8 ms·

I always thought the Autopilot name and the claims about having all the equipment for FSD were basically fraudulent and Tesla would be liable for false advertis

by treis 4y ago

I always thought the Autopilot name and the claims about having all the equipment for FSD were basically fraudulent and Tesla would be liable for false advertisement. Never made the connection of Fraud => Someone driving negligent as a result => Negligent Homicide/Manslaughter but it seems solid and somewhat obvious once stated.

Symmetry 4y ago
I've generally always considered level 2 or 3 autonomy to be a recipe for disaster, humans can't be expected to remain alert and respond quickly when they aren't doing anything. But at the same time the way Tesla autopilot woks is congruent to autopilots on boats or airplanes. Those won't avoid other vehicles and are usually perfectly happy to let you crash into shoals or mountains.
- ht85 4y ago
  Taking human nature into account has driven so much progress in terms of road safety. Cue corporation selling you "Full Self Driving" for 5 figures, allowing your vehicle to become autonomous. Except you have to be alert and behave as if it wasn't. At all times. Of course.
  - kylecordes 4y ago
    The usual FSD complaint is that Tesla has been offering it for years, at ascending prices, without any date-certain of delivering it (just tweets predicting it), without refunding it when not delivered after X years. I can easily imagine an eventual class-action suit requiring some % of refund all the way back to the first car purchased with someday-FSD (!). If they deliver it, then (at that time, and depending on how well it works), the complaints of not-good-enough or dangerous-killing-people could come into play. The second thing sounds even more dangerous to Tesla - smart to keep delaying (and building up that first risk higher and higher!)
    - CoastalCoder 4y ago
      So like Star Citizen bit for cars.
    - FireBeyond 4y ago
      And just one of the disingenuous responses from Tesla is that you could have it all now, or could have, if it wasn't for pesky regulators. There might be an awkward silence when you ask why as recently as six months ago, it was still happily hopping the curb of roundabouts, or why even to this very day, there's no AEB capability in FSD (if your foot is on the accelerator, the car will consider that a higher priority input than an imminent collision).
      - wnkrshm 4y ago
        Probably because of false positives and removing radar, because "it's not needed".
- sidewndr46 4y ago
  I'm not sure if you're being serious, but the way "autopilot" works in a private yacht is the captain turns it on and goes below deck and gets drunk with the rest of the crew. It just maintains a heading towards a destination at that point. You learn very quickly on the water to get out of the way of large private yachts when in open waters. There is literally no one at the helm. Even if they did notice you, they aren't in a position to halt the boats travel.
  - mike_d 4y ago
    You left out the part that if there is a collision or loss of life the captain goes to prison.
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      Same with cars
      - vkou 4y ago
        Short of being drunk, it's pretty difficult to go to prison for killing someone in a car, even if you were driving like a moron.
        s1artibartfast 4y ago
        Not my experience. I knew a kid who went to prison for years after hitting a biker in black with no reflector at night.
        vkou 4y ago
        Was the biker the police chief's son-in-law, or some rot like that? Did the driver have a few down at the local, but didn't quite blow a 0.08? Most hit-and-runs don't even result in jail time[1]. But sure, I can believe that hitting and killing the wrong person may once in a blue moon result in the law coming down on you like a ton of bricks. [1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/hit-run-drivers-kill-people-jail-time-rarely/story?id=61845988 https://abcnews.go.com/US/hit-run-drivers-kill-people-jail-t...
- treis 4y ago
  If anything this just cements why they shouldn't have called it autopilot in the first place.
- mrtksn 4y ago
  We have a small and cheap Japanese car that features adaptive cruise control and line assist that works pretty alright. So it’s essentially like line following robot that can adjust its speed to keep a safe following distance and do hard breaking if needed. It’s feels almost like full self driving when you drive on the highway. It makes the ride significantly less tiresome but I would say it definitely reduces my attention. I can totally see how people with more capable systems may treat the car as intelligent enough to drive %100 by itself and became negligent.
  - cyrux004 4y ago
    See. This is the problem. Where do you draw the line ? I can see somebody who can come and say, adaptive cruise control and lane departure assist which applies slight tourque when the car sees your drift out of lane very helpful to them. next up, adaptive cruise control and lane centering which applies torque most of the time on straight roads but cant do curves. THis is now available most if not all car systems today , in the most basic version without any additional packages. Then comes some smarter ones like Tesla AP or comma.ai which are pretty good at centering on straight roads, curve roads, wide lanes, lane splitting etc.
    - rootusrootus 4y ago
      Are there cars shipping now with lane centering that can only handle perfectly straight roads? In my experience most manufacturers currently offer at least one model & trim that has lane centering & adaptive cruise that is functionally equivalent to basic AP. In some cases, e.g. SuperCruise, it's significantly better.
      - widdakay 4y ago
        Yes there are some. Eg: Acura MDX. It uses the mobileye chipset and can barely make a highway turn. The car is good otherwise, but it in no way compares to the Tesla ADAS (I have daily driven both). The Tesla has done several trips to LA and back with >1hr between touches on California i5. my commute on bay area 280 feels far more natural on Autopilot when cars cut me off etc. I think performance depends significantly on what roads people drive.
- GuB-42 4y ago
  One significant difference between Autopilot in Teslas and autopilots in airplanes is that in an airplane you typically have to prove that you can use the autopilot correctly in order to be allowed to fly that plane. Another difference is that piloting a boat or a plane is usually much less dependent on quick reactions than when you are driving a car. The skies and seas are much more open, with much less traffic than on the road. On a well trimmed plane, I could probably sleep for 10 minutes and there is a good chance nothing will happen. Obviously, it is excessively dangerous, but I am not almost guaranteed to crash as I would be on a car. Flying or sailing is more about precision and planning than it is about reacting.
  - medion 4y ago
    Having crossed oceans on autopilot, I’ve had three very, very near misses - so even in an environment which is virtually an uninhabited desert in comparison to a road, the risk in not maintaining appropriate and proactive watch is real.
    - throw827474737 4y ago
      Curious, what near missed?
      - nsxwolf 4y ago
        "Near miss?! It's a near hit! A collision is a near miss! 'Oh what a shame, they nearly missed'" - George Carlin
        FpUser 4y ago
        >"George Carlin" - never get tired listening to the guy. He is just amazing.
      - medion 4y ago
        Tanker bound for Panama from Hong Kong, not keeping watch. Woke up to engines and lights. Sailing boat off American Samoa maintaining watch, but watch crew unable to change course (we did). Near miss with unidentified floating object.
- davewritescode 4y ago
  Just want to chime in and say that I completely agree. From a technology perspective it’s interesting, from a human factors perspective it’s a complete disaster. Automating the easiest parts of driving and just expecting a human to jump in and figure out the tricky stuff in an instant is just such a horrible design that it’s hard to see how it’s gone this far.
WWLink 4y ago
> I always thought the Autopilot name and the claims about having all the equipment for FSD were basically fraudulent and Tesla would be liable for false advertisement Same. I thought they'd get slapped hard and forced to stop doing that YEARS AGO. Instead they doubled down and started selling "full self driving" lmao.
- tenpies 4y ago
  The whole Musk saga is basically a cautionary tale for regulators, and a classic American story of regulatory capture. The second something that's not autopilot was marketed as autopilot should have been an instant barrage from the FTC. The second Musk committed securities fraud for "funding secured" he should have been banned from ever being an officer or director in a publicly listed company. The second it became clear that Tesla was ignoring the requirement to have a Twitter Nanny on Musk's Twitter, the SEC should have obliterated the Tesla board. But this is the post-Obama US, where insider trading is fine as long as it's the Right People doing it. Where bankers and investors can take obscene and reckless risk knowing the tax payer will cover their loses. Where a President's son can openly try to sell influence - who knows with what degree of success - and the intelligence agencies won't move a finger. So the Musk saga makes perfect sense.
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    I agree, but I think this predates Obama. More like post Reagan US? Maybe post Clinton?
  - renewiltord 4y ago
    And thank god for that. Because we have, as a result, an EV revolution, a space revolution, and a communications revolution. We can only be glad that the regulators were asked to back off what is openly a good thing for America.
    - wewtyflakes 4y ago
      This seems dishonest, as the things you mention happened before, or were in motion before, Elon went full-on nutter over the past 2 years, and you make it sound like Elon acting like a nutter is somehow a prerequisite for for these things, when they are clearly not.
sedatk 4y ago
That's what I thought too, but interestingly, autopilot is mere cruise control for airplanes. It can't take off or land the plane, it doesn't change course. It's definitely not "self-flying". But somehow, the term "autopilot" for cars made me think that the car would drive itself. That's an interesting twist of perception.
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  Tesla apparently also uses the phrase “Full Self-Driving”? I don't think the claims are solely about the name "autopilot", but additional names and marketing.
- ethanbond 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure autopilot in planes can land them. They don't do this because they need pilots to be trained in how to land them in the event of autopilot failure. I know for a fact there are non-commercial planes, for example, that will detect pilot incapacitation, find the nearest airport, account for local weather, talk to ATC, and land the aircraft.
  - sedatk 4y ago
    That’s ILS, AFAIK, not autopilot per se.
  - bluGill 4y ago
    Autoland works. But the pilot doesn't turn it on until the tower (other other communication if no tower) says okay, and since nobody else is in the way of course it won't hit anyone. There is a second mode in some. There it broadcasts emergency, uncontrolled plane will land, get of my way as I won't get out of yours. Useful if the pilot is dead (so a passenger who is told hit that button in an emergency can safely land), but cannot be used for anything else.
    - SpelingBeeChamp 4y ago
      Mind linking to evidence regarding the ‘second mode’ you referred to? I have not heard of anything like that, and I am a reporter who covers transportation safety.
nixass 4y ago
Will they finally be forced to name it adaptive cruise control, as it should've been from beginning?
- twblalock 4y ago
  No, because "adaptive cruise control" is a different thing that all Teslas have already. It simply refers to cruise control that will slow down if the car in front of you does. All Teslas have that for free, and it's been an industry standard term for at least 20 years. Even cheap cars have adaptive cruise control these days. The self-driving feature also steers the car, stops at signals and stop signs, merges onto the freeway, etc. Those are all things that adaptive cruise control does not do.
  - robotresearcher 4y ago
    The standard Tesla adaptive cruise control steers the car center lane.
    - twblalock 4y ago
      No it doesn't. I know that for sure because I own a Tesla.
      - robotresearcher 4y ago
        Here's the manual page for the feature, described as 'building on' the ACC. You have to opt in to a beta feature, so 'standard' is not strictly correct. But my Model 3 follows center lane without Autopilot. https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-69AEB326-9831-424E-96AD-4021EABCB699.html https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-69AEB32...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
concinds 4y ago
This comment is highly misleading; the DoJ probe centers on fraud and "misleading consumers, investors and regulators". It has nothing whatsoever to do with manslaughter, and Reuters never even hinted at this.

by treis 4y ago

Symmetry 4y ago

I've generally always considered level 2 or 3 autonomy to be a recipe for disaster, humans can't be expected to remain alert and respond quickly when they aren't doing anything. But at the same time the way Tesla autopilot woks is congruent to autopilots on boats or airplanes. Those won't avoid other vehicles and are usually perfectly happy to let you crash into shoals or mountains.

ht85 4y ago
Taking human nature into account has driven so much progress in terms of road safety. Cue corporation selling you "Full Self Driving" for 5 figures, allowing your vehicle to become autonomous. Except you have to be alert and behave as if it wasn't. At all times. Of course.
- kylecordes 4y ago
  The usual FSD complaint is that Tesla has been offering it for years, at ascending prices, without any date-certain of delivering it (just tweets predicting it), without refunding it when not delivered after X years. I can easily imagine an eventual class-action suit requiring some % of refund all the way back to the first car purchased with someday-FSD (!). If they deliver it, then (at that time, and depending on how well it works), the complaints of not-good-enough or dangerous-killing-people could come into play. The second thing sounds even more dangerous to Tesla - smart to keep delaying (and building up that first risk higher and higher!)
  - CoastalCoder 4y ago
    So like Star Citizen bit for cars.
  - FireBeyond 4y ago
    And just one of the disingenuous responses from Tesla is that you could have it all now, or could have, if it wasn't for pesky regulators. There might be an awkward silence when you ask why as recently as six months ago, it was still happily hopping the curb of roundabouts, or why even to this very day, there's no AEB capability in FSD (if your foot is on the accelerator, the car will consider that a higher priority input than an imminent collision).
    - wnkrshm 4y ago
      Probably because of false positives and removing radar, because "it's not needed".
sidewndr46 4y ago
I'm not sure if you're being serious, but the way "autopilot" works in a private yacht is the captain turns it on and goes below deck and gets drunk with the rest of the crew. It just maintains a heading towards a destination at that point. You learn very quickly on the water to get out of the way of large private yachts when in open waters. There is literally no one at the helm. Even if they did notice you, they aren't in a position to halt the boats travel.
- mike_d 4y ago
  You left out the part that if there is a collision or loss of life the captain goes to prison.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    Same with cars
    - vkou 4y ago
      Short of being drunk, it's pretty difficult to go to prison for killing someone in a car, even if you were driving like a moron.
      - s1artibartfast 4y ago
        Not my experience. I knew a kid who went to prison for years after hitting a biker in black with no reflector at night.
        vkou 4y ago
        Was the biker the police chief's son-in-law, or some rot like that? Did the driver have a few down at the local, but didn't quite blow a 0.08? Most hit-and-runs don't even result in jail time[1]. But sure, I can believe that hitting and killing the wrong person may once in a blue moon result in the law coming down on you like a ton of bricks. [1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/hit-run-drivers-kill-people-jail-time-rarely/story?id=61845988 https://abcnews.go.com/US/hit-run-drivers-kill-people-jail-t...
treis 4y ago
If anything this just cements why they shouldn't have called it autopilot in the first place.
mrtksn 4y ago
We have a small and cheap Japanese car that features adaptive cruise control and line assist that works pretty alright. So it’s essentially like line following robot that can adjust its speed to keep a safe following distance and do hard breaking if needed. It’s feels almost like full self driving when you drive on the highway. It makes the ride significantly less tiresome but I would say it definitely reduces my attention. I can totally see how people with more capable systems may treat the car as intelligent enough to drive %100 by itself and became negligent.
- cyrux004 4y ago
  See. This is the problem. Where do you draw the line ? I can see somebody who can come and say, adaptive cruise control and lane departure assist which applies slight tourque when the car sees your drift out of lane very helpful to them. next up, adaptive cruise control and lane centering which applies torque most of the time on straight roads but cant do curves. THis is now available most if not all car systems today , in the most basic version without any additional packages. Then comes some smarter ones like Tesla AP or comma.ai which are pretty good at centering on straight roads, curve roads, wide lanes, lane splitting etc.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    Are there cars shipping now with lane centering that can only handle perfectly straight roads? In my experience most manufacturers currently offer at least one model & trim that has lane centering & adaptive cruise that is functionally equivalent to basic AP. In some cases, e.g. SuperCruise, it's significantly better.
    - widdakay 4y ago
      Yes there are some. Eg: Acura MDX. It uses the mobileye chipset and can barely make a highway turn. The car is good otherwise, but it in no way compares to the Tesla ADAS (I have daily driven both). The Tesla has done several trips to LA and back with >1hr between touches on California i5. my commute on bay area 280 feels far more natural on Autopilot when cars cut me off etc. I think performance depends significantly on what roads people drive.
GuB-42 4y ago
One significant difference between Autopilot in Teslas and autopilots in airplanes is that in an airplane you typically have to prove that you can use the autopilot correctly in order to be allowed to fly that plane. Another difference is that piloting a boat or a plane is usually much less dependent on quick reactions than when you are driving a car. The skies and seas are much more open, with much less traffic than on the road. On a well trimmed plane, I could probably sleep for 10 minutes and there is a good chance nothing will happen. Obviously, it is excessively dangerous, but I am not almost guaranteed to crash as I would be on a car. Flying or sailing is more about precision and planning than it is about reacting.
- medion 4y ago
  Having crossed oceans on autopilot, I’ve had three very, very near misses - so even in an environment which is virtually an uninhabited desert in comparison to a road, the risk in not maintaining appropriate and proactive watch is real.
  - throw827474737 4y ago
    Curious, what near missed?
    - nsxwolf 4y ago
      "Near miss?! It's a near hit! A collision is a near miss! 'Oh what a shame, they nearly missed'" - George Carlin
      - FpUser 4y ago
        >"George Carlin" - never get tired listening to the guy. He is just amazing.
    - medion 4y ago
      Tanker bound for Panama from Hong Kong, not keeping watch. Woke up to engines and lights. Sailing boat off American Samoa maintaining watch, but watch crew unable to change course (we did). Near miss with unidentified floating object.
davewritescode 4y ago
Just want to chime in and say that I completely agree. From a technology perspective it’s interesting, from a human factors perspective it’s a complete disaster. Automating the easiest parts of driving and just expecting a human to jump in and figure out the tricky stuff in an instant is just such a horrible design that it’s hard to see how it’s gone this far.

WWLink 4y ago

> I always thought the Autopilot name and the claims about having all the equipment for FSD were basically fraudulent and Tesla would be liable for false advertisement Same. I thought they'd get slapped hard and forced to stop doing that YEARS AGO. Instead they doubled down and started selling "full self driving" lmao.

tenpies 4y ago
The whole Musk saga is basically a cautionary tale for regulators, and a classic American story of regulatory capture. The second something that's not autopilot was marketed as autopilot should have been an instant barrage from the FTC. The second Musk committed securities fraud for "funding secured" he should have been banned from ever being an officer or director in a publicly listed company. The second it became clear that Tesla was ignoring the requirement to have a Twitter Nanny on Musk's Twitter, the SEC should have obliterated the Tesla board. But this is the post-Obama US, where insider trading is fine as long as it's the Right People doing it. Where bankers and investors can take obscene and reckless risk knowing the tax payer will cover their loses. Where a President's son can openly try to sell influence - who knows with what degree of success - and the intelligence agencies won't move a finger. So the Musk saga makes perfect sense.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  I agree, but I think this predates Obama. More like post Reagan US? Maybe post Clinton?
- renewiltord 4y ago
  And thank god for that. Because we have, as a result, an EV revolution, a space revolution, and a communications revolution. We can only be glad that the regulators were asked to back off what is openly a good thing for America.
  - wewtyflakes 4y ago
    This seems dishonest, as the things you mention happened before, or were in motion before, Elon went full-on nutter over the past 2 years, and you make it sound like Elon acting like a nutter is somehow a prerequisite for for these things, when they are clearly not.

sedatk 4y ago

That's what I thought too, but interestingly, autopilot is mere cruise control for airplanes. It can't take off or land the plane, it doesn't change course. It's definitely not "self-flying". But somehow, the term "autopilot" for cars made me think that the car would drive itself. That's an interesting twist of perception.

jrochkind1 4y ago
Tesla apparently also uses the phrase “Full Self-Driving”? I don't think the claims are solely about the name "autopilot", but additional names and marketing.
ethanbond 4y ago
I'm pretty sure autopilot in planes can land them. They don't do this because they need pilots to be trained in how to land them in the event of autopilot failure. I know for a fact there are non-commercial planes, for example, that will detect pilot incapacitation, find the nearest airport, account for local weather, talk to ATC, and land the aircraft.
- sedatk 4y ago
  That’s ILS, AFAIK, not autopilot per se.
- bluGill 4y ago
  Autoland works. But the pilot doesn't turn it on until the tower (other other communication if no tower) says okay, and since nobody else is in the way of course it won't hit anyone. There is a second mode in some. There it broadcasts emergency, uncontrolled plane will land, get of my way as I won't get out of yours. Useful if the pilot is dead (so a passenger who is told hit that button in an emergency can safely land), but cannot be used for anything else.
  - SpelingBeeChamp 4y ago
    Mind linking to evidence regarding the ‘second mode’ you referred to? I have not heard of anything like that, and I am a reporter who covers transportation safety.

nixass 4y ago

Will they finally be forced to name it adaptive cruise control, as it should've been from beginning?

twblalock 4y ago
No, because "adaptive cruise control" is a different thing that all Teslas have already. It simply refers to cruise control that will slow down if the car in front of you does. All Teslas have that for free, and it's been an industry standard term for at least 20 years. Even cheap cars have adaptive cruise control these days. The self-driving feature also steers the car, stops at signals and stop signs, merges onto the freeway, etc. Those are all things that adaptive cruise control does not do.
- robotresearcher 4y ago
  The standard Tesla adaptive cruise control steers the car center lane.
  - twblalock 4y ago
    No it doesn't. I know that for sure because I own a Tesla.
    - robotresearcher 4y ago
      Here's the manual page for the feature, described as 'building on' the ACC. You have to opt in to a beta feature, so 'standard' is not strictly correct. But my Model 3 follows center lane without Autopilot. https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-69AEB326-9831-424E-96AD-4021EABCB699.html https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-69AEB32...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

concinds 4y ago

This comment is highly misleading; the DoJ probe centers on fraud and "misleading consumers, investors and regulators". It has nothing whatsoever to do with manslaughter, and Reuters never even hinted at this.