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Comment by benatkin | Hacker News Reader

He didn’t completely f up, it was a valid test, and a misrepresentation of branding, not facts. The connotation of the name autopilot overlaps significantly with FSD. Nobody forced Tesla to name it that rather than enhanced cruise control or something.

Testing a wider release rather than a more exclusive one meh.

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Why do you say that? The autopilot of an airplane doesn’t dodge obstacles either.

All the other drive assistance systems out there with proximity radar would have detected the wall. None of them claim a grandiose name like 'autopilot'.

>All the other drive assistance systems out there with proximity radar would have detected the wall

All? Of the 30 cars tested, 7 got "Poor" grades for IIHS's "front crash prevention rating". I spot checked a few of the failing cars and they all supposedly use radar.

https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/automakers-make-big-strides...

From your link:

> The poor-rated vehicles also struggled in the tests with the passenger car target. Most failed to slow enough in the 37 mph test with the target centered to qualify for additional AEB testing. However, in most trials with the passenger car and semitrailer, they delivered timely forward collision alerts.

Detecting a motorcycle is significantly harder than detecting a semitrailer, which is what this kind of wall would look like to a radar.

While walls like this are a contrived example, I distinctly remember a case from a few years ago where Autopilot failed to detect a semitrailer, drove under it at full speed, and decapitated the driver.

You are mistaken. Automotive radar does not detect stationary walls because it cannot tell the difference between a metal sign near/above the roadway and a wall blocking the roadway. Automotive radars are useful only for moving obstacles.

TCAS on a wide variety of Airbus chassis can actually automatically fly the collision avoidance directives.

https://skybrary.aero/articles/autopilotflight-director-apfd...

Granted it's muuuuch easier in planes because 1) they're already being routed to avoid each other by humans when the route is setup, 2) they continually announce their position with a high degree of accuracy, 3) generally speaking only two planes will be that close to each other at a time in the air so deconflicting doesn't cause huge ripple effects and 4) the sky is really big but also gives them a 3d dimension to play with where streets are 2 dimensional.

I was a little bit imprecise. Because the article was talking about a stationary obstacle, literally a wall, I was still talking about stationary objects when I said that airplanes don't avoid obstacles. The autopilot of an airplane will not avoid any kind of stationary obstacle, not even a mountain. It can certainly be done; several militaries use terrain–following guidance in both airplanes and missiles. But there’s nothing about the word “autopilot” that should cause people to think that the car will avoid stationary obstacles. An autopilot follows a route and that’s it.

Some aircraft can avoid other aircraft under some circumstances but those aren’t stationary obstacles and unlike random walls that people build, or mountains, they are all tagged with transponders.

> The autopilot of an airplane will not avoid any kind of stationary obstacle, not even a mountain

Well a core part of the flight is colliding with the ground at the end.

But also the hazard of a stationary object doesn’t exist - crew receive an IFR clearance and fly that route; that route won’t have stationary obstacles.

Aviation’s autopilots aren’t “eyes-off” in VFR so that’s a meaningless comparison.

Sure, there’s a good argument that we should limit self–driving cars to predictable environments. For example, we could dig a bunch of tunnels under our cities and have self–driving cars in them. It’s a controlled environment. If the tunnels connect to buildings underground, then the cars would not need to be used on surface roads.

Except terrain following radar also exists for military aircraft. Civilian planes don't have it because it's not something they want or need to do not be cause the capability doesn't exist.

If the plane is anywhere near terrain on autopilot things have gone horribly wrong and a person should be flying anyways.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrain-following_radar

Yea, I did say that. There’s no reason for the average person to expect their car’s autopilot to do that. Autopilots follow routes.

Still, watching the video people will take away that Tesla FSD is not safe (whereas only autopilot is relatively unsafe). Nothing can be further from the truth, considering I have been using some form of FSD/AutoPilot since it started. One very interesting things happens when you drive with FSD. Because the FSD in-cabin camera is watching you extremely closely, it is literally like having 2-drivers driving.

I insist that my wife and kids drive with FSD, because then I know then that FSD is forcing them to watch the road. Think about that! Use the latest FSD on HW4 for a while (I do 90% of my drives with FSD) and make an informed decision. IMO, not using FSD is killing/hurting people.

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