Comment by GhostVII | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GhostVII | Hacker News Reader

The problem with level 2 "FSD" is that the better it gets, the more dangerous it is because the driver gets complacent. Autopilot is already being investigated because drivers don't monitor it enough and hit emergency vehicles, and all autopilot does is go in a straight line. FSD is making far more decisions, and gives the driver far less time to react to it behaving badly.

Tesla FSD has several situations where the car regularly performs maneuvers that, if the driver didn't intervene, it would likely kill the driver and other people on the road. It also has many types of routes where it can operate without any disengagements for a long period of time. I think that is a very dangerous combination.

If they really wanted to reduce deaths due to driving, they could use this FSD software to add better collision avoidance technology. Once you have that, introducing self-driving should be safer, even if it doesn't always make the right decisions it will be caught by the collision avoidance tech.

> and all autopilot does is go in a straight line

This isn't true, and there's any number of YouTube videos demonstrating that. At the very least, it knows how to navigate highway interchanges, how to change lanes, how to avoid other cars that would otherwise collide with it, and to avoid/slow down for pedestrians and cyclists.

The last feature is perhaps overly sensitive in my personal experience. It used to slow down dramatically whenever it was passing a cyclist, that has improved in recent versions.

To clarify, I wasn't saying that it literally just goes in a straight line without any additional collision avoidance logic, just that from the drivers perspective all they have to do is make sure it continues in it's lane, as opposed to FSD where there is an order of magnitude more decisions the driver has to monitor. There is a huge difference between the focus required to make sure your car driving on the highway stays in it's lane and doesn't run into stopped vehicles, vs the focus required to make sure your car doesn't turn in front of other cars or take a turn to wide and hit something.

I wasn't including Navigate on Autopilot as a part of that but even with Navigate on Autopilot, the driver has far less to monitor than with FSD, since it just changes lanes on the highway occasionally rather than having to turn across traffic, frequently switch lanes in the city, or manage stop signs and lights.

Perhaps someone can build a Tesla-detector, so when it sees one the owner can brace for impact ...

Sadly, only half-joking here.

Valets driving manual seems to be a bigger risk, in my experience.

You seen to overlook the fact that Tesla basic autopilot is already saving lives and preventing accidents.

Source?

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