I wonder how many people turn on traditional cruise control and then crash due to neglectful driving. That's what we should be comparing Tesla Autopilot against, we should compare it against the status quo.
We all benefited from our ancestors killing opposing tribes so I'm going to ignore that too. If everyone you know is pure, you're doing better than me.
No one mentioned racism? Then what's apartheid, mate. Come off it.
Our ancestors, sure. But my dad wasn't a rich white guy from apartheid SA who invested in my first company and financed who knows what else.
... you're saying it's racist of me to mention he's from an extremely racist system that reserved land and particular careers for members of a particular racial classification? Are you okay? Are you on the right site?
> you're saying it's racist of me to mention he's from an extremely racist system that reserved land and particular careers for members of a particular racial classification?
So your lineage won some and lost some yes? What is the point of saying at one time your people benefited from conquest but this other time you didn't? So what?
Sounds like cope and sour grapes. He's a successful, wealthy, and accomplished man. That's a good thing. Why would anyone want to be on the losing side of the equation? Are you ok?
Maybe he was rich maybe not, but this is what Elon has to say:
> “One thing he [Musk's father] claims is he gave us a whole bunch of money to start, my brother and I, to start up our first company [Zip2, which provided online city guides to newspapers]. This is not true,” Musk says. “He was irrelevant. He paid nothing for college. My brother and I paid for college through scholarships, loans and working two jobs simultaneously. The funding we raised for our first company came from a small group of random angel investors in Silicon Valley.” [0]
Errol invested between 20-30k well after Zip2 was on it's way and they closed a huge round weeks after. His father took credit for helping him but the Musk brothers strongly deny it [0], and Elon literally slept in the office and showered in the local YMCA to get off the ground [1]
Even Elon's wiki page misreports this, but the Zip2 wiki page has it right.
I don’t understand this whole ‘tar the son with the (perceived) sins of the father’.
Does this logic mean that if you have the misfortune to be born into a family that has the capability to perform it’s root functions more effectively than others (providing education) your achievements are worth bunk because you don’t have a story of adversity to overcome?
Don’t get me wrong I lean left, believe capability is evenly distributed and opportunity isn’t, but how is this a useful slight?
I dare you to prove how; the only verifiable account is that he had enough privilege to immigrate to Canada with like $1,000 to his name. He took student loans. People who knew him back then characterize him as almost pathologically frugal.
The "elon and his brother walking around with emeralds in their pockets" thing is a story straight from 1 interview with his estranged father and verified by nobody. The nearest verifiable records show lifetime earnings from the mine of ~$400k before tax.
What's more, elon's dad was elected to local office on an anti-apartheid ticket, which was a bit of a dangerous move for him.
Other automaker AEB (automatic emergency braking) systems have the same stationary object detection deficiency and specifically indicate that the system can fail under these circumstances [1].
Tesla gets called out because their autosteer is so good at lane keeping, comparatively speaking. Their new high resolution radar [2] (Phoenix) they’ve registered with the FCC, as well as a retrofit campaign across the fleet, will likely resolve this gap. If so, I’m unsure what happens when other automakers continue to have this deficiency as their autosteer capability improves but they don’t have high res forward facing radar. Will NHTSA hold legacies to the same standard?
> Their new high resolution radar [2] (Phoenix) they’ve registered with the FCC, as well as a retrofit campaign across the fleet, will likely resolve this gap.
Is a retrofit confirmed or is it just your assumption? They even sold hundreds of thousands of "vision only" cars (including mine) with Musk and Karpathy claiming radar is useless for them. Funny how they've walked it back with this new radar news.
I was always _shocked_ that Musk was such a genius that he figured out how to do self driving without RADAR or LIDAR. If only the hundreds of engineers at Google and Cruise could have made the same discovery. /s
Strong assumption NHTSA will issue a recall due to the severity of the issue and Tesla offers up sensor fusion as the fix.
Tesla Vision was a successful strategy to keep shipping units during supply chain issues (inability to source radar units), but it is clearly not sustainable based on the Vision codebase maturity reflected by operational performance.
AEBs and lane-keeping systems on other automakers vehicles are much more conservative in their function, and therefore aren't as conducive to passive driving behavior.
The driving dynamics of different vehicles result in different outcomes not just due to those dynamics themselves, but also in the driving behavior they elicit. (and even further, in that drivers of different driving habits often exhibit selection bias in the vehicles they choose)
>Tesla gets called out because their autosteer is so good at lane keeping, comparatively speaking.
Yeah, Tesla gets "called out" because their technology is so good, not because their implicit marketing claims the cars can drive themselves.
There are full time shills whose entire focus is demonstrating on YouTube how the cars can drive themselves. You don't think that has something to do with this? Arguing "That's FSD this is Autopilot" misses the entire point. Elon has 100M followers on Twitter; go scan through any thread. People think they've solved FSD, people think they have humanoid robots, people think he already owns Twitter for crying out loud.
So, yes, if Mary Barra got in her Chevy Bolt and told a reported the car can drive itself and someone died doing the same thing, I think GM would be held to the same standard.
It’s not just the feature that’s unsafe, it’s the feature plus the marketing.
If the other manufacturers start throwing “full self-driving” around to describe their cruise control/lane keeping/automatic breaking, and people start crashing because they rely on that, then yes. I expect there would be some regulatory activity.
I don't. You rarely see crashes of other vehicles make the press, but with Teslas you do.
Tesla articles get views because of both the Tesla haters and fanboys, makes financial sense for news sites to publish them. That increased press leads to increased investigations.
To be fair, they didn't say Tesla has delivered any self-driving cars. Everyone knows a huckster is at their happiest with an internet horde making excuses for their incapacity to fulfill their promises.
Interesting, that makes sense. I view it differently at first. In the front seat passenger of a car people are sometimes called the CoPilot and that’s what I thought of, someone is who looking out.
I don’t think the average person knows that an aircrafts autopilot requires constant monitoring.
Do neglectful people turn on cruise control and then rear-end other cars in their Volvos and GMs? I'm going to guess that there's plenty of such instances, but they're not as headline-prone as crashing Teslas. Hence, why this data would be useful for comparison.
They are very similar in my view: they automate part of driving to reduce load on the driver. Traditional cruise control just maintains velocity. My Subaru's adaptive cruise control maintains velocity and controls distance relative to the car ahead. Tesla also keeps your car centered in lane, but is otherwise just adaptive cruise control. There's some more features in the "self-driving" cars, like auto-parking and overtaking - I don't have much experience with those, I've only used non-self-driving Tesla autopilot. For the normal Tesla autopilot, though, "adaptive cruise control plus lane-centering" seems to accurately describe it.
Yes so technically, and as marketed, they are not the same. A dumb setting that fixes velocity is not the same, in any way, as a sophisticated self-driving mechanism that aims to recognize the world around it and adjust multiple parameters dynamically. More surface area for errors, and a misguided sense in the driver that their car is smart and can manage this process itself without the same attention as a fixed-speed (and nothing else), dumb cruise control
> A dumb setting that fixes velocity is not the same, in any way, as a sophisticated self-driving mechanism that aims to recognize the world around it and adjust multiple parameters dynamically.
Except plenty of modern cars don't just have fixed velocity cruise control. They have adaptive cruise control that will speed up or slow down to match the velocity of the car ahead of you. They also have lane centering that will keep your car in its lane. That sounds an awful lot like Teslas.
Expectations matter. Even if the exact same thing would be sold under different names, calling it autopilot/self-driving is the one that should be called out.
It's a good question, and I'm dismayed to see the various knee-jerk reactions to it. Seems to get caught up in the pro/anti-Tesla/Musk/blah noise. No, thank you.
Here's the thing - people get in accidents all the time when assistance features like ABS, lane keeping, traction control, TACC, good-old-fashioned dumb cruise control, etc. are actively altering the vehicle's performance and behavior.
So when we consider Tesla's AP system, it's really just TACC + lane keeping. Something that is common on a wide variety of vehicles today. Why then is Tesla specifically being focused on? All these other systems have similar failure modes, including, but not limited to: Not stopping for a stopped vehicle far ahead, not slowing for or avoiding objects in or near the lane, etc.
These are assistance features. Thus, in all of these scenarios, it is likely that chief responsibility for the accident lies with the human behind the wheel. We should be studying all OEM systems, not just Tesla's. And specifically, we should be looking at whether the system made the situation worse through its actions than if it had taken no action (akin to a distracted human driving on dumb cruise control).
If it is the case that a Tesla on AP will ram right in to a firetruck flashing its lights while stopped in the lane directly ahead, it is quite likely that many other systems do the same. We just don't really talk about them, because it casually falls under the realm of "human wasn't paying attention". They're not special. We all sort of implicitly accept that. But when it's a Tesla, it's special.
In any case, we'll get over it eventually. This technology is not unique to Tesla and will only become more commonplace. It will continue to get better at avoiding things despite the hoards of distracted drivers.
Most of these other implementations have radar and LiDAR. Teslas is the inferior solution. That’s why if you order one you see a disclaimer that it is vision only.
I think all the crashes involved in this investigation would have been radar. The vision only is really 2022+ year model cars (and possibly some late 2021).
> Why then is Tesla specifically being focused on?
Because before Tesla launched the feature, "Autopilot" was known in the general consciousness to mean a specific thing. Autopilot is the thing on planes that lets the pilot do other tasks (like navigational routing).
Other car manufactures are smart enough to not brand their cruise control as "Self Driving" or the like.
If I sold a brand of drain cleaner under the name "Laundry Detergent" that would rightly result in some consumer protection investigations.
The environment matters. An aircraft autopilot will allow the pilot to safely disengage while in controlled airspace. A Tesla "Autopilot" will not let the driver disengage in any situation.
Clearly, it must be possible to disengage the Tesla "Autopilot" at any time. Because it can fuck up any second.
I was talking about freeing the pilot from maintaining situational awareness. This is not supported for drivers of Tesla vehicles; the term "autopilot" is misleading in that context.
Tesla markets their system as autopilot and full self driving. They are misleading people into believing the car is capable of driving itself. No one reads TACC/lane keeping and thinks "cool I can just play on my phone", But tons of tesla owners think that. It's not a coincidence.
Lots of people also buy sport motorcycles, thinking that because it has traction control and ABS means its safe, but then still end up crashing them and getting seriously hurt or dying.
Should there be in investigations for motorcycle companies making unsafe bikes? Or is it more the case of certain people in general being predisposed to taking more risks and not realizing the consequences?
Not really. Tesla markets their features a certain way with all the warnings present, and motorcycle manufacturers also market their features a certain way, and ironically enough, there isn't giant warning labels plasted all over the bike and/or dash about how dangerous motorcycles are.
Why? Because most anyone already understands that motorcycles are dangerous, and those that choose to ignore risks get fucked. Why should Tesla be any different?
The difference between Tesla's system and driver assistance features that other automakers have, is that Tesla's system encourages a lower level of driver engagement, and it will initiate larger inputs. If those inputs are not what the driver is expecting, a driver in a Tesla may have to correct a more severe failure mode and they may have to do so after being mentally disengaged for a longer period.
From watching youtube videos I got the impression that the Ford 'Blue Cruise' does not require the hands to be on the wheel.
I haven't used the Ford system but I have used the Tesla system and it requires you to move the wheel at a pretty annoyingly and regular frequency to remain in autopilot mode. I believe the cabin camera can also detect when you are on your phone or looking away - but i'm not sure if this is rolled out to non-FSD cars.
I think the frequency that you have to prove you are paying attention is about every 30 seconds
Tesla is the only one maliciously advertising their tech as something else than what it is. The general public doesn’t understand that the tech is largely the same as in a low-end car.
>I wonder how many people turn on traditional cruise control and then crash due to neglectful driving. That's what we should be comparing Tesla Autopilot against, we should compare it against the status quo.
This is so disingenuous.
Go on YouTube and search for people "self-driving" in their Teslas, then do the same for people doing anything remotely the same with standard cruise control.
Tesla and its fanatics want it both ways: it's both the most sophisticated self-driving software on the planet, and only regulations are preventing it from being widely used and reducing traffic accidents, but when accidents happen it's just "cruise control". Pick one.
Is this actually a problem with tesla marketing? Or is it a problem with people being dumb? An aircraft autopilot will happily fly you straight into a mountain. It just holds altitude and bearing. Everyone I know with a Tesla exclusively uses autopilot on the highway in between exits. I'm pretty baffled as to how some people think it's fully autonomous driving, and I'm dubious as to how culpable Tesla is for that ignorance.
It's both, and unless you have a solution to eliminating stupid people, then the tech needs to be regulated out of the market so innocent people don't get killed on the roads due to this stupidity.
There's only so much a company can do to protect against user error. People stick their fingers down a running drain garbage disposal. People will look down the barrel of a loaded gun and pull the trigger. The question is not "has anyone hurt themselves?", the question is "does the product have reasonable safety precautions?"
Themselves? This is about their cars being a threat to everyone around them.
>so much a company can do
Yes, therefore the product should not be legal if these error's can't be minimized or the magnitude of the consequences are disastrous (random unpredictable crashing etc). "Errors" are not all created equal. Some are catastrophic and occur at random.
If I turned on cruise control in my previous car and took a nap it'd happily drive me into the rear end of the car in front of me, or off the road. Where's the outrage over cruise control? And again, I'm highly confident that plenty of people do get in collisions while they're neglectfully driving on cruise control, but those incidents don't catch headlines.
Tesla does have safeguards to prevent people from dozing off on autopilot: there's sensors on the steering wheel, and apparently some models have front facing cameras. Some people put weights on the steering wheels, but at that point people are taking deliberate efforts to bypass safeguards. If someone jams a shim in their microwave latch, they can turn it on while the door is open and fry themselves. That's comparable to putting weights on Tesla's steering wheel.
Does cruise control require the same, more, or less focused attention from the driver than whatever it is these new features require (or will require)?
What are these features for, if they require 100% attention from the driver to monitor? At that point, why not just drive the car? Is there a goal for these features to take incrementally more and more proportion of the responsibility away from the driver, such that the driver can incrementally devote less attention to monitoring? We all know the answers to these questions. We know what the goal is here.
But the problem is, human's cannot sort of, kind of, partially pay attention to the road and the car. And any feature that propagandizes them that it will take care of incrementally more of the driving responsibility will result in less (rounded to none) attention devoted to by the driver. It's a binary proposition beyond some threshold as mutli-tasking is a myth. Do you see the problem?
As the features appear to be working better and better, the more people will devote less attention to the road even in some bounded range of their drive but this is all it takes for catastrophic errors (that will and are happening because of the nature of failure modes of AI) to occur. And these errors are qualitatively different than the ones humans make. At any given point in time the care can and will just do something completely stupid and dangerous. Swerve into a median, crash into an emergency vehicle, turn sharply into a car in another lane. There's documented occurrences of all of this. When these random catastrophic errors occur, the human will be on the margin paying less attention to the situation than if it was simple cruise control or normal driving.
Adaptive cruise control definitely requires less attention than traditional cruise control. Where's the alarm when a car equipped with adaptive cruise control gets in a collision? Same deal with lane assist. And autopilot is basically just adaptive cruise control with lane assist.
Over the last 6 years, there's been 16 collisions, one of them fatal. How many of those accidents would have still happened if people were using adaptive cruise control instead of Autopilot? How many were averted because autopilot is more sophisticated than traditional cruise control. Jumping straight to the conclusion that all of these collisions were due to autopilot, and not considering the fact that it might have been the same or even better than the status quo is naive.
For a start, call it what it is: fancy lane assist. That will remove any blame on the company side, but as it stands now it is a deliberate malicious marketing on tesla’s part.
Regulated by whom..... the people who have absolutely zero clue about how even the basic technology works, and are only interested in getting reelected?
Its funny how people rightfully criticize the government and laugh at videos of senator grilling the CEOs of Facebook or Google with stupid questions, but then as soon as a company does something that they don't like, they somehow expect those people to get their shit together and sensibly regulate something as nuanced as autopilot?
For technology to get better, it needs to be stress tested - in this case that means accidents and people dying. Which is pretty much on par with development of car technology since its origin. The warnings on autopilot are there. If you don't want to take the risk, don't use it.
You don't buckle people in and yeet them against the wall that is your optimism! Half the bloody challenge of testing is setting up the conditions for actually getting meaningful data!
>the people who have absolutely zero clue about how even the basic technology works
This won't be a problem when the regulation equates to: "get these death traps off the road, now". Or, "disable your not-intelligent pseudo-self driving now".
I'm not talking about working on the technology, I'm saying if it doesn't work get it off the market.
> in this case that means accidents and people dying.
It is an absolutely ridiculous view. I really don’t want a shitty company be able to freely test on the streets their shitty technology that can cause the death of innocents. Are you seriously saying that they are free to increase their profits over the lives of people? On what basis is that ethical or moral? Especially when we talk about a company that jumped into an arguably technically inferior solution by having an incentive to develop their “self-driving” based on visual input only. Their competitors at least take it seriously enough and realize that just because humans can manage with a vision-only system (though a goddamn moving one, not static), lidar and other sensors are required on cars, because ML is nowhere near the capacity of even a worm’s brain, let alone what a human has.
> I'm dubious as to how culpable Tesla is for that ignorance.
Tesla labeling a feature "Full Self Driving" certainly isn't helping the situation when the feature clearly does not deliver what the name of the functionality implies.
Doesn't Tesla have driver monitoring and a driver score? So to use autopilot, you not only have to roughly pay attention, but also be pretty good at driving in general to use the beta?
Or did they get rid of that? It sounded like a good compromise to me.
There are tutorials on social media for how to circumvent the driver monitoring for 'autopilot'. See for example, the instance in the article of a Tesla going down the highway with the driver in the back seat.
On what basis can a private company decide what is and isn’t allowable on public roads? Also, there is no human that can engage with a suddenly dangerous situation on a split second basis. People suck at continuous monitoring tasks, if you are driving yourself you are actually engaged.
> Everyone I know with a Tesla exclusively uses autopilot on the highway in between exits.
Tesla touts (and sells as a separate option) "full self-driving" capability.
They tout that it can make turns on city streets, obey street lights, yield to city traffic, change lanes, park, etc. This is not intended for the use case of on the highway, well-supervised, between exits.
at the time tesla announced autopilot, most people figured that meant you could press a button and it would take you safely to where you want to go. A bunch of pilots chimed in to say that wasn't a good understanding of autopilot, but remember: the people being marketed to by and large aren't pilots.
IMHO Tesla has repeatedly overmarketed their actual capabilities. It's clearly starting to catch up with them.
> Is this actually a problem with tesla marketing?
It is, definitely. How come they advertise it as FSD (and I know they very much circle around the exact wording, but a good Litmus test to see what is the actual expected output from the ads is to ask a random person on the street and they will definitely think that they are full self driving, while most other cars have some basic lane assist, etc)?
Their marketing is absolutely malicious, what else would keep up their massive hype bubble?
As an industrial company, you are responsible for the outcome of people using your products in a reasonable way.
If you are a company building cooking knifes, but sell knifes as sharp as razor blades and people start injuring themselves super badly in their kitchen, saying that "people should be more careful with their kitchen knives" won't get you very far in court and in the public's eyes.
> Tesla cars come standard with advanced hardware capable of providing Autopilot features, and full self-driving capabilities—through software updates designed to improve functionality over time.
And this is the stuff that is filtered through their communications staff; the stuff Musk has said is even more egregious.
The fundamental problem is that Tesla's Autopilot is defective. It has repeatedly steered people into highway barriers, and sometimes has no clue which lane it's in or where it's going. See the opening of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMvdI8nSAJE
An Apple employee was killed by his Tesla, which always veered into a highway barrier after an OTA update (he was distracted one day and didn't prevent the crash, died as a result).[0] The video above also involves the results of an OTA update.
There are more reports of dangerous Autopilot behavior than any other brand's cruise control that I'm aware of.
The problem here isn't neglectful driving, it's that you may be driving in a straight line on a highway for half an hour, distracted and "lulled" by the monotony and predictability of the road, and in a split second your car veers off and tries to kill you because it no longer knows where the lane is.
Now drivers need to not only pay attention to the road and over cars, but also be ready to react instantly with zero warning if the car does something unexpected and dangerous.
The wife got a new car - not a Tesla - that has several smart cruise control features.
She actually ended up disabling some of them. She explained that they "made driving too easy" and it was too hard for her to keep her attention on the road while using them.
As a bay-area commuter, the value prop is not having to micromanage the accelerator/brake/steering wheel in stop-and-go traffic. I did the commute for years in "regular" cars, and I've done it for years with autopilot, and autopilot is without a question a much easier commute.
There is a continuum between actively driving the car and falling asleep in the back seat, and AP puts you somewhere on the left side of the middle. It's generally great stuff.
All the point-to-point full-self-driving BS is meh, I don't really care about it, but give me world-class TACC and lane keeping (original autopilot) and I'm a happy commuter.
> the value prop is not having to micromanage the accelerator/brake/steering wheel in stop-and-go traffic
I largely agree with you here, having driven a car with adaptive cruise control in stop-and-go traffic and finding it to be a total game changer.
That said, I'd argue there's a huge difference between having the car micromanage the accelerator+brake versus having it micromanage the accelerator+brake+steering. With the former, the driver must remain engaged with the driving task (even though the most tedious aspect is taken care of), but with the latter, no engagement whatsoever is required.
But that is a decade old technology available in even low-end cars, and is not responsible for car crashes because it was never marketed as anything more.
Tesla maliciously advertises as much much more than adaptive cruise control, lane assist, etc, which is disgusting on their part.
It'll be a few years before we have definite data, but back in 2018 there was reason to think that the number of driver fatalities per million vehicle years was significantly worse in teslas than in comparable cars. https://medium.com/@MidwesternHedgi/teslas-driver-fatality-r...
Some luxury car models have incredibly low driver fatality rates regardless of cruise control activation. Just the fatal stories I've seen reported on hackernews take tesla out of the top bracket for safety.
My most recent car has adaptive cruise control (tries to keep a speed, and break/resume if it can't). And it also has some lane detector that pushes the car gently back into the lane if you don't apply pressure. I used it for about 10 minutes before I had to prevent it from making a very serious accident. I would never compare that to Autopilot, which can go many hours before making a very serious accident.
Yes- that's my point. It took me ten minutes to realize my car's technology is unsafe, but from what I can tell, lots of people used FSD Beta enough to consider it reliable enough after a few hours of watching it work more or less OK on a freeway to completely disengage from driving.
If I go looking about articles related to the Biden administration and Tesla, I mostly see articles about Musk complaining the Biden administration was ignoring them. That's not what I'd expect if they were "bitterly anti Tesla".
Here are some quotes from the article for you. The concern is not that she cares about safety, but that she is very strongly biased against Tesla and has a financial interest in promoting other companies.
"The same goes for her stance regarding CEO Elon Musk. In March 2020, for example, Dr. Cummings seemingly joked about needing someone to stop her from punching Elon Musk in the face. "
"It should be noted that Dr. Cummings’ seat at Veoneer was not disclosed when she published a paper (which was later updated to remove inaccurate details about a fatal Tesla crash) criticizing systems such as Autopilot for their possible dangers. And so far, the incoming NHTSA senior safety adviser has not shared if she would be leaving her post at the Swedish LIDAR company, especially since she would soon be advising a US safety agency on driver-assist systems that adopt both LIDAR and non-LIDAR solutions. "
"Missy Cummings receives around $400,000 worth of stock in Swedish LIDAR company Veoneer per year as compensation for her role as a non-employee member of the board."
Driver behavior on the road can be totally unpredictable. Intent versus observed motion can have divergence.. I wonder if its the algorithms or the sensors.
UX and interfaces are important. If it's marketed and described as "autopilot" or "full self driving," then a reasonable person expects it to automatically pilot the vehicle I'm normal driving situations. Tesla is unfortunately trapped in a all too common story of AI development: over-hype and under-deliver.
There are plenty of warnings about "keeping hands on the wheel" and "full attentiveness". Of course people are going to ignore this, just like many people chose to ignore the effects of alcohol and drive.
Imagine if Mary Barra was on TV telling everyone that you could "pretty much drive our cars drunk", and then put in fine print that drunk driving is bad and illegal.
There is a big difference between claiming that "you could just go in the backseat while the car drives itself", and calling your system Autopilot, considering collision avoidance isn't anywhere in the traditional definition of autopilot as it pertains to planes.
Don't let your hate for Musk as a person cloud your judgement. These things are not comparable.
> There is a big difference between claiming that "you could just go in the backseat while the car drives itself", and calling your system Autopilot, considering collision avoidance isn't anywhere in the traditional definition of autopilot as it pertains to planes.
Do you think that the average consumer knows this much about how plane autopilots work? If not, how is it relevant?
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadNo one mentioned racism? Then what's apartheid, mate. Come off it.
... you're saying it's racist of me to mention he's from an extremely racist system that reserved land and particular careers for members of a particular racial classification? Are you okay? Are you on the right site?
What on Earth? Obviously I'm not saying that.
So your lineage won some and lost some yes? What is the point of saying at one time your people benefited from conquest but this other time you didn't? So what?
Sounds like cope and sour grapes. He's a successful, wealthy, and accomplished man. That's a good thing. Why would anyone want to be on the losing side of the equation? Are you ok?
> “One thing he [Musk's father] claims is he gave us a whole bunch of money to start, my brother and I, to start up our first company [Zip2, which provided online city guides to newspapers]. This is not true,” Musk says. “He was irrelevant. He paid nothing for college. My brother and I paid for college through scholarships, loans and working two jobs simultaneously. The funding we raised for our first company came from a small group of random angel investors in Silicon Valley.” [0]
Errol invested between 20-30k well after Zip2 was on it's way and they closed a huge round weeks after. His father took credit for helping him but the Musk brothers strongly deny it [0], and Elon literally slept in the office and showered in the local YMCA to get off the ground [1]
Even Elon's wiki page misreports this, but the Zip2 wiki page has it right.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20200817165150/https://www.rolli...
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/the-rise-of-elon-musk-2016-7...
Does this logic mean that if you have the misfortune to be born into a family that has the capability to perform it’s root functions more effectively than others (providing education) your achievements are worth bunk because you don’t have a story of adversity to overcome?
Don’t get me wrong I lean left, believe capability is evenly distributed and opportunity isn’t, but how is this a useful slight?
The "elon and his brother walking around with emeralds in their pockets" thing is a story straight from 1 interview with his estranged father and verified by nobody. The nearest verifiable records show lifetime earnings from the mine of ~$400k before tax.
What's more, elon's dad was elected to local office on an anti-apartheid ticket, which was a bit of a dangerous move for him.
Tesla gets called out because their autosteer is so good at lane keeping, comparatively speaking. Their new high resolution radar [2] (Phoenix) they’ve registered with the FCC, as well as a retrofit campaign across the fleet, will likely resolve this gap. If so, I’m unsure what happens when other automakers continue to have this deficiency as their autosteer capability improves but they don’t have high res forward facing radar. Will NHTSA hold legacies to the same standard?
[1] https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a24511826/safety-featu...
[2] https://www.autoevolution.com/news/tesla-backpedals-on-the-u...
Is a retrofit confirmed or is it just your assumption? They even sold hundreds of thousands of "vision only" cars (including mine) with Musk and Karpathy claiming radar is useless for them. Funny how they've walked it back with this new radar news.
Tesla Vision was a successful strategy to keep shipping units during supply chain issues (inability to source radar units), but it is clearly not sustainable based on the Vision codebase maturity reflected by operational performance.
The driving dynamics of different vehicles result in different outcomes not just due to those dynamics themselves, but also in the driving behavior they elicit. (and even further, in that drivers of different driving habits often exhibit selection bias in the vehicles they choose)
Yeah, Tesla gets "called out" because their technology is so good, not because their implicit marketing claims the cars can drive themselves.
There are full time shills whose entire focus is demonstrating on YouTube how the cars can drive themselves. You don't think that has something to do with this? Arguing "That's FSD this is Autopilot" misses the entire point. Elon has 100M followers on Twitter; go scan through any thread. People think they've solved FSD, people think they have humanoid robots, people think he already owns Twitter for crying out loud.
So, yes, if Mary Barra got in her Chevy Bolt and told a reported the car can drive itself and someone died doing the same thing, I think GM would be held to the same standard.
Tesla's don't.
If the other manufacturers start throwing “full self-driving” around to describe their cruise control/lane keeping/automatic breaking, and people start crashing because they rely on that, then yes. I expect there would be some regulatory activity.
Tesla articles get views because of both the Tesla haters and fanboys, makes financial sense for news sites to publish them. That increased press leads to increased investigations.
Those other manufacturers have more robust legal teams, so they advertise their cars capabilities a bit more honestly.
I don’t think the average person knows that an aircrafts autopilot requires constant monitoring.
If they're not the same thing why equate them?
Except plenty of modern cars don't just have fixed velocity cruise control. They have adaptive cruise control that will speed up or slow down to match the velocity of the car ahead of you. They also have lane centering that will keep your car in its lane. That sounds an awful lot like Teslas.
Here's the thing - people get in accidents all the time when assistance features like ABS, lane keeping, traction control, TACC, good-old-fashioned dumb cruise control, etc. are actively altering the vehicle's performance and behavior.
So when we consider Tesla's AP system, it's really just TACC + lane keeping. Something that is common on a wide variety of vehicles today. Why then is Tesla specifically being focused on? All these other systems have similar failure modes, including, but not limited to: Not stopping for a stopped vehicle far ahead, not slowing for or avoiding objects in or near the lane, etc.
These are assistance features. Thus, in all of these scenarios, it is likely that chief responsibility for the accident lies with the human behind the wheel. We should be studying all OEM systems, not just Tesla's. And specifically, we should be looking at whether the system made the situation worse through its actions than if it had taken no action (akin to a distracted human driving on dumb cruise control).
If it is the case that a Tesla on AP will ram right in to a firetruck flashing its lights while stopped in the lane directly ahead, it is quite likely that many other systems do the same. We just don't really talk about them, because it casually falls under the realm of "human wasn't paying attention". They're not special. We all sort of implicitly accept that. But when it's a Tesla, it's special.
In any case, we'll get over it eventually. This technology is not unique to Tesla and will only become more commonplace. It will continue to get better at avoiding things despite the hoards of distracted drivers.
https://electrek.co/2022/06/08/tesla-files-use-new-radar-con...
Because before Tesla launched the feature, "Autopilot" was known in the general consciousness to mean a specific thing. Autopilot is the thing on planes that lets the pilot do other tasks (like navigational routing).
Other car manufactures are smart enough to not brand their cruise control as "Self Driving" or the like.
If I sold a brand of drain cleaner under the name "Laundry Detergent" that would rightly result in some consumer protection investigations.
Not that I agree with your statement, but the "general consciousness" would be wrong in that case.
Autopilot in most aircraft will gladly fly you into the side of a mountain or other aircraft.
Um, what? A driver can override Tesla autopilot at any time.
I was talking about freeing the pilot from maintaining situational awareness. This is not supported for drivers of Tesla vehicles; the term "autopilot" is misleading in that context.
Should there be in investigations for motorcycle companies making unsafe bikes? Or is it more the case of certain people in general being predisposed to taking more risks and not realizing the consequences?
Why? Because most anyone already understands that motorcycles are dangerous, and those that choose to ignore risks get fucked. Why should Tesla be any different?
I haven't used the Ford system but I have used the Tesla system and it requires you to move the wheel at a pretty annoyingly and regular frequency to remain in autopilot mode. I believe the cabin camera can also detect when you are on your phone or looking away - but i'm not sure if this is rolled out to non-FSD cars.
I think the frequency that you have to prove you are paying attention is about every 30 seconds
This is so disingenuous.
Go on YouTube and search for people "self-driving" in their Teslas, then do the same for people doing anything remotely the same with standard cruise control.
Tesla and its fanatics want it both ways: it's both the most sophisticated self-driving software on the planet, and only regulations are preventing it from being widely used and reducing traffic accidents, but when accidents happen it's just "cruise control". Pick one.
>so much a company can do
Yes, therefore the product should not be legal if these error's can't be minimized or the magnitude of the consequences are disastrous (random unpredictable crashing etc). "Errors" are not all created equal. Some are catastrophic and occur at random.
Tesla does have safeguards to prevent people from dozing off on autopilot: there's sensors on the steering wheel, and apparently some models have front facing cameras. Some people put weights on the steering wheels, but at that point people are taking deliberate efforts to bypass safeguards. If someone jams a shim in their microwave latch, they can turn it on while the door is open and fry themselves. That's comparable to putting weights on Tesla's steering wheel.
What are these features for, if they require 100% attention from the driver to monitor? At that point, why not just drive the car? Is there a goal for these features to take incrementally more and more proportion of the responsibility away from the driver, such that the driver can incrementally devote less attention to monitoring? We all know the answers to these questions. We know what the goal is here.
But the problem is, human's cannot sort of, kind of, partially pay attention to the road and the car. And any feature that propagandizes them that it will take care of incrementally more of the driving responsibility will result in less (rounded to none) attention devoted to by the driver. It's a binary proposition beyond some threshold as mutli-tasking is a myth. Do you see the problem?
As the features appear to be working better and better, the more people will devote less attention to the road even in some bounded range of their drive but this is all it takes for catastrophic errors (that will and are happening because of the nature of failure modes of AI) to occur. And these errors are qualitatively different than the ones humans make. At any given point in time the care can and will just do something completely stupid and dangerous. Swerve into a median, crash into an emergency vehicle, turn sharply into a car in another lane. There's documented occurrences of all of this. When these random catastrophic errors occur, the human will be on the margin paying less attention to the situation than if it was simple cruise control or normal driving.
Over the last 6 years, there's been 16 collisions, one of them fatal. How many of those accidents would have still happened if people were using adaptive cruise control instead of Autopilot? How many were averted because autopilot is more sophisticated than traditional cruise control. Jumping straight to the conclusion that all of these collisions were due to autopilot, and not considering the fact that it might have been the same or even better than the status quo is naive.
Its funny how people rightfully criticize the government and laugh at videos of senator grilling the CEOs of Facebook or Google with stupid questions, but then as soon as a company does something that they don't like, they somehow expect those people to get their shit together and sensibly regulate something as nuanced as autopilot?
For technology to get better, it needs to be stress tested - in this case that means accidents and people dying. Which is pretty much on par with development of car technology since its origin. The warnings on autopilot are there. If you don't want to take the risk, don't use it.
You don't buckle people in and yeet them against the wall that is your optimism! Half the bloody challenge of testing is setting up the conditions for actually getting meaningful data!
This won't be a problem when the regulation equates to: "get these death traps off the road, now". Or, "disable your not-intelligent pseudo-self driving now".
I'm not talking about working on the technology, I'm saying if it doesn't work get it off the market.
It is an absolutely ridiculous view. I really don’t want a shitty company be able to freely test on the streets their shitty technology that can cause the death of innocents. Are you seriously saying that they are free to increase their profits over the lives of people? On what basis is that ethical or moral? Especially when we talk about a company that jumped into an arguably technically inferior solution by having an incentive to develop their “self-driving” based on visual input only. Their competitors at least take it seriously enough and realize that just because humans can manage with a vision-only system (though a goddamn moving one, not static), lidar and other sensors are required on cars, because ML is nowhere near the capacity of even a worm’s brain, let alone what a human has.
Tesla labeling a feature "Full Self Driving" certainly isn't helping the situation when the feature clearly does not deliver what the name of the functionality implies.
Popular understanding of the word aside, Tesla often throws around phrases like "full self driving" in the same sentence as "autopilot".
Or did they get rid of that? It sounded like a good compromise to me.
There are tutorials on social media for how to circumvent the driver monitoring for 'autopilot'. See for example, the instance in the article of a Tesla going down the highway with the driver in the back seat.
Tesla touts (and sells as a separate option) "full self-driving" capability. They tout that it can make turns on city streets, obey street lights, yield to city traffic, change lanes, park, etc. This is not intended for the use case of on the highway, well-supervised, between exits.
IMHO Tesla has repeatedly overmarketed their actual capabilities. It's clearly starting to catch up with them.
It is, definitely. How come they advertise it as FSD (and I know they very much circle around the exact wording, but a good Litmus test to see what is the actual expected output from the ads is to ask a random person on the street and they will definitely think that they are full self driving, while most other cars have some basic lane assist, etc)?
Their marketing is absolutely malicious, what else would keep up their massive hype bubble?
If you are a company building cooking knifes, but sell knifes as sharp as razor blades and people start injuring themselves super badly in their kitchen, saying that "people should be more careful with their kitchen knives" won't get you very far in court and in the public's eyes.
> Tesla cars come standard with advanced hardware capable of providing Autopilot features, and full self-driving capabilities—through software updates designed to improve functionality over time.
And this is the stuff that is filtered through their communications staff; the stuff Musk has said is even more egregious.
An Apple employee was killed by his Tesla, which always veered into a highway barrier after an OTA update (he was distracted one day and didn't prevent the crash, died as a result).[0] The video above also involves the results of an OTA update.
There are more reports of dangerous Autopilot behavior than any other brand's cruise control that I'm aware of.
The problem here isn't neglectful driving, it's that you may be driving in a straight line on a highway for half an hour, distracted and "lulled" by the monotony and predictability of the road, and in a split second your car veers off and tries to kill you because it no longer knows where the lane is.
Now drivers need to not only pay attention to the road and over cars, but also be ready to react instantly with zero warning if the car does something unexpected and dangerous.
[0]: https://www.kqed.org/news/11801138/apple-engineer-killed-in-...
Essentially, autopilot's main value proposition is that you don't need to pay attention to it -- and that's what makes it so dangerous.
She actually ended up disabling some of them. She explained that they "made driving too easy" and it was too hard for her to keep her attention on the road while using them.
There is a continuum between actively driving the car and falling asleep in the back seat, and AP puts you somewhere on the left side of the middle. It's generally great stuff.
All the point-to-point full-self-driving BS is meh, I don't really care about it, but give me world-class TACC and lane keeping (original autopilot) and I'm a happy commuter.
I largely agree with you here, having driven a car with adaptive cruise control in stop-and-go traffic and finding it to be a total game changer.
That said, I'd argue there's a huge difference between having the car micromanage the accelerator+brake versus having it micromanage the accelerator+brake+steering. With the former, the driver must remain engaged with the driving task (even though the most tedious aspect is taken care of), but with the latter, no engagement whatsoever is required.
Tesla maliciously advertises as much much more than adaptive cruise control, lane assist, etc, which is disgusting on their part.
Some luxury car models have incredibly low driver fatality rates regardless of cruise control activation. Just the fatal stories I've seen reported on hackernews take tesla out of the top bracket for safety.
Does it concern you that it might provide a false sense of security?
Let’s say that people are not good at determining a black-box system’s reliability (as it is hard enough to do so with even statistics and hard data)
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-autopilot-fsd-bias-nhtsa-saf... (obviously a biased source -but worth a read)
"The same goes for her stance regarding CEO Elon Musk. In March 2020, for example, Dr. Cummings seemingly joked about needing someone to stop her from punching Elon Musk in the face. "
"It should be noted that Dr. Cummings’ seat at Veoneer was not disclosed when she published a paper (which was later updated to remove inaccurate details about a fatal Tesla crash) criticizing systems such as Autopilot for their possible dangers. And so far, the incoming NHTSA senior safety adviser has not shared if she would be leaving her post at the Swedish LIDAR company, especially since she would soon be advising a US safety agency on driver-assist systems that adopt both LIDAR and non-LIDAR solutions. "
"Missy Cummings receives around $400,000 worth of stock in Swedish LIDAR company Veoneer per year as compensation for her role as a non-employee member of the board."
Kinda looks like she did:
https://www.automotiveworld.com/news-releases/veoneer-resign...
Don't let your hate for Musk as a person cloud your judgement. These things are not comparable.
I don’t dislike the guy, but this is irresponsible.
Do you think that the average consumer knows this much about how plane autopilots work? If not, how is it relevant?
How about calling your system Full self driving and then sticking with a promotional video that says the driver is only there for legal reasons