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Tesla bows to pressure, stops allowing drivers to play video games while driving

theguardian.com

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Re: Tesla bows to pressure, stops allowing drivers to play video games while driving

#31

Post by pxc »

jeroenhd wrote: post #14
warning26 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I wish the powers-that-be would crack down harder on touchscreens in vehicles. There is no case where manipulating a touchscreen while driving is safe, for one simple reason: you have to look at the screen to use it because there's no tactile feedback. They are truly, as that one book title went, unsafe at any speed .

There have been some experiments with effective tactile feedback provided by touch screens, but they're complicated to produce and expensive. Most of the research seems to be aimed at providing touch screens to the visually impaired. It's possible to get some kind of tactile response mimicking the edges of buttons well enough. I'd say a good implementation of this technology would be safe IF the position and availabi…

> It's strange how this obvious flaw of a car design has ever been allowed onto the roads.

It's strange that anyone thinks it's even desirable. Touchscreens aren't even pleasant to use in this context.

Re: Tesla bows to pressure, stops allowing drivers to play video games while driving

#32

Post by neilv »

gnicholas wrote: post #22

When I first heard about video games in Teslas, my first thought was about Ender’s Game. Will there be a time where self-driving cars are piloted/assisted by players of massive online gaming platforms? It’s been shown that monitoring a vehicle that is mostly driving itself is not an easy task for humans. But if you gamify it and add several layers of redundancy (multiple people effectively monitoring the same vehicle…

Even closer Ender's Game than gamifying crowdsourcing driving is if [spoiler alert] the players thought they were only playing a game, not controlling real cars.

(On the off chance that's the actual situation, all my hours of GTA Online griefing mean I probably owe quite a few people an apology. :) )

Re: Tesla bows to pressure, stops allowing drivers to play video games while driving

#33

Post by greyface- »

ajross wrote: post #11
olliej wrote: post #6

This was clearly a terrible idea from the beginning. They presumable thinking was that autopilot/fsd would be driving the car so the driver could play games. At the same time they’re claiming that they aren’t responsible for autopilot crashes because the driver is always meant to be able to instantly be in control of the car. You can’t really do both “the driver can be focused on non driving tasks” and also “the driv…

> They presumable thinking was that autopilot/fsd would be driving the car so the driver could play games. Arrgh. It was a feature for the passenger to play games while preserving the driving UI. Absolutely no one intended for this to be used by drivers. There isn't even any evidence of a driver being caught doing this. The coverage is basically clickbait, and you appear to have bought it exactly as it was intended.…

> There isn't even any evidence of a driver being caught doing this.

Elsewhere in this very discussion, a driver admitted to doing this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29670414

Re: Tesla bows to pressure, stops allowing drivers to play video games while driving

#34

Post by perl4ever »

rektide wrote: post #15

a reminder that automobiles in the united states kill 36 thousand people a year (~6k being pedestrians), cause >3 million medically consulted injuries, and >10m property damages/non-disabling injuries. i have a hard time with this issue of what is permitted in a car. personally i feel like a good driver, like i will handle things fine. but i also once was going up an icy highway late at night & ended up spinning 360…

I don't know if you're a Californian or not, but what do you think of the car culture there? Particularly as it exists along with all of the regulations that are distinct to the state?

What do you think of the people to whom automobiles are art, pastime, recreation, lifestyle?

Re: Tesla bows to pressure, stops allowing drivers to play video games while driving

#35

Post by dylan604 »

userbinator wrote: post #5
alphabettsy wrote: post #3

It seems like they could’ve used the occupancy sensor to detect a passenger. A passenger playing a game on the screen which are also where your only instruments are located seems like an unnecessary added distraction so I’d say they made the right call.

which are also where your only instruments are located I think this is the most important fact to note here. If the primary instruments were on a separate display, this would not have been as severe of a concern. It's another reason why having a single touchscreen as the interface of a car is a horrible idea. I've seen a lot of newer cars where the instruments are all in the center instead of immediately behind the w…

>which are also where your only instruments are located

>I think this is the most important fact to note here.

I think the fact that you are encouraging the "driver" to actively be distracted and not paying attention is a much larger issue than if the speedometer is visible or not. Nobody pays attention to the RPM gauge in automatics. Maybe they look at a fuel gauge, maybe. For a Tesla, the fuel gauge is the battery gauge, so no need for that one either.

Ensuring the "driver" is not paying attention though, that's never a good idea.

Re: Tesla bows to pressure, stops allowing drivers to play video games while driving

#36

Post by MereInterest »

gnicholas wrote: post #22

When I first heard about video games in Teslas, my first thought was about Ender’s Game. Will there be a time where self-driving cars are piloted/assisted by players of massive online gaming platforms? It’s been shown that monitoring a vehicle that is mostly driving itself is not an easy task for humans. But if you gamify it and add several layers of redundancy (multiple people effectively monitoring the same vehicle…

If multiple people need to be monitoring a single vehicle, doesn't that increase the total time investment required? Freeing up the driver's time isn't worth spending an equivalent amount of time by multiple others.

Though, your comment on latency did give me an idea. What if we were to co-locate the person monitoring the system within the car itself? That would free up the driver to do other tasks, and would avoid the latency issue entirely.

Granted, there would be costs associated with having a co-located monitor of the driving, but that's something we can solve by scaling the problem up. Similar to running multiple virtual containers on the same physical host, we can have several virtual cars, each with their own driver, instantiated on the same physical hardware. This setup would only require a single co-located monitor per physical hardware instance, rather than needing a monitor for each virtual system.

Extending this analogy to no-server solutions, there's probably a market for no-car solutions. If I have a sudden need for transit, but don't have a car available, I could rent a virtual car on top of existing physical hardware, without needing to bring my own car.

Re: Tesla bows to pressure, stops allowing drivers to play video games while driving

#37

Post by perl4ever »

ehnto wrote: post #18
waiseristy wrote: post #8

Which brings up a fun question; At which point does pressing buttons on a screen to play a video game while driving cause just as much distraction as pressing buttons on a screen to manage your windshield wipers / drive mode / HVAC / windows? There used to be a lot of crashes attributed to "playing with the radio" in the 90's / 00's. Maybe all those buttons on the wheel and a display centered in the drivers cone of v…

If your eyes aren't on the road, you aren't driving. I have zero sympathy for any of the edge cases people tend to bring up except checking your speed. Just drive the car. Take your tech-addled brains out of dopamine acquisition mode for the duration of the drive, then have a big 'ol binge at the end if you must. It's such trivial things that people risk their lives for too. A sort of trashy naivety. Like smoking at…

>If your eyes aren't on the road, you aren't driving.

>I have zero sympathy for any of the edge cases people tend to bring up except checking your speed.

You're saying the speedometer is the only instrument that needs to be scanned regularly?

I would've said that the speedometer really isn't needed - if you go with traffic and don't hang out in the passing lane, you're never going to get in trouble.

It's a lot more important to me to know if I've lost oil pressure or am overheating.

And if the HVAC controls are unnecessary to mess with while driving, they are still not an "edge case". Nor is the radio.

Re: Tesla bows to pressure, stops allowing drivers to play video games while driving

#38

Post by millimeterman »

userbinator wrote: post #28
jeroenhd wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that it's very hard to accidentally kill a family by messing with your PC or smartphone, assuming you're not doing it while driving. Your own safety is your own responsibility and if you want to try for a Darwin award you should be allowed to, but you're not the likely victim of something goes wrong. Cars are inherently dangerous, mostly to the people around you. Modern car safety makes sure you can…

On behalf of the entire aftermarket and performance tuning community: "fuck you". We have minimum requirements for licensing, but otherwise we still have the freedom. Of course you are still liable for any damages caused, but that's called personal responsibility.

There are plenty of aftermarket mods and tuning that are perfectly road legal. And if for some reason you need to stray outside those, I figure you can afford to keep a dedicated track car around. "Personal responsibility" doesn't work when your lack of responsibility puts other people at risk.

Also, I'm pretty sure most people don't care one bit what that community wants. When I hear "aftermarket and performance tuning", I think of idiots street racing, overly aggressive drivers, and obnoxiously loud cars. (I don't care if it's a straightpiped Civic or a freaking LFA, it's still obnoxious for everyone not driving the car.) Not exactly what most people want on public roads.

Re: Tesla bows to pressure, stops allowing drivers to play video games while driving

#39

Post by frazbin »

MereInterest wrote: post #36
gnicholas wrote: post #22

When I first heard about video games in Teslas, my first thought was about Ender’s Game. Will there be a time where self-driving cars are piloted/assisted by players of massive online gaming platforms? It’s been shown that monitoring a vehicle that is mostly driving itself is not an easy task for humans. But if you gamify it and add several layers of redundancy (multiple people effectively monitoring the same vehicle…

If multiple people need to be monitoring a single vehicle, doesn't that increase the total time investment required? Freeing up the driver's time isn't worth spending an equivalent amount of time by multiple others. Though, your comment on latency did give me an idea. What if we were to co-locate the person monitoring the system within the car itself? That would free up the driver to do other tasks, and would avoid t…

Can't tell if you're deadpan describing a bus on purpose or by accident, but it is funny either way!

Re: Tesla bows to pressure, stops allowing drivers to play video games while driving

#40

Post by toast0 »

warning26 wrote: post #17
jeroenhd wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been some experiments with effective tactile feedback provided by touch screens, but they're complicated to produce and expensive. Most of the research seems to be aimed at providing touch screens to the visually impaired. It's possible to get some kind of tactile response mimicking the edges of buttons well enough. I'd say a good implementation of this technology would be safe IF the position and availabi…

> ...safe IF the position and availability of the controls would be static Agreed -- this was also why the Apple Touchbar failed, IMO. Typically keyboard use relies on a lot of muscle memory, and so the touchbar's "you get a different set of controls with different shapes and sizes that do different things depending on which app you're using" design ethos didn't really fit with how people actually use keyboards.

Soft buttons aren't terrible. F-keys are an example where the same button could mean different things in different contexts, but they're tactile. Or if you had a Ti-85 (or 86), it had soft f1-5 and was a lot more flexible than the Ti-82 which had hard function keys. You could get muscle memory of entering menus and using the f keys that would be presented. Of course, hopefully a car doesn't have quite so deep of a menu tree.

If buttons are too expensive and you want to reduce the count, if I press radio and then F1, that could be radio preset 1, and if I press fan and then F1, that turns the fan speed to 1 of 6 (which could be off, I don't really care), that would be fine, and then you don't need quite so many buttons. Otoh, if I'm paying $20k or more for a car, you can afford some buttons.

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