Indeed. When reading Tesla's statement,
"The Palo Alto-based automaker, led by Elon Musk, has said it repeatedly warns drivers to stay alert, keep their hands on the wheel and maintain control of their vehicle at all times while using the Autopilot system."
...one can't help but think, "then WTF is it good for, if I still have to drive the car myself while using it?"
Supervising autopilot to the degree required to correct sudden mistakes seems, to me, to be probably very close to the mental load of the details of steering yourself.
I'd say the mental load is higher than manually driving --- not unlike being a driving instructor to a student driver who is OK most of the time but occasionally makes a possibly fatal mistake that you need to watch out for and quickly correct. Normally, a car will go in a straight line with no steering input, but the autopilot almost "has a mind of its own" and can steer itself in the wrong direction.
This is subtly different from cruise control, which lets you concentrate on steering and rest your foot on the brake so you can use it quickly if needed. Cruise control doesn't encourage lowering attention, but enhances it.
And why are Tesla burning karma by promoting this technology?
For SpaceX, self-landing rockets are a direct method of reducing costs.
For Tesla, sort-of-self-driving cars are a distraction from the core product and are tainting the brand. Stick to selling top-tier electric vehicles with human-driving, people will still buy them on merit.
To me it's am example of what happens when software developers run the asylum. You can do nearly anything in software, but should you?
Except if the rumors about turnover in the Tesla software team are true, the exact opposite is the case. The hot goss is that they're under pressure to meet unrealistic goals, not vomiting their own hubris into the product.
What has lead you to this conclusion? Autopilot is really just advanced cruise control. You can treat it the exact same way by leaving your foot on the brake and leaving a hand on the wheel. If people aren't using it that way, that is certainly something Tesla should try to fix. But I am just not sure I buy the argument that cruise control is inherently a safer technology than cruise control plus auto steering.
But it isn't fully assisted and doesn't completely remove the need for interaction. It just is another step forward from cruise control that is more assisted and requires less interaction. I am not sure why everyone assumes the sweet spot for driver assistance ends immediately after adaptive cruise control and before cruise control plus lane keeping.
>Your brain will stop spending power on backseat driving
That is an interesting phrase to use considering backseat drivers have zero responsibility or control of a car but still manage to pay attention.
Your characterization of autopilot as “just cruise control” is fundamentally incorrect. Mere cruise control still demands significant and continuous attention and manual control on your behalf (steering). Autosteer makes the leap to fully automatic, which opens the door to not paying attention for long stretches of time.
From a practical perspective, Autopilot still needs to be monitored. But more relevant to this discussion, the user still needs to interact with the car to keep Autopilot engaged. It is possible to do that while paying very little attention. It is also possible to drive a car with cruise control while paying very little attention. Both systems can be abused. I have already said Tesla should do a better job of trying to crack down on the abuse of Autopilot. But I don't know why it is controversial to say that if used properly both systems can lead to greater safety by allowing the driver to focus on other aspects of driving.
You're just trying to make them sound similar, e.g. "if used properly" or "both can be abused". But there is an ocean of difference. It is vastly easier to ignore a system that is capable of driverless operation for long periods of time.
A good start would be to not call it auto pilot, and rename it to cruise control plus or whatever.
No doubt collision avoidance is a fantastic feature though.
Addendum: Looks likes the NHTSA has disavowed Tesla’s interpretation of that study. They did not evaluate whether autosteer (autopilot) was engaged.[1]
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/02/effectiveness-of-tesla-autop...
Wow. This is a story in its own, because that statistics has been touted a million time by the tesla/elon apologists..
Furthermore, no one is forcing anyone to buy Teslas. People should be free to do as they choose. I have no doubt, for example, that a corvette, lambo, m3, or convertible all increase certain risks for their drivers by far more than autopilot - which probably decreases their risks.
There's some threshold of interventions/minute that I think humans just aren't very good at. Which is why there are systems like Threat Image Projection, which turns baggage scanning into what is effectively a video game: https://www.rapiscansystems.com/en/products/rapiscan-threat-...
In my experience it’s LESS boring to drive with autopilot and I pay MORE attention to the actually important, potentially dangerous, things like what’s coming up (you’re actively aware of longer stretch forward, which also means you know you’re coming up to a stretch that autopilot won’t be able to handle well in advance and have plenty of time to disengage) and the cars around it (not watching lanes closely frees you to give all your attention to cars around you).
I engage similar system on my car before fiddling with the attention seeking touch screen, or when I need to give a quick look at the kids behind. Another is traffic jam: a lot of nothing going followed by a lot of things going on - focus on the wrong thing and you can rear end somebody. Minor benefit are some fuel saving if you are a "dynamic" driver, and it can make you more relax in stressful situation like the traffic jam above.
That's just to answer your question. I completely agree with you that the feature is overhyped, not worth paying much for it and actively promoting dangerous driving behaviour. However, it nowadays comes nearly for free as a consequence of other very useful systems: the whole set of emergency braking scenario (emergency, cruise control, safety distance, pedestrian, ...), line keeping assist, blind spot monitoring. It has its uses, if you remain aware of its shortcomings.
...in other words, the feature partially works around some of the problems they introduced themselves by using an overly complex touchscreen UI instead of the traditional no-eyes-needed buttons and knobs.
Autopilot basically adds autosteering to that. Seems to me that could lull you into more distracted situations that collision avoidance is unable to cope with.
Note: autopilot and collision avoidance both came out around the same time, so it's far from clear that autopilot has resulted in a reduction in accident rates, or if it was mostly just the collision avoidance.
You feel comfortable looking away a full 400% more than you would under manual control. There is not supposed to be any delta. And for many people, it’s probably more than 2 seconds. Many of these accidents including the recent fatal one happened inside of a few seconds of distraction.
...except when it doesn't, and you're forced to suddenly comprehend the unusual situation and react before its too late:
intuitively, the load seems higher. this is because your brain must now include predictions regarding an additional third party who is not there in cars without autopilot or with autopilot off. it’s similar to how i am more stressed and tired after riding in the passenger seat with a less experienced driver at the wheel than i am at the wheel myself.
Of course, there's zero data about how many accidents happen because drivers were staring at their phones, so you rarely see articles screaming "<non electric car> driven by an idiot staring at phone screen crashes <into what ever catches attention>".
I was skeptical about Autopilot from day one, but one test drive convinced me that this may not lead to zero accidents, but it certainly is way way better than vehicles that crash when driven by distracted drivers
Living in a high traffic area I would appreciate the time I don't have to pump my damn foot up and down every 10 seconds for hours straight while waiting in traffic.
You have an extra failsafe for those moments where you fail to remain alert. People keep treating these incidents in isolation and failing to account for the fact that human drivers make exactly this kind of fuckup every hour of every day, and lives are lost. Every day.
You get that right? Cars. Kill. People. Every day.
Tesla is shipping systems in the absolute infancy of this technology that are already statistically indistinguishable from human drivers as far as safety goes. And the luddites here want to throw all that in the garbage because of "what is the benefit right now".
That’s a hell of a claim, I’d love to see some serious citations on it.
For comparison the overall casualty rate for the average car in the US is somewhere near 12 deaths per 1 billion miles driven.
I wouldn't say that Tesla's have proven safer, but I think saying they are "statistically indistinguishable" from human drivers is relatively fair at this point.
No, it's over a billion miles driven by Tesla cars that have the sensor hardware that Autopilot uses. The number of miles driven with Autopilot actually engaged is about 300 million, at least according to the data Tesla has released.
https://electrek.co/2016/11/13/tesla-autopilot-billion-miles...
EDIT: Here is a Tweet from April 2016 saying 47m miles. [1] Your linked article is from November 2016 and shows 300m miles. That is 250m miles in 7 months. Projecting that forward with zero growth, Tesla would have accumulated roughly 950m miles in Autopilot usage. That isn't including the over 100,000 cars Tesla has sold since November of 2016 or the miles those cars have accumulated in that time. I stand by my statement that Teslas have recorded over a billion miles while using Autopilot.
But here I am asking about the other feature, autopilot, i.e. autosteering. The TOS requires you to remain fully alert when using the feature. So even if it were pitched as a safety benefit that keeps you from lane drifting when you’re not paying attention — you’d be violating the TOS.
So what is the benefit that doesn’t violate TOS? Clearly the implication is — and most Tesla users agree — it lowers the cognitive load while driving. But this would seem to undermine Tesla’s defense that drivers must remain vigilant and attentive at all times when using it.
I can see the benefit to Tesla and future Tesla customers of essentially crowdsourced fleet learning. But what is the benefit right now if you strictly follow the rule of remaining alert enough to intervene at a second's notice?
In previous threads the best explanation I got from Tesla owners was that it frees you from the "details of physically driving" so you "can now supervise instead."[1] That just seems suspect. Supervising autopilot to the degree required to correct sudden mistakes seems, to me, to be probably very close to the mental load of the details of steering yourself.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17151116