6 ms·

Tesla has no autopilot or self driving capabilities. It is just something called Adaptive Cruise Control and Lane Assist in other vehicles with some minor addit

Tesla has no autopilot or self driving capabilities. It is just something called Adaptive Cruise Control and Lane Assist in other vehicles with some minor additions. Tesla’s marketing gives the impression that it is much more, but it isn’t.

nicky0 8y ago
If Tesla calls it Autopilot mode, you can hardly blame everyone else doing so.
- michaelmior 8y ago
  Just because Tesla calls it Autopilot doesn't absolve drivers of responsibility in my mind. Especially since Tesla explicitly says drivers should still be attentive. That said, I agree it's poor marketing.
  - RobLach 8y ago
    Autopilot is not a word made up by marketing though. It’s already defined: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/automatic_pilot https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/automatic_pilot “A device for keeping an aircraft on a set course without the intervention of the pilot.” If you enable an autopilot, intervention by the pilot is not necessary by definition
    - hyperbovine 8y ago
      “By definition“ you are not driving a car.
    - cynix 8y ago
      > If you enable an autopilot, intervention by the pilot is not necessary by definition Only if you're happy for the aircraft to continue travelling in the same set course. I guess by the same virtue, driver intervention is also not required if you're willing to let the vehicle travel in the same direction and disregard the firetruck ahead... Tesla's Autopilot is perfectly capable of maintaining direction/speed of travel, and it even follows the curves of the road most of the time which is presumably more than an aircraft autopilot system can do. It is the driver who is not willing to disregard the obstacles ahead, the same way presumably aircraft pilots are not willing to disregard obstacles in their course and will take over control of the aircraft if there is one. Nothing wrong with our tendency to avoid obstacles in order to not die, of course, but it's not the autopilot's job since the definition of autopilot is to maintain a set course, as you quoted. You may be confusing it with full self-driving, which doesn't exist yet.
    - readams 8y ago
      Aircraft autopilot will happily fly you into a mountain or other aircraft.
      - King-Aaron 8y ago
        I'm glad someone mentioned this. It's frustrating that the general public doesn't understand what the word 'autopilot' means... Otto the automatic pilot from the movie Airplane! isn't what an automatic pilot is. However, since it is commonly misrepresented, they should change the name of Tesla's system.
      - Twisell 8y ago
        While true, there is like a lot of redondant auxiliary warning system in a plane that work independently of the autopilot. So if autopilot tried to fly you into a mountain, the humans pilots would have to willingly ignore all the warnings thrown at them (it happened recently, and was qualified as human error). What is terrifying with Tesla autopilot is that there is seemingly not enough auxiliary warning system. With only two of them (hand on wheel or stop, static object detection) you could have avoided almost all Tesla crashes. They putted beta vehicle in hand of customers, that’s a choice, now they have to live with it. Edit: first sentence was misleading
    - Sharlin 8y ago
      General public has little idea of what a plane autopilot can or cannot do. Somewhat ironically, the Tesla Autopilot is quite close to a real plane autopilot in that it’s a rather dumb system that cannot adjust to unexpected events. But Joe R. Driver reads Tesla marketing material and doesn’t realize that, dictionary definition notwithstanding.
  - watwut 8y ago
    So, now that we pinpointed who is responsible, can we discuss which design leads to many people making deadly errors and which design leads to few people making deadly errors? And how much responsibility the designer when choosing between former and latter?
  - rebuilder 8y ago
    It seems like deceptive marketing to me. If I sold shoes with proprietary NailStopper soles, with a disclaimer the soles don't actually stop nails and it's up to the user to make sure they don't step on any, would that be cool?
    - michaelmior 8y ago
      I'm not saying the marketing is cool. Although your example is fundamentally different since in the "Autopilot" case, you're not just dealing with your own safety, but the safety of others. (Presumably you're not putting others in danger by wearing NailStopper shoes and continuing to step on nails.)
      - rebuilder 8y ago
        Fair enough. I guess this is a case of something lost in translation. To me, bad marketing is when the marketing doesn't help sell the product. Deceptive marketing misleads the consumer as to what they're being enticed to purchase.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- kingkongjaffa 8y ago
  Tesla's marketing has directly contributed to a number of deaths now.
  - JoshCole 8y ago
    It's also directly prevented a number of deaths. The same is true of the consumption of water. However, I can count the number of deaths caused by Tesla on one hand, but I cannot count the number of deaths caused by the consumption of water on one hand [1][2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autonomous_car_fatalities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autonomous_car_fatalit... [2]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-drinking-too-much-water-can-kill/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-... If you really care about road safety? Encourage the use of Uber among the intoxicated. It saves more than a handful of lives in this world in which more than a hundred thousand people die each day.
    - perl4ever 8y ago
      People frequently argue that "X hasn't caused very many deaths compared to Y" and thus the dangers of X are insignificant, while ignoring that people are reacting in a frightened way to X because it might scale such that it soon becomes significant.
      - JoshCole 8y ago
        What I was hoping to show was that there are things where the property of causing deaths doesn't mean that the thing itself was a bad idea. Water is an example of that. Going without water is fatal. Getting water can be fatal. It would be very easy to write thousands of news articles about water killing people. But its still good that people can drink water. The same is true of these driver-assistance technologies. Without them, people are already crashing and dying all the time. They do this at a greater rate than the rate at which people crash and die in vehicles that have these driver-assistance technologies. So on the whole, its actually better to have people in cars with these driver-assisting technologies, not worse.
    - 8y ago
oldcynic 8y ago
People are buying, using, and in some cases dying because of the impression they gained from the clearly pitched marketing.
- MikkoFinell 8y ago
  Lets change the marketing, then people won't die from car accidents anymore.
  - vntok 8y ago
    Well they won't die from Tesla car accidents anymore. That's something, right?
abhiminator 8y ago
Precisely. Although it makes reasonably good cars, Tesla still relies heavily on hype and astro-turfing (mostly on sites where enthusiasts/potential buyers congregate) [0] to get the word out and generate gargantuan amounts of intrigue. Choosing this 'hype-heavy' model of "advertising" can sometimes thrust customers into relying on those hyped-up features way more, thus leading to accidents like the article talks about. I'm saying this with the firm understanding that majority of the responsibility for safety lies at the hands of the driver in command, but letting Tesla's hype driven marketing strategy off the hook would be unfair to the customers. [0] https://www.talkwalker.com/blog/tesla-marketing-strategy-social-ceo https://www.talkwalker.com/blog/tesla-marketing-strategy-soc...
bjelkeman-again 8y ago
After talking to quite a few drivers and driving thousands of miles on Auotopilot myself, I don’t think people are confused by the name. It is pretty clear very quickly what the car can or can’t do. I think people are poor at estimating risk and we would have these accident whatever you call these semi-autonomous features. The interesting thing for me is that despite the shortcomings of the current Autopilot, I wouldn’t go back to a car without. It lowers the strain of driving sufficiently to really be worth it. And I am a driver with a hand on the wheel and eyes on the traffic, all the time.
- abalone 8y ago
  Help me understand. How does it lower the strain of driving if you have to remain 100% as attentive anyway? Or are you actually less than 100%.
  - chrisper 8y ago
    I don't have a Tesla, but I have a car with ACC. When I activate ACC I do not have to pay 100% attention to the distance between my car and the one in front of me and the speed. The car does all the work for me. I only have to keep steering and make sure that if the car in front of me stops in an emergency way that I start breaking myself because in certain cases it is too late for ACC to notice it. In traffic jams (< 30 km/h) ACC takes away 90% of the work. The difference is that my car got marketed with ACC as a driver assitance and not "self driving autopilot."
    - abalone 8y ago
      I am not talking about ACC. I’m talking about autosteering. But it’s interesting you concede the primary benefit is paying less attention. If you did that in a Tesla you would be violating the TOS and be responsible for resulting accidents. Ergo, what is the TOS-compatible benefit?
      - chrisper 8y ago
        I would rather say, it allows me to pay more attention to other things, like the traffic around me, or doing lane changes etc. But that TOS thing is kind of weird. What is "not paying attention"? Looking at a sign while the car in front of you slams the breaks? Technically you are not paying attention to the car at that moment and breaking the TOS.
Roritharr 8y ago
I'm driving a 2018 VW Tiguan Allspace with ACC, Lane Assist, Side Assist and everything. If that's what Autopilot is, i'm scared. In part I ordered those features because of assessments like yours that this is pretty much Autopilot. It isn't. My car can in theory follow the lane, but only in pretty much ideal conditions and even then it sometimes loses the lane and goes straight ahead, even in turns, possibly plowing into oncoming traffic or off the road. If it follows the lane, it does so very broadly, sometimes with driving actually on or a little over the lane in a turn, screaming at me to take control. This is the best case scenario. I can't imagine Autopilot being this bad when looking at YouTube. Don't get me wrong, I love my car and those systems for what they are, but they couldn't be called Autopilot in anyones wildest dreams.
- chrisper 8y ago
  I am pretty sure VW is advertising them as driver assits and not as autopilot.
  - Roritharr 8y ago
    Yes, VW does so, but multiple people in this Thread say that Teslas Autopilot is ACC + Lane Assist. That's what I'm challenging.
    - pavs 8y ago
      Its neither a driver assist or an autonomous car, it's somewhere in between. Which makes it even worse, because the driver is not aware of the limitation unless it's too late. Ramming into stationary Red Firetruck TWICE is not an edge case.
  - 1234 8y ago
    1234
- bgarbiak 8y ago
  The systems in VWs are like that by purpose. Their premium brands do behave better, yet they still not on the level of Tesla's system (I refuse to call it autopilot). Still, no one knows if what Tesla does is indeed that much better, or it just has all the settings set to eleven. Digression: I've seen a direct comparison of all the popular semi-autonomous systems somewhere, but can't find it now. So, take it with a pinch of salt, but from what I recall the only worthy rival to Tesla's system is GM's SuperCruise, and BMW has a somewhat competent lane assist system.
beenBoutIT 8y ago
RedBull got in some trouble for claiming that 'RedBull gives you wings'. Tesla should be in for more trouble than RedBull, considering a number of people have died as a result of their false claims. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11155731/13m-lawsuit-proves-Red-Bull-doesnt-give-you-wings.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/...

nicky0 8y ago

If Tesla calls it Autopilot mode, you can hardly blame everyone else doing so.

michaelmior 8y ago
Just because Tesla calls it Autopilot doesn't absolve drivers of responsibility in my mind. Especially since Tesla explicitly says drivers should still be attentive. That said, I agree it's poor marketing.
- RobLach 8y ago
  Autopilot is not a word made up by marketing though. It’s already defined: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/automatic_pilot https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/automatic_pilot “A device for keeping an aircraft on a set course without the intervention of the pilot.” If you enable an autopilot, intervention by the pilot is not necessary by definition
  - hyperbovine 8y ago
    “By definition“ you are not driving a car.
  - cynix 8y ago
    > If you enable an autopilot, intervention by the pilot is not necessary by definition Only if you're happy for the aircraft to continue travelling in the same set course. I guess by the same virtue, driver intervention is also not required if you're willing to let the vehicle travel in the same direction and disregard the firetruck ahead... Tesla's Autopilot is perfectly capable of maintaining direction/speed of travel, and it even follows the curves of the road most of the time which is presumably more than an aircraft autopilot system can do. It is the driver who is not willing to disregard the obstacles ahead, the same way presumably aircraft pilots are not willing to disregard obstacles in their course and will take over control of the aircraft if there is one. Nothing wrong with our tendency to avoid obstacles in order to not die, of course, but it's not the autopilot's job since the definition of autopilot is to maintain a set course, as you quoted. You may be confusing it with full self-driving, which doesn't exist yet.
  - readams 8y ago
    Aircraft autopilot will happily fly you into a mountain or other aircraft.
    - King-Aaron 8y ago
      I'm glad someone mentioned this. It's frustrating that the general public doesn't understand what the word 'autopilot' means... Otto the automatic pilot from the movie Airplane! isn't what an automatic pilot is. However, since it is commonly misrepresented, they should change the name of Tesla's system.
    - Twisell 8y ago
      While true, there is like a lot of redondant auxiliary warning system in a plane that work independently of the autopilot. So if autopilot tried to fly you into a mountain, the humans pilots would have to willingly ignore all the warnings thrown at them (it happened recently, and was qualified as human error). What is terrifying with Tesla autopilot is that there is seemingly not enough auxiliary warning system. With only two of them (hand on wheel or stop, static object detection) you could have avoided almost all Tesla crashes. They putted beta vehicle in hand of customers, that’s a choice, now they have to live with it. Edit: first sentence was misleading
  - Sharlin 8y ago
    General public has little idea of what a plane autopilot can or cannot do. Somewhat ironically, the Tesla Autopilot is quite close to a real plane autopilot in that it’s a rather dumb system that cannot adjust to unexpected events. But Joe R. Driver reads Tesla marketing material and doesn’t realize that, dictionary definition notwithstanding.
- watwut 8y ago
  So, now that we pinpointed who is responsible, can we discuss which design leads to many people making deadly errors and which design leads to few people making deadly errors? And how much responsibility the designer when choosing between former and latter?
- rebuilder 8y ago
  It seems like deceptive marketing to me. If I sold shoes with proprietary NailStopper soles, with a disclaimer the soles don't actually stop nails and it's up to the user to make sure they don't step on any, would that be cool?
  - michaelmior 8y ago
    I'm not saying the marketing is cool. Although your example is fundamentally different since in the "Autopilot" case, you're not just dealing with your own safety, but the safety of others. (Presumably you're not putting others in danger by wearing NailStopper shoes and continuing to step on nails.)
    - rebuilder 8y ago
      Fair enough. I guess this is a case of something lost in translation. To me, bad marketing is when the marketing doesn't help sell the product. Deceptive marketing misleads the consumer as to what they're being enticed to purchase.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
kingkongjaffa 8y ago
Tesla's marketing has directly contributed to a number of deaths now.
- JoshCole 8y ago
  It's also directly prevented a number of deaths. The same is true of the consumption of water. However, I can count the number of deaths caused by Tesla on one hand, but I cannot count the number of deaths caused by the consumption of water on one hand [1][2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autonomous_car_fatalities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autonomous_car_fatalit... [2]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-drinking-too-much-water-can-kill/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-... If you really care about road safety? Encourage the use of Uber among the intoxicated. It saves more than a handful of lives in this world in which more than a hundred thousand people die each day.
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    People frequently argue that "X hasn't caused very many deaths compared to Y" and thus the dangers of X are insignificant, while ignoring that people are reacting in a frightened way to X because it might scale such that it soon becomes significant.
    - JoshCole 8y ago
      What I was hoping to show was that there are things where the property of causing deaths doesn't mean that the thing itself was a bad idea. Water is an example of that. Going without water is fatal. Getting water can be fatal. It would be very easy to write thousands of news articles about water killing people. But its still good that people can drink water. The same is true of these driver-assistance technologies. Without them, people are already crashing and dying all the time. They do this at a greater rate than the rate at which people crash and die in vehicles that have these driver-assistance technologies. So on the whole, its actually better to have people in cars with these driver-assisting technologies, not worse.
  - 8y ago

oldcynic 8y ago

People are buying, using, and in some cases dying because of the impression they gained from the clearly pitched marketing.

MikkoFinell 8y ago
Lets change the marketing, then people won't die from car accidents anymore.
- vntok 8y ago
  Well they won't die from Tesla car accidents anymore. That's something, right?

abhiminator 8y ago

Precisely. Although it makes reasonably good cars, Tesla still relies heavily on hype and astro-turfing (mostly on sites where enthusiasts/potential buyers congregate) [0] to get the word out and generate gargantuan amounts of intrigue. Choosing this 'hype-heavy' model of "advertising" can sometimes thrust customers into relying on those hyped-up features way more, thus leading to accidents like the article talks about. I'm saying this with the firm understanding that majority of the responsibility for safety lies at the hands of the driver in command, but letting Tesla's hype driven marketing strategy off the hook would be unfair to the customers. [0] https://www.talkwalker.com/blog/tesla-marketing-strategy-social-ceo https://www.talkwalker.com/blog/tesla-marketing-strategy-soc...

bjelkeman-again 8y ago

After talking to quite a few drivers and driving thousands of miles on Auotopilot myself, I don’t think people are confused by the name. It is pretty clear very quickly what the car can or can’t do. I think people are poor at estimating risk and we would have these accident whatever you call these semi-autonomous features. The interesting thing for me is that despite the shortcomings of the current Autopilot, I wouldn’t go back to a car without. It lowers the strain of driving sufficiently to really be worth it. And I am a driver with a hand on the wheel and eyes on the traffic, all the time.

abalone 8y ago
Help me understand. How does it lower the strain of driving if you have to remain 100% as attentive anyway? Or are you actually less than 100%.
- chrisper 8y ago
  I don't have a Tesla, but I have a car with ACC. When I activate ACC I do not have to pay 100% attention to the distance between my car and the one in front of me and the speed. The car does all the work for me. I only have to keep steering and make sure that if the car in front of me stops in an emergency way that I start breaking myself because in certain cases it is too late for ACC to notice it. In traffic jams (< 30 km/h) ACC takes away 90% of the work. The difference is that my car got marketed with ACC as a driver assitance and not "self driving autopilot."
  - abalone 8y ago
    I am not talking about ACC. I’m talking about autosteering. But it’s interesting you concede the primary benefit is paying less attention. If you did that in a Tesla you would be violating the TOS and be responsible for resulting accidents. Ergo, what is the TOS-compatible benefit?
    - chrisper 8y ago
      I would rather say, it allows me to pay more attention to other things, like the traffic around me, or doing lane changes etc. But that TOS thing is kind of weird. What is "not paying attention"? Looking at a sign while the car in front of you slams the breaks? Technically you are not paying attention to the car at that moment and breaking the TOS.

Roritharr 8y ago

I'm driving a 2018 VW Tiguan Allspace with ACC, Lane Assist, Side Assist and everything. If that's what Autopilot is, i'm scared. In part I ordered those features because of assessments like yours that this is pretty much Autopilot. It isn't. My car can in theory follow the lane, but only in pretty much ideal conditions and even then it sometimes loses the lane and goes straight ahead, even in turns, possibly plowing into oncoming traffic or off the road. If it follows the lane, it does so very broadly, sometimes with driving actually on or a little over the lane in a turn, screaming at me to take control. This is the best case scenario. I can't imagine Autopilot being this bad when looking at YouTube. Don't get me wrong, I love my car and those systems for what they are, but they couldn't be called Autopilot in anyones wildest dreams.

chrisper 8y ago
I am pretty sure VW is advertising them as driver assits and not as autopilot.
- Roritharr 8y ago
  Yes, VW does so, but multiple people in this Thread say that Teslas Autopilot is ACC + Lane Assist. That's what I'm challenging.
  - pavs 8y ago
    Its neither a driver assist or an autonomous car, it's somewhere in between. Which makes it even worse, because the driver is not aware of the limitation unless it's too late. Ramming into stationary Red Firetruck TWICE is not an edge case.
- 1234 8y ago
  1234
bgarbiak 8y ago
The systems in VWs are like that by purpose. Their premium brands do behave better, yet they still not on the level of Tesla's system (I refuse to call it autopilot). Still, no one knows if what Tesla does is indeed that much better, or it just has all the settings set to eleven. Digression: I've seen a direct comparison of all the popular semi-autonomous systems somewhere, but can't find it now. So, take it with a pinch of salt, but from what I recall the only worthy rival to Tesla's system is GM's SuperCruise, and BMW has a somewhat competent lane assist system.

beenBoutIT 8y ago

RedBull got in some trouble for claiming that 'RedBull gives you wings'. Tesla should be in for more trouble than RedBull, considering a number of people have died as a result of their false claims. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11155731/13m-lawsuit-proves-Red-Bull-doesnt-give-you-wings.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/...