I have to agree. You can't call it autopilot or full self driving if it's not. It leads people into thinking it is.
I think this is just because Elon promised and sold it back in the day, couldn't actually deliver so now with some smart wording he has 'delivered'. No need for refunds.
But when full self driving is not actually full or self driven... Something should be done. It's driving assistance.
Yeah and IIRC some Tesla commercials are saying that there’s a person behind the wheel "only for legal reasons", which tells the target audience that it can fully drive itself, if it was not for these pesky regulations.
And then, when they say "you must keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road", people tend to understand that they risk a ticket because "legal reasons", but that otherwise it’s perfectly safe to ignore these requirements.
I think they mislead people on purpose, leveraging this ambiguous claim of "only for legal reasons", together with the misleading way they call it Auto Pilot, and now even Full Self Driving. How do they get away with it? How comes they don’t get sued?
It shows the current head of Autopilot Software, Ashok Elluswamy, and Elon Musk faking Tesla’s self driving demo as admitted to in Ahsok Elluswamy’s deposition on Page 70:
During filming the car crashed at least once. They fully mapped the route ahead of time and ran the route multiple times until it did not crash or require intervention.
My question was actually a bit stupid. I wanted to clarify what the parent implied by posting that link, but I guess it was just a citation for the grandparent. Thanks for the interesting info.
That is unfair to Boeing. They did not know it was unsafe and deliberately lie, they were just criminally negligent in glossing over the mandatory safety testing. The video is Theranos levels of fraud.
> And then, when they say "you must keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road", people tend to understand that they risk a ticket because "legal reasons", but that otherwise it’s perfectly safe to ignore these requirements.
All of Tesla's messaging around this is very much this, nudge nudge, wink wink.
When they initially introduced driver attention tracking, which they had to be pressured to do, they only checked every fifteen minutes.
Even on the actual order form, "features depend on regulatory approval".
For Summon, "have your car come to you while dealing with a fussy child" (while buried somewhere entirely different is a comment is "pay full attention to the vehicle").
I think the autopilot name is fine and reasonably accurate. My (actual) autopilot is perfectly happy to fly me into a mountain, ocean, or thunderstorm. All I have to do is fail to keep it from doing that.
The autopilot is just another control, albeit an indirect one. When I’m flying on autopilot, I’m still logging flight time as “sole manipulator of the controls”.
Marketing it as “full self-driving” is something else entirely, IMO.
I'd say that half of the issue is that even if the term is accurate, people hear the word autopilot and expect it to be a lot more than what it actually is.
Yes I'm a pilot too and I know what an autopilot does.
However the average user does have a different idea of this as others have pointed out, and Tesla is marketing this to the general public, not knowledgeable pilots.
I’m not a pilot, but my impression is that the reaction time required to take over in a dangerous situation is much less strict with planes than with cars. Except when the plane is close to the ground, I suppose, but pilots know when this is happening and can specifically pay more attention for that brief period. The plane autopilot physically can’t cause you to crash within a second at any point mid flight, AFAIK, unlike with a car “autopilot”.
Yes, planes are actually a lot easier than cars because there's pretty much nothing else to crash into up there. If you get into a bad situation you've generally had a long enough time to identify it and stop it developing.
On the road you've always got the risk that a Tesla on Autopilot will freak out over the shadow of a telephone wire across the road and panic brake to a complete stop on a 70mph motorway.
Which is why everyone buying a tesla with autopilot is required to complete hundreds of hours of training on it that help them understand these limitations and complications, and how to understand the opaque system.
Oh wait, no, drivers get half an hour to demonstrate they won't immediately kill someone when driving, and routinely don't even know how their car's mirror dimmer works.
So maybe these contexts should stop being compared, because it's dishonest to do so.
I got my pilot license in an airplane equipped with an autopilot and got exactly 1 minute of training on it. It was "here's the switch to make sure it's turned off." (That's literally true, no exaggeration.)
All autopilot knowledge I got was from my own reading the manuals. I assume there's the same information available from Tesla on it.
But you received hundreds of hours in training to fly, more than most car drivers get. Besides, you probably have a minute to turn the autopilot off and take over before anything disastrous can happen in the worst case scenario. A far cry from requiring sub-second response times.
> Sterling Archer : I thought you put it on autopilot!
>Rip Riley : It just maintains course and altitude! It doesn't know how to find THE ONLY AIRSTRIP WITHIN A THOUSAND MILES SO IT CAN LAND ITSELF WHEN IT NEEDS GAS!
Why would you attribute Tesla's autopilot with more abilities than the basis of the term?
>Autopilot, Enhanced Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Capability are intended for use with a fully attentive driver, who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any moment.
The fully attentive driver is important. In the Archer TV quote from above Rip, the pilot of the Loosey Goosey, has just been knocked unconscious for a number of hours.
In English law (and since then in Canadian, Australian and Hong Kong law) there's the concept of the "man on the Clapham omnibus". It means an hypothetical ordinary person.
I can reasonably argue that the man on the Clapham omnibus understands "autopilot" to mean little or no human intervention is expected.
There we go. Regulations on pilots include training on operation of autopilot. The training of autopilot in personal vehicles is not connected to the regulations of operators of personal vehicles.
I believe the limitation on takeoff is a conscious decision by the manufacturers designed to ensure a pilot is present (similar to Tesla's hands-on-the-wheels) and not a technical limitation.
Tesla autopilot systems can do basic tasks too. Can modern autopilot systems in planes handle things outside their abilities? Like a variable crosswind while landing?
> It just maintains course and altitude! It doesn't know how to find THE ONLY AIRSTRIP WITHIN A THOUSAND MILES SO IT CAN LAND ITSELF WHEN IT NEEDS GAS!
In fact a lot of modern autopilots can take full control, find the nearest airport and land when the pilot becomes incapacitated.
For me, there is a clear distinction in the level of situational awareness the pilots of these vehicles are required to keep when they enable automation.
In an aircraft, they clear their path with traffic control, set up the autopilot, check in on it from time to time.
In a Tesla they enable Autopilot and then they watch for closed lanes, fire trucks, people on the road. They also have to take over immediately on deviations from the lane, and accelerate when it brakes for no reason.
For aircraft, there is a lot of buffer space. For cars, there is none. Should the aircraft autopilot malfunction, the pilot typically has minutes to spot the error before a failure occurs. A Tesla on Autopilot is routinely fractions of seconds away from a crash should it malfunction.
>Tesla on Autopilot is routinely fractions of seconds away from a crash should it malfunction.
Which is exactly why the "you should be paying attention and ready to take over" argument is horse shit. You physically CANNOT. The car will give no warning it's getting itself into a dangerous situation and then just give up.
I can’t help but be somewhat cynical in this case. An 18 year old driver, whos car is driving in the middle of the lane, crashes into a parked truck on the highway… could it be the teen can now conveniently blame the “autopilot” for his poor driving? How do we know what actually happened? Does Tesla release stats on these incidents to show that autopilot was on during the incident? Surely they have access to this info afterwards
One of the features in Autopilot is Traffic Aware Cruise Control and Automatic Emergency Braking. It appears that in this case, they should have helped to prevent this. At the very least, provided you have not disabled it, it tends to produce a loud alarm to alert the driver of potential hazards.
If this is indeed the case, maybe the problem goes beyond AP and extends to the safety features of the car...
Notably, you can override the accelerator while driving on Autopilot. It warns you that Autopilot will not brake when you do this. This may be a potential factor.
"could it be the teen can now conveniently blame the “autopilot” for his poor driving?"
I think it's much more likely the teen had the autopilot feature turned on and was not paying any attention at all to traffic.
This kid was 18 years old and was given a car to drive that has an "Auto Pilot" feature. Probably hasn't ever worked on a car in his life and doesn't know anything about how that feature works or the real potential for it to fail.
His parents telling him not to use that feature would have no effect at all.
Every time one of these Tesla cars crash someone here blames the diver for using the technology, as opposed to the company that promotes and sells it.
"This car can drive itself! But you still have to drive it yourself." is bullshit.
The short answer to your 2nd question is you learn how and why cars break and people crash into stuff. I have a lot of experience with that.
I've been driving for 47 years and I've never crashed a car, or crashed into one, or had one crash into me, and I've never gotten a ticket.
That's not all luck. It's "defensive driving". To sum in up you have to drive like everyone else is trying to crash into you and the roads are always slippery, and nowadays like your autopilot sucks.
Wasn't there a news recently that Tesla have been hiding lots of autopilot crashes? The number of crashes that turn up in news like this is a tiny fraction of what Tesla knows from customer complaints.
The real answer to that is one should always take control when in any kind of tricky situation. I use autopilot all the time, but I don't trust it to do the right thing when the right thing isn't obvious.
I guess I was being facetious around the semantics of if it's autopilot or self driving. The owner wasn't in control of the vehicle anyway so his excuse was pretty poor.
The problem is that autopilot can turn a not dangerous situation into a dangerous one, and leave you holding the bag when it disengages a second from the incident.
But but but everyone told me the whole "being unable to see a stopped vehicle" problem was because of radar! Tesla doesn't use radar anymore so why did it happen?
Meanwhile my VW with radar has no problem initiating emergency braking for a stopped object.
I try to remember that we, the public, doesn't have any idea how many miles are driven on autopilot or full-self-driving. We hear about crashes and argue about whether or not FSD/autopilot was engaged or made a warning and disengaged at the last moment but the driver failed to avoid to crash. But we don't know the denominator in the ratio of crashes per mile so we can't directly compare it with human only or other manufacturers' automation products.
It’s around 1 accident every 5 million miles while using Autopilot and 1 accident per 1.5 million miles when not. Keep in mind that Autopilot only works on highways so these numbers are not directly comparable - it’s a biased sample.
For FSD they have been publishing a “Cumulative miles driven with FSD Beta” chart in their quarterly “Shareholder Deck” since Q2 2022.
As of 4/19/23 it’s over 150 million miles. This is of limited value without accident counts.
However during their 2023 Investor Day Presentation they gave the accident rate for FSD as 1 per 3.2 million miles. It’s on page 92 of the pdf that can be downloaded here:
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[ 22.0 ms ] story [ 2371 ms ] threadI think this is just because Elon promised and sold it back in the day, couldn't actually deliver so now with some smart wording he has 'delivered'. No need for refunds.
But when full self driving is not actually full or self driven... Something should be done. It's driving assistance.
And then, when they say "you must keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road", people tend to understand that they risk a ticket because "legal reasons", but that otherwise it’s perfectly safe to ignore these requirements.
I think they mislead people on purpose, leveraging this ambiguous claim of "only for legal reasons", together with the misleading way they call it Auto Pilot, and now even Full Self Driving. How do they get away with it? How comes they don’t get sued?
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23574198-elluswamy-d...
During filming the car crashed at least once. They fully mapped the route ahead of time and ran the route multiple times until it did not crash or require intervention.
"THE PERSON IN THE DRIVER'S SEAT IS ONLY THERE FOR LEGAL REASONS. HE IS NOT DOING ANYTHING. THE CAR IS DRIVING ITSELF."
Additionally, the "driver" also does not have their hands on the wheel as required.
I can imagine the dealership showing this to customers and them getting totally the wrong idea.
Edit: And I didn't even know what Veserv said below. Wow... That is like 737MAX levels of misleading.
All of Tesla's messaging around this is very much this, nudge nudge, wink wink.
When they initially introduced driver attention tracking, which they had to be pressured to do, they only checked every fifteen minutes.
Even on the actual order form, "features depend on regulatory approval".
For Summon, "have your car come to you while dealing with a fussy child" (while buried somewhere entirely different is a comment is "pay full attention to the vehicle").
There is a delightfuly cinical alternative interpretation that is also obviously true:
the legal reason is that without a human at the wheel it is Tesla who is legally responsible for any damge. Not so with a human at the wheel.
The autopilot is just another control, albeit an indirect one. When I’m flying on autopilot, I’m still logging flight time as “sole manipulator of the controls”.
Marketing it as “full self-driving” is something else entirely, IMO.
However the average user does have a different idea of this as others have pointed out, and Tesla is marketing this to the general public, not knowledgeable pilots.
On the road you've always got the risk that a Tesla on Autopilot will freak out over the shadow of a telephone wire across the road and panic brake to a complete stop on a 70mph motorway.
Oh wait, no, drivers get half an hour to demonstrate they won't immediately kill someone when driving, and routinely don't even know how their car's mirror dimmer works.
So maybe these contexts should stop being compared, because it's dishonest to do so.
All autopilot knowledge I got was from my own reading the manuals. I assume there's the same information available from Tesla on it.
You can do it in that with an intensive course though if you take it slow it can take longer.
> Sterling Archer : I thought you put it on autopilot!
>Rip Riley : It just maintains course and altitude! It doesn't know how to find THE ONLY AIRSTRIP WITHIN A THOUSAND MILES SO IT CAN LAND ITSELF WHEN IT NEEDS GAS!
Why would you attribute Tesla's autopilot with more abilities than the basis of the term?
>Autopilot, Enhanced Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Capability are intended for use with a fully attentive driver, who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any moment.
The fully attentive driver is important. In the Archer TV quote from above Rip, the pilot of the Loosey Goosey, has just been knocked unconscious for a number of hours.
I can reasonably argue that the man on the Clapham omnibus understands "autopilot" to mean little or no human intervention is expected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_on_the_Clapham_omnibus
Tesla apologist always try to make things up about autopilot to downplay the clearly irresponsible name.
You should try not to be unconscious for too long, that's like, super bad for you.
In fact a lot of modern autopilots can take full control, find the nearest airport and land when the pilot becomes incapacitated.
https://www.wired.com/story/cirrus-garmin-vision-jet-autolan...
The "Safe return autoland" feature can be triggered by the passengers.
In an aircraft, they clear their path with traffic control, set up the autopilot, check in on it from time to time.
In a Tesla they enable Autopilot and then they watch for closed lanes, fire trucks, people on the road. They also have to take over immediately on deviations from the lane, and accelerate when it brakes for no reason.
For aircraft, there is a lot of buffer space. For cars, there is none. Should the aircraft autopilot malfunction, the pilot typically has minutes to spot the error before a failure occurs. A Tesla on Autopilot is routinely fractions of seconds away from a crash should it malfunction.
Which is exactly why the "you should be paying attention and ready to take over" argument is horse shit. You physically CANNOT. The car will give no warning it's getting itself into a dangerous situation and then just give up.
The car lets jesus take the wheel, but seriously.
How would blaming Autopilot lower your culpability?
If this is indeed the case, maybe the problem goes beyond AP and extends to the safety features of the car...
Notably, you can override the accelerator while driving on Autopilot. It warns you that Autopilot will not brake when you do this. This may be a potential factor.
I think it's much more likely the teen had the autopilot feature turned on and was not paying any attention at all to traffic.
This kid was 18 years old and was given a car to drive that has an "Auto Pilot" feature. Probably hasn't ever worked on a car in his life and doesn't know anything about how that feature works or the real potential for it to fail.
His parents telling him not to use that feature would have no effect at all.
Every time one of these Tesla cars crash someone here blames the diver for using the technology, as opposed to the company that promotes and sells it.
"This car can drive itself! But you still have to drive it yourself." is bullshit.
How do you "work on" a EV? Why would being a mechanic make you a better driver?
The short answer to your 2nd question is you learn how and why cars break and people crash into stuff. I have a lot of experience with that.
I've been driving for 47 years and I've never crashed a car, or crashed into one, or had one crash into me, and I've never gotten a ticket.
That's not all luck. It's "defensive driving". To sum in up you have to drive like everyone else is trying to crash into you and the roads are always slippery, and nowadays like your autopilot sucks.
If you don't have to concentrate on driving, and accordingly don't, you've lost control already.
That sentence doesn't make sense for me. He wasn't driving, so at what point did he lose control??
It’s actually a glorified cruise control. Would One say a driver isn’t driving because they had cruise control turned on?
Meanwhile my VW with radar has no problem initiating emergency braking for a stopped object.
https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
It’s around 1 accident every 5 million miles while using Autopilot and 1 accident per 1.5 million miles when not. Keep in mind that Autopilot only works on highways so these numbers are not directly comparable - it’s a biased sample.
For FSD they have been publishing a “Cumulative miles driven with FSD Beta” chart in their quarterly “Shareholder Deck” since Q2 2022.
https://ir.tesla.com/#quarterly-disclosure
As of 4/19/23 it’s over 150 million miles. This is of limited value without accident counts.
However during their 2023 Investor Day Presentation they gave the accident rate for FSD as 1 per 3.2 million miles. It’s on page 92 of the pdf that can be downloaded here:
https://ir.tesla.com/#other-documents-events