Comment by suprgeek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by suprgeek | Hacker News Reader

Tesla is innovating rapidly in the Autonomous driving space AND releasing those inventions to the customer, which is great.

Typically these things used to take 5-7years to "trickle down" where a reasonably-priced car (not that $80k is reasonable) might have these available for end users.

However Tesla absolutely NEEDS to do more to prevent this technology push model that they have from tainting the whole Autonomous Driving trend. Expecting that a Driver will read the f'ing manual about

"....Traffic-aware cruise control may not brake/decelerate for stationary vehicles, especially in situations when you are driving over 50 mph (80 km/h) ....Depending on TrafficAware Cruise Control to avoid a collision can result in serious injury or death."

is insane.

My suggestion: Enforce a must watch video tutorial with questions (such as is common for say a driving test) before enabling the Partial AutoDrive. It really is a matter of Life or Death - you have a very short time to react on the road. With their distribution model Tesla definately has the resources to pull this off, and might serve as a model for the rest of the industry.

my guess is, without any insider information, they were (or at least would be) willing to deal with negative pr, for the amount of data this program is likely to get.'

While google (and many others) have been working on self-driving cars/testing systems, Tesla is a car company with many active vehicles. They benefit from huge fleets of vehicles (comparative to other autonomous car companies not car manufacturers) of which to test. So releasing this product and having potentially 50-100K people using it daily as well as over millions of miles logged could be net worth it.

They probably assumed (and likely calculated) a falure mode would be non-lethal/minimal dents and very small risk of human life. So they would allow the tech out there early and hope that a lot of this data helped to improve the vehicles.

It isn't PC to say, but this is how humans have learned most things. Being 90% something works, and then getting last 10 percent by learning what not to do which often comes at with a cost as high as human life. For example, the Challenger mission was a tradgedy and we, and very unfortunately some brave men and woman, paid a price for us to learn how to protect those future astronauts.

I kind of wonder if Tesla figures "Hey, once a few crashes happen people will figure it out."

It doesn't matter what Tesla does or says. Stupid always finds a way.

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