In my experience, having driven or been driven by the autopilot v1 hardware and software for thousands of kilometers, it is not ridiculous to use this safely. You configure how you use it once, you don't have to remember the state of every feature.

There are moments when you have to think about what state the car is in. But in opinion it is by far offset by how much less tiring it is to drive a long way.

"Mode confusion" is a major cause of CFIT accidents in aviation. And these are trained operators with partners and checklists.

Having driven a long distance in the vicinity of a Tesla that was presumably on autopilot, I found it very unsafe-seeming, darting around within its lane, sometimes drifting onto the lane line. You may not realize if you aren't paying attention, but your car might not drive as well as you expect.

Having driven for years in the vicinity of human drivers, I'd say they do far worse than that. And that is before you add the DUI.

> presumably on autopilot

I don't know, that sounds like lots of human drivers I've encountered!

Side sitted at a Tesla car, it's not.

Agree that lane weaving is annoying and frequently has no good explanation - there are no tight curves, the road markings are in perfect condition, there are no obstacles ahead and no one is changing lanes in front of the car.

I also wish that left-most and right-most lanes were special-cased, with a bit of preference towards left and right side respectively, instead of sticking to the center of the lane no matter what. Just seems safer overall, and with fairly large number of US roads not exceeding 2 lanes in one direction, seems like a pretty good rule of thumb.

In the USA are there not rules about which lanes you use? Various dash cam videos from the US seem to show drivers choosing any lane, though I could viewing then wrong.

In the UK you use the outside lane if you are a slower vehicle and use the inside lane(s) as overtaking lanes, with the inside for the fastest speeds (within the limit) . If you are using one of the inside lane and are travelling slower that traffic in the outside lane you can get stopped by the police and fined, and will certainly feel the ire of of other drivers.

The dash cam videos would be correct, outside of high-occupancy lane (2+ people) there are no lane speed restrictions, and if someone feels like getting into the left-most lane and driving 5 miles below the speed limit, they most certainly act on that impulse.

As you can imagine, anybody intending to use the left-most lane for high-speed driving is now forced to use the brakes, execute a [rarely safe] lane merge to the right, pass the slower vehicle on the right, and then aggressively execute a merge back to the left.

Roughly 100 people die in car accidents on a daily basis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths... For further context, the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001 resulted in 3,000 deaths and has led to a brief but complete shutdown of air traffic, complete overhaul of homeland security, passage of PATRIOT Act, at least one major war and countless "military operations" that don't count as wars.

I only recently discovered that in the US many people driving in the left lane will not move to the middle lane to allow cars approaching from behind overtake them.

That's incredibly selfish, not least because it's incredibly dangerous for the driver that has to weave into the middle lane and back again.

Seems bizarre. Then again, you Yanks also don't have kettles, so nothing surprises me ;)

> you Yanks also don't have kettles

Mind blown. What on earth do they boil water with?

We typically don't drink beverages that require boiling water, aside from coffee which is brewed in machines. Everyone that I know that drinks tea or uses a french press has an electric kettle, though.

> The dash cam videos would be correct, outside of high-occupancy lane (2+ people) there are no lane speed restrictions, and if someone feels like getting into the left-most lane and driving 5 miles below the speed limit, they most certainly act on that impulse.

Depending on state there are laws about using left lanes only for passing, which implies you must be travelling faster than the lane to your right. Those laws are rarely enforced though.

My driving instructor and parents all told me that driving in the left lane when not passing is illegal and that people who do it are dickheads. I see signs reminding people to stay in the right lane when not passing on a regular basis.

Is it just the state I live in (WA) or is the rule not as solid as I thought?

It seems like even in WA the "Slow Traffic Keep Right" is more of a suggestion than a hard rule. There's also subjective interpretation of the rule - someone driving 71 in a 70-mph speed limit zone might not qualify themselves as slow, while someone behind who's okay with going 80 mph might disagree.

I have no experience with Autopilot v2, but v1 is better than I am at lane keeping on a motorway except for special circumstances, like when there are no lane markers.

I supervise the car and pay attention. I am very aware of what the car is doing. It may be a big difference between v1 and v2 though.

Speak for yourself. I love the radar cruise control on my Mazda 3 Astina, and also value the AEB. I specifically bought this car because of these systems - at the time (mid 2015) it was the cheapest such car available on the market in Australia. It's a 2014 2.5 liter sedan, manual, ex demo. Love it.

well, it yells at you if you let go of the steering wheel and will even disable itself if you keep doing it. It's not that scary. And the features are real. At least it gives owners the confidence that things are moving forward and if they buy a Tesla today they will have full self driving some day.

I have about 18K miles on my Model S with the first-generation sensor package. I live and drive in New England.

The lane-holding feature (autosteer) does expect you to keep slight pressure on the wheel. It has, that I can discern, four modes ...

freeway following (another vehicle in front) freeway leading nonfreeway following nonfreeway leading.

Only in the first case, you have five minutes before it starts pestering you to hold the wheel. In the other cases it's one minute.

Lane holding and adaptive cruise control in freeway following mode is a WONDERFUL feature. It drastically reduces the driver's workload in heavy traffic. And, it has speed control features that contribute to the melting of compression-wave traffic jams.

Lane holding can be a little squirrely when the road surface is dirty. I think the car sometimes mistakes tire marks for lane markings. There are parts of my regular route where I just take over from lane holding.

Snow or heavy rain? the lane holding feature goes first, then the adaptive cruise control. Snow, rain, or frost on the windshield interferes with the forward looking camera. Snow or ice on the nose interferes with the radar. Ice on the bumpers interferes with the near-field sonar proximity sensors.

Autonomous driving on the Stanford campus and up Sand Hill Road is one thing. Autonomous driving in a nor'easter snowstorm on winding Atlantic Coast roads is another. We shall see.

I admire and support people who tackle hard problems fearlessly. Tesla's doing that.

What they're saying is humans can't recontextualize themselves fast enough when the system fails and it starts yelling at you.

It's still pretty easy to tune out even if you're gripping the steering wheel…

where else would the training data come from?

this is probably one of the most ignorant and short sighted comments i've ever read on HN and reaks of competitive shilling.

It's like saying we shouldn't have released seatbelts because people moght not have used them. Or maybe we shouldn't have released vaccines because you still need booster shots.

Safety features, even incremental ones, make the world safer for everyone.

I would like to respectfully disagree with you here. While I believe that self driving cars are infinitely better than human drivers, in this case I'd exercise caution. The issue here is that the vehicle is not fully self-driving–it still requires a human to be paying attention. The problem is that the system appears to be automatic and as such reduces the driver's focus; I've heard stories of people simply tuning out while this "autopilot" on, not knowing that they must be alert for any exceptional circumstances. In this case, the autopilot may actually make it slightly less safe–not from its inherent design, but by human psychology.

if the driver allows themselves to lose focus, they are just bad drivers. autopilot won't change that. what it will do is reduce the number of collisions by people who are shitty drivers and are currently driving unprotected.

the data already demonstrates that autopilot reduces collisions and fatalities. to argue that it doesn't put you in league with climate change deniers.

> if the driver allows themselves to lose focus, they are just bad drivers

This needs empirical support. All of us are human, and are susceptible to false senses of security. Most of us are not good at assessing real-world risks and probabilities. If the autopilot software is good enough to drive the car successfully for months on end, drivers will start to trust it. It will be very hard to stay vigilant and aware, with eyes on the road at all times and an alertness level on par with manual driving.

In other words, an otherwise “good” driver can easily be lulled into complacency by a system that’s really good, but not perfect. It’s an uncanny valley that is worth discussing.

its only worth discussing if you can prove it exists. you've just offered supposition, not fact.

the fact that safety features such as seatbelts and airbags save lives is undeniable. they didn't lead to uncanny valleys of complacency for anyone but drivers who chose to abuse those features with wreckless driving. the data for AP already indicates this trend will continue with ML drivers.

I never claimed anything more than supposition. I think these autopilot features are probably a net safety gain. But that's just a gut feeling.

I think his concern is that it's unsafe because you might trust it when you weren't supposed to because it's too complicated to figure out who's in control at any moment.

However, since the number of features is quite small, I'm sure owners will quickly get used to what the car does and doesn't do. The autopark and summon is surely going to run over far fewer children than human drivers do in those situations. That leaves just adaptive cruise control and lane changing. Well, if you forget to change lanes because you trusted the car, you still won't crash since the front crash detection (and your eyes) should protect you from that. So I don't see any safety issue there.

The difference between autopilot and examples you mentioned is that autopilot can decrease safety. If it works correctly 99.9% of the time, you get used to it and when 0.1% arrive you will cause accident, because you weren't paying attention.

The airplanes of this world demonstrate this.

IMHO airplanes demonstrate the exact opposite. A plane can not only potentially fly the entire flight path on its own, it can also autonomously land. The reason why pilots still hand fly planes is 1) because the whole process is not automatic and you are still receiving directions from an ATC, and 2) to keep their proficiency in controlling the plane.

Numerous times I've seen pilots complain that their employer requires autopilot to be used wherever possible, while they would like to fly the plane by themselves occasionally.

If we polished off the autopilot to also handle take-off and taxi, and installed it in every single plane that exists, I'm pretty sure the entire aviation industry could be completely automated.

Airplanes generally somewhat safer than driving. By quite a margin.

Without consulting the literature, it just seems easy to believe that machine-like consistency 99.9% of the time is more important to safety than confusion in the 0.1%.

It really depends on what 0.1%.

If the car fails to detect one in a thousand cars in front of you, or one in a thousand corners, I can see that being highly dangerous.

Let's say you change lane 5 times while commuting. That's 50 times per week. Now, are you going to pay attention well enough that you catch it twice a year just before it pulls out right into another car?

Perhaps likening it to having another person driving you would be good. If you were given a perfect chauffeur, except with the knowledge that they'll drive straight through one in a thousand red lights with no warning, are you confident you'll catch them?

That may well not be a decrease in safety, considering how poorly most people drive.

the same can be said for the examples i gave. if you get used to being vaccinated but forget your boosters before traveling to a new part of the world, should you have forgone your vaccinations altogether? of course not. if you have technology that makes it safer to drive 99.9% of the time but you expect it to cover for you when you're not paying attention, should you disregard the benefits of the other 99.9% of the time?

This is not a good analogy. Being vaccinated is strictly better than not being vaccinated, even if you don’t get your boosters. It’s not settled yet whether a three-nines level of automation is strictly better than zero automation. It’s entirely possible that this level of automation is good enough to convince most users of its infallibility, but not good enough to reduce the statistical accident or fatality rate.

Perfectly safe 99.9% and highly dangerous the other 0.1% may be overall more hazardous than human-level safe 100% of the time. Or it may not. I’m not making a claim either way. But it’s not a crazy notion that it may not be.

More data is needed. I’m cool with that data being collected in the real world with real drivers. Gotta crack some eggs...

more data IS needed. but some automation is indeed better than no automation. this has been settled time and time again. computers are more accurate, more precise, and don't get tired, sick, or drunk.

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