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Comment by whatsreal | Hacker News Reader

I am torn by this. On the one hand a weighted chain and buckled seat belt is a simple hack. On the other hand it is clear that they were intentionally attempting to get around Tesla's safeguards. I fail to see how this is the company's fault.

What could Tesla possibly do to provide more safegaurds? Measure resistance on the steering wheel to prove it is flesh on there? Driver-facing camera? Weight sensor in the seat? Each of these has their own issues including defeatability and privacy invasions.

Anything can be defeated eventually. However any attempts to be defeated should automatically put the liability on the person making that attempt. Example: It is not Samsung's fault if I intentionally disable safeguards and over charge my battery causing a fire or explosion.

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> I fail to see how this is the company's fault.

Because other companies do it better. Tesla likes to publicly position its driver assistance as being so good that they refer to it as "Full Self Driving", and yet the system doesn't include a number of basic safety measures. That's part of the reason why they tell regulators that "Full Self Driving" is only a level 2 system:

https://www.thedrive.com/tech/39647/tesla-admits-current-ful...

> Measure resistance on the steering wheel to prove it is flesh on there? Driver-facing camera? Weight sensor in the seat?

Yep.

> Each of these has their own issues including defeatability and privacy invasions.

Tesla cars in general are privacy invasions. For example, a recent car crash resulted in Musk tweeting about what Tesla's logs supposedly reveal about the car before it crashed. Tesla is quite happy to rummage through your data and use it to protect themselves. In this case it earned Tesla a search warrant:

https://www.thedrive.com/tech/40250/elon-musk-denies-autopil...

> Tesla likes to publicly position its driver assistance as being so good that they refer to it as "Full Self Driving"

No, Tesla very clearly says that full self driving is a future feature and not one that is available today (https://www.tesla.com/autopilot). All it says on there is that the hardware is present to enable it. There’s also a disclaimer on there:

> Current Autopilot features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous.

They spell this out even more clearly elsewhere in their documentation. The FSD Beta release notes explicitly tell users that it can do the wrong thing at the worst time, that they need to pay extra attention, and that they shouldn’t get complacent (https://www.newsweek.com/tesla-full-self-driving-beta-releas...).

I do agree Tesla’s practices seem like they’re normalizing massive privacy invasions. But I really don’t think the company is at fault if irresponsible drivers use their vehicle in an incorrect manner, which they’ve been abundantly warned against.

> No, Tesla very clearly says that full self driving is a future feature and not one that is available today

But this is the sort of thing Tesla says with a megaphone:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/22/18510828/tesla-elon-musk-...

Where are all those robotaxis?

The fine print doesn't defend their grubby marketing and it's little wonder people believe the cars to be capable of more than they are. Just using the phrase "full self driving" in relation to a system not capable of it is bad enough.

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