Is Tesla telling us the truth over autopilot spat? | Hacker News Reader

Is Tesla telling us the truth over autopilot spat?

theregister.co.uk

53 pointsalan_cx29 comments

At the risk of fulfilling the "HN loves tesla" stereotype, I find it really difficult to take seriously an article that begins with a photo that was very clearly chosen to be unflattering, captioned "Overlord".

That kind of flagrant skew poisons the credibility of everything else around it.

That's the Register for you. Having followed their work for well over a decade now, I might suggest there's a certain element of haste in discounting their coverage on the basis of their deliberately irreverent style. It's not that they're not nice to Elon Musk; they're not nice to anyone.

At least they are consistent, then.

Not only that, but a pleasantly bracing chaser for the sort of uncritical, even fawning, coverage that's so often lavished on the subjects of their articles. But there's no accounting for taste, of course.

The Register openly stated some time ago that they don't care about facts if they can cause a "good bun fight". I don't know if that's changed, but it's not a good source if you want civil and substantial discussion of a topic.

Did they so state? The only reference I can find to the quoted phrase is in a reader comment from 2007. I'd be interested to see the statement to which you refer.

In general, it's very true that the Reg doesn't mind stirring up a bit of controversy here and there. (I'm pretty sure they're still permabanned from being credentialed to cover Apple events.) But that's not the same as saying they don't care about facts, or that they're more interested in controversy than in accurate coverage.

Maybe you've never read The Register before. Its articles have a certain dry humor. Taking offense to a goofily hyperbolic photo does fulfill a "HN loves Tesla" stereotype.

Also, what about more balanced and critical coverage of Mobile Eye and their previously fawning statements of how they loved working with such an aggressive customer like Tesla ...it somewhat undermines their position.

I haven't seen this statement, but i think everyone here would agree that it was a surprise to see tesla advertize autopilot, full hands off driving, while every other technology maker in the world were telling about technology not beeing fully mature yet.

I've seen a technology talk from mobile eye founder, and those guys look quite serious and down to earth. Very far from telsa's taste for shine and fame.

I'd be interested to read such articles! Where may I find them, do you know? It's always such a pain with search engines to try to find older information on a topic that's big in the current news cycle.

They like to be snarky, and then whine about being excluded from press events by firms they've been snarky about. See their reporters rant about Apple PR after spending years slagging on Apple PR folks all the way back to 2007. After They hammer on Elon Musk, post odd photos and captions, they will be incredulous that they don't get a press credential to the next Tesla event.

But writing the article and selecting the photo were probably done by different people.

In that case the editor is the one to blame.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qam1fbQmA_s

Hard to take seriously a video link with no context.

Looks like the parent comment was deleted, so yes :p

It said something to the effect of stirring up trouble/negativity for no reason.

"It has long been Mobileye's position that Tesla's Autopilot should not be allowed to operate hands-free without proper and substantial technological restrictions and limitations," said the company's most recent statement, adding: "In communications dating back to May 2015 between Mobileye Chairman and Tesla's CEO, Mobileye expressed safety concerns regarding the use of Autopilot hands-free."

That seems a bit damning for Tesla, but it's hard to take very seriously without examples of the "communications".

I'm no Luddite but I basically yelled at my business partner the other day when he took his hands off the wheel, eyes off the road, and was punching out an email as if we were on the train.

I've done plenty of computer vision projects and pitched in on some autonomous driving/flying hobby projects- so I'm definitely willing to accept our robot driving overlords, but maybe I know just enough about it to know we're not all the way there yet.

I feel like Tesla is in a bit of a Catch-22 in that to get the system better you want as many people driving with it and feeding you data. At the same time people are people and they will get lulled into a complacent state and begin not paying attention pretty quickly.

That being said, if there was some data that said right now, today, Tesla autopilot is better than the average (or maybe up to the 75th percentile) driver, I'd be okay with people just letting it take the wheel and not screwing things up.

EDIT: Just to be clear, we were in a Tesla w/ autopilot. We weren't just coasting down the highway at rush hour in a regular car.

Tesla could gets lots of quality data with the autopilot disengaged and running in a passive state such that the autopilot's calculations are compared to the human driver's actions. Any large variances (such as the autopilot wanting to suddenly veer left when the driver didn't) would be very valuable. I've done this with experimental machine control algorithms a number of times.

What makes you think they're not doing it?

There's not enough data yet to say for sure, but currently Tesla's autopilot record is one fatality per 70 million miles (assuming the recent Chinese death involved autopilot)

You can compare this to your local road stats. I don't think autopilot is there yet in terms of safety.

computing an avarage over one or two data points is questionable statistics

/r/TeslaMotors dug up this video[1] of MobilEye CEO talking about the Autopilot, so if they really disagreed with the usage of Autopilot, shouldn't they have brought that up prior, and not included it in promotional material. From all indications on their end, I believe that they said that the Tesla Autopilot shouldn't be driven hands-free. I have no qualms with that, but why then use the Autopilot as a promotional feature for their products? Not trying to fanboy with Tesla here, as I do think that MobilEye was right in pulling their products away from Tesla.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCMXXXmxG-I

Are you kidding ? His talk basically explain that we're not there yet ( at 2min "this is a challenge that remains to be solved")... It's not a marketing talk. It's a tech talk on the general issues faced before we can reach the goal of autonomous driving ( and how mobile eye can help, of course).

Also, in his conclusion (38min) : " you have to take this tools with a grain of salt, people tend to overreach..." He is talking about his own tools, the tools he presented. I can't see how someone can be more cautious and humble.

Oh wow, you can clearly see they were willing to go with it till there was an accident and they then immediately buckled under the first sign of trouble.

I can totally see why Tesla ditched them.

Might Mobileye be reacting to advice from their lawyers?

I do my best to mentally invert the Tesla/Musk hype, and my own affinity for what they do, but:

1) It doesn't seem like Tesla was dishonest about anything.

2) MobilEye seems to be very whiny/wimpy about getting a tiny, indirect fraction of the flak that Tesla has gotten for the crash.

Seems like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... applies.

What about the NY reporter who reviewed a Tesla, and when top gear reviews one? Was Tesla's response to each of those - were those dishonest?

ugh, more ME noise. so ME has a lot of evidence that they are lying through their teeth, if they were so worried why let all the other brands do the hands free thing? http://www.caranddriver.com/features/semi-autonomous-cars-co...

* ME boasting about their tech making hands free possible https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCMXXXmxG-I&feature=youtu.be...

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