Tesla touts (and sells as a separate option) "full self-driving" capability. They tout that it can make turns on city streets, obey street lights, yield to city traffic, change lanes, park, etc. This is not intended for the use case of on the highway, well-supervised, between exits.
Tesla labeling a feature "Full Self Driving" certainly isn't helping the situation when the feature clearly does not deliver what the name of the functionality implies.
Popular understanding of the word aside, Tesla often throws around phrases like "full self driving" in the same sentence as "autopilot".
IMHO Tesla has repeatedly overmarketed their actual capabilities. It's clearly starting to catch up with them.
>so much a company can do
Yes, therefore the product should not be legal if these error's can't be minimized or the magnitude of the consequences are disastrous (random unpredictable crashing etc). "Errors" are not all created equal. Some are catastrophic and occur at random.
Tesla does have safeguards to prevent people from dozing off on autopilot: there's sensors on the steering wheel, and apparently some models have front facing cameras. Some people put weights on the steering wheels, but at that point people are taking deliberate efforts to bypass safeguards. If someone jams a shim in their microwave latch, they can turn it on while the door is open and fry themselves. That's comparable to putting weights on Tesla's steering wheel.
What are these features for, if they require 100% attention from the driver to monitor? At that point, why not just drive the car? Is there a goal for these features to take incrementally more and more proportion of the responsibility away from the driver, such that the driver can incrementally devote less attention to monitoring? We all know the answers to these questions. We know what the goal is here.
But the problem is, human's cannot sort of, kind of, partially pay attention to the road and the car. And any feature that propagandizes them that it will take care of incrementally more of the driving responsibility will result in less (rounded to none) attention devoted to by the driver. It's a binary proposition beyond some threshold as mutli-tasking is a myth. Do you see the problem?
As the features appear to be working better and better, the more people will devote less attention to the road even in some bounded range of their drive but this is all it takes for catastrophic errors (that will and are happening because of the nature of failure modes of AI) to occur. And these errors are qualitatively different than the ones humans make. At any given point in time the care can and will just do something completely stupid and dangerous. Swerve into a median, crash into an emergency vehicle, turn sharply into a car in another lane. There's documented occurrences of all of this. When these random catastrophic errors occur, the human will be on the margin paying less attention to the situation than if it was simple cruise control or normal driving.
Over the last 6 years, there's been 16 collisions, one of them fatal. How many of those accidents would have still happened if people were using adaptive cruise control instead of Autopilot? How many were averted because autopilot is more sophisticated than traditional cruise control. Jumping straight to the conclusion that all of these collisions were due to autopilot, and not considering the fact that it might have been the same or even better than the status quo is naive.
Its funny how people rightfully criticize the government and laugh at videos of senator grilling the CEOs of Facebook or Google with stupid questions, but then as soon as a company does something that they don't like, they somehow expect those people to get their shit together and sensibly regulate something as nuanced as autopilot?
For technology to get better, it needs to be stress tested - in this case that means accidents and people dying. Which is pretty much on par with development of car technology since its origin. The warnings on autopilot are there. If you don't want to take the risk, don't use it.
It is an absolutely ridiculous view. I really don’t want a shitty company be able to freely test on the streets their shitty technology that can cause the death of innocents. Are you seriously saying that they are free to increase their profits over the lives of people? On what basis is that ethical or moral? Especially when we talk about a company that jumped into an arguably technically inferior solution by having an incentive to develop their “self-driving” based on visual input only. Their competitors at least take it seriously enough and realize that just because humans can manage with a vision-only system (though a goddamn moving one, not static), lidar and other sensors are required on cars, because ML is nowhere near the capacity of even a worm’s brain, let alone what a human has.
You don't buckle people in and yeet them against the wall that is your optimism! Half the bloody challenge of testing is setting up the conditions for actually getting meaningful data!
This won't be a problem when the regulation equates to: "get these death traps off the road, now". Or, "disable your not-intelligent pseudo-self driving now".
I'm not talking about working on the technology, I'm saying if it doesn't work get it off the market.
It is, definitely. How come they advertise it as FSD (and I know they very much circle around the exact wording, but a good Litmus test to see what is the actual expected output from the ads is to ask a random person on the street and they will definitely think that they are full self driving, while most other cars have some basic lane assist, etc)?
Their marketing is absolutely malicious, what else would keep up their massive hype bubble?
If you are a company building cooking knifes, but sell knifes as sharp as razor blades and people start injuring themselves super badly in their kitchen, saying that "people should be more careful with their kitchen knives" won't get you very far in court and in the public's eyes.
Or did they get rid of that? It sounded like a good compromise to me.
There are tutorials on social media for how to circumvent the driver monitoring for 'autopilot'. See for example, the instance in the article of a Tesla going down the highway with the driver in the back seat.
> Tesla cars come standard with advanced hardware capable of providing Autopilot features, and full self-driving capabilities—through software updates designed to improve functionality over time.
And this is the stuff that is filtered through their communications staff; the stuff Musk has said is even more egregious.
This is so disingenuous.
Go on YouTube and search for people "self-driving" in their Teslas, then do the same for people doing anything remotely the same with standard cruise control.
Tesla and its fanatics want it both ways: it's both the most sophisticated self-driving software on the planet, and only regulations are preventing it from being widely used and reducing traffic accidents, but when accidents happen it's just "cruise control". Pick one.