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Also, ever notice how in none of the Tesla Autopilot accidents, Tesla finds itself guilty? I don't even read these posts from Tesla anymore because I know each

by mtgx 9y ago

Also, ever notice how in none of the Tesla Autopilot accidents, Tesla finds itself guilty? I don't even read these posts from Tesla anymore because I know each one of them is just justification for how Tesla did nothing wrong, and it's the fault of the stupid human driver for using its Autopilot "wrong" and dying in the process. Meanwhile, Tesla is laughing all the way to the bank selling the usage of Autopilot as one of the primary features of its cars. It almost reminds me of how Coke markets its sugar-filled soda "Drink as much as you can at every meal and at any event...but you know, in moderation (because that's what the government makes us say with its dietary guidelines)". Tesla is kind of like that. It tells people to use Autopilot because it's such a great experience and whatnot, but then stuffs its terms and conditions with stuff like "but don't you dare to actually lay back and enjoy the Autopilot driving. You need to watch the car like a hawk, and if you happen to ignore any of our warnings, well it's your stupid-ass fault for ignoring them, even though we wrote everything there in the 11-point font." It's very irresponsible for any company to do stuff like this. I don't know what the exact process is now, but I wish the authorities would be able to get access to un-tampered logs of the accident after the fact from the self-driving car companies. I don't care if it's a car company that has "Elon Musk's reputation" (who I like) or Uber's reputation. These accidents, especially the deadly ones, should be investigated thoroughly. No company will ever have the incentive to show proof that leads to itself becoming guilty. It's the job of the authorities to independently (and hopefully impartially) verify those facts. I'm a big fan of Tesla and its electric vehicles, big fan of Tesla Energy, big fan of SpaceX. But I've always criticized them for the Autopilot because it was obvious to me from day one that they're being very irresponsible with it and putting the blame on humans, when they were marketing it as a self-driving feature (they did for years, even if they don't do it as much now, but they still use the same name), while its system is far from being anywhere close to a complete self-driving system, and thus putting anyone who uses in danger of dying.

snarfy 9y ago
It reminds me of South Park's drink responsibly ad [1]. You could almost replace 'drink' with 'drive' and it would sound like the current autopilot spin. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3osSJSGInQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3osSJSGInQ
Amezarak 9y ago
Tesla's huge success in people's mindspace of self-driving vehicles is baffling to me. Correct me if I'm wrong, but these are the self-driving features in Teslas: - Cruise control maintains speed, will automatically decelerate if a car in front slows down, speed back up if they speed or go away, etc. - Collision avoidance: the car will automatically emergency brake if it believes a collision is imminent. - Lanekeeping: the car will stay in the lane without driver attention, although if it doesn't detect your hands on the wheel with enough frequency, the system will disengage. - The car can park itself. A quick look at Wikipedia tells me it can also change lanes and be "summoned." Most of these features, especially considering cruise control, collision avoidance, and lane-keeping as the core featureset, since at least in 2017, have been in wide deployment among most car manufacturers, down to even cheap economy cars, that people are buying right now without getting on waiting lists or anything of the kind. You can buy a car right now with this core featureset for around ~18k. Not only that, people seem to dramatically overestimate what kind of auto-pilot Teslas have. Speaking with my doctor about it, he assured me that "you just tell the car where to go, and it goes there." How did Teslas get so hyped up in the common man's imagination?
- zmarty 9y ago
  Yeah, I'm going to call BS on this one. More specifically, on the lanekeeping claim. The current non-Tesla implementations are worse or much more limited at the price point you mentioned (and frankly, at most price points).
  - Amezarak 9y ago
    All I can tell you is that the Honda lanekeeping does everything I would expect or want, and its the only one I have a lot of experience with. The only thing that annoys me is that it requires you touch the wheel every now and then. Can you elucidate on what tesla lanekeeping does that others don't?
wilun 9y ago
> It's very irresponsible for any company to do stuff like this. It's very irresponsible for regulation to allow them to do that. And statistically for us to vote for politics that are not against that kind of behavior. Big companies rarely give a shit about killing people in the process of making money, as long as they are not punished for doing that. (And we, btw, mostly don't give a shit when the people being killed live in other countries, even when the process to do so is far more direct than the 1st world problem that interest us here.) People who used to organize those kind of criminal behaviors used to be held responsible for the consequences, but it is more rare now and the laws in various countries have actually been changed so that people managing companies are far less accountable than before for the illegal and otherwise bad things they order. As for companies being accountable, it is usually in punitive money that is order of magnitude less amount than the extra profit they made in doing their shit, so why would them stop? The risk of the CEO being sent to jail would stop them. Ridiculously small fines against the company, in the astonishingly rare cases where they even actually fined, not so.
AsyncAwait 9y ago
Totally agree, which is why I refuse to automatically be hyped about everything that Musk does.

by mtgx 9y ago

snarfy 9y ago

It reminds me of South Park's drink responsibly ad [1]. You could almost replace 'drink' with 'drive' and it would sound like the current autopilot spin. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3osSJSGInQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3osSJSGInQ

Amezarak 9y ago

Tesla's huge success in people's mindspace of self-driving vehicles is baffling to me. Correct me if I'm wrong, but these are the self-driving features in Teslas: - Cruise control maintains speed, will automatically decelerate if a car in front slows down, speed back up if they speed or go away, etc. - Collision avoidance: the car will automatically emergency brake if it believes a collision is imminent. - Lanekeeping: the car will stay in the lane without driver attention, although if it doesn't detect your hands on the wheel with enough frequency, the system will disengage. - The car can park itself. A quick look at Wikipedia tells me it can also change lanes and be "summoned." Most of these features, especially considering cruise control, collision avoidance, and lane-keeping as the core featureset, since at least in 2017, have been in wide deployment among most car manufacturers, down to even cheap economy cars, that people are buying right now without getting on waiting lists or anything of the kind. You can buy a car right now with this core featureset for around ~18k. Not only that, people seem to dramatically overestimate what kind of auto-pilot Teslas have. Speaking with my doctor about it, he assured me that "you just tell the car where to go, and it goes there." How did Teslas get so hyped up in the common man's imagination?

zmarty 9y ago
Yeah, I'm going to call BS on this one. More specifically, on the lanekeeping claim. The current non-Tesla implementations are worse or much more limited at the price point you mentioned (and frankly, at most price points).
- Amezarak 9y ago
  All I can tell you is that the Honda lanekeeping does everything I would expect or want, and its the only one I have a lot of experience with. The only thing that annoys me is that it requires you touch the wheel every now and then. Can you elucidate on what tesla lanekeeping does that others don't?

wilun 9y ago

> It's very irresponsible for any company to do stuff like this. It's very irresponsible for regulation to allow them to do that. And statistically for us to vote for politics that are not against that kind of behavior. Big companies rarely give a shit about killing people in the process of making money, as long as they are not punished for doing that. (And we, btw, mostly don't give a shit when the people being killed live in other countries, even when the process to do so is far more direct than the 1st world problem that interest us here.) People who used to organize those kind of criminal behaviors used to be held responsible for the consequences, but it is more rare now and the laws in various countries have actually been changed so that people managing companies are far less accountable than before for the illegal and otherwise bad things they order. As for companies being accountable, it is usually in punitive money that is order of magnitude less amount than the extra profit they made in doing their shit, so why would them stop? The risk of the CEO being sent to jail would stop them. Ridiculously small fines against the company, in the astonishingly rare cases where they even actually fined, not so.

AsyncAwait 9y ago

Totally agree, which is why I refuse to automatically be hyped about everything that Musk does.