Tesla Autopilot ‘easily’ tricked into working without anyone in the driver seat
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Re: Tesla Autopilot ‘easily’ tricked into working without anyone in the driver seat
#2I am torn by this. On the one hand a weighted chain and buckled seat belt is a simple hack. On the other hand it is clear that they were intentionally attempting to get around Tesla's safeguards. I fail to see how this is the company's fault.
What could Tesla possibly do to provide more safegaurds? Measure resistance on the steering wheel to prove it is flesh on there? Driver-facing camera? Weight sensor in the seat? Each of these has their own issues including defeatability and privacy invasions.
Anything can be defeated eventually. However any attempts to be defeated should automatically put the liability on the person making that attempt. Example: It is not Samsung's fault if I intentionally disable safeguards and over charge my battery causing a fire or explosion.
Re: Tesla Autopilot ‘easily’ tricked into working without anyone in the driver seat
#3Musk said the logs show that the car wasn't even in autopilot mode.
Driver maybe was trying to escape the fire and thus was not found in the driver seat. Although this is just as much speculation as assuming the autopilot was tricked so we should just wait and see what the investigation will show.
Re: Tesla Autopilot ‘easily’ tricked into working without anyone in the driver seat
#4I am torn by this. On the one hand a weighted chain and buckled seat belt is a simple hack. On the other hand it is clear that they were intentionally attempting to get around Tesla's safeguards. I fail to see how this is the company's fault. What could Tesla possibly do to provide more safegaurds? Measure resistance on the steering wheel to prove it is flesh on there? Driver-facing camera? Weight sensor in the seat?…
> I fail to see how this is the company's fault.
Because other companies do it better. Tesla likes to publicly position its driver assistance as being so good that they refer to it as "Full Self Driving", and yet the system doesn't include a number of basic safety measures. That's part of the reason why they tell regulators that "Full Self Driving" is only a level 2 system:
https://www.thedrive.com/tech/39647/tesla-admits-current-ful...
> Measure resistance on the steering wheel to prove it is flesh on there? Driver-facing camera? Weight sensor in the seat?
Yep.
> Each of these has their own issues including defeatability and privacy invasions.
Tesla cars in general are privacy invasions. For example, a recent car crash resulted in Musk tweeting about what Tesla's logs supposedly reveal about the car before it crashed. Tesla is quite happy to rummage through your data and use it to protect themselves. In this case it earned Tesla a search warrant:
https://www.thedrive.com/tech/40250/elon-musk-denies-autopil...
Re: Tesla Autopilot ‘easily’ tricked into working without anyone in the driver seat
#5I own this exact tractor
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:New_Holland_TC30_HST...
and even it has a sensor in the driver's seat that will stop it if there is less than 100 lbs in the driver's seat. (When my son weighed 80 lbs he couldn't drive it unless I put 2 10 lb weightlifting plates and put them in a backpack.)
The purpose there is so that the tractor doesn't drag or crush you if you fall out of the seat, but that kind of sensor is also commonly used in the passenger seat of cars to scale the force of the passenger side airbag to the size of the occupant.
Re: Tesla Autopilot ‘easily’ tricked into working without anyone in the driver seat
#6I am fairly certain I could "trick" my 2006 Toyota Camry into driving without anyone in the driver seat.
Re: Tesla Autopilot ‘easily’ tricked into working without anyone in the driver seat
#7If I wanted to trick GM supercruise, I could just tape a picture of a face onto the driver's headrest and put a sandbag on the seat, no?
Re: Tesla Autopilot ‘easily’ tricked into working without anyone in the driver seat
#8I own this exact tractor https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:New_Holland_TC30_HST... and even it has a sensor in the driver's seat that will stop it if there is less than 100 lbs in the driver's seat. (When my son weighed 80 lbs he couldn't drive it unless I put 2 10 lb weightlifting plates and put them in a backpack.) The purpose there is so that the tractor doesn't drag or crush you if you fall out of the seat,…
AFAIK, Teslas do have weight sensors in the drivers seat. Now the question is, why is that not used in this scenario? A bug or some actual reason not to continuously check driver weight (=presence)?
Re: Tesla Autopilot ‘easily’ tricked into working without anyone in the driver seat
#9Musk said the logs show that the car wasn't even in autopilot mode. Driver maybe was trying to escape the fire and thus was not found in the driver seat. Although this is just as much speculation as assuming the autopilot was tricked so we should just wait and see what the investigation will show.
Govt has witnesses saying the dead passengers were showing off the Autopilot.
I see no reason to believe Musk, a serial liar with a massive incentive to lie here.
He even hedged by saying "data recovered so far" doesn't show Autopilot engaged.
Re: Tesla Autopilot ‘easily’ tricked into working without anyone in the driver seat
#10Both this article and the Ars Technica article (https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/04/consumer-reports-shows-...) are prime examples of misinformation and fake news. Unfortunately they won’t be flagged as such by Twitter or Facebook, even though they very regularly flag other articles for having misleading headlines or missing context.
The Consumer Reports people went out of their way to bypass Tesla’s existing safety features, by placing a fake weight on the wheel (a heavy chain) and by buckling the seat belt without anyone sitting there. So what - it’s a contrived experiment.
Lots of people in social media seem to hate Elon Musk and are using this as some sort of indictment of him or Tesla. I don't see anything particularly interesting or outrageous about this. People can misuse cars already, and they will come up with clever workarounds in the future as well. It’s not exclusive to Tesla. It’s not even exclusive to cars. You could misuse a kitchen knife as a toothbrush but that doesn’t mean Cutco need to be regulated.