> Absolutely terrifying that these beta tests are being conducted on public roads without everyone's consent.

Tesla is by far not the worst offender. I rented a Kia EV6 and the lane keeping feature repeatedly tried to kill me within about 5 minutes of turning it on. I’ve had the same experience with plenty of other brand new vehicles. The only difference is Tesla’s implementation actually works so well that people stop paying attention to the road when they shouldn’t.

Just an anecdote, but I test drove 3 different kinds of Tesla (S, 3, Y) and the EV6 as well, and I found the lane keeping/cruise control in the EV6 to be substantially better - I think the EV6 has more and/or higher def cameras, although the S I drove had HW4, it was soon after they were introduced and it's possible the software has not yet been optimized for them, and radars to detect cars which Tesla has removed. For some reason, the Teslas seem to lack object permanence, so cars around you will flicker in and out of existence, that doesn't seem to happen on the Kia. I also learned that Tesla actually has completely different code for the base-level TACC (traffic aware cruise control) versus the $15k Autopilot option. I assumed they were mostly the same with features turned off for TACC, but afaik they're completely different code.

Worrying about it being a “beta” is nonsensical. It’s a hands-on driver-assistance system available to the general public and its safety should be evaluated thusly. The word “beta” is meaningless from a safety perspective and is essentially just advertising that the system’s ultimate goal is to be driverless.

Also, we don’t use affirmative consent for vehicle regulations, because that’s silly. Instead, you are able to weigh in via the normal mechanism of a democracy.

Something like this should be up for a referendum.

We have seriously a lot more major and pressing problems. No one is picking and choosing representatives based on how they feel about beta testing software with the general public.

Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised if the NHTSA rightfully bans large scale operations of this software until overwhelming evidence of it being “safer than humans” have been given.

This also includes fully disclosing the source and training material used to the NHTSA.

> Something like this should be up for a referendum.

That would only increase the cost of achieving agreement by necessitating the purchase of adverts before referendum. It was sold as miraculous. People bought into something they were told is miraculous. They would surely slso vote for the miraculous thing to be allowed.

beta means it's not yet ready for production, and the question is why this beta grade software is being used in production (on street with real people vs only in development environments) where it time and time again hurts and kills people. there is numerous people on hn saying that driving assistance almost killed them but they reacted in time. I don't see if/how those instances could be reported, but obviosly the failure rates could therefore be a lot higher.

high beam assistance should be an easy problem to solve compared to full self driving, yet I turn it off because it's not good enough/blinds oncoming traffic.

imho there should be estrictions to only specific areas/roads for testing, or fsd cars should only be allowed at much lower speed limits.