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I didn't really have a problem with Tesla or Autopilot's latest issues until I re-read this sentence: >Autopilot was not operating as designed and as described

by Dwolb 10y ago

I didn't really have a problem with Tesla or Autopilot's latest issues until I re-read this sentence: >Autopilot was not operating as designed and as described to users: specifically, as a driver assistance system that maintains a vehicle's position in lane and adjusts the vehicle's speed to match surrounding traffic. My problem is with Autopilot's branding - it's called AUTOPILOT. The name isn't "Maintain Lane Position" or "Cruise Distance" or something boring that describes it better - it has AUTO in the name. Typical drivers aren't airline pilots who complete thousands of hours in flight training and have heavily regulated schedules. We're just people who are busy and looking for solutions to our problems. If Tesla doesn't want people to think Autopilot functions as crash avoidance/smart vehicle control/better than humans in all situations or blame Tesla for accidents (whether human or machine is at fault) it should come up with a less sexy name.

jasonjei 10y ago
I agree with your post. Having said that, autopilot on airplanes is meant to be a "macro," rather than an autonomous flying function (in that they do not replace a human operator; in fact the pilot programs the instructions into the flight computer). Somehow autopilot's meaning was lost in translation, and people interpreted it to mean they don't have to take control when things go wrong. Perhaps the prefix auto- is what's wrong--people think the car will drive itself. Automobiles contain the prefix auto- yet nobody assumes the car is self-driving. Most people understand it to mean gears don't need to be changed manually (not applicable to Tesla since it's single gear and gains full torque).
- wbillingsley 10y ago
  > Automobiles contain the prefix auto- yet nobody assumes the car is self-driving. Actually, in that regard yes they do -- "auto-mobile" = "moves itself", as in, you don't have to pedal or Fred Flintstone it... > Most people understand it to mean gears don't need to be changed manually No, that'd be "automatic gearbox". As in "Do you drive a manual or an automatic?" So "autopilot" would suggest it does the piloting as well (ie, the stuff the person sitting at the controls -- the common view of a "pilot" -- normally does)
bdcravens 10y ago
Telling is that this letter uses the term "driver assistance system" multiple times. I wonder if that's how they'll market it, or if that phrasing is reserved for PR damage control. (They also use the phrasing, "a death that had taken place in one of its vehicles" as opposed to the common "fatal crash")
- tajen 10y ago
  It's hard to change the name from "Autopilot" to "Merely assist you in straight line, but please regain control when there's a white truck coming from the right [1], and DO NOT TOUCH THE BRAKE [2] because it disengages the emergency stop". It's especially hard when you sell the Autopilot for $2500-$3000 [3]. [1] Reference to the last accidents [2] http://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/05/another-driver-says-teslas-autopilot-failed-to-brake-tesla-says-otherwise/ http://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/05/another-driver-says-tesl... [3] https://www.tesla.com/models/design https://www.tesla.com/models/design see pricing
  - bdcravens 10y ago
    "Driver assistance system" sounds like a good summary, in the sense that it's smarter to say "fire-retardant" instead of "fireproof"
electic 10y ago
Agreed. It should be called "CoPilot"
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Except that copilots tend to be human and thus smarter than autopilots.
  - cobbzilla 10y ago
    how about "CruiseControl+" or some other marketing riff on CC, since that's basically what it is.
Terr_ 10y ago
Exactly, this is a failure of marketing, not technology. Somebody in Tesla made a decision to prioritize "building a brand" and "making a sale" over "accurately communicating product limitations to customers". At a certain point it doesn't matter what you put in the manual or in the fine-print, you've got to ensure the customer has the correct mental model about what they are (or aren't) buying. To clarify, I'm not saying Tesla made a dumb or unforgivable misstep (there will always be a dumber customers) but if they're going to do a (literal) post-mortem, they need to acknowledge that their branding is a factor.
- skrebbel 10y ago
  I like how on Hacker News, Elon Musk gets all the credit when Tesla is awesome, but "Somebody in Tesla made a decision" when people die. Musk made the call. He might not have proposed it, but given how involved he is with the marketing and PR aspect of Tesla, there's no way he didn't OK the decision to call it Autopilot.
  - Animats 10y ago
    Musk personally made the decision to not use LIDAR and rely to a great extent on single-camera vision.[1] Musk, in 2015: "I don’t think you need LIDAR. I think you can do this all with passive optical and then with maybe one forward RADAR. I think that completely solves it without the use of LIDAR. I’m not a big fan of LIDAR, I don’t think it makes sense in this context." The "one forward radar" was the decision that killed. Tesla cars are radar blind at windshield height, which is why the car underran a semitrailer from the side. Most automotive radars have terrible resolution and no steering in elevation. There are better radars[2], but they haven't made it down to automotive yet. [1] http://9to5google.com/2015/10/16/elon-musk-says-that-the-lidar-google-uses-in-its-self-driving-car-doesnt-make-sense-in-a-car-context/ http://9to5google.com/2015/10/16/elon-musk-says-that-the-lid... [2] http://www.fhr.fraunhofer.de/en/businessunits/security/the-ultra-high-resolution-radar-miranda-300.html http://www.fhr.fraunhofer.de/en/businessunits/security/the-u...
  - tangue 10y ago
    Move fast, kill people. Oh wait can't we rebase th ... Damned !
maratd 10y ago
> it has AUTO in the name. So does autocorrect, but I don't see people complaining that banging on the keyboard doesn't produce sonnets. This whole "auto" thing is ridiculous. By the way, it's an automobile and has been for a while ... where's the expectation that it will drive itself? Should we not call them automobiles anymore, in case someone gets the wrong impression? This is silly.
- tmd83 10y ago
  Do you disagree that Tesla is using autopilot and not 'drive assist' or something like that to make the potential think their implementation is so much better than the rest of the world? Or the fact that they don't push so much on keeping the hands on the wheel to make this more comfortable for the users vs. the rest. They are actively trying to exploit the fact people think autopilot is more capable then the rest. Hence you/they can't complain when that perception backfires on them.
  - maratd 10y ago
    > Do you disagree that Tesla is using autopilot and not 'drive assist' or something like that to make the potential think their implementation is so much better than the rest of the world? Their implementation is much better than the competition. http://www.caranddriver.com/features/semi-autonomous-cars-compared-tesla-vs-bmw-mercedes-and-infiniti-feature-the-physiology-of-semi-autonomy-and-test-results-page-6 http://www.caranddriver.com/features/semi-autonomous-cars-co... > Or the fact that they don't push so much on keeping the hands on the wheel to make this more comfortable for the users vs. the rest. I'm glad they don't. Here is why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kv9JYqhFV-M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kv9JYqhFV-M
- wbillingsley 10y ago
  > So does autocorrect, but I don't see people complaining that banging on the keyboard doesn't produce sonnets. But a bucketload of rage-filled complaints about when autocorrect gets it wrong and your email to Sinead was modified to "Dear Pinhead"... :)
prostoalex 10y ago
Isn't the plane's auto-pilot pretty much a pilot assistance system designed to keep the plane at the specified altitude and follow a straight line (heading bug on older systems, GPS coordinates in the flight plan on modern ones)? It's not designed for collision avoidance, runway taxiing, emergency situations, short/soft field landings or departures. It's occasionally used for normal landings (according to https://www.quora.com/How-often-are-commercial-flights-landed-using-autopilot https://www.quora.com/How-often-are-commercial-flights-lande...) but it doesn't seem prevalent.
- detaro 10y ago
  I think an important difference is in the necessary reaction time. Situations in which a plane flying at altitude under automatic control suddenly requires a sub-second reaction by the pilots are extremely rare, in traffic they happen way more often. Obstacles don't suddenly pop up in mid-air, and a lot of infrastructure makes sure other traffic is nicely separated at all times. Thus a plane actually can do most of a flight automatically and it's okay if it has to fall back on not fully attentive humans in edge-cases, because there is some time for error-correction. The car equivalent might be if highways had lanes separated by walls and cars could detect obstacles a few hundred meters away, then taking the hands of the wheel wouldn't be an issue. On real-world streets, you can't be as hands-off as you could be in a plane at 35,000 feet.
- sitharus 10y ago
  You are correct, but I'm constantly surprised by how many people think the pilot taxies to the runway and pushes 'go'. Tesla autopilot works like an aeroplane autopilot actually does, not how people seem to think it does.
- tmd83 10y ago
  As I was saying down the thread, I think its fair to say that Tesla use the autopilot naming because it sounds catchy and better than the terms rest of the world use. I think its a conscious marketing decision to make their look better when its probably not. Everyone in the airlines industry use the same term and the people involved are too informed/trained for their to be confusion. Tesla's branding vastly different from the market is meant to confuse by making them sound better. Thats what they should be penalized for.
wibr 10y ago
Another problem with the name is that autopilots in planes and ships do exactly what the pilot programmed them to do, e.g. hold a certain course. The Tesla autopilot on the other hand tries to intelligently react to the subset of the environment which it see through it sensors, which makes it more unpredictable. I assume that pilots don't have to monitor the behaviour of the autopilot itself, whereas in a Tesla you have to do that and be ready to interfere any second. That doesn't really reduce the workload for the driver, so people just trust the system instead.
- snom380 10y ago
  Pilots do have to monitor the behaviour of the autopilot. Even though they are programmed to do one thing (hold a course or altitude, change to a course or an altitude with a certain rate of change), they rely on potentially faulty sensors and control many parameters to meet the goal. Usually the autopilot will simply disconnect if it detects a problem, but there are examples of autopilots causing passenger injuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72
dlitz 10y ago
The "auto" in "autopilot" stands for automatic, not autonomous. Autopilot systems have existed for decades, and they've always referred to systems that automate the most tedious parts of operating a vehicle, while still requiring a human operator to handle new/unexpected situations.
- givinguflac 10y ago
  Exactly! People seem to get really caught up and adamant about this label. However, airplane autopilot is arguably significantly dumber than Tesla's autopilot. Yet for some reason people expect more even though Tesla has been clear on how limited the use case is.
unclebucknasty 10y ago
>Autopilot was not operating as designed and as described to users: specifically, as a driver assistance system that maintains a vehicle's position in lane and adjusts the vehicle's speed to match surrounding traffic I agree with your comment regarding their branding choice, and I'd add that the design itself is flawed: specifically, the entire notion of the car taking over specific reaction-based functions, but a.) leaving other such functions to the driver and b.) requiring the driver to supervise and override according to split second situations.
al_chemist 10y ago
> My problem is with Autopilot's branding - it's called AUTOPILOT. Quite a fitting name for an AUTOmobile, don't you think?

by Dwolb 10y ago

jasonjei 10y ago

I agree with your post. Having said that, autopilot on airplanes is meant to be a "macro," rather than an autonomous flying function (in that they do not replace a human operator; in fact the pilot programs the instructions into the flight computer). Somehow autopilot's meaning was lost in translation, and people interpreted it to mean they don't have to take control when things go wrong. Perhaps the prefix auto- is what's wrong--people think the car will drive itself. Automobiles contain the prefix auto- yet nobody assumes the car is self-driving. Most people understand it to mean gears don't need to be changed manually (not applicable to Tesla since it's single gear and gains full torque).

wbillingsley 10y ago
> Automobiles contain the prefix auto- yet nobody assumes the car is self-driving. Actually, in that regard yes they do -- "auto-mobile" = "moves itself", as in, you don't have to pedal or Fred Flintstone it... > Most people understand it to mean gears don't need to be changed manually No, that'd be "automatic gearbox". As in "Do you drive a manual or an automatic?" So "autopilot" would suggest it does the piloting as well (ie, the stuff the person sitting at the controls -- the common view of a "pilot" -- normally does)

bdcravens 10y ago

Telling is that this letter uses the term "driver assistance system" multiple times. I wonder if that's how they'll market it, or if that phrasing is reserved for PR damage control. (They also use the phrasing, "a death that had taken place in one of its vehicles" as opposed to the common "fatal crash")

tajen 10y ago
It's hard to change the name from "Autopilot" to "Merely assist you in straight line, but please regain control when there's a white truck coming from the right [1], and DO NOT TOUCH THE BRAKE [2] because it disengages the emergency stop". It's especially hard when you sell the Autopilot for $2500-$3000 [3]. [1] Reference to the last accidents [2] http://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/05/another-driver-says-teslas-autopilot-failed-to-brake-tesla-says-otherwise/ http://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/05/another-driver-says-tesl... [3] https://www.tesla.com/models/design https://www.tesla.com/models/design see pricing
- bdcravens 10y ago
  "Driver assistance system" sounds like a good summary, in the sense that it's smarter to say "fire-retardant" instead of "fireproof"

electic 10y ago

Agreed. It should be called "CoPilot"

TeMPOraL 10y ago
Except that copilots tend to be human and thus smarter than autopilots.
- cobbzilla 10y ago
  how about "CruiseControl+" or some other marketing riff on CC, since that's basically what it is.

Terr_ 10y ago

Exactly, this is a failure of marketing, not technology. Somebody in Tesla made a decision to prioritize "building a brand" and "making a sale" over "accurately communicating product limitations to customers". At a certain point it doesn't matter what you put in the manual or in the fine-print, you've got to ensure the customer has the correct mental model about what they are (or aren't) buying. To clarify, I'm not saying Tesla made a dumb or unforgivable misstep (there will always be a dumber customers) but if they're going to do a (literal) post-mortem, they need to acknowledge that their branding is a factor.

skrebbel 10y ago
I like how on Hacker News, Elon Musk gets all the credit when Tesla is awesome, but "Somebody in Tesla made a decision" when people die. Musk made the call. He might not have proposed it, but given how involved he is with the marketing and PR aspect of Tesla, there's no way he didn't OK the decision to call it Autopilot.
- Animats 10y ago
  Musk personally made the decision to not use LIDAR and rely to a great extent on single-camera vision.[1] Musk, in 2015: "I don’t think you need LIDAR. I think you can do this all with passive optical and then with maybe one forward RADAR. I think that completely solves it without the use of LIDAR. I’m not a big fan of LIDAR, I don’t think it makes sense in this context." The "one forward radar" was the decision that killed. Tesla cars are radar blind at windshield height, which is why the car underran a semitrailer from the side. Most automotive radars have terrible resolution and no steering in elevation. There are better radars[2], but they haven't made it down to automotive yet. [1] http://9to5google.com/2015/10/16/elon-musk-says-that-the-lidar-google-uses-in-its-self-driving-car-doesnt-make-sense-in-a-car-context/ http://9to5google.com/2015/10/16/elon-musk-says-that-the-lid... [2] http://www.fhr.fraunhofer.de/en/businessunits/security/the-ultra-high-resolution-radar-miranda-300.html http://www.fhr.fraunhofer.de/en/businessunits/security/the-u...
- tangue 10y ago
  Move fast, kill people. Oh wait can't we rebase th ... Damned !

maratd 10y ago

> it has AUTO in the name. So does autocorrect, but I don't see people complaining that banging on the keyboard doesn't produce sonnets. This whole "auto" thing is ridiculous. By the way, it's an automobile and has been for a while ... where's the expectation that it will drive itself? Should we not call them automobiles anymore, in case someone gets the wrong impression? This is silly.

tmd83 10y ago
Do you disagree that Tesla is using autopilot and not 'drive assist' or something like that to make the potential think their implementation is so much better than the rest of the world? Or the fact that they don't push so much on keeping the hands on the wheel to make this more comfortable for the users vs. the rest. They are actively trying to exploit the fact people think autopilot is more capable then the rest. Hence you/they can't complain when that perception backfires on them.
- maratd 10y ago
  > Do you disagree that Tesla is using autopilot and not 'drive assist' or something like that to make the potential think their implementation is so much better than the rest of the world? Their implementation is much better than the competition. http://www.caranddriver.com/features/semi-autonomous-cars-compared-tesla-vs-bmw-mercedes-and-infiniti-feature-the-physiology-of-semi-autonomy-and-test-results-page-6 http://www.caranddriver.com/features/semi-autonomous-cars-co... > Or the fact that they don't push so much on keeping the hands on the wheel to make this more comfortable for the users vs. the rest. I'm glad they don't. Here is why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kv9JYqhFV-M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kv9JYqhFV-M
wbillingsley 10y ago
> So does autocorrect, but I don't see people complaining that banging on the keyboard doesn't produce sonnets. But a bucketload of rage-filled complaints about when autocorrect gets it wrong and your email to Sinead was modified to "Dear Pinhead"... :)

prostoalex 10y ago

Isn't the plane's auto-pilot pretty much a pilot assistance system designed to keep the plane at the specified altitude and follow a straight line (heading bug on older systems, GPS coordinates in the flight plan on modern ones)? It's not designed for collision avoidance, runway taxiing, emergency situations, short/soft field landings or departures. It's occasionally used for normal landings (according to https://www.quora.com/How-often-are-commercial-flights-landed-using-autopilot https://www.quora.com/How-often-are-commercial-flights-lande...) but it doesn't seem prevalent.

detaro 10y ago
I think an important difference is in the necessary reaction time. Situations in which a plane flying at altitude under automatic control suddenly requires a sub-second reaction by the pilots are extremely rare, in traffic they happen way more often. Obstacles don't suddenly pop up in mid-air, and a lot of infrastructure makes sure other traffic is nicely separated at all times. Thus a plane actually can do most of a flight automatically and it's okay if it has to fall back on not fully attentive humans in edge-cases, because there is some time for error-correction. The car equivalent might be if highways had lanes separated by walls and cars could detect obstacles a few hundred meters away, then taking the hands of the wheel wouldn't be an issue. On real-world streets, you can't be as hands-off as you could be in a plane at 35,000 feet.
sitharus 10y ago
You are correct, but I'm constantly surprised by how many people think the pilot taxies to the runway and pushes 'go'. Tesla autopilot works like an aeroplane autopilot actually does, not how people seem to think it does.
tmd83 10y ago
As I was saying down the thread, I think its fair to say that Tesla use the autopilot naming because it sounds catchy and better than the terms rest of the world use. I think its a conscious marketing decision to make their look better when its probably not. Everyone in the airlines industry use the same term and the people involved are too informed/trained for their to be confusion. Tesla's branding vastly different from the market is meant to confuse by making them sound better. Thats what they should be penalized for.

wibr 10y ago

Another problem with the name is that autopilots in planes and ships do exactly what the pilot programmed them to do, e.g. hold a certain course. The Tesla autopilot on the other hand tries to intelligently react to the subset of the environment which it see through it sensors, which makes it more unpredictable. I assume that pilots don't have to monitor the behaviour of the autopilot itself, whereas in a Tesla you have to do that and be ready to interfere any second. That doesn't really reduce the workload for the driver, so people just trust the system instead.

snom380 10y ago
Pilots do have to monitor the behaviour of the autopilot. Even though they are programmed to do one thing (hold a course or altitude, change to a course or an altitude with a certain rate of change), they rely on potentially faulty sensors and control many parameters to meet the goal. Usually the autopilot will simply disconnect if it detects a problem, but there are examples of autopilots causing passenger injuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72

dlitz 10y ago

The "auto" in "autopilot" stands for automatic, not autonomous. Autopilot systems have existed for decades, and they've always referred to systems that automate the most tedious parts of operating a vehicle, while still requiring a human operator to handle new/unexpected situations.

givinguflac 10y ago
Exactly! People seem to get really caught up and adamant about this label. However, airplane autopilot is arguably significantly dumber than Tesla's autopilot. Yet for some reason people expect more even though Tesla has been clear on how limited the use case is.

unclebucknasty 10y ago

>Autopilot was not operating as designed and as described to users: specifically, as a driver assistance system that maintains a vehicle's position in lane and adjusts the vehicle's speed to match surrounding traffic I agree with your comment regarding their branding choice, and I'd add that the design itself is flawed: specifically, the entire notion of the car taking over specific reaction-based functions, but a.) leaving other such functions to the driver and b.) requiring the driver to supervise and override according to split second situations.

al_chemist 10y ago

> My problem is with Autopilot's branding - it's called AUTOPILOT. Quite a fitting name for an AUTOmobile, don't you think?