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This is a very upsetting response. Yes, the driver could have paid more attention, and yes, he shouldn't have activated Autopilot in an area where he knew Tesla

This is a very upsetting response. Yes, the driver could have paid more attention, and yes, he shouldn't have activated Autopilot in an area where he knew Tesla's autopilot was not working correctly. However, Tesla calling it "Autopilot" should be no longer allowed. It's clear that it is most certainly not that, and customers are not treating this feature in a careful and cautious fashion, and I do believe that's due to Tesla overselling Autopilot's abilities. In addition, its warning systems are obviously not enough to get drivers to take corrective action and ensure their hands are on the wheel. (Why you can take your hands off the wheel at all when engaging autopilot is a mystery to me.)

supreme_sublime 9y ago
I see your point on calling it "Autopilot", but if you think about the application of the term in terms of aviation, I think it makes more sense. Autopilot in planes won't land the plane for you. It basically will just keep you at a certain elevation and direction. I think that Tesla's Autopilot function is comparable to planes. That's probably how they will justify it. However there might be a legitimate point in that people don't have that kind of understanding of what "Autopilot" means.
- mikepurvis 9y ago
  Aviation autopilots handle flying duties in a giant expanse of open sky. It's a way, way easier job to do than navigating a highway from behind a steering wheel. So even if the "capabilities" may be comparable between the two systems, the amount of supervision they require is not, so I don't think they should use the term. It may be "lane-keeping cruise control" isn't nearly as sexy, but it doesn't establish unrealistic expectations which get people killed.
  - deleted 9y ago
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- deleted 9y ago
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- slavik81 9y ago
  > Autopilot in planes won't land the plane for you. For unmanned aircraft, autoland is an safety feature. After loss of link, an autopilot might be configured to land at a designated location, rather than just circling until it runs out of fuel and drops out of the sky. Though admittedly, crashing in a safe place is less serious when the vehicle has no people in it. The Tesla autopilot needs much closer supervision than any of the autopilots I've worked with. That's more a result of its domain than of its sophistication, but it still makes me very uncomfortable with the name.
  - chrisper 9y ago
    Autoland is also a safety feature for manned aircraft because it allows you to land in bad visibility or avoid accidents like the one at SFO a couple of years ago.
    - greglindahl 9y ago
      Excessive reliance on features like autoland was actually the cause of that SFO accident, according to the NTSB.
      - chrisper 9y ago
        But ILS (the autoland system on ground) was disabled that day. Are we talking about two different incidents?
        greglindahl 9y ago
        No, did you read the accident report which talked about the pilots being unable to land the plane because they were used to the computer doing most of the work?
- raverbashing 9y ago
  Well, people in aviation are more aware (hopefully) of the limitations of the systems and even then gets on snags. I agree, Tesla shouldn't call it autopilot, call it Highway Assistance or something. Or even, at this point, I don't see why it should even exist, if it fails on basic situations.
- greedo 9y ago
  Actually autopilots in airliners, and some military jets ARE capable of landing aircraft.
  - dingaling 9y ago
    And have been doing commercially so since 1966! First Cat III autoland aircraft was the Shorts Belfast freighter. Sud Caravelle and HS Trident airliners started at lower categories and worked up to III.
- lifeformed 9y ago
  In a domain like marketing, it doesn't matter what something technically means, but what people think it means.
- gamblor956 9y ago
  Autopilots can and do land planes; the first autopilot landing was decades ago! They simply don't as a matter of practice so that pilots can maintain their skills during landing, which is the most crucial and dangerous part of the flight. Additionally...Autopilot in planes is hands off. The pilots look at the gauges but they're not actively maintaining their grip on the controls.
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    Now you're damning Tesla because of a safety feature: the point of keeping the hands on the wheel is that it's a way of keeping the driver alert.
    - gamblor956 9y ago
      No, I'm damning Tesla because they sell the vehicle as self-driving when it cannot, and moreover "require" the driver to maintain superficial alertness without actually enforcing alertness in a reasonable matter like all of their major competitors do.
      - greglindahl 9y ago
        Wow. You sure are an expert in alertness.
selectout 9y ago
A big part of being allowed to take your hands off the wheel is probably "how do I detect the hands are on the wheel?". In current S/X with no interior camera the way autopilot works is you have to "yank" the wheel every now and then to prove you have your hands on. Requiring constant "yanking" wouldn't work, and there are often long stretches of roads on highways (where Autopilot is meant to work) that wouldn't require any movement of the wheel at all so they wouldn't know the difference between hands on or off unless you "yanked" it.
- brandon272 9y ago
  Every time I learn about how these cars are handling things I end up disappointed and concerned because the actual implementation is way less impressive and seemingly less foolproof than I - and I'm sure many other people - are assuming they are. I would have never guessed "hands on wheel" is detected only if the driver yanks the wheel. I figured it was camera based or that the wheel had capacitive sensors.
  - freerobby 9y ago
    The steering wheel detects torque. Generally if your hands are on the wheel, they exert enough torque through natural movements for the vehicle to detect them. In rare cases, where a road is straight and a driver's hands are perfectly balanced, the car will flash a warning, in effect telling the driver to provide some brief feedback. The slightest of forces on the wheel will quell the warning (much less force than is required to move the steering wheel).
    - selectout 9y ago
      Are you talking about vehicles in general or Teslas? I've had a Model X for about a year now and can say that just having hands on the wheel definitely does not generate enough torque to deter the warnings on Autopilot, it definitely requires a "yank".
      - freerobby 9y ago
jhall1468 9y ago
Autopilot is a marketing term here. It's correct if we think of Autopilot = autonomous but it isn't. The thing alarms at you (visually and via sound) when you take your hands off the wheel. The fact that drivers ignore that isn't Tesla's fault, and saying it's "not enough" is kind of absurd. What the hell are they going to do if you take your hands off the wheel? Stop the car in the middle of a freeway? I could use your exact same argument to say Ford isn't doing enough to force people to put on their seat belt. It's a silly argument. It provides seatbelts, alarms when you fail to put it on. At that point, any harm is user-error. That's the exact same case here.
- redial 9y ago
  > Stop the car in the middle of a freeway? Yes. When the alternative is having a crash they should find a way to stop. [edit: of course I don't mean to suddenly stop. But if the system can't trust the driver is alert it should disengage or stop. As we've seen now multiple times, if it continues it will result in a crash.] The current behavior is not only dangerous to the driver of a tesla. It puts everyone in the road at risk, most of whom have no contract with tesla and never agreed to be guinea-pigs in their so-called "autonomous" experiment.
  - Jemmeh 9y ago
    Stopping in the middle of the road is dangerous (people will crash into you) and it would also be hard to make something have a feature to pull them off the road. If the computer reads it wrong you'll be in a ditch from the car trying to pull you off the road into something with no shoulder. The shoulder of a road is also dangerous as well even if there is a proper one because people often do not stay exactly in their lane. This is why officers often come around to the passenger side.
    - jakobegger 9y ago
      Just make the car turn on the warning lights and gently come to a stop when the driver lets go of the steering wheel or is otherwise not paying attention. There are two possibilities: 1) The driver is actually incapacitated. Then slowing down and stopping is a million times safer than continuing to drive. 2) The driver was looking at his mobile phone. Then he'll probably quickly react and take control of the car again. I don't see the scenario where continuing to drive is safe when the car knows the driver isn't paying attention.
xvf22 9y ago
It'll work 99% of the time and lull you into a false sense of security. The other 1% of the time you better be ready to take over with little notice or there's a chance you'll end up dead. And with automatic updates a section of road that has been fine for a year suddenly tries to kill you... Blaming the victim certainly doesn't sit well with me.
- waitwhatt 9y ago
  I totally agree. I am a massive fan of Tesla but this response is absolutely atrocious and disrespectful. They refuse to acknowledge a bug in THEIR software which drove his car in to a concrete barrier and pin all the blame on him. Even so far as to tease him and ask why he would even use their product in that area (which Tesla allows). It must feel so so so sad to have your loved one die and then to read this heartless BS from tesla.
- mlamat 9y ago
  I also always say this to others. It doesn't matter if it works 99.9% of the time. It took them maybe 10 years to get the software to this point. But it will take 50 years to solve the rest. And nobody is going to use the systems before that.
spurgu 9y ago
>However, Tesla calling it "Autopilot" should be no longer allowed. Meh, autopilots on boats don't do anything more than steer a straight compass course.
- Someone1234 9y ago
  That's inaccurate. Many marine autopilots integrate with AIS, sonar, and charts for accident avoidance and alerts. For example on some larger ships it is able to calculate if at the current speed a collision would occur and reduce speed to avoid it. Some can do "port to port" auto-steer, taking the vesicle through narrow channels.
  - spurgu 9y ago
    We are both accurate. I was talking about boats, not ships. My point still stands - ships are required by Collision Regulations to keep a lookout at all times. And yet they are called "autopilots". Even the most crude of devices that I described (that is used on pleasure boats).

supreme_sublime 9y ago

I see your point on calling it "Autopilot", but if you think about the application of the term in terms of aviation, I think it makes more sense. Autopilot in planes won't land the plane for you. It basically will just keep you at a certain elevation and direction. I think that Tesla's Autopilot function is comparable to planes. That's probably how they will justify it. However there might be a legitimate point in that people don't have that kind of understanding of what "Autopilot" means.

mikepurvis 9y ago
Aviation autopilots handle flying duties in a giant expanse of open sky. It's a way, way easier job to do than navigating a highway from behind a steering wheel. So even if the "capabilities" may be comparable between the two systems, the amount of supervision they require is not, so I don't think they should use the term. It may be "lane-keeping cruise control" isn't nearly as sexy, but it doesn't establish unrealistic expectations which get people killed.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
slavik81 9y ago
> Autopilot in planes won't land the plane for you. For unmanned aircraft, autoland is an safety feature. After loss of link, an autopilot might be configured to land at a designated location, rather than just circling until it runs out of fuel and drops out of the sky. Though admittedly, crashing in a safe place is less serious when the vehicle has no people in it. The Tesla autopilot needs much closer supervision than any of the autopilots I've worked with. That's more a result of its domain than of its sophistication, but it still makes me very uncomfortable with the name.
- chrisper 9y ago
  Autoland is also a safety feature for manned aircraft because it allows you to land in bad visibility or avoid accidents like the one at SFO a couple of years ago.
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    Excessive reliance on features like autoland was actually the cause of that SFO accident, according to the NTSB.
    - chrisper 9y ago
      But ILS (the autoland system on ground) was disabled that day. Are we talking about two different incidents?
      - greglindahl 9y ago
        No, did you read the accident report which talked about the pilots being unable to land the plane because they were used to the computer doing most of the work?
raverbashing 9y ago
Well, people in aviation are more aware (hopefully) of the limitations of the systems and even then gets on snags. I agree, Tesla shouldn't call it autopilot, call it Highway Assistance or something. Or even, at this point, I don't see why it should even exist, if it fails on basic situations.
greedo 9y ago
Actually autopilots in airliners, and some military jets ARE capable of landing aircraft.
- dingaling 9y ago
  And have been doing commercially so since 1966! First Cat III autoland aircraft was the Shorts Belfast freighter. Sud Caravelle and HS Trident airliners started at lower categories and worked up to III.
lifeformed 9y ago
In a domain like marketing, it doesn't matter what something technically means, but what people think it means.
gamblor956 9y ago
Autopilots can and do land planes; the first autopilot landing was decades ago! They simply don't as a matter of practice so that pilots can maintain their skills during landing, which is the most crucial and dangerous part of the flight. Additionally...Autopilot in planes is hands off. The pilots look at the gauges but they're not actively maintaining their grip on the controls.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  Now you're damning Tesla because of a safety feature: the point of keeping the hands on the wheel is that it's a way of keeping the driver alert.
  - gamblor956 9y ago
    No, I'm damning Tesla because they sell the vehicle as self-driving when it cannot, and moreover "require" the driver to maintain superficial alertness without actually enforcing alertness in a reasonable matter like all of their major competitors do.
    - greglindahl 9y ago
      Wow. You sure are an expert in alertness.

selectout 9y ago

A big part of being allowed to take your hands off the wheel is probably "how do I detect the hands are on the wheel?". In current S/X with no interior camera the way autopilot works is you have to "yank" the wheel every now and then to prove you have your hands on. Requiring constant "yanking" wouldn't work, and there are often long stretches of roads on highways (where Autopilot is meant to work) that wouldn't require any movement of the wheel at all so they wouldn't know the difference between hands on or off unless you "yanked" it.

brandon272 9y ago
Every time I learn about how these cars are handling things I end up disappointed and concerned because the actual implementation is way less impressive and seemingly less foolproof than I - and I'm sure many other people - are assuming they are. I would have never guessed "hands on wheel" is detected only if the driver yanks the wheel. I figured it was camera based or that the wheel had capacitive sensors.
- freerobby 9y ago
  The steering wheel detects torque. Generally if your hands are on the wheel, they exert enough torque through natural movements for the vehicle to detect them. In rare cases, where a road is straight and a driver's hands are perfectly balanced, the car will flash a warning, in effect telling the driver to provide some brief feedback. The slightest of forces on the wheel will quell the warning (much less force than is required to move the steering wheel).
  - selectout 9y ago
    Are you talking about vehicles in general or Teslas? I've had a Model X for about a year now and can say that just having hands on the wheel definitely does not generate enough torque to deter the warnings on Autopilot, it definitely requires a "yank".
    - freerobby 9y ago

jhall1468 9y ago

Autopilot is a marketing term here. It's correct if we think of Autopilot = autonomous but it isn't. The thing alarms at you (visually and via sound) when you take your hands off the wheel. The fact that drivers ignore that isn't Tesla's fault, and saying it's "not enough" is kind of absurd. What the hell are they going to do if you take your hands off the wheel? Stop the car in the middle of a freeway? I could use your exact same argument to say Ford isn't doing enough to force people to put on their seat belt. It's a silly argument. It provides seatbelts, alarms when you fail to put it on. At that point, any harm is user-error. That's the exact same case here.

redial 9y ago
> Stop the car in the middle of a freeway? Yes. When the alternative is having a crash they should find a way to stop. [edit: of course I don't mean to suddenly stop. But if the system can't trust the driver is alert it should disengage or stop. As we've seen now multiple times, if it continues it will result in a crash.] The current behavior is not only dangerous to the driver of a tesla. It puts everyone in the road at risk, most of whom have no contract with tesla and never agreed to be guinea-pigs in their so-called "autonomous" experiment.
- Jemmeh 9y ago
  Stopping in the middle of the road is dangerous (people will crash into you) and it would also be hard to make something have a feature to pull them off the road. If the computer reads it wrong you'll be in a ditch from the car trying to pull you off the road into something with no shoulder. The shoulder of a road is also dangerous as well even if there is a proper one because people often do not stay exactly in their lane. This is why officers often come around to the passenger side.
  - jakobegger 9y ago
    Just make the car turn on the warning lights and gently come to a stop when the driver lets go of the steering wheel or is otherwise not paying attention. There are two possibilities: 1) The driver is actually incapacitated. Then slowing down and stopping is a million times safer than continuing to drive. 2) The driver was looking at his mobile phone. Then he'll probably quickly react and take control of the car again. I don't see the scenario where continuing to drive is safe when the car knows the driver isn't paying attention.

xvf22 9y ago

It'll work 99% of the time and lull you into a false sense of security. The other 1% of the time you better be ready to take over with little notice or there's a chance you'll end up dead. And with automatic updates a section of road that has been fine for a year suddenly tries to kill you... Blaming the victim certainly doesn't sit well with me.

waitwhatt 9y ago
I totally agree. I am a massive fan of Tesla but this response is absolutely atrocious and disrespectful. They refuse to acknowledge a bug in THEIR software which drove his car in to a concrete barrier and pin all the blame on him. Even so far as to tease him and ask why he would even use their product in that area (which Tesla allows). It must feel so so so sad to have your loved one die and then to read this heartless BS from tesla.
mlamat 9y ago
I also always say this to others. It doesn't matter if it works 99.9% of the time. It took them maybe 10 years to get the software to this point. But it will take 50 years to solve the rest. And nobody is going to use the systems before that.

spurgu 9y ago

>However, Tesla calling it "Autopilot" should be no longer allowed. Meh, autopilots on boats don't do anything more than steer a straight compass course.

Someone1234 9y ago
That's inaccurate. Many marine autopilots integrate with AIS, sonar, and charts for accident avoidance and alerts. For example on some larger ships it is able to calculate if at the current speed a collision would occur and reduce speed to avoid it. Some can do "port to port" auto-steer, taking the vesicle through narrow channels.
- spurgu 9y ago
  We are both accurate. I was talking about boats, not ships. My point still stands - ships are required by Collision Regulations to keep a lookout at all times. And yet they are called "autopilots". Even the most crude of devices that I described (that is used on pleasure boats).