I don't follow it super closely but there is exactly 1 car manufacture that I can think of guilty of pushing the self driving myth. The established car makers seem to market it as an assist, not as an autopilot. Tesla is the outlier, everyone else is much more conservative.

I think there is more than one. This Audi ad from 2016 shows it driving around with no hands on wheel. They don't get as much press as Tesla, and I don't know how good their system is, but it sure does make a bold implication (although their choice of the "Piloted Driving" name is probably a much safer choice than Teslas.

https://youtu.be/I2j2-DqcPfM

Well do you think a T. rex is going to be able to drive? If you visit the website [1] the large header text says:

> Audi development engineer Thomas Müller and his team sent “Lu Ban” and “Kong Ming”, two piloted Audi A7 Sportback prototypes, on a very special kind of test drive.

This is a very far cry from what Tesla and Musk are doing. For starters you can't even buy the car yet. If you look for information on "Audi Piloted Driving" [2] you can see they're just as cautious as you'd imagine a German company to be:

> In 2017 Audi will introduce what’s expected to the world’s first to-market Level 3 automated driving system with “Traffic Jam Pilot” in the next generation Audi A8. The system will give drivers the option to travel hands-free up to 35 mph, when certain conditions are met prior to enabling this feature — for instance, the vehicle will ensure it is on a limited-access, divided highway.

Note that it will only work on highways, but also only at non-highway speeds. Stop and go traffic.

> In 2020-2021, Audi will introduce a Level 4 “Highway Pilot” feature—technology similar to what has been demonstrated in our concept vehicle “Jack”—that offers hands-free driving at posted limited access highway speeds in which the vehicle can execute lane changes and pass cars independently.

Seems pretty cautious to me.

[1] https://www.audi.com/en/innovation/piloteddriving/piloted_dr...

[2] http://media.audiusa.com/models/piloted-driving

Is it though? Piloted means human controlled, often by a highly trained professional. I agree that auto pilot is a confusing term, but in an aircraft auto pilot systems are actually more primitive than Tesla's offering. To me, it just sounds like a cheesy way to mimic the name people are familiar with for self-driving features without infringing trademark. Because taken literally, it suggests a more capable system than auto pilot does.

> "but in an aircraft auto pilot systems are actually more primitive than Tesla's offering."

I contend that while that's true, it's not something your typical consumer is aware of. There is a common misconception that modern airline pilots simply press a button then kick back as the plane takes off, flies and land itself.

Well, no. Mercedes had to pull Drive Pilot (notice the name...) ads that actually claimed, unlike Tesla, to be self-driving... about a system significantly underperforming Tesla’s.

Tesla is outlier mostly in the disproportionate amount of flak it takes.

http://www.autonews.com/article/20160801/RETAIL03/308019956/...

Auto pilot != Self driving. People love to conflate these two so much that the people saying it rely on everybody else conflating it to justify their ignorance.

This is just like Fox "some people say" - Fox people say! Or Javascript Bitcoin miners - Monero is not Bitcoin! It's snowing so there is no global warming - It is "climate change" but the entire globe is warming! This hurricane is just weather, not climate change - it is the 10th 1 in 500 year hurricane we have had this month!

I could go on. Sure, talking about the future self driving features (and selling them) is poor form to avoid this from Tesla, so they aren't helping - but they have always been clear that it is not self driving. It is the listeners/ readers that are incorrectly connecting the dots.

https://www.tesla.com/autopilot/ -> big text saying "Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars" + video showcasing said capability.

You have to go way down to "Enhanced Autopilot" section to read the smaller text that mentions that its subject to regulatory approval, and that the driver is responsible.

If you don't think that's misleading advertising, I don't know what is.

In the purchase section it clearly breaks the capability out including which ones are active/ enabled. In addition on the car manual and UI at enabling also spells it out. It says keep your hands on the wheel and paying attention to pick over immediately.

People don't read manuals. People don't read instructions in the UI. That is well-established reality. People glance at a web page or ad and see the words "full self-driving" and that's what sets their expectations.

They don't apparently read pop-ups prior to driving, ends of sentences ("full self driving capable hardware"), definitions of words, hacker news comments, listen to audible warnings to keep hands on the steering wheel. At what point does a person become responsible for their own actions?

Rephrased: at what point should Tesla remove this ambiguity from their marketing materials?

Depends on the ambiguity. I would agree that they should remove the video unless they put a giant disclaimer on it right now.

By smaller text do you mean the text that is at the same sized font as every paragraph on the page except for the headings? Right in the middle of the page and not in a disclaimer wall of text (which also exists at the bottom with bold.)

I will admit showing a video of full hands off video, not on a highway, underneath a statement about the hardware, showing off software being used in a way that is not recommended in the manual is bad.

As I stated before in my first comment, they shouldn't be selling "self driving" that isn't available. I see no issue with promoting the hardware though and selling future proofing.

Well then maybe they shouldn't call it auto pilot? I mean, how dumb of a name could they have chosen if they didn't want people to think the car can drive itself?

They should also retrain their sales staff because on my test drive the saleswoman specifically told me the car could drive itself and that I should take my hands off the wheel to test it out.

They should also retrain their CEO who keeps talking about "self driving" in reference to existing cars:

https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...

> "All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware"

Have full self driving hardware != full self driving software != full self driving capabilities.

Auto pilot - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopilot

"An autopilot is a system used to control the trajectory of an aircraft without constant 'hands-on' control by a human operator being required. Autopilots do not replace human operators, but instead they assist them in controlling the aircraft. This allows them to focus on broader aspects of operations such as monitoring the trajectory, weather and systems.[1]"

You are doing the exact conflating I am referring to.

If you want to be maximally pedantic, advanced autopilots are indeed capable of flying the plane by themselves. Modern commercial and military aircraft can take off, fly a route, and put the plane back on the ground, all by themselves. And autonomously flying a route is not unusual at all even in better-equipped small aircraft.

http://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1026435

Autoland has been around for more than 80 years and been used commercially for 60 of those.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland.

It's pretty obvious what Tesla is getting at when they are advertising "every car sold with self-driving hardware".

The asterisk is of course that the hardware is self-driving capable, but the software isn't. But it's not hard to see where people are getting that idea from - it's Tesla's advertising and sales material.

Tesla sells a car that everyone from the sales people to the CEO says can drive itself, has a feature called Autopilot where the car drives itself and you're saying no one should be confused that the car can't drive itself...

Regardless, the actual people who have gotten into an accident because of this should be proof enough that Tesla is misleading people.

Those accidents and these comments and downvotes are a greater proof that people like to mislead themselves.

You must have missed the definition of autopilot in my comment.

I thought the car crashing into the parked police car, a parked fire engine, decapitated, and driving straight into a road divider at full speed were better proof that people are mislead by the term "autopilot."

Tesla likes to play both sides, it is "autopilot" when it works, but when it doesn't then the driver has literally under six seconds (according to Tesla) to avert a fatal accident.

>the driver has literally under six seconds (according to Tesla) to avert a fatal accident.

This is what gets me the most. Right after a tragedy Tesla is always quick to put out a victim blaming PR piece claiming that it's all the driver's fault and that they had i.e. "6 seconds" where they could see the divider yet they never publish anything like how long they had between when the car left the lane and the collision. Sure it was 6 seconds where they could see the barrier but how long was it between when autopilot went into casual murder mode and when it hit the barrier?

We've all seen videos like this one https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/8a0jfh/autopil... where autopilot swerves towards an obstacle and the driver only has a split second to react or be the next fatality. I think it's about time that Tesla acknowledges that their sensor platform is fundamentally dangerous. They never should have made such huge promises without lidar of any form. They aren't just going to be able to magically fix this with a software update.

No, it is always autopilot, you must pay attention and it never is or has been fully self driving.

Honestly the whole system is in the "uncanny valley." It is just effective enough to leave people with a false sense of security but just buggy enough to continue to kill people.

Any system that randomly needs a massive correction in under six seconds between potentially several minutes of inaction is too dangerous to be used on public roads.

I didn't sign Tesla's little disclaimer, I shouldn't have to share roads with people beta testing dangerous software.

You mean you shouldn't have to share roads with bad drivers. I do think that this probably makes bad drivers worse and good drivers marginally assisted.

It's great that you're willing to take a prescriptivist rather than descriptivist linguistic stance, but it's not that useful when it comes to consumer behavior.

I hardly think that is the distinction. The word is literally accompanied by a definition after its first use.

"Your Tesla will match speed to traffic conditions, keep within a lane, automatically change lanes without requiring driver input, transition from one freeway to another, exit the freeway when your destination is near, self-park when near a parking spot and be summoned to and from your garage.

Tesla’s Enhanced Autopilot software has begun rolling out and features will continue to be introduced as validation is completed, subject to regulatory approval. Every driver is responsible for remaining alert and active when using Autopilot, and must be prepared to take action at any time."

Don't pretend that Tesla doesn't know exactly what people think when they hear "autopilot". It can be literally true and still deceptive marketing, like a jar of yogurt labeled "light" because it's lighter in color than the regular kind.

Like how you're ignoring the repeated assertions that Tesla salespeople and Musk are misrepresenting or outright lying about the "autopilot's" capabilities?

If you want to debate the point, you can't just ignore all the parts that you inconveniently have no answer to.

I ignored what Tesla sales people say because it is anecdotal and contrary to what I experienced when I bought mine.

Far from ignore the parts "I have no answer to", I acknowledge the parts that are misleading like the video. I can only presume that you ignored reading my comments and enjoy misleading yourself.

I'll place it here for you again to read.

"I will admit showing a video of full hands off video, not on a highway, underneath a statement about the hardware, showing off software being used in a way that is not recommended in the manual is bad."

Good on you for editing "smug pedant" out of your comment.

Those things are nothing alike. Some are facts that can be checked, others are definitions. If people all agree that the sun won't come up tomorrow, it's still coming up. If people all agree to start using a word in a new way, then it's time to change the dictionary.

So we should just start calling Monero Bitcoin because many people are consistently wrong?

No, we shouldn't.

But a company that advertises software against JavaScript-Bitcoin-miners knows exactly that people will think their software helps against JavaScript-Monero-miners.

If it's a reasonable company, they'll try to deal with this public misunderstanding and point out that their software can't help with Monero-miners.

If it's an asshole company, they'll cash in on people mistakenly buying their software. And even worse, those people will then think they're safe when they're not.

Such an asshole company deserves all of the negative PR, so that they're hopefully at some point forced to change their business practices.

There are no javascript Bitcoin miners, people just think they exist. I mean technically it is possible, but it would be very pointless.

People just lump all crypto together because of ignorance. As is the case here. Autopilot is not fully self-driving.

It's the difference between Tesla's capital A "Autopilot" product and the english word lower case a "autopilot." The language doesn't define Autopilot, but it does define autopilot, like it doesn't define Monero. If I had a product that I called Meat and it wasn't meat, I don't get to say "well the word 'meat' originally just meant solid food," when my customers complain I misled them.

> People love to conflate

Those people being Tesla's marketing team, presumably.

> they have always been clear that it is not self driving

That is very far away from the truth.

Based on all of your citations for evidence which should be numerous since it is by definition information delivered to the public.

You're like Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty

> what I say is always what I mean, and if you misunderstand, it's your fault.

Linguistic pragmatics 101: communication is a two way street.

That crosses into personal attack, which please don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

So Wikipedia's consensus that I linked to is wrong?

You've unfortunately contributed the most to this flamewar. We don't want those here. Please stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thank you. I didn't take any offense to Humpty Dumpty, I understand his point. I'm more surprised that somebody calling me a "smug pedant" led to me being banned for what seems a simple point, Tesla never said their car was fully self driving, and went to fairly great lengths to explain and notify that it isn't. (sans the video which I agree implies a lot too much).

You weren't banned! We'd have said so if we did that.

Being called a rude name is bad (though I think the commenter edited it out?), but like every user here, you still need to follow the rules regardless of what someone else does.

The core issue is the flamewar thing—by which I mean high-quantity, low-quality controversies—which is the essence of what we're asking people to avoid in comment threads.

Fair enough, I do see this as high quantity, low quality - although I do wish people would understand the point. I didn't realise that equalled a flame war. I just wanted to stand up for myself and an obvious truth. I didn't really think it was a flamewar until there was name slinging and the arguments deviated away from a reasoned rebuttal. The snark level was definitely escalating, so apologies if I contributed to that - my karma was duly punished :)

THat thank you was actually directed at dang, anyway, why am I not surprised that even that comment was downvoted. I am truly amazed by this conversation and fail to understand how those commenting here pass the bar for civil conversation.

It is unfortunate that they were name called “smug pedant”.

Yes, but not relevant to the main point, which is that users need not to proliferate high-quantity-low-quality controversies (a.k.a. flamewars) on this site.

(If we saw a commenter calling another a smug pedant, of course we'd tell them not to. I didn't see it though.)

From Wired's "People Keep Confusing Their Teslas for Self-Driving Cars" (https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-crash-dui/):

A spokesperson pointed out that the owner's manual reads, “Autosteer is not designed to, and will not, steer Model S around objects partially or completely in the driving lane”.

I haven't seen the encouragement to not pay attention. In some ad on TV, maybe it was for a new Cadillac, the driver opens a soda with both hands off the wheel, and that seemed to be as far as they were willing to go.

Yes, because people are known for diligently reading fine print. /s

Cadillac has an eye-tracking system that deactivates the self-driving features if you aren't watching the road, and their system is limited to specific highways they have mapped.

Tesla has a ridiculously inadequate attentiveness control, and they do little to nothing to remind people who regularly fail to keep their hands on the wheel. They don't nag people because they want them to believe the car is more capable than it actually is.

And, I say that as a proud owner of a Model S with Autopilot v1.

If their life is on the line they'd be stupid not to. Which, of course, a lot of people are. But the fact it's common doesn't take away the blame

Almost nobody reads the entire owner's manual for their car, and even those who do read them skim over warnings like that.

The warnings are shown on the behind-wheel display every time you engage Autopilot. Unmissable.

> Cadillac has an eye-tracking system that deactivates the self-driving features if you aren't watching the road, and their system is limited to specific highways they have mapped.

I don't even get the point of that. Why even take one's hands off the wheel(or if knee-steering, one's foot off the pedal) if they can't even take their eyes off the road? I haven't driven one of these vehicles so maybe I'm missing something. It seems intuitive that automation would free us to do other tasks, but I'm not seeing that in these early "self-driving" implementations. It's more like these car companies are actually selling these cars as experiments, at the expense of people's wallets and possibly their lives.

Yes, because they definitely do not call the technology "Auto-pilot".

It's called "Autosteer". That's misleading to non techies who don't have a firm grasp on the limitations of the tech.

They should be legally required to call it something like "lane assist".

You're right, 'lane assist' is probably more appropriate. However, it's not 'autobrake' or 'auto-no-crash', the feature is actually called 'autopilot'. (why does that article say 'autosteer')

An autopilot maintains heading, and that's all. Many sailors are not techies --- an autopilot on a boat will run you right into an obstacle.

> An autopilot maintains heading, and that's all.

Aircraft autopilots can follow a flight plan, maintain an altitude or rate of climb/descent, do an instrument approach, and (using ADS-B) perform an automated avoidance maneuver when another aircraft is too close.

Some of them can. Others are no more than a gyroscope linked to the rudder.

Sure, but that's like pointing out that Toyota Corollas exist.

In the context of a conversation where people say “car” implies something capable of 200MPH, that would be worth pointing out.

I need to stop being poor and fly a citation. Closest I seen Garmin 430 do is flight path using waypoint.

It says “autosteer” because that’s the name of one of the components. Tesla’s Autopilot is autosteer, traffic-aware cruise control, and some safety features like automatic emergency braking.

Don't you see? When it's time to buy the car, it's self-driving. When it's time to take responsibility for avoiding obstacles, you're the one driving.

>I'm not a self-driving car fanboy or anything. I don't think it's just around the corner, but it's clearly going to happen /eventually/ ...

Self driving vehicles have been used at Rio Tinto's Pilbara mine for a couple of years. Sure, it's on private land and the complexity of the task is far smaller than for public roads, but it's happening now.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-18/rio-tinto-opens-worlds...

I wrote the initial interface specification for the co-ordination system in Rio's open-pit mines. The mere fact that we were able to account for the state of every moving thing in the pit makes this a completely different proposition to self-driving vehicles in an uncontrolled real-world environment. At a guess it's at least ten to a hundred times easier.

Eventually this could be put into place in the broader traffic ecosystem - if all the cars on the road were required to have a transponder sort of arrangement on board, you could have a central point of control, and perhaps tie in people's phones etc to locate pedestrians. I do want to note that I am aware that there is an unfathomably large amount of complexity behind that however.

There's a movement towards this; look up "Vehicle-to-Everything" or "V2X". The idea is to enable things like one vehicle transmitting sensory information or intent to others around it, helping to prevent rear-end collisions, etc. My personal take is that it's well intentioned, but there will always be things that aren't part of the corpus of communicating devices that will then limit the utility. I suspect the communication of sensor data is the more useful part than some of the demos I've seen so far of, for example, a car sending an alert to a person's phone so they don't step into a driveway when it's reversing.

Because my dog will totally have his mobile phone on him when I'm chasing him down. Or my little kid chasing after his ball...

And when software on a car assumes pedestrians always have a mobile device on their person, charged and ready for a split second alert? IMO This would be an absurd design.

It'd be a tool in the toolkit, in my hypothetical. I mean, by the time autonomous cars were common enough on the road, we might all be tagged with an rfid chip as a normal identification or something... I don't disagree that it's an absurd idea, but it's just a devils advocate position I'm discussing here.

One can also see elevators as self-driving electric vertical motion vehicles. Sure, they are not operating on public roads, and the extra constraints reduce complexity, but they've been around for a while.

Personally, I don't see mining operations as anything remotely close to public roads autonomous vehicles because you have a controlled environment in which paid workers that have been trained to interact with equipment and be aware of its limitations and dangers are performing the said interactions in a strictly constrained manner with the autonomous equipment clearly visible as such and while protected by all kinds of insurance and work-specific regulations.

There's none of that even in the testing stage of current "autonomous" driving vehicles.

Very large work sites are far from completely controlled environments. Visitors, wildlife, weather, equipment malfunctions, human error, and a host of edge cases from trespassers to protesters.

See neighbor comment from someone who actually knows of what they speak: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17184043

Visitors, trespassers and protesters are all a very remote possibility in the Rio Tinto mines mentioned, and certainly wouldn't be a surprise if they did show up.

No real traffic and predetermined path cleared of unexpected obstacles.

All vehicles can safely communicate with each other and are controlled from central location.

It is automated driving but not even close to "self-driving".

> Self driving vehicles have been used at Rio Tinto's Pilbara mine for a couple of years.

Accidents still happen up there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WZCweaakOg

(*video may not explicitly of an autonomous truck, I'm not entirely sure, but just using it as an illustration)

Self driving strikes me as a technology with a hard boolean quality threshold. Either it is as good as a human or it just doesn't work.

This is a lot like rocketry. A rocket that meets 95% of its design requirements explodes, crashes, or fails to reach the proper orbit. Its damn near 100% or failure. Too bad Elon can't see this.

I think Tesla's obsession with autopilot is misplaced. Give me a solid reliable affordable EV with good range. Autopilot would be nice but only if it works. I can wait for that. But a solid EV is something I'm actually more excited about believe it or not.

I'm sort of afraid Tesla will throw the whole game in pursuit of self driving tech.

Elon's argument is that it meets your hard boolean quality threshold and is as good as a human, and he's aiming for 10x lower accidents than humans. That may not be true but that's what he's going for.

I think he can see it, but the first seriously solid entrant into the space is going to have a huge advantage and so that drives their interest in Autopilot.

Eventually, you're not marketing to consumers but to fleet owners.

Outside of that, he's in the grey area where he can build product excitement and fall back onto the "Keep your hands on the wheel" type of fineprint. I agree with those saying that it's far from ideal.

It's not even necessarily a matter of inattention. Imagine that the autopilot was driving along just fine, and when it was just a few feet away from the parked cruiser suddenly veered towards it for whatever reason. It might be physically impossible for any human, no matter how well they are paying attention, to intervene and avoid a collision.

I'm not saying that's what happened, but it's certainly possible. The mere fact that it's possible to me casts doubt on this entire design philosophy.

From the article:

> "Tesla has always been clear that Autopilot doesn't make the car impervious to all accidents, and before a driver can use Autopilot, they must accept a dialogue box which states that 'Autopilot is designed for use on highways that have a center divider and clear lane markings,'" a Tesla spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

From the picture at the top of the story, it is clear there is no divider on the stretch of road where the accident occurred.

Maybe it should detect when it is being misused, and start blaring loud noises, do its best to make the driver carsick, or simply immobilize the car.

Musk demos auto-pilot to the press in response to a recent crash in an area that is: A) not a highway, and B) has no lane dividers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AO33rOofFpg&t=2m18s

Also takes his hands off the wheel while using it in a manner that if someone else did and died, Tesla would slam them in the press for doing so, using dodgy-from-a-privacy-perspective and potentially-inaccurate (frequent reports of hands on wheel false negatives) telemetry.

its utterly insane

uh, isn't a self-driving car you have to drive an oxymoron?? does anybody understand words??

I agree, they should publicly distance themselves from the self-driving monicker until they at least reach level 4 coverage. At level 3, this should be at best described as 'driver assistance', or maybe a more descriptive but less palatable marketing term could be 'training wheels'---you still have to drive, but if you take your eyes off the road you might not die immediately like in a 'real' car.

Agree, except self driving car regs have been published.

Cadillac Super Cruise doesn't claim you still have to be driving it. It's hands free. It watches your eyeballs to make sure you're paying attention, otherwise it drives the car. But it only does this on specifically supported roads. It also doesn't claim to be fully autonomous.

Blame Elon Musk. I'm serious.

He's been promising "self-driving" for years, except the damn technology isn't ready/safe enough for what people are clearly using this from. The manufacturer puts a warning label, but the usage model/UI is clearly flawed.

His engineers know this, which is why Tesla's self-driving group has had such a high turnover rate over the last few years. Musk keeps overriding them.

Tesla's "Auto-pilot" is one of the most blatant market-speak lies I have come across lately, and they have been getting away it.

"Move fast and break things" is probably the worst philosophy to sweep over SV. It encourages a worldview where externalities that potentially break laws and maim or kill other people should be disregarded in the pursuit of "progress" and profits. But it's nice to see the HN community finally start to come to this realization

That.... was just Facebook's idea. I don't know any other company apart from those founded by former Facebook employees that took the monicker seriously.

A more mainstream paradigm was 'disrupt!' as in disrupt old industries, by applying the rules in ways that they couldn't aided by technology that they are disinclined to use. For instance Uber used 'disrupt!' as the centerpiece of their business, by acting as contracting service for limo companies, before finally expanding the definition of 'limo' to include any Toyota made after 2015.

Facebook may have invented the slogan, but others still took the concept and ran with it. There's various incubators in SV that repeat that same mantra to startups because they heard it from one of the big boys (Facebook) or read about it in some VC Medium post. I'm not pointing fingers, but just saying that even in such innovative places people will still blindly follow those paradigms like it's conditioning.

There are a lot of companies who try to be like Facebook and copy everything about them. Look at how do you open work spaces are becoming popular.

It started at Facebook and made sense for Facebook since nobody’s life is ruined if they can’t use Facebook for 5 minutes. It’s not appropriate for Tesla or even Google.

"Move fast and break things" was Facebook's idea, not Tesla's.

It's Facebook's motto, but the mindset is far more widespread.

I've only seen others apply that to Tesla, I've never seen them apply it to themselves.

"Move fast and break things" was never meant for actual real world physical things (or laws). It was a mantra that encouraged breaking sacred cows and assumptions but has been bastardized and vilified by the anti-big tech crowd. Obviously you can be a little more lax on your production quality if you're building inane web apps rather than rocket ships or medical devices.

No, it hasn't (see upthread, where you repeated this claim).

False, read again the facts and stop spreading wrong conclusions or facts, btw the study you are thinking off is not open so it was not verified, I think there is an action in justice to open the data.

I feel like I-5 between SF and LA is probably one of the safer places to use it. Any place else, maybe not so much.

No, that's not at all clear, and is in fact unlikely; rather: some of the capabilities in the basket of features Tesla calls "autopilot" are associated with lower crash rates, and it's not at all clear which; there are steep reductions in accidents, possibly exceeding Tesla's numbers, from cars with automatic emergency braking. Just because AEBs are useful safety features does not mean that auto-steering is necessarily on net a safe feature.

Thank you for saying this. I'm just astounded people don't question things logically

No, the NHTSA found no such thing. They did, however, determine that Tesla was not participating in their investigations in good faith.

This is false, stop this Tesla propaganda with false facts.

Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

The person posted same false fact/conclusion that there is data to prove autopilot is 40% safer all over HN, it looked to me as a misinformation campaign,

You are right though, it may look as a PR campaign but I can be sure, it could be just a misinformed fanboy

But not any worse than the term cruise control really.

Since circa 1968, "cruise control" has been used to refer to automatic throttle adjustment to maintain speed. [1] Is there some previous meaning that makes you think it misleading? Because I've never thought of it as meaning anything else.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruise_control#History

From your link:

The first car with Teetor's system was the 1958 Imperial (called "Auto-pilot") using a speed dial on the dashboard.

More details here:

http://www.imperialclub.com/Yr/1958/58AutoPilot/index.htm

http://www.imperialclub.com/Articles/58AutoPilot/index.htm

How ironic. I wonder how many drivers using that system crashed, thinking it would do everything for them...

From looking at the photos on the latter article, I'm guessing zero people crashed expected it to do everything for them. The UI is a knob on which you set the speed you want.

The state of the art in computers at the time was the RAMAC 305, a vacuum tube computer which featured IBM's first disc drive. The computer itself was meant to be installed in a room 30'x50'. The disk drive itself was 4' across, weighed about a ton, and held 5 million characters (6 bits each). All this could be yours for only $300k/year (in current dollars).

Given that, and given that the transistor radio was introduced only a few years before, I doubt anybody expected the sort of magic we see as commonplace today. And if they did, they would let go of the wheel and find out in about 2 seconds that it was not staying on course.

Confusion over the function of cruise control was the subject of a long series of urban legends. I remember hearing at least one of these when I was growing up in the 90s. Ironically, the lesson of many of these stories is that the name for a fully self-driving system is "autopilot" not "cruise control".

> [1995] This guy saves up his money and finally gets the van he always wanted. Fridge and tv in the back, all the works. He starts driving out on a country road that leads to his home. He sets the van on cruise control and gets out of the drivers seat and goes into the back to get a beer. The van of course goes off the road, and when the paramedics ask him what happened, he said he thought he had auto-pilot.

> [1993] An old china man was driving along in his motor home. He turned on his ‘cruise control’. Apparently misunderstanding the function of ‘cruise control’, he then went into the back of the motor home. The motor home drove off the road and crashed. Apparently he did not realize that ‘cruise control’ is not ‘autopilot.’

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cruise-uncontrol/

And don't forget this famous example:

> [1996] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29ToNp1MY3c&t=33s

Likely did contribute to some accidents. Even simple cruise control can catch you out if you're not really paying attention -- e.g. when coming up on slower traffic.

But nobody in 1958 would have the slightest expectation that the car would actually drive itself. Tesla has been using the terms "self driving" and "autopilot" together since they started markting the car.

This is a good example of a case where engineering from first principles, especially around user experience for driving, can lead to making the same mistakes again (e.g., autopilot naming, and potentially issues related to consistent braking performance found in the Consumer Reports review.)

You're getting downvoted, but I agree.

A commercial pilot doesn't flip on autopilot and start browsing the internet on a phone or take a nap. And that's at 30k feet where there's little traffic to worry about.

It seems like a misunderstanding of what the technology does, by consumers and the media. I'm no expert on Tesla's marketing history, but I'm of the opinion that these crashes are due to drivers misunderstanding that the system does and what its capabilities are.

I don’t totally disagree with you but I will point out that planes land everyday in white out conditions with no visibility due to level 3 landing systems. The pilot can’t see anything and thus can’t help really even if they are awake. They’re mostly just there to talk to air traffic control for these kinds of landings. One pilot told me the Airbus planes no longer allow manual control.

Accoring to Wikipedia, you still need to have a minimum runway visibility unless you are landing CAT-IIIc, which is not used commercially (yet).

CAT-III landings are automatic, but the pilot needs some visibility to decide if the plane is going to touch down in the landing zone. If they are totally blind they will divert.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system#ILS_...

From the "Special CAT II and CAT III operations" you linked:

Some commercial aircraft are equipped with automatic landing systems that allow the aircraft to land without transitioning from instruments to visual conditions for a normal landing. Such autoland operations require specialized equipment, procedures and training, and involve the aircraft, airport, and the crew. Autoland is the only way some major airports such as Paris–Charles de Gaulle Airport remain operational every day of the year. Some modern aircraft are equipped with Enhanced flight vision systems based on infrared sensors, that provide a day-like visual environment and allow operations in conditions and at airports that would otherwise not be suitable for a landing. Commercial aircraft also frequently use such equipment for takeoffs when takeoff minima are not met.

I get your argument, but pilots do sleep all the time. Usually they take turns, but there have been multiple incidents that we know about where both pilots have fallen asleep at the same time.. we only ever hear about them if the pilot overshoots the airport, or in one case, the pilots self-reported it to encourage others to talk about the issue.

It's extremely likely it happens more often than we think and that most pilots simply just aren't going to voluntarily give up that information.

It doesn’t matter what the term ACTUALLY means, what matters is what the general public THINKS the term means.

And that seems to be “I don’t have to care while this is on“.

And that’s a big problem.

And a big part of what causes the general public to think that is Tesla's egregiously misleading marketing.

See Tesla's page on "autopilot" here: https://www.tesla.com/autopilot

The first (and only) thing you see at first is "Full Self Driving hardware on all cars", and a blurb about how all Tesla's have the ability to be self-driven. It does not mention here, nor anywhere else on the page that the current implementation of autopilot in Tesla cars is not fully self-driving. The video just underneath the headline is a video that shows a car using self-driving capabilities, not autopilot.

The entire rest of the page is like this as well. It talks at length about how Tesla's have the capability to drive themselves, and hardly ever mentions that self-driving and "autopilot" are not the same thing. There is only one single sentence, buried in the middle of the page, that mentions that drivers must remain alert and ready to take control.

And again, this is on Tesla's home page for their autopilot function. This is the first page that comes up when you Google "Tesla Autopilot". It's really shameful for Tesla to have marketing materials like this.

> It seems like a misunderstanding of what the technology does, by consumers and the media. I'm no expert on Tesla's marketing history, but I'm of the opinion that these crashes are due to drivers misunderstanding that the system does and what its capabilities are.

Perhaps the name "autopilot" has something to do with that misunderstanding.

Eh. This is reminding me of a law school friend bragging about how great lawyers are, giving the example of suing a firearms manufacturer for a 'faulty' safety. They'd done something insane, like pointing a loaded gun at a friend and pulling the trigger, thinking "haha the safety's on!" But lo and behold, the safety failed and someone was dead.

She was adamant that a safety was infallible, and any damage from failure was the manufacturer's responsibility. As someone who grew up with guns, I realized that only an idiot would put someone's life in the hands of a 'safety' mechanism.

If people have dumb, uninformed ideas about what words mean in context, they should probably educate themselves. Based on videos and articles I've seen, people are doing extremely stupid things that are clearly warned against by Tesla, like driving down a winding country road, or assuming it's going to somehow know about road work.

Then it's incumbent on car manufacturers who sell their cars with 'auto-pilot' as a marketing term to educate the public on what that term-of-art means. This might cost some money to do. A line in the manual doesn't count.

How much training does the average pilot get before they are in a situation where they can activate autopilot?

If someone misunderstands you, they may have a problem.

If everyone misunderstands you, you may have a problem.

If almost everyone understands you but a tiny vocal minority pretends they didn't, though...

> A commercial pilot doesn't flip on autopilot and start browsing the internet on a phone or take a nap. And that's at 30k feet where there's little traffic to worry about.

That's rich, you may want to actually do some research into what commercial pilots do when flying before making such claims.

e.g. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-24296544

> A commercial pilot doesn't flip on autopilot and start browsing the internet on a phone or take a nap

Commercial pilots are trained professionals; Tesla drivers are not.

> where there's little traffic to worry about

I don't think you are aware of how much traffic on the "air roads" really is....

Well, that was condescending for no reason.

I drove around five miles to my friend's house and back today. I'd estimate that I was in near proximity with potential for collision with around 1,000 cars on that trip.

During the portion of a flight where traditional autopilot is used, how many planes are on a potential collision course? They're traveling at specified altitudes, along specified paths through 3D space. So tell me, how many planes is a jet airliner likely to collide with at cruising altitude when operating on autopilot?

Auto pilot implies level 5 autonomous vehicle, while Tesla has glorified assistance capabilities, at level 1.

Idiots are using as if Tesla is Level 5.

No, idiots are naming it as if it's level 5.

"Tesla on cruise control crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser"

^ I wouldn't have bothered to read the article. BUT it is the exact same thing. [Just a system to help you drive]

> The manufacturer puts a warning label, but the usage model/UI is clearly flawed.

Not just the model/UI but the actual sensor suite. Remember, the Tesla that resulted in a decapitation had over-saturated cameras that couldn't see a tractor trailer. Of course, that's where the UI comes into play, because if the driver hadn't been watching Harry Potter, he would have seen the tractor trailer as well.

> because if the driver hadn't been watching Harry Potter

This was proven to not be true: https://jalopnik.com/the-ntsb-to-partially-blame-teslas-auto...

That's the thing, how do you make an UI that unambiguously conveys that the car hasn't seen an object in front of it, so that the driver can react to it?

Maybe with AR the car could highlight the objects detected so that the driver can brake if the car doesn't see an object it knows about, but a head mounted display seems pretty clunky.

The problem is that the "paying attention" part of driving is actually one of the most mentally taxing for the driver and it seems the pay attention 100% of the time is basically the same as saying 5% of the time an event might occurs that requires your immediate action. The problem being that if you have to jump into action to avoid something catastrophic 'sometimes' you basically have to be paying full attention all the time in order to collect enough contextual information about the incident. It's the same as watching someone toss a baseball to you and catching it vs your friend yelling "Headts up!" as a baseball is already flying through the air at your head.

Japanese train drivers are famous for pointing at things to always keep attention. May be similar system can be used for cars: for example car could narrate objects it sees and ask driver to point at them with hand, then check with depth sensor and gesture recognition that user pointed correctly, and then slow down and stop if user pointed wrong.

But that has the problem of "computer recognizes 'car', asks fleshy meat-bag to point at 'car', sees meat-bag point at 'car'".

It doesn't learn anything about the environment from that, so to me it doesn't change anything.

So wait, rather than just pay attention to the road when driving my old beater, I could constantly be pointing at things and struggling with poor voice recognition? Somehow this sounds like more work than just driving the car myself.

Well, how does an airplane do it. A loud robot voice that goes “PULL... UP...”

If a loud robot voice goes "PULL UP", airplane pilots still have much more than a couple seconds to do something about it.

I don't think people realize that "Tesla Autopilot" will never, ever, ever stop for an object in front of it. Tesla has said repeatedly it isn't designed to do so. If you run a Tesla toward a brick wall with Autopilot on, it will crash into it 100 out of 100 times. It will hit ANYTHING in the lane ahead of you. It isn't designed to stop in such cases.

So there's no need for a UI. If there's something ahead of you, you must stop or you will hit it full speed without braking.

They definitely can and do stop. There are plenty of videos of accidents avoided because of stopping, and this is a rather common feature on most mid to high-end cars now, commonly called a collision avoidance system and grouped under the umbrella of pre-crash safety systems.

The avoidance feature is designed to stop the car in the event of an unavoidable obstacle directly ahead. It doesn't guarantee a stop but it will still apply the brakes faster and more fully than a human can react and thus shed more speed from the impact. Pre-crash safety will also tighten the seatbelts, move seat positions, close windows, and inflate auxiliary airbags in preparation, and these are all well-tested and proven features.

What? That's not true. It can and does brake for objects in front of you that it senses. Its ability to sense objects is sadly very incomplete, but it does (quite often, but not often enough) successfully sense objects and slow or stop for them.

See page 93 of this owner's manual, for example: https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/model_s_owners_man...

(What it won't do is steer around obstructions in a lane, either full or partial.)

What is the difference between “objects in front of you that it senses” and “obstructions in a lane”?

Well, I guess the second doesn't presuppose that it senses them. But I think you concentrated on the wrong thing:

Autopilot is not designed to steer around obstructions.

Autopilot is designed to brake for obstructions.

It sometimes fails to brake for obstructions. But it sometimes succeeds in braking for obstructions. It never steers around obstructions, even if it senses them perfectly.

Emergency braking is designed to lessen the impact, not prevent crash. See manual. This is mostly for avoiding crashes into a car that suddenly stops in front of you, I.e. in lower speed city traffic and jams. For this, detection within a few meters is all you need - ultrasound sensors might do. If the velocity delta is 120km/h, you’re not going to meaningfully slow down when already this close.

I think the idea is that the UI needs to force you to always pay attention.

The NTSB report said that the driver was not watching any movie.

> Of course, that's where the UI comes into play, because if the driver hadn't been watching Harry Potter, he would have seen the tractor trailer as well.

Reports at the time said he was watching it on a portable DVD player, not the Tesla screen. Not sure about the NTSB report someone just cited though. If that report really said he wasn't watching anything, I wonder how that rumor started?

I test drove a Volvo S90 recently. The Pilot Assist feature almost feels like a gimmick due to the attention required. If you don't give steering input in five seconds, Pilot Assist disables itself. It basically requires enough of your attention that there's little difference between using it and not using it.

It seems pretty clear to me that Volvo only has Pilot Assist in the first place as a method to gather data via telemetry for the next generation of self-driving vehicles, because it otherwise doesn't seem to add anything useful to the driving experience. Consequently, I haven't heard of any notable incidents where Pilot Assist caused an accident.

I haven't test driven Enhanced Autopilot but I see people on YouTube taking their hands off the wheel completely for much longer than the Volvo let me do. Tesla seems like they're pushing something half-baked out and representing it as something it isn't.

I’ve found lane keeping assistants to be fantastic, but you have to think of them as ASSISTING.

It’s not going to drive for you. But it does an amazing job of basically canceling out crosswinds when you find yourself driving down the highway. It makes a huge difference, it makes it much less tiring/frustrating.

Going slow on a windless day? Straight street? Not that useful.

For helping with very gentle curves or very annoying crosswinds it’s quite nice.

And for basic station keeping in relatively predictable stop and go traffic. It relieves you of some unnecessary micromanagement but it's not autonomous.

> Consequently, I haven't heard of any notable incidents where Pilot Assist caused an accident.

It may be, but is not necessarily “consequently”. That Volvo is not cool to write about plays a role. You don’t read about boring daily crashes either.

It’s pure arrogance. In the model 3 when you are in autopilot they have video games and memes to play/watch on the giant screen. How does this pass regulation and is allowed to be sold? Building products to actively distract an operator of a 2 ton vehicle moving 60 mph?

This is actually true. it baffled me too. For proof, check this review video by Top Gear. They demo the Easter eggs that are only available in AutoPilot mode; https://youtu.be/1GrNv3ow9H8

calling it video games and memes is extremely disingenuous. it replaces icons

What are you talking about? There are no games or memes.

Um https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/998988641702526977

Suddenly we’re trusting Elon to deliver on his tweets?

Here are the easter eggs in action, on a production vehicle: https://youtu.be/1GrNv3ow9H8?t=640

Weird, the tweet was dated 2018-05-22 but the Youtube video shows easter eggs already deployed by 2018-05-23. I know all Tesla vehicles have automatic over-the-air updates but that's still surprisingly quick. Must be Musk playing around with his time machine again.

Yes, there are easter eggs. I was replying to a comment that said “video games.”

The screen displays a Mars rover. You turn the steering wheel to control where that Mars rover goes. I'd consider that a video game.

I guess you don't consider that a video game, which is a perfectly valid opinion. But I'd just wish you had made your first comment "I don't consider Tesla's interactive easter eggs to be video games" instead. That way you clearly communicate your intent and this whole needless bikeshed could have been avoided in the first place.

"You turn the steering wheel to control where that Mars rover goes."

No you don't. The Mars map is exactly like the Earth map, with a Mars texture instead of the map, and a rover instead of an arrow. Technically you control where the rover goes by using the steering wheel, because the steering wheel controls where your car goes, and the rover's movements come from your car's GPS. But it's not the sort of video game you describe. There's no way it could possibly work as you describe. The steering wheel is mechanically connected to the front wheels and still steers the car even when Autopilot is engaged, so it could not possibly be used as a video game control.

The problem isn't my failure to disclose my opinion of the easter eggs, it's your misunderstanding of what they actually are.

All the same I'd rather the developers at Tesla were working on improving the autopilot functionality instead of developing easter eggs.

That's fair, but a radically different statement from "when you are in autopilot they have video games and memes to play/watch on the giant screen."

Nothing about that thread suggests those are available while in autopilot, and they're not.

They are, you can see the driver demoing it here: https://youtu.be/1GrNv3ow9H8

Hmm, yup, that's way more eye candy than I thought was available. Agree that it should be very difficult to get to that stuff during auto-pilot.

It's time to hold all of these tech CEOs accountable for their wild promises and myth-making at the expense of the public good.

Nope, I am still blaming government (and I am in no way a Musk fanboy)

Self-driving tech has been there for decades. Convoy driving of trucks (one human-driven truck in front, several trucks following its lead) on highways was developed in the 90s.

On well-maintained infrastructures, automated driving is a problem that was solved before deep learning. The fact that we don't have an automatic lane-driving mode for highways as a standard feature in new cars is a political failure.

In 1997 a huge and successful demonstrator for an automated highway system was made. And legislator did not follow up by allowing on the road the systems they spent more than 10 billions to develop. [1]

In my opinion, a technology should be considered ready/safe enough if it is x times safer than the average driver. Zero accident is a crazy requirement. 10 times safer as human is much more reasonable but no politician will accept that.

And obviously it is easier to develop a safe system on some well known and well maintained road segments (e.g. highways) than on 100% of the roads and dirt roads on the North American continent.

So yes, the only way for an economic actor to get into there is to bend the existing rules, as rules for automated vehicles were never made. You can't sell a car saying "no need to look at the road, I'll drive for you" so you put a disclaimer, while making sure people understand that you actually made a self-driving car.

You can't sell a self-driving car and argue that your rate of accident is acceptable because the laws for such a notions are not there. A single accident in your self-driving car (that may be 10 times safer than a manual car) and you will be considered responsible.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-national-automate...

> Blame Elon Musk. I'm serious.

If you want to fix the problem, just charge him with attempted murder of a cop.

Entities like Elon Musk is a symptom of the worsening of the disease of stupidity that has gotten hold of the global human population....

It is not really surprising when our whole system of existence has the stupidity and weakness of its inhabitants at its foundation. Point is, this will only get worse. Because any "progress" along the current lines asks the common man to be more stupid...

> except the damn technology isn't ready/safe enough for what people are clearly using this from

Outrageously false. These incidents are so rare that they have whole news stories written about every single one. How many crashes were there in Laguna Beach yesterday?

Tesla accident rates in aggregate are quite good. Under autopilot the data is noisy but still underneath the level of an average car (not as low as luxury vehicles in the same price range, though).

Claiming that it "isn't ready" is innumerate nonsense. It could clearly be better, sure. So could you. And no one is demanding to revoke your license, because you aren't a scary AI.

The problem is that the argument being presented: "self driving is safer" is defeated by very obvious failures (driving into pillars, police cars, and people) that are /exactly/ the kinds of things that a computer should be able to handle. Human caused accidents in these situations are almost invariably due to inattentiveness that should not apply to any automated system.

So we get to the problem of "if it can't do handle the specific obvious case where it should be absolutely superior" (I would argue an automated system should not have ever been able to make either the police cruiser or the 280 crash in any circumstances. Those were both in perfect conditions - clear weather, etc, etc), how can we trust it to handle any of the complex situations that a self driving car necessarily must handle?

The Tesla system solves this by simply saying "the driver is still driving, we're merely assisting", but that assistance leads to inattentiveness - that's human nature, you have to design around it - which should be fine, if the systems were able to handle that, but that clearly are not.

I would argue that given the configuration of the Tesla system they are less safe, not necessarily due to net accidents, but rather because of the failure modes of the accidents. Bumper to bumper accidents on a freeway happen all the time, even driving perfectly you can end up in them because not everyone else is driving perfectly. The problem with things like the Tesla system is that it's generally fine, except in those cases where it drives at speed into objects because it gets confused.

If your vision or mental state leaves you unable to safely account for large obstructions you aren't allowed to drive. Because it isn't safe.

How many Tesla's are there? How many crash without autopilot, and how many crash with autopilot? How does this compare with other low-ownership rate cars in the same class?

Seems to me that it's premature to me making bold claims like this. Of cars costing over $100k, what's the accident rate?

There were numbers thrown around in the last thread on this, I gave you my memory. The answer is "Teslas are safe enough". Human drivers with the same accident rate wouldn't raise even a hair on an eyebrow.

And the "bold claims" bit is exactly backward. You are the one claiming that the technology "isn't ready" based on sensationalist local news story and not actual numbers.

By definition and design, Autopilot is used in the safest, most predictable driving situations, only. So it really makes no sense when you start comparing it with statistics on human drivers in general. My first reaction was that it is better to compare with interstate driving, but even that is still an unfair comparison, because humans are going to have a disproportionate number of fatalities in precisely the situations that most drivers with Autopilot turn it off.

«the damn technology isn't ready/safe enough»

What data are you basing this statement on? Or is this just your vague gut feeling based on reading about a few accidents in the news? I thought statistical data showed otherwise, that the technology was safe enough (ie. better than humans).

Edit: removed "debunked stats".

Reading that blog entry makes me more distrustful of Tesla than I was, because I don't think it's appropriate to compare Autopilot miles to generic human driver miles. Autopilot is not suitable for all types of driving. The most readily accessible statistics that would be more comparable would be fatalities on interstates.

US interstate deaths are about 1 per 183 million miles, so while Autopilot may be safer, it's not as clear depending on the uncertainty of the 320 million mile figure. Also, German drivers on the autobahn have roughly half the fatality rate, which is better than the claim for Autopilot. All in all, I think an honest assessment would be that it's probably as good as an average driver in good conditions who isn't drunk. But rhetoric about saving 900K lives raises my hackles - I do not want to trust the source of this sort of PR with my life.

These numbers from Tesla have been debunked several times (see every older discussion on this on HN) because of the flawed methodology (mostly comparing apples to oranges).

No offense but this is exactly the attitude that inhibits progress and led the auto industry to languish in mediocrity for years. If you wait until the technology would prevent all accidents, you'd be waiting forever.

Your attitude is inhibiting progress. Everybody knows the technology is not ready and everyone is fine with it and willing to face the consequences of refining it. Everyone except Tesla that is, which insists their self-driving tech is so advanced they even call it autopilot encouraging people to treat it as such and refuse to admit any fault in this mess.

> Everybody knows the technology is not ready And by what standards are you gauging its not ready? My point was if you wait until it becomes "safe enough", you'll be waiting forever because Tesla would be forever at the mercy of whose rules govern what "safe" means. Roads are hazardous places and unfortunately accidents are going to happen.

What I do know is that the Autopilot system will never be distracted, will never fall asleep, will never drive intoxicated or recklessly, will never disobey traffic laws like humans do. Tesla also has a financial incentive to improve their technology to prevent this from happening. Unlike humans who, for the most part, have far less incentive to drive more carefully.

I think you're setting up a dichotomy here that doesn't exist. It's not a choice between waiting forever or disregarding safety. Look at how Waymo is approaching the problem, for example.

It needs to be as good as an average human. Do we have enough stats to compare yet?

As good as a human at what? It's 100% better at not falling asleep behind the wheel or driving while under the influence which statistically are the most common cause of traffic accidents.

They are falling way behind in blasting errant pedestrians. Stories from the last 24hrs.

https://www.google.com/search?q=pedestrian+killed&prmd=nvi&s...

And you would be alive.

tell this to the families of the people who have died

We don't yet have evidence that Tesla's using Autopilot are any less safe than human drivers. We do have plenty of examples of traditional auto makers negligently ignoring safety regulations, manufacturing faulty vehicles and also causing fatalities. But somehow we don't hear the same pleas for sympathy for those souls.

We don't yet have any evidence that Teslas using Autopilot are any safer than human drivers. We do have plenty of evidence suggesting that humans are unable to pay proper attention when asked to do tasks like driving a level 3 automation of cars. There is plenty of reason to believe that this going to cause an increase in accidents, particularly of the fatal variety (say, running over a pedestrian at lethal speed).

The NHTSA found a 40% crash rate reduction from Tesla's autopilot. So how about you tell all the people who lives have been saved that you wish they hadn't been because you're an emotional reactionary

I believe many people have found issues with the data used and how they were prevented. Also it's worth comparing the common case of accidents - bumper to bumper, etc on a freeway which I'd except all self driving systems to instantly reduce the rate of just by increasing the distance to the next car - to the number of serious crashes - e.g. driving into parked vehicles, concrete pillars - those have entirely different failure modes.

That said, the reality is that the types of self driving systems currently deployed - Tesla or whomever - are all fundamentally flawed because they do two things:

* Require attention from the human driver at all times * Cause driver inattention

The first is fairly clear, literally every one of these products is prefaced with "the driver is still in control of the vehicle and must remain attentive", and the latter is clearly demonstrated because of all of the different mechanisms that the manufacturers are deploying to try and deal with the fact that if you tell a human to pay attention to a specific task, but they aren't doing that specific task, they will not pay attention. Every system tried just increases the time required for a human driver to adapt to unconsciously managing the various "pay attention" alarms.

The solution is fully self driving cars. We don't have that yet. I fully expect them to be safer once we get there.

I don't disagree that levels 2/3 are a danger zone in self-driving technology, but I feel the need to point out that there are plenty of people who are disabled or suffer chronic injuries resulting from being rear-ended. Stop and go traffic can be plenty dangerous as well.

Just read their autopilot page and tell me it’s not intentionally misleading to the average person:

https://www.tesla.com/autopilot

To be fair, the system really isn’t designed to encourage the driver to not pay attention. Quite the opposite.

> I really wish all the car manufacturers would stop with this bullshit "you still have to be driving it" self driving nonsense.

To align with your statement, I can state; "I really wish all people would stop this bullshit "auto pilot means it can drive itself and I don't have to do anything" nonsense.

I feel this is quite a critical analysis of an ambiguous product title; [1]'Telsa Autopilot (& Enhanced Autopilot)'.

I read the title; "Tesla in Autopilot mode crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser"... and wondered how this article is even news..

Where, besides future plans for their vehicle product (Which, as suggested by Wikipedia - may be an independent product itself, and not an extension 'Tesla Autopilot / Enhanced Autopilot'), does Tesla's product in question indicate it's self driving? Autonomous Car? I do admit, the 'summon' feature of their vehicles makes this slightly confusing...

Additionally; what is the criteria to be 'self driving'? I assume; you are talking about 'auto pilot'..?

If so; this over-simplifies the entire scenario.

The very definition, and scope, of the title 'autopilot'/ 'automatic pilot' is far from specific. In fact; most of them are applicable only to [2]aerospace.

> Claiming that the driver is still responsible for driving the car, while using a system designed to encourage the "driver" to not pay attention is a dumb idea, and all I can see is this kind of thing leading to regulations the delay actual self driving cars.

This part of your post, I actually agree with. Having said that; I believe this is more so associated to an applied opinion of what a 'self driving' car is, and what we are seeing with these vehicles - and not because of any lack of technology advancements.

But again; I urge caution in applying your, or anyone else', opinion of what a 'self driving' car is.

FINALLY: I really wish we could start taking some responsibility of what we agree to. If the driver, even once, must agree to a clear scope of requirements to use the product - then blatantly disregards this; how, or why, is this even news?

We all accept terms and conditions of use, and privacy policies - with almost every product we use - and don't expect to be shown them every time we use that same product. I'm one of the few that read these documents - and more often than not; refuse to use the product. I made the choice not to agree.

There's other comments to this article that clearly indicate they believe a 'once off' popup is questionable at best - but I really don't understand this. Without a doubt; having to push a button to enable this Telsa/Enhanced 'Autopilot' feature, then scroll through a dialog to the end (Yes, okay, exaggerated) - and then click 'ok' would be a huge hazard.

I don't believe the user should be prompted with the same notice every time they use a product.

However; I do not necessarily believe prompted once is the right answer.

What if someone else uses the vehicle? Or you sell it?

I do not pretend to have the answers...

--

Disclaimer; I know Wikipedia is not gospel.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot [1.1] https://www.tesla.com/blog/dual-motor-model-s-and-autopilot [1.2] https://www.tesla.com/autopilot [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopilot

We have seen time and time again that if corporations can wash their hands off of something, they do so. For the past few decades, and perhaps for much longer, the operating principle of corporations have been "if it's not illegal, it's moral."

As an example, rationally speaking credit bureaus and financial institutions are 100% responsible if they give someone a loan or open an account for them under your name. But they were allowed by the legal system to put the onus on the victims of the fraud to prove they are victims not perpetrators of it, and they called it "identity theft" instead of "bank fraud," and now we have victims who never did anything wrong or could have done anything differently battling CRAs and FIs for years to get out of a situation they should have never been put into in the first place [0][1].

If the laws allow companies to sell Level 5 autonomous vehicle while keeping the passenger (because it's not really a driver anymore) responsible for all legal matters, they would do so, and they would lobby against any law which puts the burden correctly where it belongs. And we would be forced to put our financial, mental, and legal well-being on the line just to get from point A to point B because it will be impossible to avoid autonomous tech then like it is impossible to avoid credit bureaus now.

[0] Like this case: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/credit-report-error-f...

[1] Obligatory Mitchell and Webb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c57WKxeELY

> If the laws allow companies to sell Level 5 autonomous vehicle while keeping the passenger (because it's not really a driver anymore) responsible

Well, law is allowing Tesla to sell a Level 1 vehicle as Level 5. They have to start applying false advertisement laws first before they can think about other laws.

So then we should ban cruise control too? No, we should educate people how to use new technologies properly.

If Tesla called Autopilot "cruise control with lane-keep assist", I think people would be a lot less likely to abuse it. By calling it Autopilot (and even letting people pay for "full self driving capability" in advance) is enticing people to use it dangerously.

First of all, they do call it that. There is no “turning on AutoPilot”. You turn on “traffic aware cruise control” and “Autosteer” separately. You can turn on TACC and not autosteer, or turn them both on, or drive yourself and switch between these modes very easily. Collectively the self driving features come in an “Enhanced Autopilot” package which you can purchase to have those individual features enabled.

Secondly, I have a Model 3. The idea that the name is misleading people is the dumbest thing i’ve ever heard. Even if people were confused, their confusion would be cleared up very quickly within a few days of use. When you pick up the car they talk to you extensively about what it can and can’t do, and there are many warnings in the car that explain it. People who make this argument probably haven’t tried using AutoPilot.

Put this is context. you can’t just release a perfect system on day 1. In order to get the software to that level earlier versions need to be seeded into the public. I am 100% convinced the software is a huge safety and convenience win as it is.

cruise control - means just controlling cruising speed. thats all. Constant 55mph or whatever speed you desire.

Auto pilot literally means vehicle operation without human participation. The name autopilot should be banned.