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This mixed messaging of “you don’t need to be looking at the road!”, “but you should be looking at the road.” Is going to lead to more deaths. As someone who wo

by atty 6y ago

This mixed messaging of “you don’t need to be looking at the road!”, “but you should be looking at the road.” Is going to lead to more deaths. As someone who works for one of the major global car companies, I’m very concerned for how breathlessly we (as an industry) talk about things like “autopilot” instead of “driver assist”, and a million other flashy marketing terms that make it difficult to just understand what the system is and is not capable of handling.

judge2020 6y ago
> talk about things like “autopilot” instead of “driver assist” As stated countless times before, autopilot in planes isn't even geared towards handing most flight scenarios or challenging conditions. Tesla is technically correct to call it this, even though this naming is confusing to consumers who think "plane flies itself" and think it means their car can drive itself in all conditions and avoid at-fault incidents - which most likely will indeed lead to more deaths.
- FuckMeNow69 6y ago
  Hi
- nitinreddy88 6y ago
  The consumers are not techsavy like Tesla or HN world. Every word used for marketing should be wisely thought or we will end up with consequences
- maxerickson 6y ago
  What are the rules to this "technically correct"? It's not even flying the car!
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    You need the latest Tesla firmware upgrade to activate flight. Or an unfinished bridge combined with lane tracking and an inattentive driver.
    - ck2 6y ago
      I understood that reference. https://jalopnik.com/a-tesla-stan-dmd-me-to-show-what-they-thought-was-an-am-1846379827 https://jalopnik.com/a-tesla-stan-dmd-me-to-show-what-they-t...
- ncallaway 6y ago
  > As stated countless times before, autopilot in planes isn't even geared towards handing most flight scenarios As stated countless times in response, it doesn't matter what autopilot actually does when the concern is the public perception of the marketing. If "autopilot" sounds to the general public like "it drives itself" (which is the simple etymology of the word), then it doesn't matter one flying fig what autopilot on planes actually does.
  - labcomputer 6y ago
    Why isn’t there the same level of hand wringing over Ford’s “co-pilot”? Surely a copilot is even more capable than an autopilot.
    - ncallaway 6y ago
      This assumes that no one is hand wringing over Ford's marketing. I haven't seen as much of Ford's marketing as I have as Tesla's, so I personally have written as many words about it. But I have the same concerns about all marketing that positions cars as being capable enough that people don't have to pay attention. Until we hit true Level 4 or Level 5 self driving cards, I'm extremely concerned about the public's perception that they don't have to operate a motor vehicle. *Especially* if the vehicle is capable of enough automated driving that the driver doesn't need to pay attention during most of the operation of the vehicle. To your specific point though, I think in general the public would view something marketed at "autopilot" as more capable than something marketed as "co-pilot", despite the significant capability advantage that a "co-pilot" actually offers over an "autopilot" inside the cockpit of an airplane.
      - madamelic 6y ago
        The difference between Ford and Tesla is that Ford is "one of the good ones". Not interested in leading the pack; happy enough to follow, crush smaller competition by their bloat, declare bankruptcy and take in hundreds of billions in handouts because of their irresponsibility and ineptitude.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  The average consumer is not familiar enough with the limits of automated avionics to understand the limits of commercial jets' autopilot. If the average consumer was also an airline pilot then it would make sense to use an industry term with nuanced meaning. Instead, the average consumer assumes a straightforward meaning of the term, especially with pop culture throwing out phrases like "planes practically fly themselves these days". Claiming "autopilot is technically correct" would only approach being true if Tesla & others went into great detail to educate buyers about the limits of the avionic autopilot features referenced by the term, and difficulties of flying a plane in non-optimal conditions, so they actually understood the "technical" meaning and could apply it correctly to the car they're buying.
  - spullara 6y ago
    They tell you every time you engage it the limitations. Stop this fud. It is better than humans being in control.
    - Kbelicius 6y ago
      No it is not[0],stop this shilling. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2020/10/28/new-tesla-autopilot-statistics-show-its-almost-as-safe-driving-with-it-as-without/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2020/10/28/new-te...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- yread 6y ago
  I can't set target altitude nor heading on this thing, it can't use ILS, follow VORs. It doesn't make sense to call it autopilot
  - nelox 6y ago
    The passengers have no idea there are no pilots around when things don’t go as expected
- jfoster 6y ago
  Remember how dangerous the roads were when the car companies producing cars without gear shifts started calling their cars "automatic" as opposed to manual?
  - totalZero 6y ago
    This is ridiculous. A transmission failure and a self-driving failure have very different implications. Automatic transmissions don't have pedestrians walking through them, etc.
    - brabel 6y ago
      You say this is ridiculous but your premise that these new "self-driving" cars are "walking trough pedestrians" is even more ridiculous and not backed by any data of real world experiments currently being undertaken.
      - upbeat_general 6y ago
        I think the point was that automatic transmissions are far simpler systems that are harder to screw up. And if you do screw them up it’s bad but not driving into pedestrians bad. No, there’s not many self driving cars that have driven into pedestrians but Uber ATG’s car notably did, and there is certainly a lot of room for failure.
        jfoster 6y ago
        Meanwhile, humans are driving into pedestrians every minute of every day, but yes, get upset about what Tesla called their system...
TameAntelope 6y ago
It doesn't say you should be looking at the road, simply that you are aware of your surroundings and that you remain ready to retake control should the vehicle notify you should. That's different.
- piva00 6y ago
  How can you keep aware of your surroundings going 60+ km/h without paying attention to the road? Even more if you are required to take control in an instant, you have to be completely enveloped by your spatial awareness. I have raced go-karts, I've raced GT cars, there is absolutely no way to keep aware of your surroundings if your focus isn't constantly on the road and checking mirrors, full stop.
  - TameAntelope 6y ago
    The language here is critical. The question is where your focus lies, and at level 3 autonomous driving, there are situations where your focus can be elsewhere besides the specific road conditions. You are assuming “aware” means “ready to take over in an instant”. That is not what it means in this context.
jeffreygoesto 6y ago
YipYipYip. This is the blue wart in the green sea [0]. The system drives until you should have taken over and died. The situations that are detectable as faulty are not the lethal ones typically. As far as I remember, Volvo denied to implement Level3 years ago [1], which is the only grown-up and responsible answer to this problem. [0] https://www.sae.org/binaries/content/gallery/cm/articles/press-releases/2018/12/j3016-levels-of-automation-image.png https://www.sae.org/binaries/content/gallery/cm/articles/pre... [1] https://auto2xtech.com/volvo-to-skip-level-3-autonomous-mode/ https://auto2xtech.com/volvo-to-skip-level-3-autonomous-mode...
- Gravityloss 6y ago
  Thanks for linking to good source material. > When the feature requests, you must drive Is there some kind of expected delay from the system requesting driver attention to the driver assuming control? Ie something like 3 seconds?
  - buran77 6y ago
    That's the problem, no such system can guarantee it gives you a minimum amount of time. Some situations appear and develop in less than 3 seconds (think small child jumping in front of your car from between parked cars). You might only have 1s to react and if you are not "plugged in" and fully attentive at that instant you missed the window to react. The more you "disconnect" as a driver, the less likely you are to take over in a split second and this has been proven again and again with humans. A system that works 90% of the time is probably the worst because it's good enough to give you confidence but bad enough that it's a false one. The driver is in the position to buy the advertised "you can disconnect" feature but then only be able to use it under explicit risk of harm to themselves and others. It actually increases the mental load as drivers will try to both "disconnect" (type on the phone, watch a movie) while also "paying attention to the road". Of course both can't be reasonably done at the same time so both experiences are sacrificed. It's like encouraging people to take a taxi after drinking but then expecting them to take over whenever the driver makes a mistake and holding them responsible and accountable for the outcome. You won't enjoy the drink, or the drive. These half-way solutions are great for marketing and for people who are all about the hype. But not only are they the bad compromises, they're also fueled by bad and incomplete data, and by marketing departments wanting to sell more. Almost no self driving outfit provides data on how many times did a human make the slightest correction while the self driving was enabled. Or out of all possible driving conditions, what percentage of them were covered by those self driving miles. My personal philosophy is that cars are either self driving or they're not. Meaning they can either match an average human driver in all conditions they're expected to encounter over the lifetime, or they're just assisting the driver. If it's self driving except when it's not then it's just like a student driver. You wouldn't confuse them with being perfect drivers just because of their perfect safety record, given the supervisor corrects their every mistake.
spullara 6y ago
It doesn't lead to more deaths. See Tesla for proof. This is a super bad take.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  The stats I’ve seen quoted about Tesla are super misleading and not at all apples to apples comparisons.
- totalZero 6y ago
  https://www.tesladeaths.com/ https://www.tesladeaths.com/
  - vletal 6y ago
    Have you mentioned how sparse the autopilot claimed column is? And how even sparser the verified autopilot is? Seems like the authors are trying to inflate the total numbers very hard.
    - madamelic 6y ago
      Not to mention the spreadsheet admits Autopilot was released in 2015 but they are still including deaths from 2013. This can't be more blatant.
      - FireBeyond 6y ago
        Autopilot might not be around, but up until very recently Tesla refused to participate in a lot of auto safety testing saying that they believed the testing regime was "flawed". I have no issue with keeping track of auto deaths from a company who is claiming that their vehicles are safe while preventing anything but the legal minimum necessary tests from occurring.
  - spullara 6y ago
    Ok, reduce that to where autopilot is engaged.
  - 6y ago
NavinF 6y ago
Meh. It only needs to be better than the average driver. Several companies have already achieved that
- dheera 6y ago
  I think the bar needs to be much higher than "average". Although beating the average is arguably "good enough" to deploy in a collective sense, we live in a society of individual actors, and if I'm an above average driver, it needs to be better than me, not better than average, for me to want to use it. Assuming a society in which each person individually and rationally chooses whether or not to use it, if you want 99% of people to use it, your software needs to be better than the 99th percentile driver.
  - stormbrew 6y ago
    This assumes a lot about the correctness of people's perceptions of their own driving skills. My experience is 99% of drivers think they're above average, and that obviously can't be true.
    - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
      In my experience there's two kinds of people who'll say their good drivers and they're both good but with wildly different definitions of "good" You've got Jose the 35yo MRI service technician who logs 100k/yr for work and has had so much time to get good he can tell exactly what traffic is doing and are highly capable of printing what is about to happen and are preemptively making moves based on that. He knows his insurance company would crucify him if the saw how he flings an overloaded Transit Connect through an on-ramp or parallel parks by braille so if you press the issue he'll tell you he's good at getting where he's going but that the bureaucrats who write the state driver's manual wouldn't like him. And then you've got Karen the elementary school teacher nearing retirement who logs 10k/yr 5k of which are spent looking at her phone. She has spent a cumulative one hour of her life above the speed limit despite spending much more than that on highways where the traffic flow is well above the speed limit. She follows every rule in the book to the letter, gets honked at daily and once a week she has a story about "some asshole" she got in a conflicting situation with. She doesn't know how far down the gas pedal on her 4Runner goes but oh boy does that brake pedal get a workout when "oh crap almost missed my turn". She swears up and down that she's a good driver because of the seventeen fender benders she's been in she was only at fault in the three that were caught on camera or where witnesses stopped. Which definition of "good" do you want near you when there's 3" of snow on the road?
cycomanic 6y ago
I blame this largely on Telsa essentially driving the industry like a heard of cattle. This is/was a great when it came to accelerating the development of electric cars, and I realise that the software development community really likes the "move fast and break stuff" mantra, but there are reasons why engineering fields with chartered engineers have processes like FMEA: people die if things fail. A friend who is an engineer at a premium car manufacturer working on sensors for self-driving is telling me that the internal policy inside the manufacturer is, that the only competitor that matters is Tesla, so they only compare themselves to Tesla. The same friend also believes that real self-driving is still many years out, even sensors that can deal with general weather conditions do not exist yet.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- kolinko 6y ago
  How did your friend arrive at the conclusion that we don’t have good enough sensors? IMHO AI to analyse the data is what’s missing - we have cameras that are just as good as human eyes, so we know for a fact that the current sensors are enough to drive in general weather conditions.
  - KaiserPro 6y ago
    Cameras don't give you depth. You have two choices: o have a sensor that gives you depth directly (ie laser, radar, or lenticular array) o try and infer depth from stereo cameras Lidars are expensive and power hungry, Radar is cheap and mature, but doesn't give you anywhere near as much resoultion lenitucular only has a tiny range. There are other time of flight sensors, but they are either not production ready, expensive or both. What Tesla have chosen to do is kinda try and merge radar and monocular object detection to give a higher frame rate depth estimation of objects. However its expensive to develop, unreliable, and terrible in corner cases (ie, if sees an unknown object, it can't place its depth.) Now humans can do this, because we've had years of training, Tesla can't. Tesla's fancy cruise control is dangerous. Its auto drive stuff its trying to develop is even more dangerous. Instead of finding the sensors and processing spec needed to drive safely, they are trying to use the sensors and GPU they already have. Its not going to work and is unsafe.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>Is going to lead to more deaths. It'll lead to the same number of deaths and slightly more complicated lawsuits. At a statistical level Nobody(TM) is heeding fine print warnings.
Dumblydorr 6y ago
More important than short run death is longer term road deaths. Their messaging is flawed but hundreds of thousands die in car accidents yearly... The rollout of these cars needs to be smooth and quick to prevent longer term death. It's incumbent upon early adopters to be responsible for the sake of society.
- mrkwse 6y ago
  Regarding this, I strongly believe the correct approach is L3 capability but only expressed through L2 features. We're not at a point where it's safe for drivers to move their attention from driving, but the technology is mature enough that it can and should intervene wherever possible to avoid collisions and other incidents. The expectation that drivers can divert their attention from driving to perform other tasks on the expectation that they can resume control at short notice is extremely misguided. This should not prevent similar sensor and software tech that could enable L3 autonomy from enabling more effective accident avoidance technology that intervenes in situations where the driver may drive in a careless or dangerous way.
daveswilson 6y ago
Goodness gracious doesn't anyone in the auto industry ever even look at how the word "autopilot" has been used in the aviation and marine industries? It has _never_ meant that the vehicle operator gets to abandon their responsibilities. However I agree that the mixed messaging is sad and irresponsible, and this article's author could have been more circumspect.
- loudmax 6y ago
  How the term "autopilot" is used by professionals in the aviation and marine industries isn't the main point here. What matters is what non-professionals think when they hear the term "autopilot". If you market something as "autopilot" don't be surprised that general consumers don't have the same nuanced understanding of the term as professional pilots.
- brianwawok 6y ago
  Right, and this is what Tesla autopilot is. Tesla no attention dream they want to someday roll out is under FSD (full self driving).
- bonestamp2 6y ago
  You're right, but pilots are highly trained and must maintain their training/skills. On the other hand, it's possible to get a driver's license without any formal training (in many Western countries at least) and then buy a "self driving" car without any training on how to use it. Because of that divide, I think there should at least be an online training curriculum and test before your car will unlock autopilot mode.
bryanlarsen 6y ago
The Honda is level 3 only during traffic jams -- it's limited to 50km/h and only on the expressway. If it's completely incompetent the worst that will happen is some minor body damage. It's not going to cause any deaths.
lukebuehler 6y ago
Yes, it should be quite simple: Self-driving: car comes with no steering wheel. Lane/drive assist: car has steering wheel and you have to steer the whole time—with occasional nudges from the AI.
csharptwdec19 6y ago
It's because they know that Self Driving Cars are the way to Guarantee a revenue stream for the life of the vehicle. Screw actual utility, this is about revenue, plain and simple.
craftinator 6y ago
> talk about things like “autopilot” instead of “driver assist” I actually find driver assist technologies almost as damaging. For example, lane assist (car centers itself in lane) can cause the car to veer when lanes are mis-painted. After having it turned on for a few minutes without issues, you begin to relax, then the car decides to take an off-ramp or swerve towards the shoulder. As a comparative example, let's look at automatic gear boxes vs manual. As far as I know, there are no auto gear boxes that will occasionally require you to hit the clutch in order to successfully change gears. Their either completely auto, completely manual, or auto with manual override. Having something halfway between automatic and manual is just ASKING for problems; that being said, an auto gearbox that is expected to work only 99% of the time also really doesn't exist, which is why self driving is hard. I'd much rather better alerting and imminent danger capabilities; more ubiquitous and accurate blind spot sensors, lane change cameras, brake alarms (or even auto-braking, if it's high reliability). These technologies will allow the overall self-driving landscape to improve (because there's so much overlap; self-driving NEEDS all of these sensing techs, and needs them to be REALLY good in order to work) and mature over time, while road infrastructure, mapping, legislature, and public opinion catch up.
- brianwawok 6y ago
  Humans mess up mispainted lane lines also. Have seen many times where there were 2-3 conflicting lane lines painted and people just kinda drove where ever. I think both humans and robots could benefit for federal laws about road construction and lane markings.
  - craftinator 6y ago
    > Humans mess up mispainted lane lines also. Have seen many times where there were 2-3 conflicting lane lines painted and people just kinda drove where ever. That's very true, I've seen it as well. I think the big difference is that humans have the context and experience to deal with those situations on the fly, making choices that a self driving systems just haven't matured enough to make; this is why I advocate for better alerting systems rather than anything that changes the trajectory of the car on its own.
markogresak 6y ago
> how breathlessly we (as an industry) talk about things like “autopilot” instead of “driver assist” Is this true? I was just purchasing a car and did a lot of research. I was looking only at the European brands because I like the overall offering. There are different names, but none too flashy or promising too much. How they call the driving assistant systems: - BMW: Driving Assist (Regular/Plus/Professional) - Volvo: Pilot assist - Mercedes-Benz: they just describe the functions, i.e. active cruise control, steering assist, etc. - VW group (VW, Skoda, Seat): Travel assist
xnx 6y ago
From my observations, it seems the most boastful (Uber, Tesla) are behaving the most recklessly. Waymo's driver is probably 10x better (however you want to measure that), and they seem the most measured and careful in their communication.

by atty 6y ago

judge2020 6y ago

> talk about things like “autopilot” instead of “driver assist” As stated countless times before, autopilot in planes isn't even geared towards handing most flight scenarios or challenging conditions. Tesla is technically correct to call it this, even though this naming is confusing to consumers who think "plane flies itself" and think it means their car can drive itself in all conditions and avoid at-fault incidents - which most likely will indeed lead to more deaths.

FuckMeNow69 6y ago
Hi
nitinreddy88 6y ago
The consumers are not techsavy like Tesla or HN world. Every word used for marketing should be wisely thought or we will end up with consequences
maxerickson 6y ago
What are the rules to this "technically correct"? It's not even flying the car!
- ineedasername 6y ago
  You need the latest Tesla firmware upgrade to activate flight. Or an unfinished bridge combined with lane tracking and an inattentive driver.
  - ck2 6y ago
    I understood that reference. https://jalopnik.com/a-tesla-stan-dmd-me-to-show-what-they-thought-was-an-am-1846379827 https://jalopnik.com/a-tesla-stan-dmd-me-to-show-what-they-t...
ncallaway 6y ago
> As stated countless times before, autopilot in planes isn't even geared towards handing most flight scenarios As stated countless times in response, it doesn't matter what autopilot actually does when the concern is the public perception of the marketing. If "autopilot" sounds to the general public like "it drives itself" (which is the simple etymology of the word), then it doesn't matter one flying fig what autopilot on planes actually does.
- labcomputer 6y ago
  Why isn’t there the same level of hand wringing over Ford’s “co-pilot”? Surely a copilot is even more capable than an autopilot.
  - ncallaway 6y ago
    This assumes that no one is hand wringing over Ford's marketing. I haven't seen as much of Ford's marketing as I have as Tesla's, so I personally have written as many words about it. But I have the same concerns about all marketing that positions cars as being capable enough that people don't have to pay attention. Until we hit true Level 4 or Level 5 self driving cards, I'm extremely concerned about the public's perception that they don't have to operate a motor vehicle. *Especially* if the vehicle is capable of enough automated driving that the driver doesn't need to pay attention during most of the operation of the vehicle. To your specific point though, I think in general the public would view something marketed at "autopilot" as more capable than something marketed as "co-pilot", despite the significant capability advantage that a "co-pilot" actually offers over an "autopilot" inside the cockpit of an airplane.
    - madamelic 6y ago
      The difference between Ford and Tesla is that Ford is "one of the good ones". Not interested in leading the pack; happy enough to follow, crush smaller competition by their bloat, declare bankruptcy and take in hundreds of billions in handouts because of their irresponsibility and ineptitude.
ineedasername 6y ago
The average consumer is not familiar enough with the limits of automated avionics to understand the limits of commercial jets' autopilot. If the average consumer was also an airline pilot then it would make sense to use an industry term with nuanced meaning. Instead, the average consumer assumes a straightforward meaning of the term, especially with pop culture throwing out phrases like "planes practically fly themselves these days". Claiming "autopilot is technically correct" would only approach being true if Tesla & others went into great detail to educate buyers about the limits of the avionic autopilot features referenced by the term, and difficulties of flying a plane in non-optimal conditions, so they actually understood the "technical" meaning and could apply it correctly to the car they're buying.
- spullara 6y ago
  They tell you every time you engage it the limitations. Stop this fud. It is better than humans being in control.
  - Kbelicius 6y ago
    No it is not[0],stop this shilling. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2020/10/28/new-tesla-autopilot-statistics-show-its-almost-as-safe-driving-with-it-as-without/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2020/10/28/new-te...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
yread 6y ago
I can't set target altitude nor heading on this thing, it can't use ILS, follow VORs. It doesn't make sense to call it autopilot
- nelox 6y ago
  The passengers have no idea there are no pilots around when things don’t go as expected
jfoster 6y ago
Remember how dangerous the roads were when the car companies producing cars without gear shifts started calling their cars "automatic" as opposed to manual?
- totalZero 6y ago
  This is ridiculous. A transmission failure and a self-driving failure have very different implications. Automatic transmissions don't have pedestrians walking through them, etc.
  - brabel 6y ago
    You say this is ridiculous but your premise that these new "self-driving" cars are "walking trough pedestrians" is even more ridiculous and not backed by any data of real world experiments currently being undertaken.
    - upbeat_general 6y ago
      I think the point was that automatic transmissions are far simpler systems that are harder to screw up. And if you do screw them up it’s bad but not driving into pedestrians bad. No, there’s not many self driving cars that have driven into pedestrians but Uber ATG’s car notably did, and there is certainly a lot of room for failure.
      - jfoster 6y ago
        Meanwhile, humans are driving into pedestrians every minute of every day, but yes, get upset about what Tesla called their system...

TameAntelope 6y ago

It doesn't say you should be looking at the road, simply that you are aware of your surroundings and that you remain ready to retake control should the vehicle notify you should. That's different.

piva00 6y ago
How can you keep aware of your surroundings going 60+ km/h without paying attention to the road? Even more if you are required to take control in an instant, you have to be completely enveloped by your spatial awareness. I have raced go-karts, I've raced GT cars, there is absolutely no way to keep aware of your surroundings if your focus isn't constantly on the road and checking mirrors, full stop.
- TameAntelope 6y ago
  The language here is critical. The question is where your focus lies, and at level 3 autonomous driving, there are situations where your focus can be elsewhere besides the specific road conditions. You are assuming “aware” means “ready to take over in an instant”. That is not what it means in this context.

jeffreygoesto 6y ago

YipYipYip. This is the blue wart in the green sea [0]. The system drives until you should have taken over and died. The situations that are detectable as faulty are not the lethal ones typically. As far as I remember, Volvo denied to implement Level3 years ago [1], which is the only grown-up and responsible answer to this problem. [0] https://www.sae.org/binaries/content/gallery/cm/articles/press-releases/2018/12/j3016-levels-of-automation-image.png https://www.sae.org/binaries/content/gallery/cm/articles/pre... [1] https://auto2xtech.com/volvo-to-skip-level-3-autonomous-mode/ https://auto2xtech.com/volvo-to-skip-level-3-autonomous-mode...

Gravityloss 6y ago
Thanks for linking to good source material. > When the feature requests, you must drive Is there some kind of expected delay from the system requesting driver attention to the driver assuming control? Ie something like 3 seconds?
- buran77 6y ago
  That's the problem, no such system can guarantee it gives you a minimum amount of time. Some situations appear and develop in less than 3 seconds (think small child jumping in front of your car from between parked cars). You might only have 1s to react and if you are not "plugged in" and fully attentive at that instant you missed the window to react. The more you "disconnect" as a driver, the less likely you are to take over in a split second and this has been proven again and again with humans. A system that works 90% of the time is probably the worst because it's good enough to give you confidence but bad enough that it's a false one. The driver is in the position to buy the advertised "you can disconnect" feature but then only be able to use it under explicit risk of harm to themselves and others. It actually increases the mental load as drivers will try to both "disconnect" (type on the phone, watch a movie) while also "paying attention to the road". Of course both can't be reasonably done at the same time so both experiences are sacrificed. It's like encouraging people to take a taxi after drinking but then expecting them to take over whenever the driver makes a mistake and holding them responsible and accountable for the outcome. You won't enjoy the drink, or the drive. These half-way solutions are great for marketing and for people who are all about the hype. But not only are they the bad compromises, they're also fueled by bad and incomplete data, and by marketing departments wanting to sell more. Almost no self driving outfit provides data on how many times did a human make the slightest correction while the self driving was enabled. Or out of all possible driving conditions, what percentage of them were covered by those self driving miles. My personal philosophy is that cars are either self driving or they're not. Meaning they can either match an average human driver in all conditions they're expected to encounter over the lifetime, or they're just assisting the driver. If it's self driving except when it's not then it's just like a student driver. You wouldn't confuse them with being perfect drivers just because of their perfect safety record, given the supervisor corrects their every mistake.

spullara 6y ago

It doesn't lead to more deaths. See Tesla for proof. This is a super bad take.

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
The stats I’ve seen quoted about Tesla are super misleading and not at all apples to apples comparisons.
totalZero 6y ago
https://www.tesladeaths.com/ https://www.tesladeaths.com/
- vletal 6y ago
  Have you mentioned how sparse the autopilot claimed column is? And how even sparser the verified autopilot is? Seems like the authors are trying to inflate the total numbers very hard.
  - madamelic 6y ago
    Not to mention the spreadsheet admits Autopilot was released in 2015 but they are still including deaths from 2013. This can't be more blatant.
    - FireBeyond 6y ago
      Autopilot might not be around, but up until very recently Tesla refused to participate in a lot of auto safety testing saying that they believed the testing regime was "flawed". I have no issue with keeping track of auto deaths from a company who is claiming that their vehicles are safe while preventing anything but the legal minimum necessary tests from occurring.
- spullara 6y ago
  Ok, reduce that to where autopilot is engaged.
- 6y ago

NavinF 6y ago

Meh. It only needs to be better than the average driver. Several companies have already achieved that

dheera 6y ago
I think the bar needs to be much higher than "average". Although beating the average is arguably "good enough" to deploy in a collective sense, we live in a society of individual actors, and if I'm an above average driver, it needs to be better than me, not better than average, for me to want to use it. Assuming a society in which each person individually and rationally chooses whether or not to use it, if you want 99% of people to use it, your software needs to be better than the 99th percentile driver.
- stormbrew 6y ago
  This assumes a lot about the correctness of people's perceptions of their own driving skills. My experience is 99% of drivers think they're above average, and that obviously can't be true.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    In my experience there's two kinds of people who'll say their good drivers and they're both good but with wildly different definitions of "good" You've got Jose the 35yo MRI service technician who logs 100k/yr for work and has had so much time to get good he can tell exactly what traffic is doing and are highly capable of printing what is about to happen and are preemptively making moves based on that. He knows his insurance company would crucify him if the saw how he flings an overloaded Transit Connect through an on-ramp or parallel parks by braille so if you press the issue he'll tell you he's good at getting where he's going but that the bureaucrats who write the state driver's manual wouldn't like him. And then you've got Karen the elementary school teacher nearing retirement who logs 10k/yr 5k of which are spent looking at her phone. She has spent a cumulative one hour of her life above the speed limit despite spending much more than that on highways where the traffic flow is well above the speed limit. She follows every rule in the book to the letter, gets honked at daily and once a week she has a story about "some asshole" she got in a conflicting situation with. She doesn't know how far down the gas pedal on her 4Runner goes but oh boy does that brake pedal get a workout when "oh crap almost missed my turn". She swears up and down that she's a good driver because of the seventeen fender benders she's been in she was only at fault in the three that were caught on camera or where witnesses stopped. Which definition of "good" do you want near you when there's 3" of snow on the road?

cycomanic 6y ago

I blame this largely on Telsa essentially driving the industry like a heard of cattle. This is/was a great when it came to accelerating the development of electric cars, and I realise that the software development community really likes the "move fast and break stuff" mantra, but there are reasons why engineering fields with chartered engineers have processes like FMEA: people die if things fail. A friend who is an engineer at a premium car manufacturer working on sensors for self-driving is telling me that the internal policy inside the manufacturer is, that the only competitor that matters is Tesla, so they only compare themselves to Tesla. The same friend also believes that real self-driving is still many years out, even sensors that can deal with general weather conditions do not exist yet.

deleted 6y ago
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kolinko 6y ago
How did your friend arrive at the conclusion that we don’t have good enough sensors? IMHO AI to analyse the data is what’s missing - we have cameras that are just as good as human eyes, so we know for a fact that the current sensors are enough to drive in general weather conditions.
- KaiserPro 6y ago
  Cameras don't give you depth. You have two choices: o have a sensor that gives you depth directly (ie laser, radar, or lenticular array) o try and infer depth from stereo cameras Lidars are expensive and power hungry, Radar is cheap and mature, but doesn't give you anywhere near as much resoultion lenitucular only has a tiny range. There are other time of flight sensors, but they are either not production ready, expensive or both. What Tesla have chosen to do is kinda try and merge radar and monocular object detection to give a higher frame rate depth estimation of objects. However its expensive to develop, unreliable, and terrible in corner cases (ie, if sees an unknown object, it can't place its depth.) Now humans can do this, because we've had years of training, Tesla can't. Tesla's fancy cruise control is dangerous. Its auto drive stuff its trying to develop is even more dangerous. Instead of finding the sensors and processing spec needed to drive safely, they are trying to use the sensors and GPU they already have. Its not going to work and is unsafe.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

>Is going to lead to more deaths. It'll lead to the same number of deaths and slightly more complicated lawsuits. At a statistical level Nobody(TM) is heeding fine print warnings.

Dumblydorr 6y ago

More important than short run death is longer term road deaths. Their messaging is flawed but hundreds of thousands die in car accidents yearly... The rollout of these cars needs to be smooth and quick to prevent longer term death. It's incumbent upon early adopters to be responsible for the sake of society.

mrkwse 6y ago
Regarding this, I strongly believe the correct approach is L3 capability but only expressed through L2 features. We're not at a point where it's safe for drivers to move their attention from driving, but the technology is mature enough that it can and should intervene wherever possible to avoid collisions and other incidents. The expectation that drivers can divert their attention from driving to perform other tasks on the expectation that they can resume control at short notice is extremely misguided. This should not prevent similar sensor and software tech that could enable L3 autonomy from enabling more effective accident avoidance technology that intervenes in situations where the driver may drive in a careless or dangerous way.

daveswilson 6y ago

Goodness gracious doesn't anyone in the auto industry ever even look at how the word "autopilot" has been used in the aviation and marine industries? It has _never_ meant that the vehicle operator gets to abandon their responsibilities. However I agree that the mixed messaging is sad and irresponsible, and this article's author could have been more circumspect.

loudmax 6y ago
How the term "autopilot" is used by professionals in the aviation and marine industries isn't the main point here. What matters is what non-professionals think when they hear the term "autopilot". If you market something as "autopilot" don't be surprised that general consumers don't have the same nuanced understanding of the term as professional pilots.
brianwawok 6y ago
Right, and this is what Tesla autopilot is. Tesla no attention dream they want to someday roll out is under FSD (full self driving).
bonestamp2 6y ago
You're right, but pilots are highly trained and must maintain their training/skills. On the other hand, it's possible to get a driver's license without any formal training (in many Western countries at least) and then buy a "self driving" car without any training on how to use it. Because of that divide, I think there should at least be an online training curriculum and test before your car will unlock autopilot mode.

bryanlarsen 6y ago

The Honda is level 3 only during traffic jams -- it's limited to 50km/h and only on the expressway. If it's completely incompetent the worst that will happen is some minor body damage. It's not going to cause any deaths.

lukebuehler 6y ago

Yes, it should be quite simple: Self-driving: car comes with no steering wheel. Lane/drive assist: car has steering wheel and you have to steer the whole time—with occasional nudges from the AI.

csharptwdec19 6y ago

It's because they know that Self Driving Cars are the way to Guarantee a revenue stream for the life of the vehicle. Screw actual utility, this is about revenue, plain and simple.

craftinator 6y ago

> talk about things like “autopilot” instead of “driver assist” I actually find driver assist technologies almost as damaging. For example, lane assist (car centers itself in lane) can cause the car to veer when lanes are mis-painted. After having it turned on for a few minutes without issues, you begin to relax, then the car decides to take an off-ramp or swerve towards the shoulder. As a comparative example, let's look at automatic gear boxes vs manual. As far as I know, there are no auto gear boxes that will occasionally require you to hit the clutch in order to successfully change gears. Their either completely auto, completely manual, or auto with manual override. Having something halfway between automatic and manual is just ASKING for problems; that being said, an auto gearbox that is expected to work only 99% of the time also really doesn't exist, which is why self driving is hard. I'd much rather better alerting and imminent danger capabilities; more ubiquitous and accurate blind spot sensors, lane change cameras, brake alarms (or even auto-braking, if it's high reliability). These technologies will allow the overall self-driving landscape to improve (because there's so much overlap; self-driving NEEDS all of these sensing techs, and needs them to be REALLY good in order to work) and mature over time, while road infrastructure, mapping, legislature, and public opinion catch up.

brianwawok 6y ago
Humans mess up mispainted lane lines also. Have seen many times where there were 2-3 conflicting lane lines painted and people just kinda drove where ever. I think both humans and robots could benefit for federal laws about road construction and lane markings.
- craftinator 6y ago
  > Humans mess up mispainted lane lines also. Have seen many times where there were 2-3 conflicting lane lines painted and people just kinda drove where ever. That's very true, I've seen it as well. I think the big difference is that humans have the context and experience to deal with those situations on the fly, making choices that a self driving systems just haven't matured enough to make; this is why I advocate for better alerting systems rather than anything that changes the trajectory of the car on its own.

markogresak 6y ago

> how breathlessly we (as an industry) talk about things like “autopilot” instead of “driver assist” Is this true? I was just purchasing a car and did a lot of research. I was looking only at the European brands because I like the overall offering. There are different names, but none too flashy or promising too much. How they call the driving assistant systems: - BMW: Driving Assist (Regular/Plus/Professional) - Volvo: Pilot assist - Mercedes-Benz: they just describe the functions, i.e. active cruise control, steering assist, etc. - VW group (VW, Skoda, Seat): Travel assist

xnx 6y ago

From my observations, it seems the most boastful (Uber, Tesla) are behaving the most recklessly. Waymo's driver is probably 10x better (however you want to measure that), and they seem the most measured and careful in their communication.