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Comment by schnide05095 | Hacker News Reader

It's not like the TrafficAware Cruise Control is meant for completely autonomous driving. It's supposed to be a convenience. To not pay attention to the road, regardless of how good your cruise control is, is not just idiotic, it's life threatening.

Have they not mentioned, time and time again, that this is not an autonomous car? I have adaptive cruse control in my Mazda, automatic breaks, but they're not a replacement for paying attention to the road.

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The problem is that Tesla's taken systems intended as driving assists and branded them using terms like "Autopilot" that imply that a human doesn't need to be in the loop. Then you end up with people who haven't read the manual (because no one actually reads the manual) and let their car ram itself into a parked van because the brakes were "the autopilot's job".

I'm of the opinion that Tesla probably needs to back down on their "autonomous" stuff-- their half-baked semi-autonomous stuff is getting enough bad press that it's going to kill true autonomous tech before it can even make it onto the road.

Exactly this, someone needs to tell the Tesla PR department to scale back. Same goes for the 'bio weapon' defense thing.

>The problem is that Tesla's taken systems intended as driving assists and branded them using terms like "Autopilot" that imply that a human doesn't need to be in the loop.

Even in aviation, 'autopilots' don't mean the pilot can leave the cockpit unmanned. Human pilots are needed at all times in case the autopilot disengages due to unexpected conditions.

The distinction being that, when an airplane's autopilot disengages, the pilot's typically going to have a couple minutes to evaluate the situation and determine how to react appropriately, because airplanes typically don't just fall out of the sky. Tesla's "autopilot" gives you seconds to react if you wait until it disengages, if it knows to disengage at all.

Most Tesla purchasers aren't pilots; the meaning communicated to them but the branding "autopilot" isn't based on experience in aviation, it's based on popular culture.

I understand that cruise control is not autonomous driving. Still, I would expect cruise control to NOT crash into a stationary object right in front of the car. If you read the disclaimers of TrafficAware in the manual, the only possible conclusion seems to be that you simply cannot use this feature. If you can't trust the system to brake in time, it means you have to do the braking yourself. Every time.

The bottom line: TrafficAware is bad technology.

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