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As a regular AutoPilot user, it does require active supervision. You need to be looking out the window as it drives you down the highway.

It detects minute levels of torque on the wheel, so resting a hand in the wheel is enough to keep it happy. If it doesn’t detect any torque on the wheel it prompts you, and you can touch the wheel or move one of the scrollwheels to let it know you’re paying attention.

> In general, it is very hard for humans to keep paying close attention to something they aren't involved in actually actively controlling

I hear this a lot without citations, and I would guess it’s not specifically studied in terms of Tesla AutoPilot.

But what I can say is that AutoPilot takes the strain away from driving and allows me to focus on higher level planning and situational awareness. I watch the cars around me, I look ahead down the road and check mirrors more frequently. AutoPilot makes driving significantly more pleasant while allowing me to be more aware of potential risks around me.

I have no doubt some people choose to disengage. But it is by no means difficult to stay engaged in monitoring the drive, or at all boring.

On the contrary, while I’ve many times “zoned out” while driving as simply maintaining position in lane is extremely tedious, I’ve never zoned out while on AutoPilot, because watching the absurd things that the drivers around you are doing never gets old.

I would even say sometimes it checks too much. I've driven, actively looking ahead at the road, and then it will beep because I ignored the prompt on the dashboard (below the wheel). The prompt is white at the top of the dashboard and is a white gradient, that looks like glare on the dash.

I don't know how these people fall asleep behind the wheel unless they've done something that mimics an active hand on the wheel. Maybe with the model 3 which has a driver-facing camera, they will enable it and check the driver's eyes.

I have had this happen to but it only goes to emphasize just how much we tune out during long drives. My use of autopilot is to have the equivalent of a back seat driver or co-pilot who is just a bit paranoid. Zoning out is something the AP system won't do but drivers can do.

I look at it this way, how many have been driving on a long trip only to glance in the rear view mirror and see a bridge behind you that you do not truly remember driving under?

I find AP reduces stress of the long drive while adding safety. I do not allow it to change lanes on its own nor do I use navigate on autopilot. Many cars have automatic cruise control, the type that keeps distances from other vehicles, some have lane keeping assist which does as the name suggest, AP is all of that with active steering. Plus the car can drive in some of the worst conditions that are tiresome for human drivers, like at night in the rain with the headlight glare of oncoming cars does not even phase it.

About the article, all those things they asked if people felt safe(r) doing with autopilot, well they actually are safer. People do it already with plain cruise control and regular driving with no overriding system doing the active driving. Do I suggest being inattentive, no, but to suggest it isn't safer with AP is silly. However saying AP replaces a human driver is just as silly.

> I look at it this way, how many have been driving on a long trip only to glance in the rear view mirror and see a bridge behind you that you do not truly remember driving under?

Attention and memory formation/retention are not the same thing. The mind tends to discard detailed memories of routine tasks that have been mastered. If I ask you to tie your laces, would you remember which hand touched the laces first? It doesn't mean you weren't paying attention - only that it wasn't memorable.

That's an interesting thought. I will say that non-memorable is not the same as non-important. "Did I drive under a bridge" isn't the same as "did I leave the oven turned on" or "did I lock the front door".

> I watch the cars around me, I look ahead down the road and check mirrors more frequently.

I havent tried tesla autopilot yet so I don’t know how much easier it makes driving, but if steering[1] keeps you from doing these things ... should you be on the road at all? If you’re too tired to both steer and maintain situational awareness you should probably take a rest :/

[1] steering, more like keeping the wheel steady on the freeway. Afaik Tesla can’t autopilot on the twisties yet anyway

Cognitive load is a real thing.

People have a finite ability to multitask especially with similar actions. The only possible approach to driving to to not pay attention to most things as you focus on something specific and then cycle through each activity. Further, when you are forced to pay attention to something specific you must spend less time focusing on other things.

Babysitting Autopilot that can unpredictably steer me into a concrete barrier would be more demanding than driving a car that is more predictable.

driving a car that is more predictable which you drove into the baricade, or got rear ended by or side swiped someone on the exit . the avg driver is more deadly than any tesla on autopilot . By the stats .

Which stats? The only statistic I'm aware of Telsa claiming is that Tesla Autopilot is safer than all other road vehicles combined.

Tesla’s are really expensive to repair which impacts insurance costs. But, some companies have self-driving car discount‘s such as: https://www.joinroot.com/blog/tesladiscount/

Suggesting a net benefit exists relative to the base model without self driving capabilities.

One big problem I continue to see is that the behaviour you get used to can change with a software update and I think that's dangerous. People can naturally let down their guard when things become routine and may be ill prepared to deal with an unexpected change in behaviour from the autopilot.

If you don’t know, you’ll learn pretty quickly when you buy one. If you don’t keep your hands on the wheel, it will flash at you, then beep at you, then stop the car.

In reality, once you are used to it, it’s actually quite easy to keep a hand on the wheel while using Autopilot.

It's not about how easy it is to put your hand on wheel so that it can detect a bit of force (you can use bottle of water to do that).

The difficult part is to stay focused when doing that. If you spent 30 minutes driving to work on a highway, and your car was able to drive itself every day for 2 months, how likely are you to take any reasonable action on 3rd month when something unexpecting happens?

I think this undersells how easy it is to disengage attention when you are actively driving. The task of driving (especially your commute route) is very mundane.

the first instinct when you are moving above 50 kph on a highway, when you see trouble is to hit the brakes . Im not sure you can forget that. braking will pull you out of AP mode.

So the problem is the human attention span? Cars without any always-on computer aids such as automatic braking must be really dangerous then.

Driving a car is absolutely the most dangerous activity most people regularly participate in. I don't think you're saying anything controversial there.

Right so any time a computer can take over is a good thing because computers don’t get bored.

Not always.

The computer focuses better, but isn’t yet as capable. When things get dicey and the computer abruptly hands control back to a zoned-out human, they won’t have the same situational awareness as if they had been driving all along. OTOH, driving also tires humans out, which leads to errors and accidents too.

Figuring out the right balance is non-trivial.

Maybe. It may be the case as other commenters in this thread have said that the automation actually lets them prepare for unexpected events more than normal because it handles the mundane steering and speed adjustments.

That seems very, very unlikely to me.

I can imagine that being able to relax on the highway makes subsequent high-stress city driving a little more bearable, but people are really bad at going from zoned-out to action mode quickly.

I'm challenging the assumption that driving aids cause drivers to "zone out" any more than normal driving. Driving automation has been common for decades in the form of cruise control. I don't see anyone making the claim that using it makes you "zone out". Auto Pilot is just an evolution of this that handles the steering too. Drivers still need to drive and be engaged.

That doesn't follow, because making the human supervise the computer as it takes over rather than actively participating increases the risk of them getting bored and losing attention.

Do we know that though? Is a distracted auto pilot driver more dangerous than the average person in a car without any aids?

> In reality, once you are used to it, it’s actually quite easy to keep a hand on the wheel while using Autopilot.

...while you do something other than pay attention. Like take a nap or watch a movie (just search YouTube for Tesla nap).

I drive on AutoPilot every day. The shit I see other drivers doing on the highway blows my mind.

Yesterday a guy was trimming his toes. Bare foot up on the dash and just going at it. Can’t. Unsee.

Approximately half of drivers are holding a cellphone on their ear, or yawning with a look of utter exhaustion on their face, occasionally rocking out to some great tunes, which is fun when they catch you watching.

None of it is OK, but it is very clearly a universal issue much bigger than AutoPilot.

100% agree. Almost as bad for me was a recent conversation with a Tesla owner who said he drives his Model 3 to bars instead of taking Uber since it can take him home when he's drunk. The level to which people are abusing the system is phenomenal.

I fail to see how this isn’t a step forward, though. Given that there will always be a subset of people who drink at bars who will drive themselves home, then the availability of things like Autopilot can only help to reduce overall the number of accidents that occur as a result.

> Yesterday a guy was trimming his toes. Bare foot up on the dash and just going at it. Can’t. Unsee.

I had that guy as a Lyft driver once.

> So it's steering... but you're supposed to leave your hands on the wheel anyway?

I do something like that with cruise control. I enable it but I keep my foot resting on the accelerator just in case I have to break suddenly. I'm afraid that if I keep my foot somewhere else, when my reflex kicks in, I won't hit the break pedal.

> So it's steering... but you're supposed to leave your hands on the wheel anyway? But not actually steering, just resting there just in case? I'm not sure how realistic this is in terms of human behavior.

I have an Acura, so no autopilot, but it allows my car to steer, accelerate, and brake automatically within its lane. Also, if I don't apply control to the steering wheel (let alone have my hands off of it) for more than N seconds, it will warn me that it will disengage. The value is then more safety (the car keeps the lane by itself if you don't bother steering for some reason), which does reduce some fatigue, I guess.

I was worried about the “diffusion of responsibility” issue, so I rented one on Turo for the day and drove around 200 miles on freeways in Northern California. The user interface is really good, you learn pretty quickly the right amount of force to hold the wheel - then you can let it “autosteer”, but taking control is instantaneous, you just make the movement you want and the car disengages autosteer instantly. I probably took over from the car around 10 times that day, mainly in the left-hand lane with the left edge of the freeway marked with 2-foot-high white concrete barriers, it felt like it wanted to go into them. But that might just have been the car trying to drive “properly” in the center of the lane, while I tend to hug the right side in those situations to have a greater margin of error on the left.

It definitely reduces the cognitive load, letting you drive better in my opinion. But there isn’t an idiot-sensor in the car, so like every technology, there will be people who abuse it. The interesting question is whether those same idiots would be safer in a regular car, or if, on balance, the “autopilot+idiot” combination is safer - that seems like an empirical question to me.

Even at the current level, it’s a great advance on a regular car (I have no idea how it compares to other expensive cars with various assistive technologies, I usually buy super cheap cars...). I also think that if fully autonomous driving is technically possible, then Tesla will be the one to do it - they have several hundred thousand drivers giving them training data in all sorts of weird edge cases every day.

It really is worth watching the whole of the recent investor event at Tesla and then deciding what you think of their technology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE

> in the left-hand lane with the left edge of the freeway marked with 2-foot-high white concrete barriers, it felt like it wanted to go into them. But that might just have been the car trying to drive “properly” in the center of the lane, while I tend to hug the right side in those situations

I do this too. It is actually really good at holding the lane center, probably better than I am unless I'm really focused. But, it is more serene about the barrier than I am so sometimes I'll flinch away and end up driving again.

I was really impressed in the heavy rains we had a few weeks ago. At night in the storm I could barely make out the lanes but the car had a solid picture of not just my lane but the adjacent lanes as well. What ever filtering they are doing is impressive.

Tesla is betting they can do full self driving without LIDAR. It isn’t clear that this bet will pan out.

That just goes to prove what a misnomer Tesla’s “autopilot” is, since its core features are just lame assist.

The same thing is true with an airplane autopilot, which is an even lamer assist. It actually isn’t a misnomer at all, if we go by what autopilots have actually done historically.

Ahh the old Tesla and orange trick https://youtu.be/rOST5S06F-o

IMO stuff like this should be subject to the same safe disclosure procedures as security vulnerabilities. You know a bunch of idiots are going to try this after watching this video and endanger other drivers in the process

Similar thing people do with Passats with lane assist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV_FcG5NvUU

All very amusing, except that it no longer works.

It's OK but they have to tell you not to.

It’s “Ok” until you’re involved in a fatal accident and Tesla blames you for not having your hands on the wheel. Doesn’t matter that Elon himself has demoed it hands off, each of the autopilot fatalities was the fault of the driver.

Did you know there are 1.5 million auto-related deaths per year around the world. And in 7 years around 23 associated with Teslas? And none of the autopilot accidents affecting other people?

How many times does it have to be repeated, those stats compare apples and oranges. Luxury, modern, new vehicles driven by statistically more wealthy drivers have a much lower accident rate than most cars. When corrected for these factors Tesla’s safety rating is abysmal.

None of the autopilot accidents affected other people? I guess if by affected you mean fatalities, but 2 of them smashed into tractor trailers, so that definitely affected others. There are multiple reports of Teslas on autopilot running into stationary rescue vehicles as well, thank goodness they haven’t been fatal.

"Luxury, modern, new vehicles driven by statistically more wealthy drivers".

As far as risk aversion, I would say this group and Tesla owners are near opposites. Add in the completely different torque and breaking behavior. A completely different cockpit experience.

Correct. And yes, it is really dangerous and has led to countless unnecessary crashes and several deaths.

Humans are not capable of suddenly be required to take control of a vehicle with a split second notice.

Hopefully the laws mature enough to prevent these for being road legal.

If tesla’s autopilot were available to all vehicles for use only on highways (which is where most Tesla owners only use autopilot), the number of highway deaths due to inattentive drivers causing rear-ending accidents would drop to near zero overnight. It is so vastly superior to distracted humans on a highway, it is a “seatbelt” type revolution in terms of human safety.

But Tesla doesn’t seem to push this specific use-case resticted angle of it, Musk is focus on full self driving.

That is nothing unique to Tesla.

If they were serious about full self driving there wouldn't be any reason to bother with autopilot.

I'm amazed that you can agree it would drop rear-endings to near zero, and then immediately say there is no reason to bother with it.

Do you think a level 4/5 system would be done already if they hadn't made a level 2?

That's not what I said.

You can have automatic braking without having such an unsafe system.

Other brands do...

It isn't ethical, not that I expect them to care. But I don't think a sane company would play so loosely with peoples lives when they are fully dependent on complete trust when they launch something with full automation.