HackerTube.dev

Tesla Autopilot Crashes into Motorcycle Riders - Why?

FortNine · 1.1M views · 2022-09-03 · 8:35

Open on YouTube ↗

If playback is restricted in your region, try opening the original video. Use Mark watched to add it to your marked videos.

Overview

FortNine looks at why Tesla Autopilot has rear-ended motorcyclists, speculating that the vision system misreads motorcycle taillights as a distant car. It argues that radar and other sensors would help.

On Hacker News

Cited in threads on motorcycle safety, Tesla's sensor choices and autonomous vehicles as a well-made explanation of the failure mode.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2022–2024

Topics

Self-driving & autonomous vehiclesCars, EVs & motorcyclesComputer vision, speech & NLP
Search by tags
teslaautopilotmotorcyclescomputer visionsensors

What people said

L0stLink · 2022-10 · Recommendation

There is a great argument for having ultrasonic sensors and radar in a recent video by Rayan from FortNine discussing two fatal accidents involving tesla autopilot [VIDEO]

Read the original HN comment ↗
kibitzor · 2024-04 · Reference

Related video "Tesla Autopilot Crashes into Motorcycle Riders - Why?"[0], summarized to: vision used by Tesla seems to process motorcycles differently, and may be incorrectly "assuming" the closer spaced brake lights on a motorcycle is actually a far away car. More details on the homicide here[1], which shows the crash happened during daylight hours and the bike resembles a sport bike. This is a different condition than my referenced video (night collisions with cruiser-style motorcycles), but I suspect similar incorrect assumptions by Tesla vision happened. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]

Read the original HN comment ↗
ultrarunner · 2023-09 · Reference

I don't really have anything to back this up, so take it with a massive gain of salt, but I seem to keep seeing discussion of Teslas hitting bikes (both cyclists and motorcycles). Most of it centers around there being enough doubt about whether Autopilot was being used, or whether the driver was actually monitoring like they should have been, or whether the cyclist "should" have been in the road, etc, as to "count" as being less safe. I can only imagine that there are impassioned interpretations of the data going multiple directions. A Verge article [0] has some discussion on this with regard to a motorcyclist that follows this pattern, and FortNine also covers this in a characteristically well-made video [1]. There's also the problem of autonomous (electric) cars being too quiet when they first begin moving, but that's easy to solve. So I'm not entirely sure about their safety being "proven", but that's largely because the problem domain is enormous and the data somewhat open to interpretation. Overall "proved" seems too certain a word as of now, without narrowly defining the scope. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]

Read the original HN comment ↗

Sources

Video by FortNine, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

Views, duration and playback status refresh separately from the published catalog. When an update fails, existing data remains visible.

Selection checks
  • SaaS & AI candidates: Topic keywords do not match
  • Editor-approved picks: Editorial review is required

Rule matches identify candidates. They do not guarantee video quality or financial results.

About the library and its sources