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Comment by abalone | Hacker News Reader

Tesla is recklessly using its own customers to train their fleet for level 5. AT BEST their response is, drivers need to be 100% as attentive as they would without autopilot. What then is the point of autopilot, except to train the fleet?

They are in complete denial that autosteering can seduce reasonable people into lowering their guard and mentally relaxing. Again, what other immediate user benefit would it provide? What would a reasonable person expect autopilot to do?

Isn’t it contradictory to offer an automation feature while claiming that legally it does ZERO automation for you?

Note: collision avoidance and emergency braking are on by default even without autopilot. “Autopilot” here really means the autosteering feature.

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Why are Tesla's permitted on European roads with the autopilot feature? Roads are quite different compared to the US.

Additionaly I am very concerned about the OTA autopilot updates which do not go through any government or 3rd party certification. In fact I have read on hacker news that Tesla will sometimes push code changes to cars on the same day.

I think the phrase 'Auto-pilot' is a misnomer. It's a lead-on phrase, confuses people to let their eyes off the road. They should have named it 'driver assist' or something mundane people shouldn't get confused by. Auto-pilot for any person means that the car will steer automatically, which it does, but also kills you. At least by now, it should be obvious that a half baked auto-steering or auto-pilot is a colossal mistake. Admit that you made a mistake and be done with it.

Tell people explicitly not to use auto pilot. Tesla can still use the onboard cameras and everything else for training the AI.

Yeah, Tesla’s response to that is it’s like a plane: autopilot means you still have be at the controls.

But it’s nothing like a plane. Concrete walls don’t suddenly appear in the sky. The required reaction time to avoid an autopilot collision in some of these videos is seconds.

The training function is independant on autopilot being active on the car. The training happens during any drive, if the Tesla owner did opt into sharing the driving data. Actually it even happens on cars which don't have autopilot, as all Tesla cars are manufactured with the hardware. You buy the autopilot function just as a software feature.

And in the car menu, "autopilot" is actually called "autosteering" as a feature to activate. And overall it is just a very fancy cruise control, which is able to keep the proper distance to cars in front of you and keep inside your lane.

Incorrect. Autopilot offers by far the most important training data: driver overrides. That is the dangerous part of the learning and Tesla makes its customers do it.

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