Trust me, when the car starts doing something you wouldn't do you feel it immediately IF you're paying attention. Remember the car doesn't do anything fancy -- it's just supposed to drive straight centered in the lane

Seems to me in the video there's no intervention needed at the 21 second mark, and the car's already hit the barrier at the 22 second mark. Youtube doesn't provide sub-second time marks, but I'd estimate it's 21.5 second before I'd expect the car to start turning, giving the driver 0.5 seconds to notice the failure, take control of the vehicle, and execute the swerve required.

The Queensland government estimates it takes drivers 1.5 seconds to react to an emergency [1] (I wouldn't be surprised if that was a 99th percentile figure, of course)

The only thing we can blame the victim for here is foolishly trusting Tesla's apparently crap software.

[1] https://www.qld.gov.au/transport/safety/road-safety/driving-...

> giving the driver 0.5 seconds to notice the failure, take control of the vehicle, and execute the swerve required.

If you have to be constantly at this level of alertness, what is even the point of having an autopilot?

Did you drive with such a system? If you did, you would know there’s a HUGE difference between having to manage minutae (just keeping yourself in a lane is surprising amount of work) and being free to pay attention to your surroundings.

Your cognitive load is lowered by Autopilot enormously. You can pay better attention to what’s going on around you and anticipate issues (say, a car that drivers weirdly in front of you) because you’re not busy with the low-level driving.

Part of that is that you see a difficult road stretch coming up and disengage the assist IN ADVANCE - becuase you’re not a complete moron, know the lane assist is for driving in highway lanes and the thing you’re approaching is decisively not one.

This is the automation paradox, and one that Tesla itself has been facing with their assembly lines.

If you over-automate something you end up having to spend more time supervising and fixing it than if you'd just done the thing yourself in the first place.

What video? I'm just talking about my actual experience driving the car. And yeah, people can react in less than one second. One second is a long time when reacting to an imminent collision.

If you've been driving on a very long, very straight, exceedingly boring stretch of road with zero traffic then your reaction times will go down. It's very difficult to stay alert in those situations and there's a frighteningly high level of single vehicle collisions on those sorts of roads caused by a sudden change in conditions or even the angle of the road.

Auto-pilot will make driving a lot more like flying is for pilots: 99% extremely dull, 1% terrifying.

It drove in a straight line right into the wall. What part of that, other than hitting the wall, are you going to "feel"?

The way it diverted from the trajectory you would take. It got off the expected path, or drivers a few km/h faster in a road arc that you would, that sort of thing raises alarm in the driver right away.

A funny feeling like that, I’m ready to disengage immediately and then 1s is plenty of time. But I wouldn’t use Autopilot near an obstacle like that to begin with - anticipate, take over for the weird stretches.

1000ms is plenty of time, but in this particular crash you have 500ms total between the car veering out of the lane and impacting the wall.

Regardless, you're saying that if you're not paying attention every single second of the trip, instantly ready to rect to even the slightest deviation from your intended trajectory, then you're doing it wrong.

What, exactly, is the point of an auto-pilot system if you need to be in that state of absolute alertness?