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Comment by narak | Hacker News Reader

Huge Tesla/Musk fanboy here, but I have no idea how they've gotten away with marketing decade old lane-keeping technology as autonomous driving to customers. Already resulted in a couple of deaths. It's clear from this video that the car didn't event attempt to avoid the upcoming obstacle, while the human driver in the pickup-truck ahead had no issues.

And somehow, stage 4/5 autonomy is a year away?

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It's nuts, Tesla always end up excused for the AP problems with the same argument: the driver should still pay attention to the road ... he's still in charge vehicle...

This kind of technology will cause you to loose focus, and at some point you wont be paying attention to the road at all. When the AP makes a mistake you can be almost certain it's at high speeds as well; as it only engages on very clearly marked roads; which means you'll only have a split second to do anything in your almost dozed off state.

Driving has resulted in innumerable deaths. In most cases the auto-pilot feature increases safety. In a very small number it decreases it. Life's about trade-offs.

I agree that autonomous doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than humans (by how much we will leave to regulators) but it's not clear that the actual safety of these systems has kept up with the marketing around them. I would love to see the evidence.

NHTSA’s full final investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction

https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/19/nhtsas-full-final-investig...

Here's the evidence.

The systems that steer the car should be evaluated independently of the emergency braking features, or else the benefits of the latter could mask deficiencies of the former.

> it just has to be better than humans

I really don't see this being approved with just that notion. Its most certainly a rational argument, but people aren't good at making rational decisions. So the standard would have to be much much better, if this is to be approved.

This particular failure of the autopilot system will be addressed in some capacity. The resulting patch will be pushed out to all Tesla cars. Every single driver using autopilot will benefit from this incident.

The same is absolutely not true with human drivers.

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