There is precedence that "it's up to the user" is not sufficient as a societal standard for what is legally allowed. (For example seat belt laws). It is reasonable to ask: "Should we allow such a feature in cars on our road?" For example, what if the car had struck a cyclist rather than a truck and the fatality went the other way?
You are not legally free to do all dumb shit. For example, you are not free in many states to ride around without a seatbelt on. Car makers are not free to make cars without seatbelts.
That's the precedence.
At 9:58 there’s a behavior I saw a few times two or three versions back, where Tesla didn’t want to make room for a car cutting you off. Since about 2019.8 it will back off even as soon as it sees a blinker to make space.
The biggest challenge which this gen AP has is crossing intersections which are on a curve and have no lane markings. It’s not supposed to be able to do that, and not surprisingly it doesn’t do it so well.
But as a counterpoint, MA was nice enough to grind off all the lane marking on the Mass Pike westbound out of Boston a couple weeks ago and, I have no idea how, but AP keeps in lane nicely with just the grinding marks remaining on the road.
It seems to me that a feature which randomly veers into objects is not in fact a form of assistance, but a hindrance which makes driving more difficult than baseline.
It's been said before, I'm sure, but telling people to keep their hands on the wheel doesn't solve the problem of determining when to take over or resist the algorithm, since you don't know what it will do next and the time between normal driving and disaster is generally very small. A crash could be caused by the combination of actions, just like when two people both try to avoid each other in a hall, but collide anyway.
It’s pretty good on freeways. It was never intended for small streets.
And yes you’re supposed to keep your hands on the wheel.
I think the point parent was making was that Tesla was playing fast and lose with what they define as what is full auto pilot and what is merely driving assistance, especially by changing their wording depending on who they're facing, but it's mostly been able to go along because so far they're still in enhanced driving assistance and it's a gray area despite all the existing rules.
But robotaxi is much clearer: at no point can you make it a requirement / way out that whoever was having a ride should have driven the car 100% of the time at 100% attention. And that's basically how they got out of every single one of their major crash.
Potentially quite difficult to detect them if the car doesn't have them marked in its GPS-map, or?
As far as taxis, Elon said they would have supervision drivers at first. This fact continues to escape the notice of people misquoting him and claiming he “promised” things that he didn’t.
The technology Tesla is using in the autopilot is pretty cool, but the feature definitely has a wrong name. It should be called something like Driver Assist Plus etc.
Oh, and there is no way in hell they'll have functioning robotaxis outside predetermined geographic areas in one year's time. I'll print this post and eat it if they do!