Hacker News Reader

Comment by danhak | Hacker News Reader

From the Article:

> The driver in Montana was headed from Seattle to Yellowstone National Park when he crashed on a two-lane highway near Cardwell. ..."It's a winding road going through a canyon, with no shoulder"

From the Tesla Owners Manual:

> Traffic-Aware Cruise Control is primarily intended for driving on dry, straight roads, such as highways and freeways.

...

> Autosteer is particularly unlikely to operate as intended in the following situations:

• When driving on hills.

• The road has sharp curves or is excessively rough.

View on HN

Can autopilot not tell a straight road from a curvy road? If it can, why does it apply throttle when it detects that it is driving in a type of road it cannot handle?

A driver is still supposed to remain alert and have their hands on the wheel, this allows Tesla to collect telemetry on autopilot so it CAN work on improving the software to handle these conditions better. I think the flaw here is the hands-on requirement is much more lenient than it should be, if it allowed the driver to keep their hands off for two full minutes (it is supposed to slow down if a driver isn't keeping their hands on the wheel) then I'd say that's a very poor design choice.

I don't think the car tells the user whether it can handle the road or not. It just sends alerts when it needs help.

Humans are the guinea pig for Tesla. They want this data of their system driving outside its normal bounds. Otherwise yes Tesla would disable autopilot on unapproved roads.

From real life:

* Real life people who aren't engineers don't read the manual and they don't read notification pop-ups.

The rule of the Dancing Pigs applies here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_pigs

From the description of "winding road going through a canyon with no shoulder" and near Cardwell, I would say this is MT-2 [0]. I live in this region and have driven this road a few times, it is not a simple road that one can just set cruise control and drive through. There are a few curves that have advisory speeds of 45-mph. I am aware that it is possible to travel well above an advisory speed and be fine but the fact remains, this is a curvy road that requires modulation of speed in order to travel in a comfortable manner.

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/@45.8317611,-111.9106714,3a,75y,...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com