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Comment by haberman | Hacker News Reader

I just saw their latest marketing literature on their website. They promise:

> All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver.

https://www.tesla.com/autopilot

It seems somewhat irresponsible to promise that you have enough hardware to achieve something that nobody has ever achieved before, with any hardware.

Tesla has plenty of impressive-looking videos on their website of autopilot working well, but if you Google for "Tesla autopilot fail" you can also find plenty of stuff like this, which is just surprisingly bad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ1XLqc5IUg

Tesla strikes me as over-promising and under-delivering here. I wouldn't want to work in a division like that.

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They say "at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver". This is a low bar to meet - some human drivers are really bad. I know I would much rather trust my life to one of the Google self-driving cars than some of the people I got in a car with in college, for example.

It's also the wrong bar to meet, because lawmakers are going to be much tougher on AIs than on human constituents. It's not enough to be better than a human, you have to be so much better than a human that it'd be irresponsible not to mandate self-driving cars.

The bar to meet will be precisely "as good as Waymo", because if Tesla's technology kills substantially more people, neither regulators nor consumers will allow it to exist.

Human drivers die at a rate of about 1 per 100 million miles driven. Waymo cars have only driven about 2 million miles, as I recall. Therefore, as it stands today, there is nowhere near enough public evidence to confidently believe that Waymo cars are less deadly than human drivers. Especially considering that much of that driving has taken place in meticulously mapped areas with good roads in daylight hours.

Personally, I would trust a human driver over a Waymo car until strong statistical evidence shows that Waymo cars are safe in a wide range of conditions.

I also don't think the bar should be "safer than a human driver", but "safer than than an experiended, sober, well-rested, defensive driver who doesn't use this phone while driving".

I think you're going to have problems finding enough people for that scientific study.

Why should the bar be any higher than the median actual human driver?

Adding vehicles operating at a higher skill level than the median to the pool of vehicles driving around should reduce incidents per mile driven.

And then if autonomous vehicles become prevalent, it becomes less punitive to raise the standards for licensing humans.

> Why should the bar be any higher than the median actual human driver?

Marketing. The western world is mostly afraid of robots so they'll need to be at least 10x safer in a hybrid (human/autopilot) environment in order to gain adoption.

To add on to this, how can they reconcile their /autopilot link with their car configurator? the /autopilot link implies all cars have the hardware to do full autopilot - but the fine print seems to be "if you add on $10k of options".

https://www.tesla.com/modelx/design

"Enhanced Autopilot" as a $6,000 option. "Full Self-Driving Capability" is another $4,000 option.

/autopilot page seems very disingenuous.

4K of that is software. The 6k option doubles the number of cameras.

This would be FAR, FAR more believable if the guy placed both his hands in view. You can't see what the right hand is doing. I remain skeptical. Does he show his hands in the rest of the video? I stopped watching after a few minutes of not seeing both of them up in the image.

What do you think his right hand might be doing? I'm not familiar with the Tesla interior setup so I don't know what is possible, but I'm having a hard time imagining what he could be possibly be doing off-camera that wouldn't be reflected in any of the visible displays.

How about steering the car with his right hand on the bottom of the wheel to make it look like there's a problem with the auto pilot?

If someone wants to claim there's a problem with any auto pilot they better have a camera view showing they are not interfering with it in any way.

The idea that one can do things that are not seen on the various reflective surfaces isn't a new concept, television shows rely on camera and object placement all the time to ensure the camera and crew are not visible.

If I were to make a claim about the auto pilot I would have both my hands in plain view in a "look ma, no hands" stance right above the steering wheel for all to see. I would also have a second camera shooting from the side or farther back in order to make it visible that nothing is interfering with the steering, like my leg for example or someone pulling on strings from the back seat.

I don't have a problem with the idea of issues with any auto pilot software. I simply want to make sure claims are not falsified through the use of trickery.

But what about the software?

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