3 ms·

Trust me, it's still a huge relief. A day and night difference. Try it on a long drive, like LA to San Francisco and you'll see what I mean. It kind of feels li

Trust me, it's still a huge relief. A day and night difference. Try it on a long drive, like LA to San Francisco and you'll see what I mean. It kind of feels like you're in the passenger seat rather than the drivers seat, but you can still grab the controls if you need to.

alkonaut 9y ago
If it allows the driver to e.g. reply to a text message on his phone, then it's dangerous. Either it requires the driver to occasionally take over and handle a situation on short notice, then the driver should have hands on the wheel and eyes forward (and the car should ensure this by alerting and slowing down immediately if the driver isn't paying attention). Or the driver isn't required to pay attention and take over occasionally, and then it's fine to reply to that email on the phone while driving. I see no future in which there is a possible middle ground between these two levels of autonomy.
- quotemstr 9y ago
  Regular manual automotive controls, in practice, "allow[] the driver to...reply to a text message". Illegal or not, it's done by millions of people every day, and for the most part, they don't crash. You'd have to actually add control instability to the car to force the kind of attention you want out of drivers, and nobody would buy a car with this deliberately annoying handling.
  - alkonaut 9y ago
    There is a double standard here: cars with autonomous features are held to the new standard, meat drivers are held to the old standard. Just like we will probably never accept (neither socially nor legally) autonomous drivers that aren't at least an order of magnitude safer than human drivers, we will likely continue to accept drivers not paying attention to their manual controls - but we do not accept drivers not paying enough attention to take over after their AI driver. > nobody would buy a car with this deliberately annoying handling. Exactly. And since this is the only way of making a reasonably safe level 3 car, this is also why many car manufacturers have actively chosen to not develop level 3 autonomous cars (because they are either not safe OR annoying - and either way it's a tough sale)
- MPSimmons 9y ago
  This isn't a black and white scenario. I use AP for probably 50 miles of my 60 mile round trip commute. Here's how it breaks down for me: In the morning, I leave at 5:30am. There is constant moving traffic at 60-80mph on the first leg of my trip (6 miles). I drive manually, or with AP, and I pay full attention, 100% of this time. If I'm using AP, it's because it's at least as reliable as I am staying in lanes. I then change interstates. I do this in manual mode almost every time. AP isn't great at dealing with changing multiple lanes quickly and tightly like traffic often requires. Once I'm on the new interstate, I get into my intended lane (second from the left), put the car in AP, and we have what you'd consider stop and go traffic for a few miles. At this point, I open the can of soda I brought. I keep a hand on the wheel, and I pay attention, but I'm more relaxed than I was earlier, when I was doing 60-80mph. At this point, the only thing that I need to do is to respond to someone jumping into my lane and cutting me off (which the AP deals with, but I have more faith in my ability to slam the brakes), or road debris, which at this speed, is not a problem that needs less than a second of response time. There's a slow steady 40mph drive that I'm in full AP for, drinking my soda and paying attention, and then the traffic thins out, and I notice that I'm starting to lag behind cars, because my AP has a set max of 70MPH from back where the speed limit was 65mph (even though I was only going 20-40). At this point, both hands on the wheel, full attention, and I increase the AP max to 75 or 80, depending on how much traffic I'm in. I switch it back over to manual to make the lane changes necessary to hit my exit, and I'm manual until I park my car at work. On the way home, I'm in stop and go traffic for an hour. When I'm 'going', I'm going 5-10mph. I am in full AP mode 95% of this time, and I could take a nap at this point, and it wouldn't actually be unsafe. I'm safer with AP than manual at this point, because my attention fades if not and I could drift lanes, or bump the car in front of me. Which I've seen happen to other people countless times, and which just increases the amount of time everyone else is in traffic, too. Even the most egregious lane jumper can't get into my lane too fast for AP at this stage of my commute. I just set the follow distance to 2, and listen to audio books while I browse twitter or facebook. I look at what's going on out the windshield, but it's virtually unchanging. Like the thousands of people surrounding me, I'm slowly creeping forward, waiting on the 20-30 miles to pass. For an hour and a half.
- omarforgotpwd 9y ago
  Newsflash: People are replying to text messages with and without AutoPilot. AutoPilot just makes doing so safer
  - alkonaut 9y ago
    This is the same non-argument - people don’t want safer (in that case a crappy autopilot that’s only slightly better than a human driver would be a viable product) - they just don’t accept any notion of unsafety in new tech. The bottom line is that people don’t accept any risk at all involving autonomous driving - regardless of whether the alternative/old tech was worse. So, to put it very bluntly, people accept being hit by a texting person not paying attention for 1 second. People don’t accept being hit by a person in a level 3 autonomous vehicle not paying attention for 10 seconds - and that’s regardless of the relative safety of the two systems. Obviously if you use Autopilot in bumper to bumper traffic this is an improvement, and a huge improvement over texting while manually driving. But texting at highway speed is thankfully rare when manually driving and should be just as outlawed with AP.
mtgx 9y ago
Again, you're making the same mistake op talked about - that the Autopilot works 80-90% so you'll keep letting it drive you while you relax, which means it's just a matter of time until you'll crash.
jijojv 9y ago
You could achieve the same level of comfort today on many common cars with adaptive cruise control. Autopilot gives you a false sense of security when it works great 90% of the time.

alkonaut 9y ago

If it allows the driver to e.g. reply to a text message on his phone, then it's dangerous. Either it requires the driver to occasionally take over and handle a situation on short notice, then the driver should have hands on the wheel and eyes forward (and the car should ensure this by alerting and slowing down immediately if the driver isn't paying attention). Or the driver isn't required to pay attention and take over occasionally, and then it's fine to reply to that email on the phone while driving. I see no future in which there is a possible middle ground between these two levels of autonomy.

quotemstr 9y ago
Regular manual automotive controls, in practice, "allow[] the driver to...reply to a text message". Illegal or not, it's done by millions of people every day, and for the most part, they don't crash. You'd have to actually add control instability to the car to force the kind of attention you want out of drivers, and nobody would buy a car with this deliberately annoying handling.
- alkonaut 9y ago
  There is a double standard here: cars with autonomous features are held to the new standard, meat drivers are held to the old standard. Just like we will probably never accept (neither socially nor legally) autonomous drivers that aren't at least an order of magnitude safer than human drivers, we will likely continue to accept drivers not paying attention to their manual controls - but we do not accept drivers not paying enough attention to take over after their AI driver. > nobody would buy a car with this deliberately annoying handling. Exactly. And since this is the only way of making a reasonably safe level 3 car, this is also why many car manufacturers have actively chosen to not develop level 3 autonomous cars (because they are either not safe OR annoying - and either way it's a tough sale)
MPSimmons 9y ago
This isn't a black and white scenario. I use AP for probably 50 miles of my 60 mile round trip commute. Here's how it breaks down for me: In the morning, I leave at 5:30am. There is constant moving traffic at 60-80mph on the first leg of my trip (6 miles). I drive manually, or with AP, and I pay full attention, 100% of this time. If I'm using AP, it's because it's at least as reliable as I am staying in lanes. I then change interstates. I do this in manual mode almost every time. AP isn't great at dealing with changing multiple lanes quickly and tightly like traffic often requires. Once I'm on the new interstate, I get into my intended lane (second from the left), put the car in AP, and we have what you'd consider stop and go traffic for a few miles. At this point, I open the can of soda I brought. I keep a hand on the wheel, and I pay attention, but I'm more relaxed than I was earlier, when I was doing 60-80mph. At this point, the only thing that I need to do is to respond to someone jumping into my lane and cutting me off (which the AP deals with, but I have more faith in my ability to slam the brakes), or road debris, which at this speed, is not a problem that needs less than a second of response time. There's a slow steady 40mph drive that I'm in full AP for, drinking my soda and paying attention, and then the traffic thins out, and I notice that I'm starting to lag behind cars, because my AP has a set max of 70MPH from back where the speed limit was 65mph (even though I was only going 20-40). At this point, both hands on the wheel, full attention, and I increase the AP max to 75 or 80, depending on how much traffic I'm in. I switch it back over to manual to make the lane changes necessary to hit my exit, and I'm manual until I park my car at work. On the way home, I'm in stop and go traffic for an hour. When I'm 'going', I'm going 5-10mph. I am in full AP mode 95% of this time, and I could take a nap at this point, and it wouldn't actually be unsafe. I'm safer with AP than manual at this point, because my attention fades if not and I could drift lanes, or bump the car in front of me. Which I've seen happen to other people countless times, and which just increases the amount of time everyone else is in traffic, too. Even the most egregious lane jumper can't get into my lane too fast for AP at this stage of my commute. I just set the follow distance to 2, and listen to audio books while I browse twitter or facebook. I look at what's going on out the windshield, but it's virtually unchanging. Like the thousands of people surrounding me, I'm slowly creeping forward, waiting on the 20-30 miles to pass. For an hour and a half.
omarforgotpwd 9y ago
Newsflash: People are replying to text messages with and without AutoPilot. AutoPilot just makes doing so safer
- alkonaut 9y ago
  This is the same non-argument - people don’t want safer (in that case a crappy autopilot that’s only slightly better than a human driver would be a viable product) - they just don’t accept any notion of unsafety in new tech. The bottom line is that people don’t accept any risk at all involving autonomous driving - regardless of whether the alternative/old tech was worse. So, to put it very bluntly, people accept being hit by a texting person not paying attention for 1 second. People don’t accept being hit by a person in a level 3 autonomous vehicle not paying attention for 10 seconds - and that’s regardless of the relative safety of the two systems. Obviously if you use Autopilot in bumper to bumper traffic this is an improvement, and a huge improvement over texting while manually driving. But texting at highway speed is thankfully rare when manually driving and should be just as outlawed with AP.

mtgx 9y ago

Again, you're making the same mistake op talked about - that the Autopilot works 80-90% so you'll keep letting it drive you while you relax, which means it's just a matter of time until you'll crash.

jijojv 9y ago

You could achieve the same level of comfort today on many common cars with adaptive cruise control. Autopilot gives you a false sense of security when it works great 90% of the time.