Comment by freerobby | Hacker News Reader

Comment by freerobby | Hacker News Reader

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How mature a system is and whether it's morally responsible (or imperative) to release it are different questions.

> The "clones" are deliberately less good because the manufacturers offering them care more about safety and reliability than about marketing beta products.

When I say "maturity," I'm not talking about holding back features. I'm saying that Tesla's system works better in situations where other manufacturers offer similar features. For example, how many other manufacturer's TACC will slow down (below the set limit) when a turn is coming up and then accelerate through the turn as a human is taught to do? How many autosteering systems will sense an adjacent car drifting from its lane and "creep" away from it to avoid a possible collision? These are the sorts of mature behaviors that put Autopilot ahead of the pack and make it much more real-world useful than its competitors.

On irresponsibility, I passionately disagree. But rather than rehash a bunch of old discussions I'll just link to prior comments explaining why I feel the way I do, and we can debate it further in those comments if you're interested.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17302164

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17233845

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16773903

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17236608

Ok, we have different definitions of maturity. To me, it means your system's core functionality works reliably in the use cases it is designed for. Nice-to-haves like speed smoothing are secondary.

Thanks for the links to your other comments. I don't think there's fruitful debate to be had here - we're just of different opinions. I think autopilot encourages bad driving behavior in drivers who would otherwise be more alert, and if I've read your comments correctly you think the responsibility is nevertheless still on the drivers and autopilot probably helps more people than it harms. I'd love to revisit this if we ever get apples to apples accident data showing comparisons between autopilot-enabled vehicles and comparable vehicles from other manufacturers in the same price and age range (thus with corresponding modern and expensive ADAS systems).

> Ok, we have different definitions of maturity. To me, it means your system's core functionality works reliably in the use cases it is designed for. Nice-to-haves like speed smoothing are secondary.

I agree with this definition, but I see it more as a sliding scale than a checkbox. I think it comes down to whether you look at each system in isolation or whether you put them all on a single spectrum. I'm imagining human driving at one end of a spectrum and fully automated driving at the other, and looking at what percent of driving conditions each system provides a safety or utility improvement in (so you can see why features like speed smoothing and reacting to nearby cars quickly become relevant to my thinking). But I can see why, judging each system on its own, one would say that Autosteer is less mature at what it aims to do than simpler and more constrained systems are at what they aim to do.

You summarized my take on Autopilot as accurately as one can in a single sentence (thank you for that btw). Like you, I look forward to the day when data is available to resolve competing hypotheses like these. Elon pledged on the last earnings call to release quarterly Autopilot data reports; I'm hoping those will include Autopilot vs non-Autopilot driving usage and their respective highway accident rates, broken down by feature (TACC, Autosteer, TACC + Autosteer, etc). I think that'd be the best way to assess Autopilot safety, as it would control for all other factors. It'd be great to have apples-to-apples numbers from all manufacturers, but I think that will take longer and probably some coordination from NHTSA.

Tesla seems to have focused on getting lane following to behave well. That gives the user the impression that the system is competent. Obstacle detection, though, is not reliable, as has become painfully clear from crash reports.

Wasn't the recent reproduction of the merge lane issue [1] showing that lane following is also not competent? I'm personally not sure any of the individual features of autopilot are really all that reliable.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QCF8tVqM3I

Braking before a turn ( or trailing-off in the turn ) is only necessary when the approach speed is higher than the entry speed.

For a computer-driven car with accurate mapping, and hence foresight, it is more efficient to plan the approach so that no braking is necessary. After all, reducing cost requires efficiency rather than speed. Likewise on a long cycle ride I'll try to match the approach and entry speeds by easing-off rather than throwing-away calories by braking.

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