I've generally always considered level 2 or 3 autonomy to be a recipe for disaster, humans can't be expected to remain alert and respond quickly when they aren't doing anything. But at the same time the way Tesla autopilot woks is congruent to autopilots on boats or airplanes. Those won't avoid other vehicles and are usually perfectly happy to let you crash into shoals or mountains.

I'm not sure if you're being serious, but the way "autopilot" works in a private yacht is the captain turns it on and goes below deck and gets drunk with the rest of the crew. It just maintains a heading towards a destination at that point.

You learn very quickly on the water to get out of the way of large private yachts when in open waters. There is literally no one at the helm. Even if they did notice you, they aren't in a position to halt the boats travel.

You left out the part that if there is a collision or loss of life the captain goes to prison.

Same with cars

Drivers get so much leeway that it's not even funny. Commercial air pilots get their licenses temporarily suspended if they're simply accused of being intoxicated.

Short of being drunk, it's pretty difficult to go to prison for killing someone in a car, even if you were driving like a moron.

Not my experience. I knew a kid who went to prison for years after hitting a biker in black with no reflector at night.

Was the biker the police chief's son-in-law, or some rot like that?

Most hit-and-runs don't even result in jail time[1]. But sure, I can believe that hitting and killing the wrong person sometimes results in the law coming down on you like a ton of bricks.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/hit-run-drivers-kill-people-jail-t...

I read the whole article twice but didn't see anything saying that "Most hit-and-runs don't even result in jail time“.

It basically says that statistics on conviction are unknown, and sometimes people don't see jail time.

Autopilot in planes is not remotely as you described. It is used to reduce cognitive load precisely so pilots can pay more attention to higher cognitive demand tasks than maintaining straight and level flight. Such as collision avoidance, radio communication, navigation, briefing, etc.

Your point only alleges that amateur yacht drivers act irresponsibly, not that naval autopilot systems are inherently unsafe.

Garmin released a product that does the radio comms, navigation, and landing in an emergency. https://discover.garmin.com/en-US/autonomi/

If by "radio comms", you mean playing a pre-recorded emergency message on a loop telling everyone to get out of the way.

It can't visually identify non-ADS-B traffic (and I'm not even sure yet if it will avoid ADS-B equipped traffic?), it can't comply with ATC clearances, it can't coordinate with other pilots in the pattern, and it will happily fly your aircraft right into potentially-fatal icing conditions. It certainly can't be used during routine flight.

Garmin Autoland is a wonderful piece of engineering, but even at best it's not a replacement for what a pilot would normally be doing to safely navigate. It's strictly there as a last-resort measure if the pilot is incapacitated.

… and it will happily fly you into a construction crane that was notam’d a couple weeks back ;)

You're 100% correct, but my point is still valid: "autopilot" on a yacht and what tells calls "autopilot" are totally unrelated.

Luckily the seas are very big, so there's much less of a chance of a collision. Not zero though.

The extra dimensionality of roads < seas < skies help a lot. Though I suppose various standard corridors and channels collapse those dimensions somewhat.

Taking human nature into account has driven so much progress in terms of road safety.

Cue corporation selling you "Full Self Driving" for 5 figures, allowing your vehicle to become autonomous. Except you have to be alert and behave as if it wasn't. At all times. Of course.

The usual FSD complaint is that Tesla has been offering it for years, at ascending prices, without any date-certain of delivering it (just tweets predicting it), without refunding it when not delivered after X years. I can easily imagine an eventual class-action suit requiring some % of refund all the way back to the first car purchased with someday-FSD (!).

If they deliver it, then (at that time, and depending on how well it works), the complaints of not-good-enough or dangerous-killing-people could come into play.

The second thing sounds even more dangerous to Tesla - smart to keep delaying (and building up that first risk higher and higher!)

So like Star Citizen bit for cars.

And just one of the disingenuous responses from Tesla is that you could have it all now, or could have, if it wasn't for pesky regulators.

There might be an awkward silence when you ask why as recently as six months ago, it was still happily hopping the curb of roundabouts, or why even to this very day, there's no AEB capability in FSD (if your foot is on the accelerator, the car will consider that a higher priority input than an imminent collision).

Probably because of false positives and removing radar, because "it's not needed".

If anything this just cements why they shouldn't have called it autopilot in the first place.

We have a small and cheap Japanese car that features adaptive cruise control and line assist that works pretty alright. So it’s essentially like line following robot that can adjust its speed to keep a safe following distance and do hard breaking if needed.

It’s feels almost like full self driving when you drive on the highway.

It makes the ride significantly less tiresome but I would say it definitely reduces my attention.

I can totally see how people with more capable systems may treat the car as intelligent enough to drive %100 by itself and became negligent.

See. This is the problem. Where do you draw the line ? I can see somebody who can come and say, adaptive cruise control and lane departure assist which applies slight tourque when the car sees your drift out of lane very helpful to them. next up, adaptive cruise control and lane centering which applies torque most of the time on straight roads but cant do curves. THis is now available most if not all car systems today , in the most basic version without any additional packages.

Then comes some smarter ones like Tesla AP or comma.ai which are pretty good at centering on straight roads, curve roads, wide lanes, lane splitting etc.

Are there cars shipping now with lane centering that can only handle perfectly straight roads? In my experience most manufacturers currently offer at least one model & trim that has lane centering & adaptive cruise that is functionally equivalent to basic AP. In some cases, e.g. SuperCruise, it's significantly better.

Yes there are some. Eg: Acura MDX. It uses the mobileye chipset and can barely make a highway turn. The car is good otherwise, but it in no way compares to the Tesla ADAS (I have daily driven both). The Tesla has done several trips to LA and back with >1hr between touches on California i5. my commute on bay area 280 feels far more natural on Autopilot when cars cut me off etc. I think performance depends significantly on what roads people drive.

I have a Toyota Rav 4 2021 with adaptive cruise control and lane assist, it worked ok on highways, especially not having it before. You have to keep nudging the wheel every 30 seconds or so which made it annoying.

I upgraded to a Comma 3 and it's basically is night and day. The car never hunts from side to side and it uses eye tracking so I don't have to touch the wheel. Again if you have to touch a wheel on a ACC system, just drive the car haha.

So you run Comma AI on a RAV4? I assume the Toyota has to have the requisite packages already optioned from the factory so the hardware is there? I'm just curious, because I'm leaning towards picking up a RAV4 Prime for my wife to use as a daily driver. I'm not 100% sure I care too much about the technology as a practical matter (I had a Tesla, I usually just drove it myself; but I like driving). But it might be fun to dork around with and see what they've built.

Yea Rav4 Hybrid 2021. afaik it doesn't work on the Prime, although you can check the car chart on the comma.ai site to be sure. I like playing with the forks every now and then too.

> Again if you have to touch a wheel on a ACC system, just drive the car haha.

I disagree with this. I use to get RSI type pain from long drives. The constant, small tweaks really took a toll on my hands/wrists/forearms.

When my car's lane centering isn't perfect, it still takes 90% of the force off. It's even more noticeable in windy conditions. Lane centering fights all of the gusts automatically.

Fair enough. I just find the steering wheel nag really really annoying. The future is eye tracking or a combination of eye and wheel nag (maybe every 5 minutes or something)

Where I live and with the kind of driving I do it actually feels safer because I get less tired on longer drives. This is long straight semi rural driving though. I don't use it on tight roads or in traffic. Be interesting to see the statistics on safety of lane assist and adaptive cruise control.

Mine has radar cruise control and "lane assist", which gives you a nudge back if the car drifts, but won't try to follow the lane by itself. Instead, it just beeps at you angrily and stops you killing yourself.

I think that's a good balance, because it's giving you alerts but you're still the one driving.

Yes I have the same thing and it's great. The radar cruise control allows me to stop being focused on maintaining speed and following the car ahead of me and let's me put more attention towards noticing traffic developments ahead, scanning the state of cars around me, and keeping an eye out for various hazards. I wouldn't want lane centering (as opposed to lane keep assist, which I have), because it would be too easy to shutoff and not pay attention to what's going on, and the window between realizing the lane centering is doing something wrong and needing to take over from it is too small for comfort given human reaction times.

Turns out, at least in my own personal experience, that’s not how it works. I don’t think this has been well studied, especially in the context of driving in a vehicle with gaze / attention tracking features.

While my Tesla is working to keep the car perfectly centered in the highway lane, it frees me to focus on higher-level situational awareness during the drive.

In particular, I find I can more quickly and consistently identify and avoid other distracted drivers, because I can look more closely at those features without drifting a few inches out of the middle of the lane.

Just because you are not steering does not mean you have to disengage from driving. The focus on steering as a proxy for engagement is over-simplistic. Manual steering just to lane center can lead to “blind stare” which causes many accidents, so it’s a lossy proxy for attention / focus.

As a new technology is adopted and people become less scared of the change, it eventually comes to a point where a new generation laughs at how things used to be done.

What HN consistently likes to frame as a fundamental human limitation (“driving without actively steering can never be safe”) is in fact just a faulty assumption and purely conjecture in the context of a modern car cockpit with advanced lane keeping, adaptive cruise, object detection, and driver gaze & blink tracking.

One significant difference between Autopilot in Teslas and autopilots in airplanes is that in an airplane you typically have to prove that you can use the autopilot correctly in order to be allowed to fly that plane.

Another difference is that piloting a boat or a plane is usually much less dependent on quick reactions than when you are driving a car. The skies and seas are much more open, with much less traffic than on the road. On a well trimmed plane, I could probably sleep for 10 minutes and there is a good chance nothing will happen. Obviously, it is excessively dangerous, but I am not almost guaranteed to crash as I would be on a car. Flying or sailing is more about precision and planning than it is about reacting.

Having crossed oceans on autopilot, I’ve had three very, very near misses - so even in an environment which is virtually an uninhabited desert in comparison to a road, the risk in not maintaining appropriate and proactive watch is real.

Curious, what near missed?

"Near miss?! It's a near hit! A collision is a near miss! 'Oh what a shame, they nearly missed'" - George Carlin

>"George Carlin" -

never get tired listening to the guy. He is just amazing.

Tanker bound for Panama from Hong Kong, not keeping watch. Woke up to engines and lights.

Sailing boat off American Samoa maintaining watch, but watch crew unable to change course (we did).

Near miss with unidentified floating object.

Plus, if something bad does happen in an airplane, the flight crew typically has on the order of minutes to solve or mitigate the problem, vs. mere seconds in a car.

This is a big difference I think. Humans will get distracted but that's not such a problem if you have a reasonable amount of time to get back into control of the situation, but that's not possible in a car.

Obviously the issue with this argument is that people equate "autopilot" to "magically flies the plane for the pilots" thanks to hollywood movies.

Does it nowadays not mostly do that, including following waypoints and being able to execute most or all of the landing?

Just want to chime in and say that I completely agree. From a technology perspective it’s interesting, from a human factors perspective it’s a complete disaster.

Automating the easiest parts of driving and just expecting a human to jump in and figure out the tricky stuff in an instant is just such a horrible design that it’s hard to see how it’s gone this far.

> I always thought the Autopilot name and the claims about having all the equipment for FSD were basically fraudulent and Tesla would be liable for false advertisement

Same. I thought they'd get slapped hard and forced to stop doing that YEARS AGO.

Instead they doubled down and started selling "full self driving"

lmao.

The whole Musk saga is basically a cautionary tale for regulators, and a classic American story of regulatory capture.

The second something that's not autopilot was marketed as autopilot should have been an instant barrage from the FTC.

The second Musk committed securities fraud for "funding secured" he should have been banned from ever being an officer or director in a publicly listed company.

The second it became clear that Tesla was ignoring the requirement to have a Twitter Nanny on Musk's Twitter, the SEC should have obliterated the Tesla board.

But this is the post-Obama US, where insider trading is fine as long as it's the Right People doing it. Where bankers and investors can take obscene and reckless risk knowing the tax payer will cover their loses. Where a President's son can openly try to sell influence - who knows with what degree of success - and the intelligence agencies won't move a finger. So the Musk saga makes perfect sense.

I agree, but I think this predates Obama. More like post Reagan US? Maybe post Clinton?

And thank god for that. Because we have, as a result, an EV revolution, a space revolution, and a communications revolution. We can only be glad that the regulators were asked to back off what is openly a good thing for America.

This seems dishonest, as the things you mention happened before, or were in motion before, Elon went full-on nutter over the past 2 years, and you make it sound like Elon acting like a nutter is somehow a prerequisite for for these things, when they are clearly not.

If what you took away was that it’s fine to commit securities fraud if you also make rockets then I don’t even know what to say. A person is allowed to do good and bad things.

Musk was not facing overregulation by not having to commit fraud and misleading consumers.

I think Elon Musk is a great person to have at the helm when rapidly growing a company. He’s a visionary and he’s clearly good at taking calculated risks despite what I think about him personally. What’s not clear is whether or not he’s any good at running a large and mature business where you need to be somewhat risk averse to protect revenue streams.

I personally think Tesla would be a better company today without Elon Musk. The reality is they’re not executing on the one thing that makes them money. They’re nearly 2 years late on their pickup truck which is a license to print money in the United States. We’re JUST seeing the first deliveries of the Cybertruck but who the fuck knows When that thing scales. The kind of risks he’s taking (removing radar from cars, losing billions of dollars while putting up Tesla stock as collateral to buy twitter, cryptocurrency nonsense) is just not the type of thing you do when you’re the size Tesla is today.

Tesla is just insanely distracted right now shareholders are eventually going to be punished. If I only knew when, because I believe there’s money to be made.

That's what I thought too, but interestingly, autopilot is mere cruise control for airplanes. It can't take off or land the plane, it doesn't change course. It's definitely not "self-flying". But somehow, the term "autopilot" for cars made me think that the car would drive itself. That's an interesting twist of perception.

Tesla apparently also uses the phrase “Full Self-Driving”?

I don't think the claims are solely about the name "autopilot", but additional names and marketing.

I'm pretty sure autopilot in planes can land them. They don't do this because they need pilots to be trained in how to land them in the event of autopilot failure. I know for a fact there are non-commercial planes, for example, that will detect pilot incapacitation, find the nearest airport, account for local weather, talk to ATC, and land the aircraft.

That’s ILS, AFAIK, not autopilot per se.

Autoland works. But the pilot doesn't turn it on until the tower (other other communication if no tower) says okay, and since nobody else is in the way of course it won't hit anyone.

There is a second mode in some. There it broadcasts emergency, uncontrolled plane will land, get of my way as I won't get out of yours. Useful if the pilot is dead (so a passenger who is told hit that button in an emergency can safely land), but cannot be used for anything else.

Mind linking to evidence regarding the ‘second mode’ you referred to? I have not heard of anything like that, and I am a reporter who covers transportation safety.

Autopilot in planes does change course. In GA it's called GPSS steering and a lot of planes have it. I believe jet planes have more sophisticated autopilot that can change when ATC gives a new heading.

> In GA it's called GPSS

It has a different name because it is different from traditional autopilot that just maintain heading and altitude.

That's how it used to be. In the past, "autopilot" was used by laymen to describe a vehicle control system that could safely drive itself (in contrast to cruise control, which was more limited). For example, in the punchline to this chain letter from 1993:

> [A 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.’

This story is apocryphal, but it illustrates that the popular understanding of 'autopilot' for road vehicles was full self-driving.

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

Will they finally be forced to name it adaptive cruise control, as it should've been from beginning?

No, because "adaptive cruise control" is a different thing that all Teslas have already. It simply refers to cruise control that will slow down if the car in front of you does. All Teslas have that for free, and it's been an industry standard term for at least 20 years. Even cheap cars have adaptive cruise control these days.

The self-driving feature also steers the car, stops at signals and stop signs, merges onto the freeway, etc. Those are all things that adaptive cruise control does not do.

The standard Tesla adaptive cruise control steers the car center lane.

No it doesn't. I know that for sure because I own a Tesla.

Here's the manual page for the feature, described as 'building on' the ACC. You have to opt in to a beta feature, so 'standard' is not strictly correct. But my Model 3 follows center lane without Autopilot.

https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-69AEB32...

This comment is highly misleading; the DoJ probe centers on fraud and "misleading consumers, investors and regulators". It has nothing whatsoever to do with manslaughter, and Reuters never even hinted at this.