If Wells Fargo or Comcast did the same pitchforks would be out. But Comcast can only hurt you, misusing AP can hurt others too. So having the government intervene is a matter of public safety and doing what a government should do: look out for people's interests, not the corporations'.
When you build a system you have to compensate for inherent weaknesses. Tesla does the opposite and exploits them for profit (as many other companies do) by capitalizing on these well known human weaknesses (lack of attention, gullibility especially with complex topics). They use easy to fool systems that assume drivers are always engaged because they allow the AP to disconnect less and look more capable. And they capitalize on the gullibility by branding the AP as something it's clearly not:
> full self-driving in almost all circumstances. The system is designed to be able to conduct short and long distance trips with no action required by the person in the driver’s seat
> All you will need to do is get in and tell your car where to go.
> manage complex intersections with traffic lights, stop signs and roundabouts, and handle densely packed freeways with cars moving at high speed.
> use of these features without supervision is dependent [...] regulatory approval, which may take longer in some jurisdictions.
In any case the fault is most certainly not merely marketing, it's a fundamental design flaw. You cannot expect people to maintain constant attention when that attention almost never leads to anything; people simply aren't capable of that. That's also why similarly "boring" tasks are so failure prone (e.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelgoldstein/2017/11/09/tsa...) and why all kinds of creative measures are needed if you really need people to stare at stuff looking for black swans until their eyes glaze over.
Better marketing is not a solution to that problem. That's merely a solution to the fraudulent advertising (also worth solving - sure!)
I was actually referring to the ruling. The court did not take issue with the autopilot system, just with the way it's marketed.
For the rest of your comment I agree and I implied something along the same lines. Tesla should have built a system that works to compensate for human failings, not take advantage of them to sell more.
New roads are built to be more wavy to keep the drivers more engaged, some traffic light systems that are synchronized as a "green wave" are sometimes stunted to not create this automation of running through lights (especially true of public transport vehicles where lights sync to the vehicle, except when an emergency vehicle is coming), etc.
Tesla should have installed an advanced driver attention monitoring system even before turning on the AP and they should have set very, very clear expectations from the system. In reality they did the opposite with people ending up believing that the AP can handle driving by itself so they can "disconnect", but the attention monitoring being completely unfit for the purpose of making sure the human is "connected".
> I was actually referring to the ruling. The court did not take issue with the autopilot system, just with the way it's marketed.
I meant the parent post you were replying to, i.e. what I think MereInterest meant when he said "If there is a human in the control loop, then it needs to take into account human limitations", to which you replied "I am honestly not sure how to interpret your comment but I'll try to respond. The fault is not with the AP."
I did not mean to imply you thought it was a fundamental design flaw - sorry!
This is a common rumour, but is there anywhere which actually implements this?
This makes sense, the light sync system is already in place and they carry dozens or more passengers at once. This kind of advantage over a car carrying one person gives people more incentive to use public transport.
(And I can also confirm the effect that at intersections where full public transport priority usually guarantees a green some drivers do react a bit... surprised on the rare occasion when it doesn't work for whatever reasons)
That's actually intentional (or at least I know for a fact that in some places it's by design). It keeps drivers alert and break the habit of just going ahead. Sometime for whatever reason the light has to be red and in some cases the public transport drivers were so used to just going through the intersection that they completely miss the lights. Also many of them get in their personal cars at the end of the day to the same effect. It's a known, studied effect and the solution is to "mix it up" a bit.
Expecting a human to remain attentive all the time is like using a sensor outside it’s linearity range to detect and mitigate a hazard. Good initiative but bad implementation and possibly a gap in the design culture
>the fraudulent advertising
purported / alleged. The claims of this have been debunked.
Isn't this entire article about how the courts in Germany determined that it is, in fact, false advertising?
Having read the Tesla website myself and understood its claims, they are not false.
I believe the court was concerned that it was theoretically possible that some people might get confused.
Or to put it in a harsh (to Tesla) way, the court feared some consumers could be misled (I would add, misled only due to the consumer’s own failure to read and listen to the information offered by Tesla with several different opportunities in varied and timely settings).
So with this in mind, the court took action based on those fears.
Conclusions beyond that are not warranted.
"The driver is only present for legal reasons".
Really? That's a direct quote from Tesla, a claim. I don't think it at all stands on itself.
But the numbers we do have make Tesla's look pretty dangerous. Tesla's overall fatality rate may be low, but that's true in general of luxury cars (perhaps because they're driven in safer areas, by safer drivers, have fewer safety related faults, or protect their occupants better). Compared to similarly priced cars, tesla does poorly (https://medium.com/@MidwesternHedgi/teslas-driver-fatality-r...).
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=no&tl=en&u=htt... - norwegian safety authority also concluding Tesla's are more dangerous.
Finally, specifically the autopilot is often compared incorrectly - autopilot isn't used on busy city streets or chaotic traffic situations (it's not capable of that yet) - but those are where most traffic fatalities occur. On the highway, fatalities are comparitively rare, even in "normal" cars. On interstates, in 2012 (I can't find more recent numbers), the fatality rate was 3.38 per billion miles travelled (source: http://www.bast.de/EN/Publications/Media/Unfallkarten-intern...) - and in some countries, much lower even than that (e.g. 0.72 in denmark). Since that includes old & cheap cars, you'd expect luxury cars to do better than that - that's the baseline autopilot should be compared against.
Comparing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_self-driving_car_fatal... with https://cleantechnica.com/2019/10/14/lex-fridmans-tesla-auto... I'd say a lower bound on autopilot's record is around 2 per billion miles - that's OK, but not very good. We may be missing autopilot related fatalities; if we missed even a single one, that would make these numbers look outright poor. That's a very rough estimate; but if we want any kind of reliable estimate on autopilot safety, you'd need much more data that we have (also more data on competitors!) Of course the very fact that we can't tell because data is so sparse is good! It means there are few deaths in this category; while driving in general may be dangerous, driving a luxury sedan on an interstate is fairly safe - exactly how safe doesn't really matter.
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All in all - Tesla's safety record looks good compared to the average car, but not very convincing compared to similarly aged similarly priced cars - i.e. Tesla's competition. If you were to base your buying choice on safety, you probably should not buy a Tesla; but definitely should not buy the marketing nonsense. On the upside; it simply doesn't matter much, driving on autopilot-enabled roads is fairly safe anyhow, regardless of whether autopilot helps or harms safety.
As of a recent update a month or two back, it is now. It is ever improving as they roll out new features.
Some of which are safety features. It’s a moving target. Whatever stats or safety records or flaws or concerns you think you know about today can be invalidated tomorrow.
In fact we just got an update tonight. I can’t tell you what’s in it since I haven’t gone downstairs to the car to read the release notes yet.
Humans are horrendous at maintaining constant attention to a task that only requires sporadic attention. If there is a human in the control loop, then it needs to take into account human limitations. Therefore, I'd be very hesitant to assign these as being the fault of the passenger who happens to be sitting in a driver seat.