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Comment by scoot | Hacker News Reader

While it's sort of understandable that the slightly schizophrenic Tesla marketing vacillates between proactively touting the "autopilot" feature, while reactively pointing out the small print that the driver is in control, and it's actually just adaptive cruise control / lane assist like any other, there"s no justification for the autopilot engineers to believe the hype.

There is absolutely no reason why if no driver interaction ( hands on) is detected, let alone no driver in the driving seat (!) that the car shouldn't come to a safe stop. Anything less is a critical engineering failure.

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There are ways of tricking sensors, and reaching over to touch the steering wheel from the passenger seat is trivial. Tricking the person-in-seat sensor(s) seems a lot more difficult but not impossible.

I would classify this as a person wildly misusing a product, not as an engineering failure. If a person purposely drove their car off a bridge, we wouldn’t call it an engineering failure.

Don't most high-end cars have some kind of detector so they can tell if someone is sitting in a seat? Both seatbelt warnings and heated seats would seem to rely on this, so there's no reason why autopilot shouldn't as well.

My car is nothing special or high end (a 2014 Seat Ibiza) but an alarm goes off if somebody is sat in one of the seats without their seat belt on.

My low end Opel does the same.

And disable future use of the autopilot system until you've visited your local police station to explain what happened and they then authorise your local Tesla service center to unlock it for you.

It does have such a system. This driver must have defeated it somehow.

Coming to a stop on a motorway mid-lane is probably among the most dangerous things an autopilot system could do.

IIRC, Tesla dings occasionally if it detects no hands are on the wheel and slowly decreases speed.

Coming to a stop on a motorway mid-lane is probably among the most dangerous things an autopilot system could do.

You’re replying to someone who specifically said coming to a “safe stop” and not what you’re saying.

Stopping in the middle of a high speed road is dangerous, but I’d say it’s less dangerous than continuing to drive at speed with nobody at the wheel.

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