I get it, but this reminds me of how my car doesn't allow my wife (in the passenger seat) to set up bluetooth pairing while I am driving.
Pretty inconvenient during road trips to have to pull off the highway, because the car doesn't trust that it's the passenger working the center console...
I've had enough close calls with people playing with their radio/hvac that I'd rather have everyone pull over to set up Bluetooth than end up in a ditch somewhere
its just too agressive for the cases where you do have a passenger.
I understand people usually drive alone but its gonna be hard to police this long term unless we start solving the real problems like why are touch screens being used in cars at all??? they are the worst possible ux for maximum distraction!
I don't know about you, but I have had to re-pair my bluetooth quite a few times with my car.
Sometimes bluetooth just seems to get itself in a state where things won't connect and you have to start again. It happens on pretty much everything with me eventually, be it my bluetooth keyboard with my laptop, my phone and my car, my headphones and iPhone...
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 wheel, and I always thought that design was less usable and more distracting --- a glance downwards is easier than one sideways and down.
I wonder if any research has been done about safety around touch controls? It's so much easier to reach over and hit a physical button or rotate a physical dial that you know is in the same spot every time without having to look at it compared to a touch interface that will by adjust depending on the app running. Like I appreciate the power that something like Apple CarPlay and Android Auto bring to the infotainment system but every time I can't control something from the physical buttons on the wheel I know I'm not going to be as focused on the road as I should be reaching over and hoping that I am correctly aiming at what I'm trying to touch and that's already after probably quickly looking away from the road to find where to aim in the first place
I completely agree. Years ago when smart phones were just emerging, people made the same complaints about them too; saying you cannot walk and text at the same time like you could with the old feature phones with physical keyboards. I believe public opinion was so vocal about this draw back that were some research projects done using gel screens that could offer a tactile responses dynamically. But then all that seamed to fizzle out and everyone stopped moaning about tactile feedback on touchscreen phones.
Fast forward a few years and the Raspberry Pi was released. My first RPi project was to built a new in car entertainment system. I used Go v1.0 (at that time even methods weren’t supported) and built a media player with text to speech. The entertainment system had 6 buttons:
1. Previous artist
2. Previous album
3. Previous song / replay song
4. Skip song
5. Skip album
6. Skip artist
The media centre would then use text to speech to read the artist, album and song details out over the speakers before playing the tracks.
This system was designed so I never needed to take my eyes off the road and it worked amazingly.
Unfortunately I’m not an electrical engineer so the device was ugly and started to fall apart quite quickly. I think it only lasted < 1 year. But I learned a lot from that experiment: there is a lot of missed opportunities for innovation in the car entertainment domain.
> Years ago when smart phones were just emerging, people made the same complaints about them too; saying you cannot walk and text at the same time
I'm still annoyed by this when texting while driving and having to look at the screen.
Downvote all you like, your moral judgement is not gonna change what I do.
I loved the T9 keyboard in my right hand and steering wheel in the left. I'm good at steering with my left knee (unless we're talking slow speeds and bendy road) so taking my hands off is not an issue - the issue is taking my eyes off the road, constantly switching between road/phone/road/phone, which is annoying as fuck.
>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.
It’s not the only interface though. You have been lied to. The car can be driven while the screen software is rebooting, with no screen and manual controls.
I tried playing a game while in FSD and the cabin camera is super sensitive when a game is open, when I reach my hand for the screen the car starts beeping and flashing warnings for me to pay attention to the road.
It supposed to be for road trips and the like, your passenger could play a game to occupy themselves, and once FSD is out of beta (if it will ever be) the driver too.
Hmm, what's next, a coffee machine, a burger dispenser? Those are road trips essentials too. Tesla should just concentrate on the car, everyone has a damn gadget (phone, Nintendo Switch, etc) for games...
I appreciate being respected as a responsible adult. Why would you want some company thinking what’s best or you? I assume you also try to be a responsible driver.
> Why would you want some company thinking what's best for you?
If you are a customer of a company, you're paying for what that company thinks is best for you. Whether they're right or not is another thing entirely.
In this case, Tesla decided that what's best for you is a car with a touch screen with no tactile feedback that serves as the car's only interface for everything: current speed, tire pressure, potential collision warnings, HVAC status and controls, an app that makes fart sounds, and so on. The list of what it's used for probably has over 100 possible items, with one of those items being "play games."
All of those features, including that last one, are features Tesla decided are best for its customers.
Giving their customers a choice to play games or not while driving wouldn't even be up for debate if they never shipped software with games in the first place.
Increasing a vehicle's safety isn't disrespectful and doesn't undermine responsible adult behavior. Adding features that invite drivers to be unsafe seems far more disrespectful. No one dies because their passengers can't play video games while driving on a vehicle's only interface.
I think that "respecting responsible adults" is also just silly. Why make laws that punish drivers for texting and driving? Can't we just allow people to be responsible? History has made it crystal clear that when given the chance, people will choose to not be responsible often enough to be disastrous.
Interestingly this cousin comment of yours illustrates precisely why we definitely cannot trust every driver to be a responsible adult -- and would be foolish to pretend that we could:
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 driver must be focused on driving”. That is obviously impossible.
> 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.
Whether it's really a good idea or not? I mean, the driver can pull out a phone or iPad and game/text/whatever to their hearts content already. And many do. And lots of them die. Why exactly are we treating this any differently?
Not seeing how this could be clickbait or even misleading. No one had to intend anything, and there doesn't have to be evidence of drivers doing anything. The NHTSA is investigating to see if they have to enforce some laws, and that made Tesla pivot.
Also the rule seems to be that you can bring a distraction into a car but you can't build the distraction into the car. Which seems totally reasonable to me. I mean, even after Tesla got rid of the games, passengers can still play any non-Tesla-exclusive game on their iPhone, so it seems like no one is really harmed.
> Not seeing how this could be clickbait or even misleading.
The upthread comment was from someone who clearly assumed that this was intended as a driver feature, even to the extent of supposing that it was designed to be used under autonomous control. And that's clearly not the case.
That mistake is a direct result of headlines like the one here, which talk about "allowing drivers" to play games. It's technically true, but it leads to the wrong conclusion. And that's the intent!
Even if that was the case, the screen is the primary information and control interface for the driver, and should not be displaying any focus drawing, non-driving related information.
Define focus-drawing, though? Radio doesn't count? Full-screen climate control? Album art? Web browser? Pairing a bluetooth device? Hell, even having a glove box on the other side of the cabin is a distraction.
The car is filled with distractions already, and we accept that it's broadly safe even if some drivers are distracted[1]. Why is this one in particular such a big deal for everyone, except for the somewhat obvious reason that it's new and Tesla did it.
[1] To be fair: by far the most fatal distraction in the vehicle isn't even the device UI, it's the phone in their pocket.
Something moving with high frequency in the peripheral vision would be mighty distracting. I did not know Teslas allow you to browse Web while driving, this also looks very distracting, the other things you listed - not much.
It was Solitaire, FWIW, not Sonic the Hedgehog. The list of Passenger Play games was curated. Which is another fact that would seem to be reasonable to have included in the reporting, but was suspiciously absent.
https://youtu.be/jKzHvIXT3Bc?t=81 looks a bit more like Sonic the Hedgehog than Solitire to me tbqh. Curation does not seem to be relevant. Why do I care if the driver that runs the red light is playing/being distracted by a game that have been curated, is he going to cause less damage because of this somehow?
Arrgh! That's not the feature! That story showed shots of the normal games in the car that work when it's parked! That car wasn't moving! You can't play those games (Cupheads seems to ahve been shown) when it is moving!
They didn't show you the games you could actually play, they showed you what they thought would make you upset. And it did. Seriously, the whole media ecosystem in this space is one intentional deception after another. Do you really not see that?
Even if it's just the Solitaire, as you claim, it's still something that should not be playing in the car if it's anything like Windows game with the same name, where big, high contrast cards are moving around. Nor should be the web browser accessible.
There is no justification for having these stupid features in the car other than marketing. Tesla should stick to the "Fart mode" and other such gimmicks, which do not endanger other people on the road and give enough for the fans to talk about the "superior technologies".
> where big, high contrast cards are moving around
I feel like this is really a reach. The passenger is using their hands to move around those little cards, and I don't think that sounds any more distracting than half the things they could be doing like gesturing while talking or fidgeting slightly.
Sonic would be bad, solitaire on a touch screen isn't bad unless the driver tries to play.
The passenger is supposed to play these games by touching the only screen in the car, the one that driver also uses for speed and navigation indications? Indeed, the size of the cards does not matter in this case, it's already distracting. I thought they have some gamepads for these games.
Not sure what you meant by "Also, huh, that's constant movement you'd be getting rid of isn't it." this does not quite parse in the context or by itself. I suppose it's somehow related to navigation? Navigation is quite useful in other cars and it does not create constant high frequency motion in the cars I've seen.
Not in the cars I drove. Also all the nav screens I've seen were low contrast so they are almost invisible in the peripheral vision, which is not very sensitive to color. I suppose, if Tesla has high contrast, jerking nav map it's fine because there is no other place to show directions (even S and X don't have HUD, so probably no navigation in the dashboard too?) and it might want to attract the driver to the changes in the route.
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 vision were actually huge advancements in safety...
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 availability of the controls would be static. I'm not sure what you'd get out of a touch screen with those constraints (less parts?), especially with the added cost and research, but that's the only way I can see a touch screen in a car that should ever be legal.
A Tesla driver in Germany already got fined for using the touch screen of his car while driving. It's strange how this obvious flaw of a car design has ever been allowed onto the roads.
> ...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.
I hate touchscreens in cars, but I'll give Tesla the fact that their touchscreen is a modern screen that's not a complete piece of crap to interact with.
When phones can run at 30 fps and have no noticeable lag, it's infuriating to switch to a car which stutters on some ugly, unnecessary graphics and takes 0.25 seconds to respond to a touch input. Not to mention the whole "you're supposed to be driving a car" aspect.
It doesn't. If you can't provide an adequate user experience free of large input delays, you should have never installed a touchscreen in the first place. Infotainment systems have gotten less bad, but I haven't seen notable advancement in reducing time spent with eyes off of the road the way a physical button or knob does.
They install touchscreens because they think people want them. The cars sell, because the only choice is touchscreens, and their decisions are validated. Rinse and repeat.
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 the gas pump.
>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.
Australia is a unique situation, the fines are enormous, and policing speed is a top priority for law enforcement here. Lots of automated cameras and hidden mobile cameras. My last speeding fine for < 10km over was $786. You only get to do that four times before losing your license temporarily, so you can't just pay the fines and be on your way either. Their goal is zero road fatalities.
While you're underway there aren't many other things you should be keeping an eye on, but that was an absolutist stance to make a point. I know people are going to be glancing at fuel or temperature or whatever.
> 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
That's really location specific, and situation specific. We can't go over ~5kmph faster than the limit here without getting fined by speed cameras. Also 10kmph faster on a highway versus 10kmph faster in town are very different. 10kmph faster in town could be the difference between killing someone or not hitting them at all.
I do somewhat agree though, I think "driving to the conditions" for me personally would be totally fine, I'd probably trend to driving slower than the speed limit. But if you had no limit and no enforcement, people would be abusing it all the time. Someone in a hurry in town would easily cause trouble. The tradeoff for limiting that is having to check your speedometer.
Speed determines time to stop including stopping distance and reaction time. For every second of reaction time per 10kmph you add about 4 meters of distance travelled before you even hit the brakes. So best case if you aren't looking at your HVAC, at 50kmph you will start the stopping process in about 28 meters, and at 60kmph it will be 33.3m and take longer to stop once you hit the pegs.
Doesn't sound like heaps but that is actually your margin for error, just 4m. If something jumps out in front of you at 28 meters away, at 50 you will have had 4 meters to stop, which modern cars can do, and at 60 you will hit them at the full 60kmph. The Australian government has some great road safety clips on the subject, I might try and find them.
> You're saying the speedometer is the only instrument that needs to be scanned regularly?
In practice, I'd hazard a yes.
Keyword: regularly...unless you're driving something that's pissing oil all over the place and/or has a cooling system that's out of service, at which point you clearly have much bigger maintenance problems and probably shouldn't be on the road with that vehicle anyways (perhaps even in a lawful sense).
> 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.
The obvious naivety here is a dependency on another driver ahead of you both maintaining situational awareness and doing the right thing...never mind sparse traffic scenarios, e.g. super late/early hours, neighborhoods, small towns, rural areas, etc. In the case of incident, the police won't care; your insurance provider won't care.
> It's a lot more important to me to know if I've lost oil pressure or am overheating.
Contrived. There's a reason why high-contrast event indicators (termed "telltale" as defined by US FMVSS statutory regulation[1]) baked directly into every passenger vehicle which control for permissible location, identification, color, and illumination targeting driver visibility. These discrete telltales are explicitly designed to ping a driver's peripheral vision with the intent of eliminating a need for active monitoring in practice.
> 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.
I forgot to address these sorry.
I've driven some pants cars in my time so I get it, but I'd say you be the judge of just how distracted you are with mechanical worries and if that's a safe amount or not.
I think HVAC being on tactile controls makes the difference here, but ultimately you could check them when you've stopped if it's too much of a hassle. Sometimes I try to get it set, but can't figure it out quickly, so give up and just set it at the next point I'm idling.
There's an implicit message from new cars having lane-keeping features that we as a society (whichever society) are going to compensate for distractions rather than cracking down.
I hate the Tesla Model 3 touchscreen. No muscle memory. No haptic feedback. Using it almost constantly causes attention problems.
If it weren't for the ability of the car to alert lane departures, cars braking ahead of you, etc., I likely would have had many accidents already, just using the touch screen for things should be physical controls.
Best bet is to engage autopilot then do whatever you gotta do.
Would be interesting to know if Tesla counts lane departure prevention caused by driver-distracted-by-touchscreen across the fleet to showcase the safety of its car, while in reality it's the lack of safety introduced by the touchscreen which caused the issue in the first place?
btw: I had the exact same experience with another brand (rental car) where the touchscreen was so ill placed, that basically any interaction with it messed with the steering.
What about the idea that, as a customer who bought and owns something, you should have control over that thing, not the other way around?
I am not saying this is the stronger argument. It's still an argument, though, and it surprised me to find this sentiment missing from the comments (granted, we're at only 7 comments right now). Why would something we want applied to smartphones and PCs not apply to cars?
Actually, smartphones are a pretty significant cause of death, but when people are using them while driving.
For Apple iPhone, for example, you just have to assert that you aren't driving to use it while driving (assuming the iPhone could be used by a passenger instead, so they can't really tell).
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 practically drive into a wall and come out fine, but any people you might hit on the way won't share your fate.
You should have control over the stuff you buy, but to use that stuff on public roads you'll have to get it certified for safety. If you want to build your own race track to play video games on, be my guest, but keep your mods off the streets.
> You should have control over the stuff you buy, but to use that stuff on public roads you'll have to get it certified for safety. If you want to build your own race track to play video games on, be my guest, but keep your mods off the streets.
When you try to use an iPhone while driving, it will ask you if you aren't driving (i.e. a passenger) but otherwise the choice is yours to obey the rule or not. Tesla is getting in trouble for offering the same thing, but it is different, because the panel is attached to the car, so is considered part of. If it was an iPad tapped to the dashboard, no one would say that you should be automatically locked out while driving (since...it isn't a part of the car, it is just something stupid).
There are actually proposals to change that: if the iDevice can detect that it is in a moving car, that it should be disabled just in case it is the driver using it, with exemptions for people on buses and such.
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.
I’m no prude around cursing but let’s keep it civil. “I disagree and here is why” is way more effective than “fuck you and here is why”. The OP, and many people, probably just ignored your second paragraph because of the first.
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.
My impression of the aftermarket and performance tuning community so far has been that they are a bunch of annoying individuals making cars noisier and more obnoxious than they already are.
No one cares what you do in your car when it's in your driveway. The issue is doing unsafe things while on a public owned and regulated road. Same reason you can't just drive any vehicle on the road, or use just any parts. They have to be road legal.
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 around (thankfully with no one around me & staying on the road) because i spent about 1 second going for some last fries in a take out bag & couldn't re-stabilize. it had just so happened to be the wrong moment.
in driving, mostly things are boring & unexciting. but secretly we are surrounded by just the wrong moments, dotted here & there amid the boring. typically there's enough slack to navigate & avoid the little hazards, to prevent catastrophe or damage. but a little compounding factor can matters a lot. it's hard to impress onto drivers- who typically see such boring, easy, unassuming tasks, endlessly playing out- that this is serious work, that it requires vigilance. eternal, unrelenting, persistent vigilance. to believe in the hazardousness of the situation, especially whenever there is another human soul anywhere in a couple hundred meters. human's aren't built for hyper-vigilance, for attentiveness in such fast moving, high energy situations.
so i don't know what we can do, but keep locking down on driving. anyone in charge of over 0.5kg of moving mass: sorry, but society has a moral obligation to clamp down on, to restrict potential distractions. whether it's your passenger playing a game or them just futzing with bluetooth. there's so so so many hours lost to driving, and having such a spartan existence at the wheel, having machines that refuse to interact (be it passenger or driver) or distract, that monitor the driver conditions... it just seems mandatory. i don't like it, don't want it for myself, it feels stupid. but i don't see that we have any other choices to pick from, given what absurd catastrophe driving enacts, every single second on this planet.
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?
Passionate but too austere. This would lead to people packing speakers in the car and other distracting behavior, and lead to too many people zoning out or falling asleep. Additionally, for those who have to drive many hours of their lives, it would be wasteful. Some value must be assigned there.
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), it could be made fun and also sufficiently safe for passengers. Latency is a risk, of course, as are evildoers.
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. :) )
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.
Right, which is suggested by “gamification”. If Billy and Bobby and Jimmy want to drive my car around because it’s part of the new Fast & Bicurious then everyone wins!
I think it was ACE magazine in the 1980s that always rated its games by "Improvements through improper play". e.g. could that racing game be made more fun by, instead of racing, turning around on the starting grid and ploughing into the entire field of cars at the end of lap 1?
https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1474238289355943949
>Look like no more pretending you are a passenger to play games while driving. The car will now ask you "Adjust the passenger seat controls to verify you are a passenger."
>Suddenly that passenger lumbar control becomes super used I guess?
Sure, save the user from themselves while driving. Still, I wish Tesla was much more open on the car. For example I wish it had Chromecast/Airplay so I could play movies from my phone (fine if it's only when parked). I also wish it supported iOS CarPlay and Android Auto, even if was just in 2/3rd of the screen in a window. I don't use the self driving feature and I'd rather use the full google maps experience than their limited built in version. And, I wish they allowed apps (heavily sandboxed).
> Sure, save the user from themselves while driving.
The problem is that those people are driving a ton of steel around and are likely to kill someone other than themselves. And people have proven to be irresponsible when using cars - alcohol, text and drive, stupid ideas are abundant. So that’s not saving the users from themselves. It’s saving me and you from idiot users.
Time and again this company proves that it still doesn't realise what cars currently are, including the ones they try to make. Maybe they should just not release this stuff until they actually have a really, really reliable level 5 autonomy.
That's exactly why Tesla are so good at what they do! I've had VW , BMW and Ford rental cars in the last year and they are literally stuck in the dark ages when it comes to on car entertainment and the things that just work and are very responsive in a Tesla.
A nice example of what should have been a non story, blown out of proportion. Obviously not Teslas business whether or not people use their touchscreen while driving. But make enough noise and anything can be an issue. Also, news headlines should really be "tesla adopts path of least resistance" because obviously there's nothing to discuss here, but some driving regulator doesn't understand their job and tesla isn't interested in the headache. Also, i can't think of a more minor potential distraction while driving then this.
I think what they did was the same as Waze. It warns against playing while driving and asks you to confirm that you’re the passenger. In other words, the software treats you as an adult. Someone who lease correct me if that is not how it was implemented. I’ve never tried to play a game while driving, for obvious reasons.
If we need software to kindergarten us against endangering ourselves and others, we have much bigger problems as a society.
Out of the same philosophy, Tesla allows you to set Autopilot speed slightly above the applicable speed limit. You can cry out that that’s illegal. But then again, try to drive exactly the speed limit in real world situations. You might actually be creating more dangerous situations than you avoid. Hence Tesla treats you as the driver. It’s your ship, and you are the captain. The tech is just there to assist you.
>If we need X to kindergarten us against endangering ourselves and others
This sentence is confusing to me - at the risk of sounding curt, we obviously do need to protect people from idiots. Given a game to play while driving, some people will. The more convenient and present it is, the more people will do it. I'm not sure how one could formulate an argument that these people don't exist. The key here is of course that they endanger others - if it were just themselves, the conversation would be much more subjective.
But they might as well drink and drive. Or text on their phone.
Cars are dangerous weapons. But we trust the public to use them.
I have no interest in playing video games while driving. But I do appreciate Tesla for treating owners as adults. That is to say, I think I can see where they’re coming from. They don’t want people to get into accidents because they’re playing a video game while driving. But they also don’t want to be their customers’ nanny. I like that. To me, that’s a very human touch. Especially for a tech company.
Perhaps I also resent the implicit attempt at shifting the responsibility. If someone crashes into my car because they’re playing a video game I’m gonna sue them. Not Tesla. It’s the driver who made the choice. To say “But Tesla put the screen in front of him. They enabled it”, to me, is to say that people are just automaton consumers, reacting to cues in their environment like some dog to clicker training.
You really don’t see a difference between manufacturer installed and advertised feature, on a main screen in the car, that also contains legally mandated functions like speedometer VS 3rd party app on a 3rd party accessory?
Especially if that feature comes from a company that’s known to overhype their self driving abilities?
Comparing that to kindergarten from software is like complaining that when you build new house you need to put right electrical cables in the wall. And that just a sticker on the outlet that says “use only for table lamb with 1 led light” should be enough.
Sure. I totally get how this looks, given the headlines. But it makes no sense to me. Tesla has no financial reason to allow drivers to trick the car into loading a game by falsely clicking the “Passenger” button. On the contrary. If a customer does this and crashes the car while playing a game, it would cause a lot of bad press for Tesla. Locking games would be the easier path for Tesla. Limiting Autopilot speed to the exact speed limit of the road would also be the easier path for Tesla. Heck, not publicly striving for FSD and getting “egg on their face” when it takes longer than expected would be the easier path for Tesla.
The problem isn't that the software is overprotective.
But that these companies specifically (fraudulently) market these assisted driving capabilities as providing more safety / autonomy than they actually do.
By giving these features names like "Autopilot" when it's just L2 for example.
It isn't the drivers, but rather the companies that need to be "kindergartened". Or in my view simply shut down by this point.
Self driving is hard. Nobody has ever done it. It’s akin to the first moon landing. You can’t fault the people trying to get there for missing deadlines.
When I build an app, I always underestimate how long it’s going to take. I get to some local maximum and think “one more week and I’ll be there”. Then I discover that, to get from 80% perfect to 90% perfect, I need to backtrack and try a completely different angle.
I own a Tesla. I paid for Autopilot. I love what it can do today. And I know that even Elon cannot predict when we can take off that steering wheel.
I also know that their Autopilot team is pushing the envelope. Look up Andrej Karpathy on GitHub. Do you really think that guy is driven by money? That he has even the faintest I interest in participating in some marketing scheme?
These people are geeks. They know they are right. They are wrestling not public opinion. They got no time for that. They are wrestling Nature. That is to say, physics, AI, and the bandwidth of human-computer-interaction.
I also haven’t heard of anyone who bought a Tesla because they believed the car could do more than it actually can. Buyers today are extremely well informed. They watch all the YouTube reviews. That story that Tesla over promises features in order to sell more cars makes for great headlines. But to believe such headlines is to miss the real reasons why people buy Teslas.
I'm not worried about Karpathy, but rather Musk, whose public conduct is positively unhinged.
And I know that even Elon cannot predict when we can take off that steering wheel.
Which must be why he said that autonomous driving was "basically a solved problem" back in 2016. Less than a month after that Model S plowed into an oncoming truck, which Autopilot thought was a stretch of bright sky -- killing its driver.
They know they are right.
This being the very worst kind of hubris - which has always led to outcomes far more foolish and destructive than the simple lust for money.
They are wrestling Nature.
And as we have seen, regulations (what you seem to refer to as "public opinion"). And per the article below, with the advice of his own engineers, as well.
As the guiding force behind Autopilot, Mr. Musk pushed it in directions other automakers were unwilling to take this kind of technology, interviews with 19 people who worked on the project over the last decade show. Mr. Musk repeatedly misled buyers about the services’ abilities, many of those people say. All spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation from Mr. Musk and Tesla.
For years, Mr. Musk has said Tesla cars were on the verge of complete autonomy. “The basic news is that all Tesla vehicles leaving the factory have all the hardware necessary for Level 5 autonomy,” he declared in 2016. The statement surprised and concerned some working on the project, since the Society of Automotive Engineers defines Level 5 as full driving automation.
More recently, he has said that new software — currently part of a beta test by a limited number of Tesla owners who have bought the F.S.D. package — will allow cars to drive themselves on city streets as well as highways. But as with Autopilot, Tesla documentation says drivers must keep their hands on the wheel, ready to take control of the car at any time.
Regulators have warned that Tesla and Mr. Musk have exaggerated the sophistication of Autopilot, encouraging some people to misuse it.
“Where I get concerned is the language that’s used to describe the capabilities of the vehicle,” said Jennifer Homendy, chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, which has investigated accidents involving Autopilot and criticized the system’s design. “It can be very dangerous.”
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 228 ms ] threadPretty inconvenient during road trips to have to pull off the highway, because the car doesn't trust that it's the passenger working the center console...
I understand people usually drive alone but its gonna be hard to police this long term unless we start solving the real problems like why are touch screens being used in cars at all??? they are the worst possible ux for maximum distraction!
Sometimes bluetooth just seems to get itself in a state where things won't connect and you have to start again. It happens on pretty much everything with me eventually, be it my bluetooth keyboard with my laptop, my phone and my car, my headphones and iPhone...
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.
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 wheel, and I always thought that design was less usable and more distracting --- a glance downwards is easier than one sideways and down.
Fast forward a few years and the Raspberry Pi was released. My first RPi project was to built a new in car entertainment system. I used Go v1.0 (at that time even methods weren’t supported) and built a media player with text to speech. The entertainment system had 6 buttons:
1. Previous artist 2. Previous album 3. Previous song / replay song 4. Skip song 5. Skip album 6. Skip artist
The media centre would then use text to speech to read the artist, album and song details out over the speakers before playing the tracks.
This system was designed so I never needed to take my eyes off the road and it worked amazingly.
Unfortunately I’m not an electrical engineer so the device was ugly and started to fall apart quite quickly. I think it only lasted < 1 year. But I learned a lot from that experiment: there is a lot of missed opportunities for innovation in the car entertainment domain.
I'm still annoyed by this when texting while driving and having to look at the screen.
Downvote all you like, your moral judgement is not gonna change what I do.
I loved the T9 keyboard in my right hand and steering wheel in the left. I'm good at steering with my left knee (unless we're talking slow speeds and bendy road) so taking my hands off is not an issue - the issue is taking my eyes off the road, constantly switching between road/phone/road/phone, which is annoying as fuck.
>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.
Makes me think of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TCeR_SWZM0, just adjust Chandler's line to "0-60 in 3 seconds, top speed of 160mph, 500 mile range!"
If you are a customer of a company, you're paying for what that company thinks is best for you. Whether they're right or not is another thing entirely.
In this case, Tesla decided that what's best for you is a car with a touch screen with no tactile feedback that serves as the car's only interface for everything: current speed, tire pressure, potential collision warnings, HVAC status and controls, an app that makes fart sounds, and so on. The list of what it's used for probably has over 100 possible items, with one of those items being "play games."
All of those features, including that last one, are features Tesla decided are best for its customers.
Giving their customers a choice to play games or not while driving wouldn't even be up for debate if they never shipped software with games in the first place.
Increasing a vehicle's safety isn't disrespectful and doesn't undermine responsible adult behavior. Adding features that invite drivers to be unsafe seems far more disrespectful. No one dies because their passengers can't play video games while driving on a vehicle's only interface.
I think that "respecting responsible adults" is also just silly. Why make laws that punish drivers for texting and driving? Can't we just allow people to be responsible? History has made it crystal clear that when given the chance, people will choose to not be responsible often enough to be disastrous.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29678919
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 driver must be focused on driving”. That is obviously impossible.
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.
Whether it's really a good idea or not? I mean, the driver can pull out a phone or iPad and game/text/whatever to their hearts content already. And many do. And lots of them die. Why exactly are we treating this any differently?
Elsewhere in this very discussion, a driver admitted to doing this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29670414
Also the rule seems to be that you can bring a distraction into a car but you can't build the distraction into the car. Which seems totally reasonable to me. I mean, even after Tesla got rid of the games, passengers can still play any non-Tesla-exclusive game on their iPhone, so it seems like no one is really harmed.
The upthread comment was from someone who clearly assumed that this was intended as a driver feature, even to the extent of supposing that it was designed to be used under autonomous control. And that's clearly not the case.
That mistake is a direct result of headlines like the one here, which talk about "allowing drivers" to play games. It's technically true, but it leads to the wrong conclusion. And that's the intent!
The car is filled with distractions already, and we accept that it's broadly safe even if some drivers are distracted[1]. Why is this one in particular such a big deal for everyone, except for the somewhat obvious reason that it's new and Tesla did it.
[1] To be fair: by far the most fatal distraction in the vehicle isn't even the device UI, it's the phone in their pocket.
They didn't show you the games you could actually play, they showed you what they thought would make you upset. And it did. Seriously, the whole media ecosystem in this space is one intentional deception after another. Do you really not see that?
There is no justification for having these stupid features in the car other than marketing. Tesla should stick to the "Fart mode" and other such gimmicks, which do not endanger other people on the road and give enough for the fans to talk about the "superior technologies".
I feel like this is really a reach. The passenger is using their hands to move around those little cards, and I don't think that sounds any more distracting than half the things they could be doing like gesturing while talking or fidgeting slightly.
Sonic would be bad, solitaire on a touch screen isn't bad unless the driver tries to play.
Depends on the model. Though that's a stupid design even without any games.
> navigation indications
Not a critical feature, and can be done without a screen. Also, huh, that's constant movement you'd be getting rid of isn't it.
High-movement games are in a different category entirely, of course, but apparently those only work stopped.
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 vision were actually huge advancements in safety...
They are truly, as that one book title went, unsafe at any speed.
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 availability of the controls would be static. I'm not sure what you'd get out of a touch screen with those constraints (less parts?), especially with the added cost and research, but that's the only way I can see a touch screen in a car that should ever be legal.
A Tesla driver in Germany already got fined for using the touch screen of his car while driving. It's strange how this obvious flaw of a car design has ever been allowed onto the roads.
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.
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.
It's strange that anyone thinks it's even desirable. Touchscreens aren't even pleasant to use in this context.
When phones can run at 30 fps and have no noticeable lag, it's infuriating to switch to a car which stutters on some ugly, unnecessary graphics and takes 0.25 seconds to respond to a touch input. Not to mention the whole "you're supposed to be driving a car" aspect.
It's such trivial things that people risk their lives for too. A sort of trashy naivety. Like smoking at the gas pump.
>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.
This may be naive, but I've assumed that it is practically impossible to enforce laws that a majority of the population habitually breaks.
> 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
That's really location specific, and situation specific. We can't go over ~5kmph faster than the limit here without getting fined by speed cameras. Also 10kmph faster on a highway versus 10kmph faster in town are very different. 10kmph faster in town could be the difference between killing someone or not hitting them at all.
I do somewhat agree though, I think "driving to the conditions" for me personally would be totally fine, I'd probably trend to driving slower than the speed limit. But if you had no limit and no enforcement, people would be abusing it all the time. Someone in a hurry in town would easily cause trouble. The tradeoff for limiting that is having to check your speedometer.
10kmph = 6.2mph.
I think of the difference between hitting someone and not hitting them as measured in distance, not speed.
Doesn't sound like heaps but that is actually your margin for error, just 4m. If something jumps out in front of you at 28 meters away, at 50 you will have had 4 meters to stop, which modern cars can do, and at 60 you will hit them at the full 60kmph. The Australian government has some great road safety clips on the subject, I might try and find them.
In practice, I'd hazard a yes.
Keyword: regularly...unless you're driving something that's pissing oil all over the place and/or has a cooling system that's out of service, at which point you clearly have much bigger maintenance problems and probably shouldn't be on the road with that vehicle anyways (perhaps even in a lawful sense).
> 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.
The obvious naivety here is a dependency on another driver ahead of you both maintaining situational awareness and doing the right thing...never mind sparse traffic scenarios, e.g. super late/early hours, neighborhoods, small towns, rural areas, etc. In the case of incident, the police won't care; your insurance provider won't care.
> It's a lot more important to me to know if I've lost oil pressure or am overheating.
Contrived. There's a reason why high-contrast event indicators (termed "telltale" as defined by US FMVSS statutory regulation[1]) baked directly into every passenger vehicle which control for permissible location, identification, color, and illumination targeting driver visibility. These discrete telltales are explicitly designed to ping a driver's peripheral vision with the intent of eliminating a need for active monitoring in practice.
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-49/subtitle-B/chapter-V/p...
I never had to use it as an excuse.
> And if the HVAC controls are unnecessary to mess with while driving, they are still not an "edge case". Nor is the radio.
I forgot to address these sorry.
I've driven some pants cars in my time so I get it, but I'd say you be the judge of just how distracted you are with mechanical worries and if that's a safe amount or not.
I think HVAC being on tactile controls makes the difference here, but ultimately you could check them when you've stopped if it's too much of a hassle. Sometimes I try to get it set, but can't figure it out quickly, so give up and just set it at the next point I'm idling.
If it weren't for the ability of the car to alert lane departures, cars braking ahead of you, etc., I likely would have had many accidents already, just using the touch screen for things should be physical controls.
Best bet is to engage autopilot then do whatever you gotta do.
btw: I had the exact same experience with another brand (rental car) where the touchscreen was so ill placed, that basically any interaction with it messed with the steering.
I am not saying this is the stronger argument. It's still an argument, though, and it surprised me to find this sentiment missing from the comments (granted, we're at only 7 comments right now). Why would something we want applied to smartphones and PCs not apply to cars?
For Apple iPhone, for example, you just have to assert that you aren't driving to use it while driving (assuming the iPhone could be used by a passenger instead, so they can't really tell).
Cars are inherently dangerous, mostly to the people around you. Modern car safety makes sure you can practically drive into a wall and come out fine, but any people you might hit on the way won't share your fate.
You should have control over the stuff you buy, but to use that stuff on public roads you'll have to get it certified for safety. If you want to build your own race track to play video games on, be my guest, but keep your mods off the streets.
When you try to use an iPhone while driving, it will ask you if you aren't driving (i.e. a passenger) but otherwise the choice is yours to obey the rule or not. Tesla is getting in trouble for offering the same thing, but it is different, because the panel is attached to the car, so is considered part of. If it was an iPad tapped to the dashboard, no one would say that you should be automatically locked out while driving (since...it isn't a part of the car, it is just something stupid).
There are actually proposals to change that: if the iDevice can detect that it is in a moving car, that it should be disabled just in case it is the driver using it, with exemptions for people on buses and such.
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.
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.
There sure are, but the idea of getting tweaks certified would be a big change.
This comment seems to confirm my biases.
This is a democracy people.
But the government owns the roads, so the same applies to them. If they say you can't drive and game... you can't drive and game.
And let's be fair here, you buy a car to drive on public roads.
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 around (thankfully with no one around me & staying on the road) because i spent about 1 second going for some last fries in a take out bag & couldn't re-stabilize. it had just so happened to be the wrong moment.
in driving, mostly things are boring & unexciting. but secretly we are surrounded by just the wrong moments, dotted here & there amid the boring. typically there's enough slack to navigate & avoid the little hazards, to prevent catastrophe or damage. but a little compounding factor can matters a lot. it's hard to impress onto drivers- who typically see such boring, easy, unassuming tasks, endlessly playing out- that this is serious work, that it requires vigilance. eternal, unrelenting, persistent vigilance. to believe in the hazardousness of the situation, especially whenever there is another human soul anywhere in a couple hundred meters. human's aren't built for hyper-vigilance, for attentiveness in such fast moving, high energy situations.
so i don't know what we can do, but keep locking down on driving. anyone in charge of over 0.5kg of moving mass: sorry, but society has a moral obligation to clamp down on, to restrict potential distractions. whether it's your passenger playing a game or them just futzing with bluetooth. there's so so so many hours lost to driving, and having such a spartan existence at the wheel, having machines that refuse to interact (be it passenger or driver) or distract, that monitor the driver conditions... it just seems mandatory. i don't like it, don't want it for myself, it feels stupid. but i don't see that we have any other choices to pick from, given what absurd catastrophe driving enacts, every single second on this planet.
What do you think of the people to whom automobiles are art, pastime, recreation, lifestyle?
(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. :) )
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.
Sure, but not everyone values their time the same.
Why would we want to do that if it's not necessary?
Sure, save the user from themselves while driving. Still, I wish Tesla was much more open on the car. For example I wish it had Chromecast/Airplay so I could play movies from my phone (fine if it's only when parked). I also wish it supported iOS CarPlay and Android Auto, even if was just in 2/3rd of the screen in a window. I don't use the self driving feature and I'd rather use the full google maps experience than their limited built in version. And, I wish they allowed apps (heavily sandboxed).
The problem is that those people are driving a ton of steel around and are likely to kill someone other than themselves. And people have proven to be irresponsible when using cars - alcohol, text and drive, stupid ideas are abundant. So that’s not saving the users from themselves. It’s saving me and you from idiot users.
Saying there was pressure just makes it sound like regulators are completely impotent.
If we need software to kindergarten us against endangering ourselves and others, we have much bigger problems as a society.
Out of the same philosophy, Tesla allows you to set Autopilot speed slightly above the applicable speed limit. You can cry out that that’s illegal. But then again, try to drive exactly the speed limit in real world situations. You might actually be creating more dangerous situations than you avoid. Hence Tesla treats you as the driver. It’s your ship, and you are the captain. The tech is just there to assist you.
This sentence is confusing to me - at the risk of sounding curt, we obviously do need to protect people from idiots. Given a game to play while driving, some people will. The more convenient and present it is, the more people will do it. I'm not sure how one could formulate an argument that these people don't exist. The key here is of course that they endanger others - if it were just themselves, the conversation would be much more subjective.
But they might as well drink and drive. Or text on their phone.
Cars are dangerous weapons. But we trust the public to use them.
I have no interest in playing video games while driving. But I do appreciate Tesla for treating owners as adults. That is to say, I think I can see where they’re coming from. They don’t want people to get into accidents because they’re playing a video game while driving. But they also don’t want to be their customers’ nanny. I like that. To me, that’s a very human touch. Especially for a tech company.
Perhaps I also resent the implicit attempt at shifting the responsibility. If someone crashes into my car because they’re playing a video game I’m gonna sue them. Not Tesla. It’s the driver who made the choice. To say “But Tesla put the screen in front of him. They enabled it”, to me, is to say that people are just automaton consumers, reacting to cues in their environment like some dog to clicker training.
Especially if that feature comes from a company that’s known to overhype their self driving abilities?
Comparing that to kindergarten from software is like complaining that when you build new house you need to put right electrical cables in the wall. And that just a sticker on the outlet that says “use only for table lamb with 1 led light” should be enough.
Why are they not doing the easier thing?
But that these companies specifically (fraudulently) market these assisted driving capabilities as providing more safety / autonomy than they actually do.
By giving these features names like "Autopilot" when it's just L2 for example.
It isn't the drivers, but rather the companies that need to be "kindergartened". Or in my view simply shut down by this point.
Self driving is hard. Nobody has ever done it. It’s akin to the first moon landing. You can’t fault the people trying to get there for missing deadlines.
When I build an app, I always underestimate how long it’s going to take. I get to some local maximum and think “one more week and I’ll be there”. Then I discover that, to get from 80% perfect to 90% perfect, I need to backtrack and try a completely different angle.
I own a Tesla. I paid for Autopilot. I love what it can do today. And I know that even Elon cannot predict when we can take off that steering wheel.
I also know that their Autopilot team is pushing the envelope. Look up Andrej Karpathy on GitHub. Do you really think that guy is driven by money? That he has even the faintest I interest in participating in some marketing scheme?
These people are geeks. They know they are right. They are wrestling not public opinion. They got no time for that. They are wrestling Nature. That is to say, physics, AI, and the bandwidth of human-computer-interaction.
I also haven’t heard of anyone who bought a Tesla because they believed the car could do more than it actually can. Buyers today are extremely well informed. They watch all the YouTube reviews. That story that Tesla over promises features in order to sell more cars makes for great headlines. But to believe such headlines is to miss the real reasons why people buy Teslas.
I'm not worried about Karpathy, but rather Musk, whose public conduct is positively unhinged.
And I know that even Elon cannot predict when we can take off that steering wheel.
Which must be why he said that autonomous driving was "basically a solved problem" back in 2016. Less than a month after that Model S plowed into an oncoming truck, which Autopilot thought was a stretch of bright sky -- killing its driver.
They know they are right.
This being the very worst kind of hubris - which has always led to outcomes far more foolish and destructive than the simple lust for money.
They are wrestling Nature.
And as we have seen, regulations (what you seem to refer to as "public opinion"). And per the article below, with the advice of his own engineers, as well.
From: https://archive.fo/psSYR :
As the guiding force behind Autopilot, Mr. Musk pushed it in directions other automakers were unwilling to take this kind of technology, interviews with 19 people who worked on the project over the last decade show. Mr. Musk repeatedly misled buyers about the services’ abilities, many of those people say. All spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation from Mr. Musk and Tesla.
For years, Mr. Musk has said Tesla cars were on the verge of complete autonomy. “The basic news is that all Tesla vehicles leaving the factory have all the hardware necessary for Level 5 autonomy,” he declared in 2016. The statement surprised and concerned some working on the project, since the Society of Automotive Engineers defines Level 5 as full driving automation.
More recently, he has said that new software — currently part of a beta test by a limited number of Tesla owners who have bought the F.S.D. package — will allow cars to drive themselves on city streets as well as highways. But as with Autopilot, Tesla documentation says drivers must keep their hands on the wheel, ready to take control of the car at any time.
Regulators have warned that Tesla and Mr. Musk have exaggerated the sophistication of Autopilot, encouraging some people to misuse it.
“Where I get concerned is the language that’s used to describe the capabilities of the vehicle,” said Jennifer Homendy, chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, which has investigated accidents involving Autopilot and criticized the system’s design. “It can be very dangerous.”