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The inverse is also true. There are plenty of videos of autopilot preventing wrecks that the human drivers said they likely would have wrecked on themselves. I

by SEJeff 7y ago

The inverse is also true. There are plenty of videos of autopilot preventing wrecks that the human drivers said they likely would have wrecked on themselves. I happen to be one of those drivers when someone pulled onto the highway from a field at night. AP swerved and missed the idiot but I'd not even seen them and would have almost certainly hit them doing about 70mph. A T-bone that fast would likely have messed both of us up really good. AP will never prevent all injuries / fatalities due to road conditions and other human drivers simply being imperfect. It has a good chance to prevent a lot of otherwise fatal crashes in the meantime however. One could say it would be unethical to not even consider the alternative here. Just some food for thought. I'm a software engineer myself and Model 3 owner.

BoorishBears 7y ago
I always see this argument and it's like everyone's forgotten that AP isn't the only automatic safety system. My Volt had the same exact hardware as AP1 (from Mobileye). GM decided not to play games with marketing, and had it only intervene in cases of immediate danger. For example, you could try and get it to follow lanes, but it's guidance would be directly proportional to your steering input, and it would intentionally stop intervening the moment you were back in your lane, eventually disengaging if you weren't trying to correct at all. - At night in pouring rain coming around a tight highway turn, my car stopped for an overturned box truck covering 2 of 3 lanes and allowed me to go around it. It saved my life with very little fanfare. AP didn't have to be called AP. AP didn't have to be something you can let take over (except jk don't let it take over or we'll victim blame you when it kills you). AP could provide traffic-aware cruise control, could take over when you drift out of your lane, swerve away from imminent crashes, and you would still have been saved from that T-bone, and Walter Huang would still be alive today. But then Tesla couldn't charge extra for Advanced AP, then extra on top of that for FSD.
semi-extrinsic 7y ago
On the flipside, in these cases where people self-report "I likely would have wrecked myself", we can reasonably expect that they are paying less attention to the driving situation while using AP than if they were driving a car without AP. So we expect them to be strongly biased towards underestimating their own abilities in the situation.
- SEJeff 7y ago
  That's fair, but I'm sort of afraid / amazed by autopilot. I have been through FAA flight school and you learn to develop an instrument panel "scan" in instrument rated flight. I find myself having developed a "scan" that includes looking side to side and behind me. With AP enabled I'm able to take in more of the current situation around me, but in this case, I was not able to see the car that drove into the middle of the highway from offroad at night. AP did a better job than a human did. End.
  - viklove 7y ago
    AP did a better job than _you_, but it's a bit of a stretch to assume that finding is true for most other people, or even just the average person. This is why the scientific method exists, so we don't fall prey to our own bias.

by SEJeff 7y ago

BoorishBears 7y ago

I always see this argument and it's like everyone's forgotten that AP isn't the only automatic safety system. My Volt had the same exact hardware as AP1 (from Mobileye). GM decided not to play games with marketing, and had it only intervene in cases of immediate danger. For example, you could try and get it to follow lanes, but it's guidance would be directly proportional to your steering input, and it would intentionally stop intervening the moment you were back in your lane, eventually disengaging if you weren't trying to correct at all. - At night in pouring rain coming around a tight highway turn, my car stopped for an overturned box truck covering 2 of 3 lanes and allowed me to go around it. It saved my life with very little fanfare. AP didn't have to be called AP. AP didn't have to be something you can let take over (except jk don't let it take over or we'll victim blame you when it kills you). AP could provide traffic-aware cruise control, could take over when you drift out of your lane, swerve away from imminent crashes, and you would still have been saved from that T-bone, and Walter Huang would still be alive today. But then Tesla couldn't charge extra for Advanced AP, then extra on top of that for FSD.

semi-extrinsic 7y ago

On the flipside, in these cases where people self-report "I likely would have wrecked myself", we can reasonably expect that they are paying less attention to the driving situation while using AP than if they were driving a car without AP. So we expect them to be strongly biased towards underestimating their own abilities in the situation.

SEJeff 7y ago
That's fair, but I'm sort of afraid / amazed by autopilot. I have been through FAA flight school and you learn to develop an instrument panel "scan" in instrument rated flight. I find myself having developed a "scan" that includes looking side to side and behind me. With AP enabled I'm able to take in more of the current situation around me, but in this case, I was not able to see the car that drove into the middle of the highway from offroad at night. AP did a better job than a human did. End.
- viklove 7y ago
  AP did a better job than _you_, but it's a bit of a stretch to assume that finding is true for most other people, or even just the average person. This is why the scientific method exists, so we don't fall prey to our own bias.