341–350 of 581 posts
I have now talked with two people who have autopilot in their model S's and both said the problem with autopilot is that it is "too good". Specifically it works completely correctly like 80 - 90% of the time and as a result, if you use it a lot, you start to expect it to be working and not fail. If it beeps then to tell you to take over, you have to mentally get back into the situational awareness of the road and the…
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If it allows the driver to e.g. reply to a text message on his phone, then it's dangerous. Either it requires the driver to occasionally take over and handle a situation on short notice, then the driver should have hands on the wheel and eyes forward (and the car should ensure this by alerting and slowing down immediately if the driver isn't paying attention). Or the driver isn't required to pay attention and take ov…
Regular manual automotive controls, in practice , "allow[] the driver to...reply to a text message". Illegal or not, it's done by millions of people every day, and for the most part, they don't crash. You'd have to actually add control instability to the car to force the kind of attention you want out of drivers, and nobody would buy a car with this deliberately annoying handling.
Just like we will probably never accept (neither socially nor legally) autonomous drivers that aren't at least an order of magnitude safer than human drivers, we will likely continue to accept drivers not paying attention to their manual controls - but we do not accept drivers not paying enough attention to take over after their AI driver.
> nobody would buy a car with this deliberately annoying handling.
Exactly. And since this is the only way of making a reasonably safe level 3 car, this is also why many car manufacturers have actively chosen to not develop level 3 autonomous cars (because they are either not safe OR annoying - and either way it's a tough sale)
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As someone that has been caught speeding, it's also worth mentioning that one of the big reasons why the UK has improved its road safety statistics is a reasonably new initiative where you get an option on your first offence to either take the points on your license or to attend a safety workshop. IIRC, the workshop was about three hours, but it was surprisingly useful. The instructors treated you like adults and not…
Out of curiosity, how are you supposed to react if an emergency vehicle wants you to go forward when you're by a set of traffic lights with a camera? I would think to look carefully at all directions and, if visibility allows, pass the red light, then contest the fine with an "emergrncy vehicle passing through" defence. But what is the official position?
Police cars will have dash cams, not sure on ambulances or fire engines.
That being said, scariest thing I did on the road was going through a red light to let an ambulance through at a motorway off-ramp. You better hope everyone else has heard those sirens.
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Out of curiosity, how are you supposed to react if an emergency vehicle wants you to go forward when you're by a set of traffic lights with a camera? I would think to look carefully at all directions and, if visibility allows, pass the red light, then contest the fine with an "emergrncy vehicle passing through" defence. But what is the official position?
It's illegal to cross through a red light, even if there is an emergency vehicle behind you that wants to get through.
Although, if you are at a set of traffic lights and an emergency vehicle tries to get you to cross the line, what you should do is write down the registration plate and contact the relevant service to report the driver. The instructor on this course was ex-police, and according to him police, paramedics, and firefighters in the UK are taught to not do this under any circumstance, and if they are caught trying to persuade someone to cross a red traffic light then they can get in a lot of trouble.
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> The roads in the UK are not intrinsically safe, they are very narrow both in urban and rural areas which means there are more hazards and less time to avoid them. Actually, paradoxically that means they are actually safer. People drive slower on narrower roads, which means that accidents are within the safe energy envelope that modern cars can absorb. Very, very few people will ever die as a passenger or driver in…
You say that but people will happily drive at 50+ down a narrow country road. I think the "narrow = slower" only works for a limited period of time before people get normalised to it.
The country roads one has always dumbfounded me though - why some of those have national speed limits I will never know.
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bizarre statement is there any point in saying that a hypothetical brain-dead, comatose bodybuilder is stronger than a starving man?
Yes, if the bodybuilder can be software-upgraded remotely out of the coma.
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They're not comparable at all. Google/Waymo uses lidar and has been at it since 2009 and per https://waymo.com/faq they are "fully automated vehicle" but alas not for sale yet. Tesla's self-driving vaporware being sold since Oct'16 is camera only and should be activated any day now ? https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/823632597284691969 " Yes, safety should improve significantly due to autonomy features, even if reg…
Waymo’s approach is also brittle, e.g. to changes in the road since the last map pass. Tesla also uses radar and ultrasonic. Lidar isn’t necessary, just makes depth measurement easier. It’s lower res than cameras, low range, power-inefficient, conflicts with other lidar. Humans drive fine in sunlight, without a coherent IR scanning beam.
Do you have any public source detailing this or do you just make this claim based on your own assumptions?
(Disclaimer: I work at Google but have no idea how our self-driving cars work.)
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Yes, if the bodybuilder can be software-upgraded remotely out of the coma.
And if the coma was remote software upgrade induced? Stretching the analogy a bit, but a lot of people hype Tesla’s remote updates without considering how many remote updates tend to brick our devices.
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What miracles was FB promising? (Again not a fan of FB).
I would guess "we'll give you social network, not a total-surveillance tool" would qualify. I don't think the second part would have been a reasonable expectation.
I am a huge fan of Tesla. What I am noticing right now is that if I were able to afford a Tesla today, there is no way I would use Autopilot. I will still buy a Tesla if I can ever afford it, I'll just leave autopilot well alone. I don't know what gets me back from this mental place that seems to be firmly set in my mind now.
AutoPilot is a human assisted utility. I think many people here, and in general, expect too much of it and are being too critical when there is an incident.
I do think Tesla needs to communicate better what AutoPilot is and isn't because we've now lost lives due to operator negligence, and by negligence, I mean the operator is still responsible for the vehicle despite relinquishing control to a computer.