Tesla crash driver posted videos of himself riding without hands on wheel
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
> When asked if he purchased a new Tesla after the previous one was impounded he said, "Yeah, I'm rich as [expletive]. I'm very rich."
> "I feel safer back here than I do up there," Sharma also told KTVU from the right-rear passenger seat.
> "I just got out of jail. I already got [another] Tesla. You feel me, I'm rich like that. I came out of the pandemic a fucking millionaire, bitch."
Is this what aristocrats would once call "new money"?
Then Consumer Reports published a video showing how to defeat Tesla's multiple safety protections by intentionally misleading the vehicle's driver occupancy sensors. Tesla was blamed for having sensors that couldn't detect intentional misuse.
Turns out that Occam's Razor holds: this whole saga was nothing more than a moron doing stupid things in a high performance vehicle. It's a shame that so many people had such wildly different assumptions because it happened to be an electric car made by a company whose CEO is an eccentric nerd and twitter troll.
In the context of a software feature, "autopilot" implies a computer control system which is capable of maintaining rudimentary ongoing control of the vehicle.
Whereas a co-pilot is a whole other pilot. Surely that's worse, implying equivalence to a human sitting next to you, with comparable levels of training and skill, intuitively capable of taking over at any time. I wonder what would happen if Ford developed a system and called it "Co-pilot". We might never know.
Literally the opening paragraph of Wikipedia:
”An autopilot is a system used to control the trajectory of an aircraft, marine craft or spacecraft without requiring constant manual control by a human operator. Autopilots do not replace human operators. Instead, the autopilot assists the operator's control of the vehicle, allowing the operator to focus on broader aspects of operations (for example, monitoring the trajectory, weather and on-board systems).”
Musk was very intentional about promoting Tesla’s autopilot as equivalent of self-driving L4 (if I remember right), even getting into fights with people who questioned the validity of the claim.
"U.S. electric vehicle maker Tesla is “very close” to achieving level 5 autonomous driving technology, CEO Elon Musk said on Thursday, referring to the capability to navigate roads without any driver input.
“I’m extremely confident that level 5, or essentially complete autonomy, will happen, and I think will happen very quickly,” Musk said in remarks made via a video message at the opening of Shanghai’s annual World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC).
“I remain confident that we will have the basic functionality for level 5 autonomy complete this year.”
Obviously not exactly the same as making a definite statement about the capacity of current cars, but we all know what part of the message sticks with the public.
https://venturebeat.com/2020/07/09/elon-musk-says-tesla-is-v...
Musk has been hyping Tesla's "full self driving" capability for years (see xvector's comment from a couple of months ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26519357). Musk does it so much that people believe the system can do more than it really can.
Musk says this with a megaphone to his 54.7 million followers: https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/22/18510828/tesla-elon-musk-...
But then Tesla privately tells regulators that "full self driving" is only level 2: https://www.thedrive.com/tech/39647/tesla-admits-current-ful...
And then Tesla privately says that Musk's comments don't match engineering reality: https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/7/22424592/tesla-elon-musk-a...
At what point does "eccentric nerd" really just mean "huckster"?
The most responsible thing Musk can do here is to very publicly admit that autopilot can't do what he's been selling. Or will his eccentricity prevent that from happening?
It is strange to claim that the autopilot feature "can't do what he's been selling" by pointing to statements containing qualifiers such as "I think we are less than two years away" and "I think probably by end of next year".
This is actually very important, because it means the customer explicitly declined Tesla's repeated prompts to option "full self driving" features into their vehicle. Therefore this customer will have been acutely aware that "full self driving" is a feature their car did not have and thus the car could not be capable of any such "full self-driving".
https://insideevs.com/news/507038/nhtsa-investigate-tesla-cr...
That made me spit out my coffee. And not because I was laughing.
Journalists have to be one of the most tone-deaf and least sensitive groups of people on this planet. And I thought I was bad.
If you feel like you have to write an article like that mentioning people by their full names, by all means, fine. But maybe leave a grieving wife the fuck alone - at least for a few months. Find a family member that is a few steps removed if you can't contain yourself.
Tesla has sold people on these cars being self driving, and this is the natural consequence of that sales pitch
> Another man was seriously injured when the electric vehicle hit him as he was helping the truck driver out of the wreck.
The problem is that the AI is held to an impossible standard of near perfection, yet we happily accept that human drivers kill themselves and others in droves.
The right question is whether self driving is better than the human driver.
Then again, other car companies have emergency braking without Lidar (just radar/camera like Tesla) that doesn't seem to crash into stationary objects, so it sounds like Tesla's software is just not as good at emergency braking.
"we registered one accident for every 4.19 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.05 million miles driven."
That's... what autopilot does. What's the allegation here? That he used autopilot correctly and filmed it?
More to the point, where's the allegation that autopilot was at fault here? The only detail I can find is that he hit an existing overturned vehicle in the middle of the night. That's actually a routine kind of accident for human drivers, who aren't prepared to see stationary objects in the road. Add to that "2:30am" and I think it's pretty clear we'd all view this as a terrible but unavoidable tragedy in any other vehicle.
Again, what's the actual story here? I know what they want us to think based on the headline and lede. I just don't see that in the text of the article. Someone help me out here.
Actually not true. From their website [0]:
“Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Capability are intended for use with a fully attentive driver, who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any moment.”
https://www.tesla.com/support/autopilot
> Before enabling Autopilot, the driver first needs to agree to “keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times” and to always “maintain control and responsibility for your vehicle.” Subsequently, every time the driver engages Autopilot, they are shown a visual reminder to “keep your hands on the wheel."