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Comment by alex_young | Hacker News Reader

> Riad was driving on the 91 freeway, heading west into Gardena. The freeway empties out into Artesia Boulevard at Vermont, but Riad, seemingly unaware of that transition, did not appear to react — and neither did his Tesla.

While I don’t think the driver is without serious fault here, shouldn’t Tesla really be able to slow and stop a car coming off of a freeway and presented with a controlled intersection?

Don’t get me wrong. I own a Tesla and use Autopilot. I also think that the combination of map and sensor data should clearly prevent incidents such as this one.

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Yes?

There's signs for miles back. The speed limit progressively slows down to surface street speeds. If a Tesla can't prepare for a freeway ending then it shouldn't be on the road.

do other cars do that? mine is fully reliant on me doing the work.

> do other cars do that?

No.

But other car manufacturers are not claiming to “drive you from LA to NYC with zero interventions”

i’d certainly be open to review marketing material to evaluate if they were making claims like that in 2019.

Tesla themselves admit Elon is overstating Autopilot/FSD capabilities to the public.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/7/22424592/tesla-elon-musk-a...

Yep - here's what you see today not the Auto-pilot feature landing page. They probably need to update this page - if only to upsell customers on full FSD (not to mention it being used against them legally)...

https://www.tesla.com/autopilot

Autopilot Full Self-Driving Hardware (Neighborhood Short) https://vimeo.com/192179726

can you quote the part you found relevant in the tesla autopilot link?

i saw this:

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

Watch the first few seconds of the video.

The video which is front and center and really the gist of the landing page for most casual viewers/buyer starts off with:

"The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything."

I agree - though - as someone who holds Tesla stock indirectly through various indexes - I fully can understand the desire to want post facto look well past the webpage fold for fine print.

Also own a Tesla and use Autopilot regularly.

Maps will always lag reality; I don’t think that it’s reasonable to expect Tesla maps to have perfect accuracy.

The bottom line is, the car is NOT self-driving. If you’re behind the wheel, you’re driving and you’re responsible, just like any other car.

My car (not as advanced as a Tesla) reads the speed limit using cameras to parse street signs.

Maps will always lag reality, but this is a commonly driven street, probably not the first Tesla to drive down it-- Waze was using info like this for years, hate to think Tesla is less capable.

In short, there is no excuse for Tesla's maps not knowing about the speed change on this stretch of road.

Teslas most certainly read speed limit signs. They have for years now. My stock Model Y purchased in January 2021 had the feature built-in.

With FSD beta, turning off a major highway onto my neighborhood street (very narrow and no lane markings), it defaults to 25 MPH. About 100 feet later, the car sees the 35 MPH sign and speeds up accordingly. In this case, 35 MPH is too fast given the curves, slight hills, and limited visibility. I slow down manually in these cases using the roller wheels.

Tesla has gradually improved its speed planning to account for different scenarios. But it's still a work in progress and often requires manual tweaking.

> Maps will always lag reality; I don’t think that it’s reasonable to expect Tesla maps to have perfect accuracy.

That's why you don't rely on maps as your only input to a feature such as this. Also, is there any information on how long this situation was in the way posted because I can't imagine that they built a city overnight at the end of that transition, it looks like a situation that had existed for many years prior to the accident.

So why is Tesla calling that feature "autopilot"?

Autopilot is a great name for the feature. An aircraft autopilot controls speed and direction, within limits. The Tesla feature does the same.

An autopilot in an airplane does not absolve the pilot of responsibility to maintain vigilance and avoid unsafe conditions. Same in the car.

The result of lawsuit will tell how much is the driver or company absolved. Also would be interesting if you'll need special licence and 1000 hr training in simulator before allowed to drive Tesla.

Assuming a "it's Tesla's fault" defense ever makes it before a jury. A judge could decide that the driver was in control of the car and trying to slough off that responsibility has no basis in law.

An aircraft autopilot controls speed and direction, within limits.

This is false, and I don't know why Tesla stans keep bringing this BS up like it's some sort of justification.

A modern aircraft autopilot is fully capable of taking a plane from takeoff to landing without any pilot intervention required. Pilots frequently use autopilot in flight, but rarely do so for takeoff or landing because it's more stressful to monitor the craft's autopilot system at those moments than it is to simply handle those parts of the flight themselves (and at least for autoland functions, the airport must be certified for autolanding).

There exist flight control systems with automatic take-off and autoland capability. Those are on fly-by-wire modern airliners.

There are also tens of thousands of Cessna’s etc. that have the functionality I described and no more (sometimes less).

This was 2 years ago, with no indication of what software version the car was running. The fact that current versions of autopilot would now slow down when exiting a freeway to help prevent accidents caused by careless drivers is a testament to Tesla's approach to development and how it will save lives

Excellent. Indistinguishable from parody.

It depends on exactly what iteration of Autopilot he was using. I'm not sure how old this case is. Early on it was little more than traffic-aware cruise control with lane holding. If that's what he was using then it has no knowledge of traffic lights or anything else and it was a 50/50 chance when you hit an exit if it would take the exit or stay in lane once it lost lane lines.

There's lots of things the media has called Autopilot.

> There's lots of things the media has called Autopilot.

The media, or Tesla? It's not the media's fault if there's confusion on the several marketing terms Tesla has come up with to imply it will drive for you.

I'm not sure how this is relevant. Either the autopilot is safe to use (regardless of "iteration") or the feature shouldn't exist and should be illegal to use. If some "iteration" of autopilot is incapable of _X_ where _X_ is some safety-critical thing, then you shouldn't be allowed to use autopilot.

It is safe to use, when used as _intended_ (ie how the car tells you every single time you turn autopilot on).

Cars are inherently unsafe when the driver is drunk, would you say cars are either safe or shouldn't exist and be illegal?

Autopilot does this in my experience. FSD Beta is more aggressive about it too.

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