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I don't agree with many of the points here. My partner bought a Tesla, I had little interest in them. I now would buy no other car. The autopilot has changed ho

I don't agree with many of the points here. My partner bought a Tesla, I had little interest in them. I now would buy no other car. The autopilot has changed how I drive forever. We regularly take long three hour drives to get to a scenic spot that I would never consider doing in another car. With autopilot engaged, I am monitoring everything - probably with more accuracy then if I was driving, due to the decreased cognitive load. I don't get tired, like I do in an other car, with all the negative effects that come with that. Im a safe driver, and autopilot makes me better at driving. I am not surprised that if you don't follow the instructions bad things can happen. (I believe statistically less than meat powered driving). That is on the human, not the technology. The guy in the article was playing a phone game. He crashed into a barrier he had had problems with before. Same guy, playing a phone game, whilst on cruise control in a BMW. Should we regulate that? No, we should regulate idiots in cars.

mayneack 7y ago
YMMV and all, but I've had a similar experience with just adaptive cruise control for long drives. Driving the 7 hours from LA to Utah became pretty easy to do without having to break/speed up every few minutes with normal traffic. It still falls short in stop and go traffic, which I think teslas do well in.
- ObsoleteNerd 7y ago
  Adaptive cruise control is incredible. I regularly do a 4 hour freeway drive (every week or two) and have noticed a distinct decrease in tiredness since using it. I feel an order of magnitude more aware of it surroundings when not having to constantly worry about whether I’m doing the speed limit (the freeway here has lots of cops and hidden speed cameras) and I find the entire drive so much more relaxing now. I couldn’t own a car without it anymore. I definitely don’t feel Tesla is responsible for the crashes caused by people ignoring all the warnings and notices. People have been ignoring warnings and dying in stupid ways since warnings first existed.
  - wil421 7y ago
    ACC is nice in my Jeep Grand Cherokee. It does not have stop and go so you get a few second warning that it will stop when you come to a complete stop. It’s easy to press resume after you move again. When I read the manual it specifically called out several situations where ACC could cause a problem. Completely stationary objects and using it around a sharp corner can cause it to lose sight of the car in front of you. As you said people have found stupid ways of dying and not paying attention while driving is one of them. I keep an eye on ACC and will keep my foot above the break if my intuition tells me to.
ProAm 7y ago
It should be easy to disable Autopilot if two hands are not on the steering wheel and start to slow the car down and play an alert over the speakers. Fixes this almost instantly.
- cortesoft 7y ago
  It does this. First, it tells you to grab the steering wheel. If you don't, it plays a chime and disengages auto pilot. If it does this, you can't use auto pilot for the rest of the drive.
  - ProAm 7y ago
    That's great, I assumed it didnt because of this accident. Was that feature implemented after this accident (or as a result)?
    - cortesoft 7y ago
      It is fairly easy to cheat.... you can buy a weight that you attach to the steering wheel, and it will think you are grabbing it. Super dangerous and stupid, but people do it.
    - Kirby64 7y ago
      No, it's been a feature pretty much forever. The thing is, you basically get '3 strikes'. It starts with a simple visual warning, then progresses to an angrier visual warning, then starts beeping, then louder beeper, then it disables and starts slowing the car down (and puts hazards on, etc). You've got quite a bit of time before it actually does this. As long as you jiggle the steering wheel every ~20 seconds or so, it shouldn't actually stop the car or disable autopilot.
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    So my friend couldn't drive a Tesla and eat a sandwich, with just one hand on the wheel? (As they do now on open motorways in good conditions.)
rtkwe 7y ago
Congrats you do what is expected [0]. Most people don't and trust Autopilot way too much because it's touted as self driving which implies a level of autonomy that the Tesla system isn't at yet [1] able to achieve. Calling something self driving implies a certain level of capability and inattention that the Tesla system isn't up to yet. [0] Well think and say you do. Most people overestimate how much attention they're actually paying. [1] And may never be with their camera system but that's another story entirely. I'm still dubious that cameras alone provide a reliable enough picture of the environment for CV systems to go 100% self driving.
- jsight 7y ago
  > Most people don't and trust Autopilot way too much because it's touted as self driving which implies a level of autonomy that the Tesla system Everything about this line is unsupported supposition.
  - rtkwe 7y ago
    It doesn't take many videos of people asleep at the wheel [0]or slamming into the back of stationary vehicles to extrapolate from what is already know about attention while driving which is that people pay way less attention than they should for controlling multiton devices moving fast. [0] https://twitter.com/DakRandall/status/1170777292768985089 https://twitter.com/DakRandall/status/1170777292768985089
allovernow 7y ago
>With autopilot engaged, I am monitoring everything - probably with more accuracy then if I was driving, due to the decreased cognitive load. This sounds like a false sense of security. I find it extremely difficult to believe that a typical human can maintain their attention glued to the road in a purely passive manner for hours on end. Even if you were paying attention, without your hands constantly on the steering wheel you would have a slowed reaction time where milliseconds matter. More importantly this kind of vigilance defeats the purpose of autopilot. I'm not necessarily saying you're doing anything dangerous since the autopilot function seems to be fairly safe, but your apologism comes across a bit like like an alcoholic claiming they drive better when drunk.
- tristanb 7y ago
  Cool - you're welcome to your opinion, but I disagree. I do the same in an airplane, though reaction time is less important.
  - foepys 7y ago
    Since reaction time was GP main and only argument, I don't understand what your comparison to an airplane is supposed to tell us.
- zaroth 7y ago
  It's actually less exhausting than manual driving. With manual driving you have to focus predominantly on one specific task - keeping your car between the lines. Bends in the road, poorly drawn lines, irregularities in the road surface, gusts of wind, all conspire to make this task require constant attention. Look in the rear view mirror for a couple seconds and then look back ahead and you might find that you've drifted, etc. With AutoPilot the task has changed. You are no longer concerned with minute adjustments to the wheel, and you no longer have to maintain a constant high priority task of staying centered in the lines. Now, instead, you perform higher order functions of route planning, estimating traffic flow, observing other drivers and whether they are paying attention or drifting toward you, etc. So by no means are you passive at all. It's actually extremely engaging, but significantly less monotonous form of driving. I find it quite pleasant, and not at all hard to stay engaged. If I'm going to play a game on my phone, it's because I'm choosing to risk my life and the lives of the drivers/passengers around me, not because I couldn't handle looking out the window to pay attention.
Koremat6666 7y ago
The only issue I have with Tesla's Autopilot is the naming. It gives a false impression. It is more like driver assist rather than autopilot.
- xxgreg 7y ago
  "An autopilot is a system used to control the trajectory of an aircraft, marine craft or spacecraft without constant manual control by a human operator being required. Autopilots do not replace human operators, but instead they assist them in controlling the vehicle." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopilot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopilot
  - missosoup 7y ago
    When autopilot fails, the PIC has minutes to take controls and avert whatever bad thing might happen. When Tesla 'autopilot' fails the driver might have less than a second to take controls and avoid collision. This fundamental mis-branding is why various regulators across the globe are cracking down on Tesla marketing.
    - blackflame7000 7y ago
      737 Max says you're wrong. Autopilot can fail in a hurry no matter what the vehicle.
      - ceejayoz 7y ago
        The 737 MAX crashes involved several minutes between the first indications of trouble and the crashes. https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-lion-air-crash-report-boeing-737-max-20181128-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-lion-air-cras... > Lemme described "a deadly game of tag" in which the plane pointed down, the pilots countered by manually aiming the nose higher, only for the sequence to repeat about five seconds later. That happened 26 times during the 11-minute flight...
        7y ago
jliptzin 7y ago
I think it really shines in heavy traffic. You don't really have to be as vigilant in bumper to bumper traffic, and can take your mind off of constantly stopping and going. After all, the worst that'll happen is you'll get into a fender bender. But I think autopilot is even less likely to cause a collision in those conditions.
- salawat 7y ago
  I find the opposite actually. I am more stressed when traffic is going slowly than when everything is flowing because recklessness tends to rear it's ugly head when you think you have the full power of that engine to get you out of whatever you might get to, and of course those brakes will work, right? Furthermore, in bumper to bumper traffic, you're better off staying stopped and letting the gap in front of you grow, only taking your foot off the brake and letting your engine idle move you forward at the average speed of traffic once the interval is large enough. Helps destroy traffic waves by keeping everyone moving forward slowly rather than having to constantly stop and go. Try it some time. It takes some getting used to, but once you bust your first traffic clot, it starts to feel like a game where the objective is to keep everyone moving forward for the longest time without everyone having to stop. Completely counter-intuitive, but I'll be damned if it doesn't work.
  - jliptzin 7y ago
    I fail to see how my particular pattern of driving affects the flow of traffic in front of me.
    - salawat 7y ago
      http://trafficwaves.org/ http://trafficwaves.org/ Enjoy. The point isn't to modify the behavior of those in front of you, But to keep traffic behind you moving forward even if only slowly.
chapium 7y ago
> He crashed into a barrier he had had problems with before. This keeps getting repeated and is complete misdirection. The barrier isn't intended to save lives from a headon crash, its to improve the slim odds of survival. Had the vehicle not accelerated toward it, chances would have still been grim. Imo, noone should be operating a vehicle in this mode at high speeds.
- tristanb 7y ago
  > Imo, noone should be operating a vehicle in this mode at high speeds. I think thats a bit of an overstatement. Try it.
  - mhh__ 7y ago
    I think there's some merit to it until the industry (or government) determines some way of establishing whether the driver is actually paying attention. Think of it like a preemptive seatbelt - Brain Computer interface maybe? Sounds like an actual use for Machine Learning (I know nothing about ML beyond toy Neural Networks, so maybe not) It's all well and good saying the driver should pay more attention - almost treating it like a normal tech product, I suppose, but most "tech" products don't control almost a Megajoule (mental maths might be wrong but you get the idea) of kinetic energy and the lives of the occupants of both the car and any others it hits. I'm not saying that it's an impossibility to get it right, just that it needs to be held to even higher standards than the existing engineering present in the car (and planes if I'm being honest), not Sillicon Valley. Luckily this doesn't seem to be too much the case, but it could happen - the few people I know who own Tesla's are all non-car people ("What's suspension?"), i.e. The gadget-factor of the car is definitely attractive. Tesla do seem to be doing a pretty good job, so hat's off to them so far.
FireBeyond 7y ago
> With autopilot engaged, I am monitoring everything - probably with more accuracy then if I was driving, due to the decreased cognitive load. Almost every study on human behavior contradicts this. When you have no load, your monitoring and responsiveness gets poorer, not better. (Now, you can certainly go to the other extreme and get overloaded, with the same effect). You may have a _perception_ that you're doing better, because you feel like you're glancing around a lot, and consider that equivalent to "monitoring", but most likely you're admiring / distracted by scenery, and you wouldn't have those immediate reaction times that (remember) you're meant to have, even with Autopilot engaged.
- aschobel 7y ago
  >> With autopilot engaged, I am monitoring everything - probably with more accuracy then if I was driving, due to the decreased cognitive load. > Almost every study on human behavior contradicts this. When you have no load, your monitoring and responsiveness gets poorer, not better. (Now, you can certainly go to the other extreme and get overloaded, with the same effect) With both a plane and a car you still have some load; you are supposed to be monitoring the performance of the systems. I perceive myself to be safer when I have autopilot enabled on a Cirrus. My thinking goes from having to manipulate the controls to monitoring the performance of the aircraft. I could be derelict in my duties at ignore the plane and play a game on my iPhone. I perceive that experience to be very similar to when I engage Autopilot on my Tesla. I go from having to manipulate the control to monitoring the performance of the car. With over 110k miles on my Tesla I really do feel with autopilot.
  - NoOneNew 7y ago
    Um... there's a whole lot different with airplane autopilot vs being on the road. Autopilot is normally engaged when there's "nothing". Clear skies rarely have "sudden" obstacles. It's a no-no during severe weather or flying through mountains. I had a fascination with watching airline disaster investigations when I was making regular flights for a year. Around 70-80% of accidents were caused by relying on autopilot during sub-perfect conditions. Using airplane autopilot as a case to use Tesla autopilot is a terrible, terrible analogy. Let's throw in an extra terrible.
turtlebits 7y ago
Agreed. I took a few trips in my fathers CRV with lane assist and adaptive cruise. I felt less fatigued by the end and more alert while driving.
nexuist 7y ago
>Should we regulate that? No, we should regulate idiots in cars. This is akin to the argument that we should replace steering wheel airbags with massive spikes in the center to promote safe driving. Could it work? Maybe, but seatbelts and airbags are more effective than regulating human behavior. In the same vein, there needs to be innovation in the self-driving safety space until we actually achieve Level 5. Autopilot operates in a weird chasm where the general public understands that it's not there yet, but expects it to be very soon. This leads to false assumptions about the capabilities of the system.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  The spikes will have a very positive effect on those not in the vehicle. You need to split the stats into those inside and outside of the vehicle other than the party facing the spike (the driver).
jacquesm 7y ago
> We regularly take long three hour drives to get to a scenic spot that I would never consider doing in another car. There is an interesting implication here, a point that I've tried to make a couple of times but this anecdote does a better job of it. Automation of self driving will lead to much more driving than we have today because today the requirement is that someone needs to be willing to make the trip as well as the vehicle. With automated driving that requirement drops away so there will be many more trips that do not happen now. This will lead to more congestion and will to some extent undo the 'green' effects of the electric revolution. > With autopilot engaged, I am monitoring everything - probably with more accuracy then if I was driving, due to the decreased cognitive load. But you've lost situational awareness and won't be able to recover it in time if the autopilot decides to call it a day due to the complexity of the situation. This has been studied countless times for airliner pilots and operators of rail vehicles.

mayneack 7y ago

YMMV and all, but I've had a similar experience with just adaptive cruise control for long drives. Driving the 7 hours from LA to Utah became pretty easy to do without having to break/speed up every few minutes with normal traffic. It still falls short in stop and go traffic, which I think teslas do well in.

ObsoleteNerd 7y ago
Adaptive cruise control is incredible. I regularly do a 4 hour freeway drive (every week or two) and have noticed a distinct decrease in tiredness since using it. I feel an order of magnitude more aware of it surroundings when not having to constantly worry about whether I’m doing the speed limit (the freeway here has lots of cops and hidden speed cameras) and I find the entire drive so much more relaxing now. I couldn’t own a car without it anymore. I definitely don’t feel Tesla is responsible for the crashes caused by people ignoring all the warnings and notices. People have been ignoring warnings and dying in stupid ways since warnings first existed.
- wil421 7y ago
  ACC is nice in my Jeep Grand Cherokee. It does not have stop and go so you get a few second warning that it will stop when you come to a complete stop. It’s easy to press resume after you move again. When I read the manual it specifically called out several situations where ACC could cause a problem. Completely stationary objects and using it around a sharp corner can cause it to lose sight of the car in front of you. As you said people have found stupid ways of dying and not paying attention while driving is one of them. I keep an eye on ACC and will keep my foot above the break if my intuition tells me to.

ProAm 7y ago

It should be easy to disable Autopilot if two hands are not on the steering wheel and start to slow the car down and play an alert over the speakers. Fixes this almost instantly.

cortesoft 7y ago
It does this. First, it tells you to grab the steering wheel. If you don't, it plays a chime and disengages auto pilot. If it does this, you can't use auto pilot for the rest of the drive.
- ProAm 7y ago
  That's great, I assumed it didnt because of this accident. Was that feature implemented after this accident (or as a result)?
  - cortesoft 7y ago
    It is fairly easy to cheat.... you can buy a weight that you attach to the steering wheel, and it will think you are grabbing it. Super dangerous and stupid, but people do it.
  - Kirby64 7y ago
    No, it's been a feature pretty much forever. The thing is, you basically get '3 strikes'. It starts with a simple visual warning, then progresses to an angrier visual warning, then starts beeping, then louder beeper, then it disables and starts slowing the car down (and puts hazards on, etc). You've got quite a bit of time before it actually does this. As long as you jiggle the steering wheel every ~20 seconds or so, it shouldn't actually stop the car or disable autopilot.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  So my friend couldn't drive a Tesla and eat a sandwich, with just one hand on the wheel? (As they do now on open motorways in good conditions.)

rtkwe 7y ago

Congrats you do what is expected [0]. Most people don't and trust Autopilot way too much because it's touted as self driving which implies a level of autonomy that the Tesla system isn't at yet [1] able to achieve. Calling something self driving implies a certain level of capability and inattention that the Tesla system isn't up to yet. [0] Well think and say you do. Most people overestimate how much attention they're actually paying. [1] And may never be with their camera system but that's another story entirely. I'm still dubious that cameras alone provide a reliable enough picture of the environment for CV systems to go 100% self driving.

jsight 7y ago
> Most people don't and trust Autopilot way too much because it's touted as self driving which implies a level of autonomy that the Tesla system Everything about this line is unsupported supposition.
- rtkwe 7y ago
  It doesn't take many videos of people asleep at the wheel [0]or slamming into the back of stationary vehicles to extrapolate from what is already know about attention while driving which is that people pay way less attention than they should for controlling multiton devices moving fast. [0] https://twitter.com/DakRandall/status/1170777292768985089 https://twitter.com/DakRandall/status/1170777292768985089

allovernow 7y ago

>With autopilot engaged, I am monitoring everything - probably with more accuracy then if I was driving, due to the decreased cognitive load. This sounds like a false sense of security. I find it extremely difficult to believe that a typical human can maintain their attention glued to the road in a purely passive manner for hours on end. Even if you were paying attention, without your hands constantly on the steering wheel you would have a slowed reaction time where milliseconds matter. More importantly this kind of vigilance defeats the purpose of autopilot. I'm not necessarily saying you're doing anything dangerous since the autopilot function seems to be fairly safe, but your apologism comes across a bit like like an alcoholic claiming they drive better when drunk.

tristanb 7y ago
Cool - you're welcome to your opinion, but I disagree. I do the same in an airplane, though reaction time is less important.
- foepys 7y ago
  Since reaction time was GP main and only argument, I don't understand what your comparison to an airplane is supposed to tell us.
zaroth 7y ago
It's actually less exhausting than manual driving. With manual driving you have to focus predominantly on one specific task - keeping your car between the lines. Bends in the road, poorly drawn lines, irregularities in the road surface, gusts of wind, all conspire to make this task require constant attention. Look in the rear view mirror for a couple seconds and then look back ahead and you might find that you've drifted, etc. With AutoPilot the task has changed. You are no longer concerned with minute adjustments to the wheel, and you no longer have to maintain a constant high priority task of staying centered in the lines. Now, instead, you perform higher order functions of route planning, estimating traffic flow, observing other drivers and whether they are paying attention or drifting toward you, etc. So by no means are you passive at all. It's actually extremely engaging, but significantly less monotonous form of driving. I find it quite pleasant, and not at all hard to stay engaged. If I'm going to play a game on my phone, it's because I'm choosing to risk my life and the lives of the drivers/passengers around me, not because I couldn't handle looking out the window to pay attention.

Koremat6666 7y ago

The only issue I have with Tesla's Autopilot is the naming. It gives a false impression. It is more like driver assist rather than autopilot.

xxgreg 7y ago
"An autopilot is a system used to control the trajectory of an aircraft, marine craft or spacecraft without constant manual control by a human operator being required. Autopilots do not replace human operators, but instead they assist them in controlling the vehicle." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopilot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopilot
- missosoup 7y ago
  When autopilot fails, the PIC has minutes to take controls and avert whatever bad thing might happen. When Tesla 'autopilot' fails the driver might have less than a second to take controls and avoid collision. This fundamental mis-branding is why various regulators across the globe are cracking down on Tesla marketing.
  - blackflame7000 7y ago
    737 Max says you're wrong. Autopilot can fail in a hurry no matter what the vehicle.
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      The 737 MAX crashes involved several minutes between the first indications of trouble and the crashes. https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-lion-air-crash-report-boeing-737-max-20181128-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-lion-air-cras... > Lemme described "a deadly game of tag" in which the plane pointed down, the pilots countered by manually aiming the nose higher, only for the sequence to repeat about five seconds later. That happened 26 times during the 11-minute flight...
      - 7y ago

jliptzin 7y ago

I think it really shines in heavy traffic. You don't really have to be as vigilant in bumper to bumper traffic, and can take your mind off of constantly stopping and going. After all, the worst that'll happen is you'll get into a fender bender. But I think autopilot is even less likely to cause a collision in those conditions.

salawat 7y ago
I find the opposite actually. I am more stressed when traffic is going slowly than when everything is flowing because recklessness tends to rear it's ugly head when you think you have the full power of that engine to get you out of whatever you might get to, and of course those brakes will work, right? Furthermore, in bumper to bumper traffic, you're better off staying stopped and letting the gap in front of you grow, only taking your foot off the brake and letting your engine idle move you forward at the average speed of traffic once the interval is large enough. Helps destroy traffic waves by keeping everyone moving forward slowly rather than having to constantly stop and go. Try it some time. It takes some getting used to, but once you bust your first traffic clot, it starts to feel like a game where the objective is to keep everyone moving forward for the longest time without everyone having to stop. Completely counter-intuitive, but I'll be damned if it doesn't work.
- jliptzin 7y ago
  I fail to see how my particular pattern of driving affects the flow of traffic in front of me.
  - salawat 7y ago
    http://trafficwaves.org/ http://trafficwaves.org/ Enjoy. The point isn't to modify the behavior of those in front of you, But to keep traffic behind you moving forward even if only slowly.

chapium 7y ago

> He crashed into a barrier he had had problems with before. This keeps getting repeated and is complete misdirection. The barrier isn't intended to save lives from a headon crash, its to improve the slim odds of survival. Had the vehicle not accelerated toward it, chances would have still been grim. Imo, noone should be operating a vehicle in this mode at high speeds.

tristanb 7y ago
> Imo, noone should be operating a vehicle in this mode at high speeds. I think thats a bit of an overstatement. Try it.
- mhh__ 7y ago
  I think there's some merit to it until the industry (or government) determines some way of establishing whether the driver is actually paying attention. Think of it like a preemptive seatbelt - Brain Computer interface maybe? Sounds like an actual use for Machine Learning (I know nothing about ML beyond toy Neural Networks, so maybe not) It's all well and good saying the driver should pay more attention - almost treating it like a normal tech product, I suppose, but most "tech" products don't control almost a Megajoule (mental maths might be wrong but you get the idea) of kinetic energy and the lives of the occupants of both the car and any others it hits. I'm not saying that it's an impossibility to get it right, just that it needs to be held to even higher standards than the existing engineering present in the car (and planes if I'm being honest), not Sillicon Valley. Luckily this doesn't seem to be too much the case, but it could happen - the few people I know who own Tesla's are all non-car people ("What's suspension?"), i.e. The gadget-factor of the car is definitely attractive. Tesla do seem to be doing a pretty good job, so hat's off to them so far.

FireBeyond 7y ago

> With autopilot engaged, I am monitoring everything - probably with more accuracy then if I was driving, due to the decreased cognitive load. Almost every study on human behavior contradicts this. When you have no load, your monitoring and responsiveness gets poorer, not better. (Now, you can certainly go to the other extreme and get overloaded, with the same effect). You may have a _perception_ that you're doing better, because you feel like you're glancing around a lot, and consider that equivalent to "monitoring", but most likely you're admiring / distracted by scenery, and you wouldn't have those immediate reaction times that (remember) you're meant to have, even with Autopilot engaged.

aschobel 7y ago
>> With autopilot engaged, I am monitoring everything - probably with more accuracy then if I was driving, due to the decreased cognitive load. > Almost every study on human behavior contradicts this. When you have no load, your monitoring and responsiveness gets poorer, not better. (Now, you can certainly go to the other extreme and get overloaded, with the same effect) With both a plane and a car you still have some load; you are supposed to be monitoring the performance of the systems. I perceive myself to be safer when I have autopilot enabled on a Cirrus. My thinking goes from having to manipulate the controls to monitoring the performance of the aircraft. I could be derelict in my duties at ignore the plane and play a game on my iPhone. I perceive that experience to be very similar to when I engage Autopilot on my Tesla. I go from having to manipulate the control to monitoring the performance of the car. With over 110k miles on my Tesla I really do feel with autopilot.
- NoOneNew 7y ago
  Um... there's a whole lot different with airplane autopilot vs being on the road. Autopilot is normally engaged when there's "nothing". Clear skies rarely have "sudden" obstacles. It's a no-no during severe weather or flying through mountains. I had a fascination with watching airline disaster investigations when I was making regular flights for a year. Around 70-80% of accidents were caused by relying on autopilot during sub-perfect conditions. Using airplane autopilot as a case to use Tesla autopilot is a terrible, terrible analogy. Let's throw in an extra terrible.

turtlebits 7y ago

Agreed. I took a few trips in my fathers CRV with lane assist and adaptive cruise. I felt less fatigued by the end and more alert while driving.

nexuist 7y ago

>Should we regulate that? No, we should regulate idiots in cars. This is akin to the argument that we should replace steering wheel airbags with massive spikes in the center to promote safe driving. Could it work? Maybe, but seatbelts and airbags are more effective than regulating human behavior. In the same vein, there needs to be innovation in the self-driving safety space until we actually achieve Level 5. Autopilot operates in a weird chasm where the general public understands that it's not there yet, but expects it to be very soon. This leads to false assumptions about the capabilities of the system.

jacquesm 7y ago
The spikes will have a very positive effect on those not in the vehicle. You need to split the stats into those inside and outside of the vehicle other than the party facing the spike (the driver).

jacquesm 7y ago

> We regularly take long three hour drives to get to a scenic spot that I would never consider doing in another car. There is an interesting implication here, a point that I've tried to make a couple of times but this anecdote does a better job of it. Automation of self driving will lead to much more driving than we have today because today the requirement is that someone needs to be willing to make the trip as well as the vehicle. With automated driving that requirement drops away so there will be many more trips that do not happen now. This will lead to more congestion and will to some extent undo the 'green' effects of the electric revolution. > With autopilot engaged, I am monitoring everything - probably with more accuracy then if I was driving, due to the decreased cognitive load. But you've lost situational awareness and won't be able to recover it in time if the autopilot decides to call it a day due to the complexity of the situation. This has been studied countless times for airliner pilots and operators of rail vehicles.