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Comment by marricks | Hacker News Reader

For the Tesla comment, what more could you expect from them right now? If you have auto pilot on your hands have to be on the wheel or it vibrates and then it starts slowing down e eventually since it knows it's not safe.

People can work around any system for this, but stuff like this makes it have to do it consciously. Seems pretty reasonable on Tesla's part.

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You could expect them to not call it autopilot, and instead call it lane keeping, like it really is. The name does a really good job at setting a terrible expectation, almost to the point of undoing any attention grabbing mechanism to keep users engaged.

The NHTSA is hinting in that direction, indicating that manufacturers must clearly distinguish between driver assistance systems (levels 1 and 2) and real self driving (levels 3 - 5). There will probably be some standard on this. There has to be; consider what happens when car rental fleets start having some of these features.

There was an accident with a Volvo where someone was showing off the pedestrian safety system, and hit a pedestrian. It turned out they hadn't purchased the pedestrian safety system.[1] Something is needed to prevent problems like that.

Then there's mode switching trouble. Classic problem with aircraft control systems. Tesla disengages the "autopilot" if the driver touches the brake. The trouble is that this also disables automatic braking, as the driver is assumed to now be in control. So tapping the brake without applying it fully in a hazardous situation causes a crash.

All these driver behavior problems with shared control authority are hard. Maybe harder than going for level 3 and letting the automation do it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_47utWAoupo

It reminds me a little of the way in which airbags are always described as "SRS" (for "Supplementary Restraint System"), to try and make it clear that they're supposed to be used with seatbelts, not instead of them.

I think the name isn't too blame, it's the misinterpretation of it (and possibly tesla overselling it).

"Autopilots do not replace a human operator, but assist them in controlling the vehicle, allowing them to focus on broader aspects of operation, such as monitoring the trajectory, weather and systems."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopilot

I've used an autopilot on a yacht and didn't expect it to dock or avoid ships. A plane autopilot doesn't freak out when the pilot takes their hands off the controls. So there seems to be room to allow the name but tighten how it's used.

> You could expect them to not call it autopilot, and instead call it lane keeping, like it really is.

That is all that most auto pilots in planes do, however. I don't get where "autopilot" somehow came to mean full autonomy in cars but not in planes (and other vehicles like boats) where the term was used previously.

Ridiculous.

Yes, but with planes and ships (on ships it's almost always called track pilot and speed pilot, by the way) you can let go of the controls for extended periods of time. In cars, right now, that's a recipe for disaster. Functionally they may be the same, but practically speaking it's very different.

This is the key point. People don't care about what it does in detail, they think about the user experience.

Autopilots in planes can take you across the world. The car analogy would be only having to pull into and out of your driveway. And while they don't use it so frequently, aren't most of the planes most people fly in (big commercial aviation) certified to autoland themselves? The connotation of autopilot is absolutely that it can fly itself. Same with tesla's autopilot.

An autopilot in a Cessna can most definitely not take you around the world. Also, autopilots even in a commercial jet keep the plane steady along a route, they don't deal with collisions at all...you could call it "lane keeping" if you want to sue the airline industry for misleading us over a term they created.

Autolanding is not autopilot. In fact, autolanding is not even certified if multiple autopilots are not available to provide redundancy.

Most people who have flown don't even know what a Cessna is, much less its capabilities. It's totally irrelevant. Same with dealing with collisions, which aren't analogous challenges between flying and driving. To a non-engineer, the point is that autopilot gets you from point A to point B, not the details of how it has to achieve that.

> Also, autopilots even in a commercial jet keep the plane steady along a route, they don't deal with collisions at all...

Yes, they do. Then the problem is when the 2 autopilots of the 2 planes take the same evasive manœuvre...

Ah, the awkward old dance where two people try to walk through the doorway and end up mirroring each other's movements trying to get out of each other's way...

The aviation world actually solved this problem a long time ago. Everyone turns to their right. FAR 91.113:

> (e) Approaching head-on. When aircraft are approaching each other head-on, or nearly so, each pilot of each aircraft shall alter course to the right

(among other collision-avoidance regs in that section)

I'm pretty sure the aviation world inherited this protocol from the nautical world.

The planes talk to each other and run a common protocol that tells the pilots what to do to resolve the conflict. The problem is when one of the pilots doesn't listen to the nice robot voice yelling at him to DESCEND NOW!...

TCAS has the unit with the higher serial number yield to the one with the lower serial number.

The name is not the problem. Regardless of what you call it, once people find out empirically that their attention is not needed most of the time, even the most well-intentioned minds will wander.

They don't have to implement SAE 2 and if their implementation isn't safe, doing the best they can might not be good enough.

I think there may be a fundamental flaw with lane keeping. It removes the driver from doing anything but still requires constant vigilance. That might be asking too much. My ADD is too strong to wach the road without having to do any part of the driving. I suspect a lot of people are the same way.

If most drivers are just keeping their hand on the wheel while day dreaming, Telsa should be forced to just disable the feature until the tech is ready for Level 3. Or use the Level 2 tech as a backup only.

Heck I refuse to use cruise control at all because it makes me get board. My personal solution to avoid boardemn while driving is to drive faster. Clearlly I am not a safe driver but, I'm going to need full automation to help me out.

There's a good chance that's what happens. Auto-braking (level 1) is likely to become standard, like anti-skid braking. Full automatic driving (levels 3-5) will be options. Semi-automatic steering (level 2) may disappear as the higher levels start to work. The shared responsibility between driver and control system is too messy at level 2.

Not totally accurate. You actually get two warnings before autopilot disengages. You have to put a hand (not hands) on the wheel at certain intervals, but you certainly can be hands-off a majority of the time.

They'd never do it but I imagine a system that was loud, flashy, and embarrassing, that activated when autopilot is misused (i.e. auto-pilot is demanding user intervention and intervention is not given) would be most effective in incentivizing drivers to change their behavior.

I.e. a loud beeping noise that annoyed pedestrians and other drivers until you took the wheel. Kind of like how accidentally triggering your car alarm in the parking lot will lead to a very hasty correction on your part.

The car already cuts the stereo for a moment and beeps at you. If you ignore the first warning, it mutes the stereo and beeps until you resolve the situation.

It sounds like they are suggesting something more like 'cuts the stereo and begins announcing on internal and external speakers that the driver is not paying attention and the car will slow to a stop in 5,4,3,2,...'.

Having your hands on the wheel is not a reliable indicator that you are paying any attention and are ready to take control.

An eye-tracking system might work.

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