Tesla Whistleblower – 'Autopilot' System Not Safe Enough for Public Roads | Hacker News Reader

Tesla Whistleblower – 'Autopilot' System Not Safe Enough for Public Roads

jalopnik.com

45 pointsthunderbong16 comments

So I might be missing something here, but is there actual data showing autopilot to be unsafe? And if so...where is it?

Elon's marketing claims are wild, safety isn't a priority in the factories, and data protection isn't exactly great either. Those are extraordinary clear from this account (and many others). But I'm not seeing any data on safety except for elon's claim about airbag deployments. I don't believe that number because it's Elon...but is there data that refuses this claim? It's not clear in this article that there is?

I never bought into the hype of the autopilot system. I was hopeful that they’d figure out how to completely self-drive but wasn’t will to pay money for it.

My neighbor paid $10k for FSD and had the moment of summoning the car with his phone in front of the neighbors at a block party. I tried it out when I earned a few months free. After the second time it slammed on the brakes in the middle of the interstate I shut off the subscription.

The pursuit of FSD has definitely driven some compute innovation at Tesla, but the promised coast-to-coast drive without intervention just isn’t there yet.

Definitely not there yet but it's getting very close. Idk when it gets there if ever since thr tail is so long but the improvements over a few years ago are pretty incredible

I treat the autopilot like every pedestrian, bicyclist and other driver in traffic: they’re out to kill me or themselves suddenly and out of the blue.

Cruise and lane control (Autosteer on Tesla) with a firm grip on the wheel and a foot tensely suspended over the speeder is still nicer than driving completely by yourself.

And the brake slam the parent refers to happens on autosteer all the time, it’s not even an issue with FSD.

It's good to hear it from an internal source, but was anyone who was paying attention thinking it was safe?

Tons of people use it and believe its safe. There are even some who have doubts but use it anyway.

But how much they've paid attention... Who knows?

Have driven ~100k miles on it, at speeds of up to 85 miles an hour (where legal to do so). Yes, very safe. More people will die from auto accidents in a day (~118) than the total that have died on Autopilot (42) in billions of miles of Autopilot miles driven over 8 years of the driver assist feature being available.

I pay attention though, and therefore aren’t dead. I also trust Autopilot more than your median human.

https://www.tesladeaths.com/

Number of teslas vs non teslas is massivly different. Id love to see comparisons for accidents expressed as a per 100k or similar.

I live in Turkey and my Model Y can't keep up with slightly unusual/high radius turns. The only way I use autopilot is long highways with less traffic. Otherwise trying to guess if it'll work correctly is more tiresome on my spine, brain and heart than actual driving.

I hate that they use the name "autopilot" for lane assist and adaptive cruise control with aggressive braking you can't disable.

TBF that's similar to what the "autopilot" does in airplanes: it mostly handles the cruise phase of the flight, but the more complicated maneuvers (takeoff and landing, and if anything unexpected should happen in between, that too) must still be handled by the pilots.

Etymology seldomly works as an argument. Tesla didn't use 'autopilot' because it works like the autopilot of a plane, but because normal people associate the word with concepts they learned from tv shows for decades, think knight rider.

I mean, Autoland has been available in civilian airliner since the 1960s, and is somewhat commonly used. I don't think auto-takeoff has ever made it past the experimental; it's not particularly clear why you'd _want_ it. Airbus has been testing it for the last few years, though.

A lane assist that navigates complex junctions in cities, gets you from A to B, etc. It's a bit more than lane assist at this point. The main criticism on FSD is not that it isn't capable of doing these things. Because it obviously is at this point as demoed in countless videos where people try it out. Instead it's that it's not doing these things safely enough that it would be able to do so unattended. That's a valid criticism. It's mostly fine but when it isn't, it's a problem. Either way, removing the requirement to have your hands on the wheel seems to be not doable as long as that's true. And that's of course the promise that has yet to be delivered.

Worth noting that this is yet another anti-tesla article from Jalopnik. They've spread clickbait and misinformation on this topic before. I wouldn't take anything they say as established fact without independent confirmation. Authors there play very loose with the facts.

Autopilot and FSD are two different things. Autopilot is just lane assist and cruise control.

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