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>I wonder how many people turn on traditional cruise control and then crash due to neglectful driving. That's what we should be comparing Tesla Autopilot agains

>I wonder how many people turn on traditional cruise control and then crash due to neglectful driving. That's what we should be comparing Tesla Autopilot against, we should compare it against the status quo. This is so disingenuous. Go on YouTube and search for people "self-driving" in their Teslas, then do the same for people doing anything remotely the same with standard cruise control. Tesla and its fanatics want it both ways: it's both the most sophisticated self-driving software on the planet, and only regulations are preventing it from being widely used and reducing traffic accidents, but when accidents happen it's just "cruise control". Pick one.

Manuel_D 4y ago
Is this actually a problem with tesla marketing? Or is it a problem with people being dumb? An aircraft autopilot will happily fly you straight into a mountain. It just holds altitude and bearing. Everyone I know with a Tesla exclusively uses autopilot on the highway in between exits. I'm pretty baffled as to how some people think it's fully autonomous driving, and I'm dubious as to how culpable Tesla is for that ignorance.
- PKop 4y ago
  It's both, and unless you have a solution to eliminating stupid people, then the tech needs to be regulated out of the market so innocent people don't get killed on the roads due to this stupidity.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    There's only so much a company can do to protect against user error. People stick their fingers down a running drain garbage disposal. People will look down the barrel of a loaded gun and pull the trigger. The question is not "has anyone hurt themselves?", the question is "does the product have reasonable safety precautions?"
    - kaba0 4y ago
      For a start, call it what it is: fancy lane assist. That will remove any blame on the company side, but as it stands now it is a deliberate malicious marketing on tesla’s part.
    - PKop 4y ago
      Themselves? This is about their cars being a threat to everyone around them. >so much a company can do Yes, therefore the product should not be legal if these error's can't be minimized or the magnitude of the consequences are disastrous (random unpredictable crashing etc). "Errors" are not all created equal. Some are catastrophic and occur at random.
      - Manuel_D 4y ago
        If I turned on cruise control in my previous car and took a nap it'd happily drive me into the rear end of the car in front of me, or off the road. Where's the outrage over cruise control? And again, I'm highly confident that plenty of people do get in collisions while they're neglectfully driving on cruise control, but those incidents don't catch headlines. Tesla does have safeguards to prevent people from dozing off on autopilot: there's sensors on the steering wheel, and apparently some models have front facing cameras. Some people put weights on the steering wheels, but at that point people are taking deliberate efforts to bypass safeguards. If someone jams a shim in their microwave latch, they can turn it on while the door is open and fry themselves. That's comparable to putting weights on Tesla's steering wheel.
        PKop 4y ago
        Does cruise control require the same, more, or less focused attention from the driver than whatever it is these new features require (or will require)? What are these features for, if they require 100% attention from the driver to monitor? At that point, why not just drive the car? Is there a goal for these features to take incrementally more and more proportion of the responsibility away from the driver, such that the driver can incrementally devote less attention to monitoring? We all know the answers to these questions. We know what the goal is here. But the problem is, human's cannot sort of, kind of, partially pay attention to the road and the car. And any feature that propagandizes them that it will take care of incrementally more of the driving responsibility will result in less (rounded to none) attention devoted to by the driver. It's a binary proposition beyond some threshold as mutli-tasking is a myth. Do you see the problem? As the features appear to be working better and better, the more people will devote less attention to the road even in some bounded range of their drive but this is all it takes for catastrophic errors (that will and are happening because of the nature of failure modes of AI) to occur. And these errors are qualitatively different than the ones humans make. At any given point in time the care can and will just do something completely stupid and dangerous. Swerve into a median, crash into an emergency vehicle, turn sharply into a car in another lane. There's documented occurrences of all of this. When these random catastrophic errors occur, the human will be on the margin paying less attention to the situation than if it was simple cruise control or normal driving.
  - ActorNightly 4y ago
    Regulated by whom..... the people who have absolutely zero clue about how even the basic technology works, and are only interested in getting reelected? Its funny how people rightfully criticize the government and laugh at videos of senator grilling the CEOs of Facebook or Google with stupid questions, but then as soon as a company does something that they don't like, they somehow expect those people to get their shit together and sensibly regulate something as nuanced as autopilot? For technology to get better, it needs to be stress tested - in this case that means accidents and people dying. Which is pretty much on par with development of car technology since its origin. The warnings on autopilot are there. If you don't want to take the risk, don't use it.
    - salawat 4y ago
      Stress testing is done in lab conditions damnit. You don't buckle people in and yeet them against the wall that is your optimism! Half the bloody challenge of testing is setting up the conditions for actually getting meaningful data!
    - PKop 4y ago
      >the people who have absolutely zero clue about how even the basic technology works This won't be a problem when the regulation equates to: "get these death traps off the road, now". Or, "disable your not-intelligent pseudo-self driving now". I'm not talking about working on the technology, I'm saying if it doesn't work get it off the market.
    - kaba0 4y ago
      > in this case that means accidents and people dying. It is an absolutely ridiculous view. I really don’t want a shitty company be able to freely test on the streets their shitty technology that can cause the death of innocents. Are you seriously saying that they are free to increase their profits over the lives of people? On what basis is that ethical or moral? Especially when we talk about a company that jumped into an arguably technically inferior solution by having an incentive to develop their “self-driving” based on visual input only. Their competitors at least take it seriously enough and realize that just because humans can manage with a vision-only system (though a goddamn moving one, not static), lidar and other sensors are required on cars, because ML is nowhere near the capacity of even a worm’s brain, let alone what a human has.
- cj 4y ago
  > I'm dubious as to how culpable Tesla is for that ignorance. Tesla labeling a feature "Full Self Driving" certainly isn't helping the situation when the feature clearly does not deliver what the name of the functionality implies.
- warning26 4y ago
  I knew it wouldn't take long for the "well AKCHTUALLY autopilot in planes just holds bearing therefore Tesla is BLAMELESS" crowd to appear. Popular understanding of the word aside, Tesla often throws around phrases like "full self driving" in the same sentence as "autopilot".
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    Autopilot is a distinct feature from full self driving. And TFA explicitly says it's investigating collisions due to autopilot.
- kube-system 4y ago
  Maybe all we need is a requirement for type certification on people's drivers licenses before they can drive a Tesla.
  - jjoonathan 4y ago
    Doesn't Tesla have driver monitoring and a driver score? So to use autopilot, you not only have to roughly pay attention, but also be pretty good at driving in general to use the beta? Or did they get rid of that? It sounded like a good compromise to me.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      No, that's for their "full self driving" system. There are tutorials on social media for how to circumvent the driver monitoring for 'autopilot'. See for example, the instance in the article of a Tesla going down the highway with the driver in the back seat.
    - kaba0 4y ago
      On what basis can a private company decide what is and isn’t allowable on public roads? Also, there is no human that can engage with a suddenly dangerous situation on a split second basis. People suck at continuous monitoring tasks, if you are driving yourself you are actually engaged.
- mlyle 4y ago
  > Everyone I know with a Tesla exclusively uses autopilot on the highway in between exits. Tesla touts (and sells as a separate option) "full self-driving" capability. They tout that it can make turns on city streets, obey street lights, yield to city traffic, change lanes, park, etc. This is not intended for the use case of on the highway, well-supervised, between exits.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- dekhn 4y ago
  at the time tesla announced autopilot, most people figured that meant you could press a button and it would take you safely to where you want to go. A bunch of pilots chimed in to say that wasn't a good understanding of autopilot, but remember: the people being marketed to by and large aren't pilots. IMHO Tesla has repeatedly overmarketed their actual capabilities. It's clearly starting to catch up with them.
- kaba0 4y ago
  > Is this actually a problem with tesla marketing? It is, definitely. How come they advertise it as FSD (and I know they very much circle around the exact wording, but a good Litmus test to see what is the actual expected output from the ads is to ask a random person on the street and they will definitely think that they are full self driving, while most other cars have some basic lane assist, etc)? Their marketing is absolutely malicious, what else would keep up their massive hype bubble?
- whiplash451 4y ago
  As an industrial company, you are responsible for the outcome of people using your products in a reasonable way. If you are a company building cooking knifes, but sell knifes as sharp as razor blades and people start injuring themselves super badly in their kitchen, saying that "people should be more careful with their kitchen knives" won't get you very far in court and in the public's eyes.
manicdee 4y ago
Where is Tesla claiming that Autopilot is self-driving?
- cj 4y ago
  "Autopilot" = "Automatic Pilot" = "Automatic Driver" = My car drives me while I play games on my iPhone
- kube-system 4y ago
  For starters, have you read the first sentence on https://www.tesla.com/autopilot https://www.tesla.com/autopilot ? > Tesla cars come standard with advanced hardware capable of providing Autopilot features, and full self-driving capabilities—through software updates designed to improve functionality over time. And this is the stuff that is filtered through their communications staff; the stuff Musk has said is even more egregious.
jstream67 4y ago
This investigation is on Autopilot, not the FSD Beta.

Manuel_D 4y ago

Is this actually a problem with tesla marketing? Or is it a problem with people being dumb? An aircraft autopilot will happily fly you straight into a mountain. It just holds altitude and bearing. Everyone I know with a Tesla exclusively uses autopilot on the highway in between exits. I'm pretty baffled as to how some people think it's fully autonomous driving, and I'm dubious as to how culpable Tesla is for that ignorance.

PKop 4y ago
It's both, and unless you have a solution to eliminating stupid people, then the tech needs to be regulated out of the market so innocent people don't get killed on the roads due to this stupidity.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  There's only so much a company can do to protect against user error. People stick their fingers down a running drain garbage disposal. People will look down the barrel of a loaded gun and pull the trigger. The question is not "has anyone hurt themselves?", the question is "does the product have reasonable safety precautions?"
  - kaba0 4y ago
    For a start, call it what it is: fancy lane assist. That will remove any blame on the company side, but as it stands now it is a deliberate malicious marketing on tesla’s part.
  - PKop 4y ago
    Themselves? This is about their cars being a threat to everyone around them. >so much a company can do Yes, therefore the product should not be legal if these error's can't be minimized or the magnitude of the consequences are disastrous (random unpredictable crashing etc). "Errors" are not all created equal. Some are catastrophic and occur at random.
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      If I turned on cruise control in my previous car and took a nap it'd happily drive me into the rear end of the car in front of me, or off the road. Where's the outrage over cruise control? And again, I'm highly confident that plenty of people do get in collisions while they're neglectfully driving on cruise control, but those incidents don't catch headlines. Tesla does have safeguards to prevent people from dozing off on autopilot: there's sensors on the steering wheel, and apparently some models have front facing cameras. Some people put weights on the steering wheels, but at that point people are taking deliberate efforts to bypass safeguards. If someone jams a shim in their microwave latch, they can turn it on while the door is open and fry themselves. That's comparable to putting weights on Tesla's steering wheel.
      - PKop 4y ago
        Does cruise control require the same, more, or less focused attention from the driver than whatever it is these new features require (or will require)? What are these features for, if they require 100% attention from the driver to monitor? At that point, why not just drive the car? Is there a goal for these features to take incrementally more and more proportion of the responsibility away from the driver, such that the driver can incrementally devote less attention to monitoring? We all know the answers to these questions. We know what the goal is here. But the problem is, human's cannot sort of, kind of, partially pay attention to the road and the car. And any feature that propagandizes them that it will take care of incrementally more of the driving responsibility will result in less (rounded to none) attention devoted to by the driver. It's a binary proposition beyond some threshold as mutli-tasking is a myth. Do you see the problem? As the features appear to be working better and better, the more people will devote less attention to the road even in some bounded range of their drive but this is all it takes for catastrophic errors (that will and are happening because of the nature of failure modes of AI) to occur. And these errors are qualitatively different than the ones humans make. At any given point in time the care can and will just do something completely stupid and dangerous. Swerve into a median, crash into an emergency vehicle, turn sharply into a car in another lane. There's documented occurrences of all of this. When these random catastrophic errors occur, the human will be on the margin paying less attention to the situation than if it was simple cruise control or normal driving.
- ActorNightly 4y ago
  Regulated by whom..... the people who have absolutely zero clue about how even the basic technology works, and are only interested in getting reelected? Its funny how people rightfully criticize the government and laugh at videos of senator grilling the CEOs of Facebook or Google with stupid questions, but then as soon as a company does something that they don't like, they somehow expect those people to get their shit together and sensibly regulate something as nuanced as autopilot? For technology to get better, it needs to be stress tested - in this case that means accidents and people dying. Which is pretty much on par with development of car technology since its origin. The warnings on autopilot are there. If you don't want to take the risk, don't use it.
  - salawat 4y ago
    Stress testing is done in lab conditions damnit. You don't buckle people in and yeet them against the wall that is your optimism! Half the bloody challenge of testing is setting up the conditions for actually getting meaningful data!
  - PKop 4y ago
    >the people who have absolutely zero clue about how even the basic technology works This won't be a problem when the regulation equates to: "get these death traps off the road, now". Or, "disable your not-intelligent pseudo-self driving now". I'm not talking about working on the technology, I'm saying if it doesn't work get it off the market.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    > in this case that means accidents and people dying. It is an absolutely ridiculous view. I really don’t want a shitty company be able to freely test on the streets their shitty technology that can cause the death of innocents. Are you seriously saying that they are free to increase their profits over the lives of people? On what basis is that ethical or moral? Especially when we talk about a company that jumped into an arguably technically inferior solution by having an incentive to develop their “self-driving” based on visual input only. Their competitors at least take it seriously enough and realize that just because humans can manage with a vision-only system (though a goddamn moving one, not static), lidar and other sensors are required on cars, because ML is nowhere near the capacity of even a worm’s brain, let alone what a human has.
cj 4y ago
> I'm dubious as to how culpable Tesla is for that ignorance. Tesla labeling a feature "Full Self Driving" certainly isn't helping the situation when the feature clearly does not deliver what the name of the functionality implies.
warning26 4y ago
I knew it wouldn't take long for the "well AKCHTUALLY autopilot in planes just holds bearing therefore Tesla is BLAMELESS" crowd to appear. Popular understanding of the word aside, Tesla often throws around phrases like "full self driving" in the same sentence as "autopilot".
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  Autopilot is a distinct feature from full self driving. And TFA explicitly says it's investigating collisions due to autopilot.
kube-system 4y ago
Maybe all we need is a requirement for type certification on people's drivers licenses before they can drive a Tesla.
- jjoonathan 4y ago
  Doesn't Tesla have driver monitoring and a driver score? So to use autopilot, you not only have to roughly pay attention, but also be pretty good at driving in general to use the beta? Or did they get rid of that? It sounded like a good compromise to me.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    No, that's for their "full self driving" system. There are tutorials on social media for how to circumvent the driver monitoring for 'autopilot'. See for example, the instance in the article of a Tesla going down the highway with the driver in the back seat.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    On what basis can a private company decide what is and isn’t allowable on public roads? Also, there is no human that can engage with a suddenly dangerous situation on a split second basis. People suck at continuous monitoring tasks, if you are driving yourself you are actually engaged.
mlyle 4y ago
> Everyone I know with a Tesla exclusively uses autopilot on the highway in between exits. Tesla touts (and sells as a separate option) "full self-driving" capability. They tout that it can make turns on city streets, obey street lights, yield to city traffic, change lanes, park, etc. This is not intended for the use case of on the highway, well-supervised, between exits.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
dekhn 4y ago
at the time tesla announced autopilot, most people figured that meant you could press a button and it would take you safely to where you want to go. A bunch of pilots chimed in to say that wasn't a good understanding of autopilot, but remember: the people being marketed to by and large aren't pilots. IMHO Tesla has repeatedly overmarketed their actual capabilities. It's clearly starting to catch up with them.
kaba0 4y ago
> Is this actually a problem with tesla marketing? It is, definitely. How come they advertise it as FSD (and I know they very much circle around the exact wording, but a good Litmus test to see what is the actual expected output from the ads is to ask a random person on the street and they will definitely think that they are full self driving, while most other cars have some basic lane assist, etc)? Their marketing is absolutely malicious, what else would keep up their massive hype bubble?
whiplash451 4y ago
As an industrial company, you are responsible for the outcome of people using your products in a reasonable way. If you are a company building cooking knifes, but sell knifes as sharp as razor blades and people start injuring themselves super badly in their kitchen, saying that "people should be more careful with their kitchen knives" won't get you very far in court and in the public's eyes.

manicdee 4y ago

Where is Tesla claiming that Autopilot is self-driving?

cj 4y ago
"Autopilot" = "Automatic Pilot" = "Automatic Driver" = My car drives me while I play games on my iPhone
kube-system 4y ago
For starters, have you read the first sentence on https://www.tesla.com/autopilot https://www.tesla.com/autopilot ? > Tesla cars come standard with advanced hardware capable of providing Autopilot features, and full self-driving capabilities—through software updates designed to improve functionality over time. And this is the stuff that is filtered through their communications staff; the stuff Musk has said is even more egregious.

jstream67 4y ago

This investigation is on Autopilot, not the FSD Beta.