are rational in that way.

Isn't nuclear energy, one of the safest forms of energy overall?

But I still can't shake the fear of it.

And that fear across most of the population has hindered nuclear energy despite all its benefits.

It is going to be interesting to watch how regulation unfolds.

"According to the company’s marketing materials, Xiaomi’s Navigate on Autopilot function can change lanes, speed a car up or down, make turns or brake with minimal human input."

The driver had been flagged multiple times for taking their hands off the steering wheel. The entire story is about the autopilot driving the car, the driver taking over one second before the accident. This is literally in the timeline.

Are you replying to the wrong story? How could you be so blatantly wrong?