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Comment by chrischen | Hacker News Reader

Is it not possible for AP to lose the lane lines temporarily and then self correct?

When AP looses the lane lines, and then re calibrates (usually due to very poor markings), it starts beeping rather insistently that you take over immediately.

If you have lane detection on, Teslas will steer you back into the lane, if you start drifting off, even if auto-pilot is off. (This alone is a huge safety feature).

Dead people often can’t hear beeping

Deaf people neither. (I am Deaf.)

Thank you. Always glad to see people on HN properly siting their sources. Who knows what to believe on the internet these days

Sure, but there's two issues here. The turn signal is on in the other direction. Activation of the turn signal in base autosteer will disable autosteer. Activation of the turn signal in more advanced modes (Nav on Autopilot) will result in a lane change in the direction of the signal.

There might be a way to trigger a scenario like this in an FSD equipped car with all FSD related features turned off, and a really careful sequence of events with the turn signal, I guess? I'd have to try it to be sure, but I think it'd actually take some work to do.

But that last part does have me thinking it might be possible. The weird slowdown that he reported at the end could be consistent with AP finally giving up on alerting the driver and trying to "make safe" by slowing aggressively and probably going crazy with audible alerts. Maybe then the driver perked up and took off the ramp?

But tbh, it all reminds me of a driver that I ran into (thankfully not literally) a while back. They were in an older car, so obviously not on ADAS... just driving that badly and probably under the influence. It happens a lot.

Sure, if there's a blizzard or heavy rainstorm that blocks the cameras. Happens in Florida all the time. Rain so heavy the cameras can't see anything but a gray wall of water. In that case AP will emit an annoying audible alarm and disable itself, at which point you are steering the car manually.

In these conditions, human drivers will "follow the taillights" but I don't think Tesla allows for that yet. If AP can't see outlines of objects due to heavy rain/snow, it cuts out.

Right. It's situations like this that I point to when people say "AP is safer than human drivers" - because AP is disabled entirely when it is unable to work effectively. Humans don't have that luxury.

I suppose you count those as wins for yourself, but it seems smart and safe to insist on turning over control in that situation. Humans don't have a safe failure mode like that where they will stop driving or surrender control to an automated system when intoxicated, falling asleep, and so on.

I'm not arguing the merit of that.

I'm arguing that you can't point to numbers and say "Look, AP is safer than humans, because in the optimal subset of conditions where AP is 'able' to drive, it does better than humans in all conditions, even ones where AP would refuse to engage".

Sometimes it can make sense even for humans to stop driving and wait for better conditions. Rarely even humans are forced to give up driving (for example being stuck in snow).

Viewed in this light the statement that humans don't have the luxury to delegate is not always applicable.

Sure. There absolutely are.

But there is a large disparity between "conditions where _ALL_ drivers should stop driving and wait", and "conditions where AP will forcibly disengage, but an average human driver should have no issue carrying on with relative safety".

I've used AP in some situations where I was having a hard time clearly seeing the lines due to the rain. It held up pretty well, with me only very rarely intervening (from memory, 2 times in 100 miles). It probably helped that I slowed down pretty significantly due to the weather. I've also heard that the newer radarless vehicles are a little more picky.

In general, I'm surprised at how many things it can handle well, but it does still need a hand on the wheel for the few times that it will fail.

Exceedingly unlikely unless the lane demarcation is extremely bad. Lane-holding tech is really standard and reliable now (and even if you don't think AP is great, it's not stupider than what ships in mass-market cars).

>>unlikely unless the lane demarcation is extremely bad

Which is the case.....a lot of the time actually? At least here in UK the lane marking is frequenly so bad that my Volvo Pilot Assist disengages because it can't see the lanes anymore - and I'm like yeah, duh, I can't see them either.

The lane demarcation on the freeway south from San Francisco is so bad that it frequently confuses me, and I've been driving on it for 20 years.

Which one? I always found both the 101 and 280 pretty clear!

Most recently, northbound 101 under the 380 overpass. But, also just before the 92, and through Redwood city.

Agreed, though I'll add that on the very rare occasion that my Model 3 does lose the lane lines a bit, it tends to very quickly jerk back into the lane once it picks up the lines again. "it drifted slowly to the left, into my lane, before slowly going back into its own lane" does not sound like plausible autopilot behavior based on my experience; even if it was on autopilot and accidentally left the lane, it wouldn't slowly go back to it's lane, it would sharply correct itself as soon as it found out what happened.

Exactly... and turning on a signal completely turns off autosteer if in base autopilot.

Not sure if it could be coerced into automatically coming back on if the car had FSD and the signal was turned back off, though?

With EAP or FSD, turning on the signal will trigger a lane change

I have lane assist in my 2019 Subaru Outback, and it works well maybe 60% of the time. Most definitely not something I would call “extremely reliable”.

Well, there is one thing that's stupider. There's no cruise control. It's AP or nothing. If I just want the car to do nothing but hold the current speed, like my 1986 Chevrolet Camaro did, it doesn't have that feature. If the cameras don't work for some reason such as a heavy rainstorm, there's no "dumb mode" cruise control as a backup. I find that annoying.

If you pull down once on the stalk, it should activate cruise control, right? It's pulling down twice that activates autosteer.

That still does TACC. He wants cruise control without TACC. That is not possible in any modern Tesla, AFAIK. I believe the most recent to offer it was the Model 3 SR, which is no longer available. The SR+ and the Y SR both included AP with mandatory TACC.

Its weird, as other cars at least offer an option to disable TACC.

I wouldn't be using cruise control during a heavy rainstorm. Standing water and hydroplaning plus cruise control = not a fun time.

Yeah this sounds crazy unsafe. Cruise control is for long boring drives down straight highways in high visibility.

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