Naah fuck that. Crux of the problem right there - for people to be responsible for their own actions, they need to understand their own actions and while Autopilot throws up all sorts of warnings, we live in a world where you need to tell your navi to STFU about your likelihood of death just to see directions to the gas'n'sip. Self-driving technology of any kind is an unprecedented technological shift and the vanilla rich dude in his Model S does not have a visceral understanding of machine vision, its successes and its failures. Expecting an unsophisticated consumer to make life'n'death choices against a background in which everything is beta, everything is disclaimed and everything is waivered is expecting tragedy. But in this universe, we don't understand why we can see a semi but the car can't. And that's troubling, and throws our entire conceptualization of "self-driving technology" into question. Google put in the work. Audi put in the work. Toyota put in the work. Tesla put out a "beta" that says you don't need to steer anymore but requires you to keep your hands on the wheel. Betas allow you to get real-world results without having to pay for research or lab testing. Conducting a beta with a 5,000lb, 500hp sedan is irresponsible. Full stop. Fight me.Now, you can quibble about whether Autopilot was released too early or irresponsibly, but I tend to fall in the camp that believes people should be responsible for their own actions.
In any even remotely sane universe, this achievement would be celebrated in the most hyperbolic fashion possible by every man, woman, and child on the planet. Americans would be as proud of the Tesla Model S as we used to be about the moon landing or about winning the Cold War.
I don't have a source because I haven't seen the source, but it's a well repeated rumor over in r/cars that Volvo is farther ahead than Tesla in terms of development but refuses to release their tech until it's 100%. When their self driving cars are released they, as a company, will take 100% of the responsibility for anything that happens. If that's really true, that speaks volumes for me.
A closed beta would have been fine. There are a lot of people driving Telsas who do know more than a little about computer vision and robot localization. Telsas engineers and programmers probably know many of them, or at least know who they are. Give it to just them. They'll not only have a sense for the limitations, they know how to write a good bug report.
Not sure I agree. Traffic is a system of which cars are a part; the beta participants can be driving them but everyone else is then subjected to the same beta, whether they like it or not. The guy who got decapitated was speeding and watching Harry Potter. He plowed through a telephone pole a quarter mile after he turned his rig into a convertible. He wrote his own luck. But the semi he hit because the Tesla didn't "see" it? What if it was a girl in an Easter dress? The truck driver wasn't a willing part of Tesla's system. Neither are the rest of us. And I feel they should have done substantially more testing before rolling it out.
Once they're at the point they're even considering releasing the thing, it's already on the road anyway because they're testing it themselves. The difference between that and letting knowledgeable customers test it for them is just that they've conned some suckers into working for free.
Betas allow you to get real-world results without having to pay for research or lab testing. Conducting a beta with a 5,000lb, 500hp sedan is irresponsible. Meh I'd rather have the feature than not. Odds of death arent all that high. That Tesla is 100 times safer than that bicycle ride you do every morning.Google put in the work. Audi put in the work. Toyota put in the work. Tesla put out a "beta" that says you don't need to steer anymore but requires you to keep your hands on the wheel.
Sure - it's 5,000lbs of airbags. My point is that because it senses differently than you, you never know when it's going to be safer and when it isn't. "Semi pulling in front of me" is one of those things that a reasonable driver has a reasonable expectation of safety, and the bridge between "reasonable safety" and "machine safety" has not been properly bridged by Tesla.
Never driven the tesla so don't know how it drives did drive a few acc cars this year though. Some drive more conservative than you would giving you another second or 2 to react because you know if it's slowing down. Others not so much. The Subaru eyesight for example drives like an old Asian woman, it speeds up and slows down erratically and prefers to brake hard and late. That is really bad design. There is about .5-1.0 seconds to react if it malfunctions or you crash. Honda and Mazda keep a good distance and start to slow down early so you know long before that the system is working correctly. Unfortunately they both kick you out under 30mpg which is kind of stupid because that's the lowest injury risk zone and its rush hour traffic speed so exactly when you need it most. The tech is basicLy ready the bugs are there but they could be patched Quickly if auto manufacturers actually did software updates. I would be happy to own and use the system associated risks and all.
You're illustrating exactly the problem I'm outlining. You're conflating adaptive cruise control with self-driving technology and they are not the same. ACC is a short-range speed-matching protocol driven by ultrasonic sensors. It modulates vehicle speed to maintain a set distance between vehicles with zero delta-V. Assuming the sensors are good, the system itself is simple - the complaints you have about Subaru vs. anybody else are a matter of driving feel, not a matter of function and overall, the task they accomplish is theoretically simple. The instrumentation is critical and robust, to be sure, but from a systems perspective it's basic. Tesla's Autopilot will pass the car in front of it if you hit the turn signal. Subaru will beep at you if you stray out of your lane. That's it. They're still maintaining a status quo, throwing warnings at you for deviating and providing instrumentation to help you make it through your commute alive. Tesla is legitimately driving for you. What they're doing is at least a couple orders of magnitude harder, and they're dealing with an environment with radically higher delta V. ACC is a driving aid that fails back to safety. Autopilot is an active technology that - as demonstrated - has no failsafe. Tesla has not made this difference clear to their consumers.
I just dont see the current Tesla tech to be anything more than a glorified ACC. Its a little more capable then the current lane assist but if it hits a corner case I dont expect it to be smart enough to know what to do. Its a still a 10E-4 or 10E-5 Tech not a 10E-6 Tech which is the point id feel comfortable letting it take full control. The lane assist system in any basic car these days is more than capable at handling the car 99-99.9% of the time its just that .1% error isnt not good enough for anything more than a brief distractionYou're conflating adaptive cruise control with self-driving technology and they are not the same.
The author lost me with this: This is straight out of Manipulating Statistics 101. Tesla Autopilot is safer, on average, than all driving. But if you want safe, ditch the Tesla and just move to Massachusetts or Minnesota or Vermont or another state with lower fatality rates. Or maybe it isn't so simple. Maybe lower income tends to correlate with higher death rates, and maybe the purchase of a Model S tends to correlate with higher incomes. Autopilot, and all the others under development or partially rolled out by a range of manufacturers (I lust after adaptive cruise control) are impressive additions to cars, but this writer is an idiot.0.76 fatalities per 100 million miles driven
It's understandable he lost you there, but the very next sentence does say this: He is undermining his first few paragraphs there, but at least he isn't a complete idiot.Again, let's not lie with statistics. The conditions under which Autopilot, Tesla's semiautonomous driving feature, will operate are, by definition, some of the safest and most predictable situations possible. [...] Implying that Tesla Autopilot is safer than the average driver is probably like suggesting that most convicted felons are Democrats; the raw data might support the assertion, but there are other, more complex factors in play.