4 ms·

The driver is responsible for stopping the car. You literally agree to it when you enable AP. People are too comfortable and not paying attention.

mhermher 5y ago
The fact that it occurs so often should suggest to you that autopilot itself makes people too comfortable and not pay attention.
- jerf 5y ago
  I, and many others, take the position that there really isn't any practical gradation between more-or-less conventional driving, maybe with light lane switching assistance or something, and full on "Level 5" autonomous driving, because the idea that human brains can watch something for hours at a time only to take instant, sub-second actions every few hours is an insane model of human cognition. I don't disagree with the idea of having a gradient to measure our progress up to full autonomy, but I haven't seen much to say that we should deploy the intermediate stages. Until autonomy can be reasonably guaranteed at at least human levels of safety under the assumption of no human control, it really shouldn't be deployed. "But the human had 673 milliseconds to take control and avert the accident! It's their fault!" is simply not a reasonable defense.
  - joelwilliamson 5y ago
    Shouldn't the objection be to anything less than Level 4, rather than Level 5? Level 4 requires that the vehicle can safely stop itself and wait for a human to take over when it is faced with a situation it can't handle. (There's an argument that if you take away the routine parts of driving, humans won't be able to deal with anomalous situations, but that's a different argument than the attentiveness one.)
    - jerf 5y ago
      If that is possible, yes. I'm not convinced it is possible to create an autonomous vehicle that only panics in situations where there is a safe pull-over, or, if such a vehicle exists, that it'll be considered "autonomous" when it can't go past 25 or 35 mph or something. There's plenty of driving situations that may be confusing where pulling over and stopping isn't possible. (And, to be clear, I'm not asking for perfect safety, I'm asking for "human or better", and also understand that there may be some interesting fuzziness near the border where the two have different strengths and weakenesses but come out statistically the same. However, I don't feel like we're there yet.)
- galangalalgol 5y ago
  Mixed control between automated and human for tasks that require persistent attention is bad. We have known this for decades. The example often given in engineering textbooks is 3 mile island. I suspect that the engineers involved in self driving systems know this too, but the liability is too great to make the switch all at once. It seems better to take baby steps into self driving, but history teaches us it should be all or nothing.
  - fallingknife 5y ago
    You could say the same about airplane autopilots, but they have an amazing safety record.
    - kaibee 5y ago
      Airplanes also have 2 pilots and nothing to crash into.
    - Piskvorrr 5y ago
      Far fewer objects to hit in the air: disengagement means "keep going this way," rarely "and crash into an eventual obstacle". Plus, their early safety record is written in blood like everything else is.
      - fallingknife 5y ago
        > Plus, their early safety record is written in blood like everything else is. Yeah, and that's how it's going to be with car autopilots. Which is why it pisses me off that people want to stop progress on it.
        Piskvorrr 5y ago
        Interesting typoes in "be unwilling test subjects". Feel free to volunteer, though. Elaine Herzberg sure didn't.
    - meepmorp 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
meepmorp 5y ago
> The driver is responsible for stopping the car. You literally agree to it when you enable AP. People are too comfortable and not paying attention. Autopilot encourages people to not pay as much attention while driving, until a critical situation comes up at which point they're expected to be fully in control. That's a design flaw that isn't fixed with a liability shifting "Agree" button.
- tyfon 5y ago
  It will nag you every 17 seconds (if not attentive/holding the wheel with a torque) and abort auto pilot completely if you do not comply. If you do this three times in a drive you have to power off and on the car again to be able to use autopilot again. I've done maybe 40.000 km on autopilot and it's very aggressive compared to my other car (ioniq electric) when it comes to attention. The fact that some people purposely defeat this system with weights on the wheel is another matter. But saying that tesla encourages you to not paying attention is not correct.
  - jsight 5y ago
    To be fair, the person you are responding to may not like those other systems either. All the articles with industry analysts insisting that other driver monitoring systems are nearly perfect have sometimes blinded me to that fact. A lot of people don't like any of these systems for a lot of the same reasons that people didn't like basic cruise control in the early days.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      I haven't used basic cruise control in years. It's actually convenient not to have to pay attention to the speed but I find, on roads with even moderate traffic, it comes at the cost of prioritizing maintaining a constant speed rather than flowing with traffic and generally staying in a lane.
avereveard 5y ago
You have no telemetry and no idea what actually happened, car might have veered without enough warning. Which is the whole point of having an investigation, really.

mhermher 5y ago

The fact that it occurs so often should suggest to you that autopilot itself makes people too comfortable and not pay attention.

jerf 5y ago
I, and many others, take the position that there really isn't any practical gradation between more-or-less conventional driving, maybe with light lane switching assistance or something, and full on "Level 5" autonomous driving, because the idea that human brains can watch something for hours at a time only to take instant, sub-second actions every few hours is an insane model of human cognition. I don't disagree with the idea of having a gradient to measure our progress up to full autonomy, but I haven't seen much to say that we should deploy the intermediate stages. Until autonomy can be reasonably guaranteed at at least human levels of safety under the assumption of no human control, it really shouldn't be deployed. "But the human had 673 milliseconds to take control and avert the accident! It's their fault!" is simply not a reasonable defense.
- joelwilliamson 5y ago
  Shouldn't the objection be to anything less than Level 4, rather than Level 5? Level 4 requires that the vehicle can safely stop itself and wait for a human to take over when it is faced with a situation it can't handle. (There's an argument that if you take away the routine parts of driving, humans won't be able to deal with anomalous situations, but that's a different argument than the attentiveness one.)
  - jerf 5y ago
    If that is possible, yes. I'm not convinced it is possible to create an autonomous vehicle that only panics in situations where there is a safe pull-over, or, if such a vehicle exists, that it'll be considered "autonomous" when it can't go past 25 or 35 mph or something. There's plenty of driving situations that may be confusing where pulling over and stopping isn't possible. (And, to be clear, I'm not asking for perfect safety, I'm asking for "human or better", and also understand that there may be some interesting fuzziness near the border where the two have different strengths and weakenesses but come out statistically the same. However, I don't feel like we're there yet.)
galangalalgol 5y ago
Mixed control between automated and human for tasks that require persistent attention is bad. We have known this for decades. The example often given in engineering textbooks is 3 mile island. I suspect that the engineers involved in self driving systems know this too, but the liability is too great to make the switch all at once. It seems better to take baby steps into self driving, but history teaches us it should be all or nothing.
- fallingknife 5y ago
  You could say the same about airplane autopilots, but they have an amazing safety record.
  - kaibee 5y ago
    Airplanes also have 2 pilots and nothing to crash into.
  - Piskvorrr 5y ago
    Far fewer objects to hit in the air: disengagement means "keep going this way," rarely "and crash into an eventual obstacle". Plus, their early safety record is written in blood like everything else is.
    - fallingknife 5y ago
      > Plus, their early safety record is written in blood like everything else is. Yeah, and that's how it's going to be with car autopilots. Which is why it pisses me off that people want to stop progress on it.
      - Piskvorrr 5y ago
        Interesting typoes in "be unwilling test subjects". Feel free to volunteer, though. Elaine Herzberg sure didn't.
  - meepmorp 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

meepmorp 5y ago

> The driver is responsible for stopping the car. You literally agree to it when you enable AP. People are too comfortable and not paying attention. Autopilot encourages people to not pay as much attention while driving, until a critical situation comes up at which point they're expected to be fully in control. That's a design flaw that isn't fixed with a liability shifting "Agree" button.

tyfon 5y ago
It will nag you every 17 seconds (if not attentive/holding the wheel with a torque) and abort auto pilot completely if you do not comply. If you do this three times in a drive you have to power off and on the car again to be able to use autopilot again. I've done maybe 40.000 km on autopilot and it's very aggressive compared to my other car (ioniq electric) when it comes to attention. The fact that some people purposely defeat this system with weights on the wheel is another matter. But saying that tesla encourages you to not paying attention is not correct.
- jsight 5y ago
  To be fair, the person you are responding to may not like those other systems either. All the articles with industry analysts insisting that other driver monitoring systems are nearly perfect have sometimes blinded me to that fact. A lot of people don't like any of these systems for a lot of the same reasons that people didn't like basic cruise control in the early days.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    I haven't used basic cruise control in years. It's actually convenient not to have to pay attention to the speed but I find, on roads with even moderate traffic, it comes at the cost of prioritizing maintaining a constant speed rather than flowing with traffic and generally staying in a lane.

avereveard 5y ago

You have no telemetry and no idea what actually happened, car might have veered without enough warning. Which is the whole point of having an investigation, really.