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Comment by rhino369 | Hacker News Reader

Level 3 autonomy is reckless. It provides next to no value when it's used as intended (i.e., a fully aware drivers instantly ready to take over) and it is dangerous under normal usage conditions (i.e., people using it to text and drive).

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This is just not true. It provides immense value in stop and go traffic and long distances. I have driven 18,000 miles using Tesla Autopilot and it is a life changer if you have a tough commute. One fatal crash doesn't change that.

While this is a good point, the obvious solution is to limit it to say under 20 mph and require constant hands on the wheel.

If you want to have your hands off the wheel and your nose in your phone, then you are driving recklessly.

That will not be very useful. Stop and go traffic usually moves between 0-40 miles an hour. AP2 initial rollout was limited to 35 miles / hr. I couldn't use it even in the Bay Area as traffic would speed up to 40-45 and slow down to 0 continually. People have their nose in their phone even without autopilot. You can't change that.

You could fix the speed to whatever would allow a person to jump back when warned. But I suspect that speed is pretty low.

The answer is tough shit, you don't get to not pay attention while driving. Get an uber then.

Having adaptive cruise control that manages stop and go will absolutely change the number of people on their phones.

i agree. not useful for you at 20? bad luck. for most folks in traffic 20-30mph is plenty to help "auto" navigate through the traffic jams.

my average current driving speed on car display is something like 25mph. thanks to constant traffic. the car is rated to 160mph top speed. how useful is that.

It is not useful because it is not usable with a 20mph limit. This is from personal experience. Stop and go traffic speed changes continuously. Let's say you are driving at 10mph and traffic then starts moving at 30mph, but your Autopilot will limit you to 20mph. Then you have to disable AP and starting driving. Again when traffic slows down, you will have to re-enable it. At that point it is not very helpful

they have plenty of data from deployed cars to figure out what speed range covers 75% of the vehicles and set a slow moving car speed limit based on that.

We should limit humanpilot to those conditions as well. Or will you special plead that lives lost because of humanpilot mistakes is morally less bad somehow?

A humanpilot that is shown to be unable to spot a truck trailer in front of them would have its driving license revoked.

Just looked it up and cell phone use while driving leads to 1.6 million crashes each year. I'm guessing they don't all have their licenses revoked.

Fair enough, but they should :)

The trade off speed for the increased risk is less time on the road.

The trade off for autopilot is that you don't have to move your foot 2-3inches every 20 seconds. That's not worth the increased risk.

Could you explain more how it's a life changer? What exactly do you do in the car?

As in, are you not watching the traffic outside because of it, and concentrating on other things? If that is the case, are you not worried about something unexpected happening?

I have a 30 mile one way commute, a lot of it is in stop and go. A major stress in stop and go is actually braking and speeding up all the time. With AP you can simply let the car do the slow down and speed up while you focus on the road ahead. Also, when you are on a road trip and in rural highways with very few cars around it is easier to let the car drive as you are not continually focused on maintaining speed and keeping the car within lanes.

"it is a life changer...one fatal crash doesn't change that"

Yeah it doesn't change that fact, it verifies it.

I would say that's an accurate "elevator pitch" of Level Level 3 or below autonomy. It's reckless of Tesla or anyone else to sell it as a working commercial feature just to try to get ahead of competitors.

I'm a big fan of Tesla and Musk, and you can see that from one of my recent comments on HN, too, but I've pretty much always criticized the Autopilot for exactly this reason.

Humans can't handle Autopilot in its current form, no matter how many asterisks Tesla puts in its Terms of Service and how many prompts and alerts it adds to warn the drivers. Either it's completely worry-free "let me take a nap until destination" self-driving - or it's not, and the driver should be expected to do manual driving at all times.

I was about to make a very similar comment and have very similar positions as you. The "Autopilot" feature is in this weird no-man's land of being in between two good places. As the article points out, the ambiguity of who's doing the driving is dangerous. The whole "you must be ready to override it" caveat really ignores what many people know about human behavior: if allowed to misbehave, someone will. The first X times the drivers are allowed to ignore the caveat and not have consequences will embolden him to continue doing it until something bad happens. It seems almost reckless on Tesla's part to release the feature this way.

I totally agree with you from the perspective of the driver, passengers and public safety.

I wonder, though, if manufacturers are going to greatly accelerate their progress to level 4 or above from the data they get having level 3 in production vehicles. They may get much more quickly to a higher quality level 4 by having what amounts to a marketing novelty feature in practice in 1000s of vehicles in real-world conditions.

Audi has a new System in the A8 for traffic jams that works only up to 60kmh, but is designed to be left alone completely. The germans seem to be starting from the bottom in a conservative way working up, while Tesla is much more aggressive. I think in this case i prefer the germans in the way they are not overpromising as much as Tesla.

Tesla has L2, barely. L3 in fact allows you to not pay attention. L3 requires several seconds (10-15) warning period for you to take over the wheel.

Couldn't Level 3 autonomy still be valuable for drivers who are slightly impaired, like elderly people? That seems like a substantial market.

The same elderly people who drive through the front of buildings because it takes them so long to recognize they hit the gas instead of brake?

How would they be able to quickly take the wheel and brake if something happens? I think the opposite is true, if you need longer reaction time it's probably a bad idea to not be fully immersed in the driving until an accident is imminent.

I'm thinking of a scenario where the driver is holding the wheel, but the computer is actually doing the driving most of the time while giving just enough feedback to the driver to feel like she is in charge.

In our tests a decade ago, we found that shared autonomy was actually much more frustrating for users than either full or no autonomy. When you were telling the computer to go over there and the computer wanted to go over here, it left all of the users frustrated and complaining that the computer wouldn't let them go where they wanted. Maybe you can come up with a better adjudication system than we did, but it is very tricky to design the system so that it catches when the user does something stupid but not when they are doing the right thing- if the computer could figure out the right thing you wouldn't need the human!

Interesting, cool to hear your experience!

It's actually harder to drive in these scenarios because your reaction time needs to be faster and your takeover has to be more aggressive. Imagine an edge case where the car veers toward another car unexpectedly. This isn't guaranteed to be avoided by level 3.

I think you need level 4 for them.

I think so, but only with substantial geofencing.

I think this indicates where level 3 is a slippery concept: it looks like it could be useful in this case, if you think only of the times when it works properly, but the only reason for a system to be level 3 is that it cannot qualify for level 4, meaning explicitly that it cannot be considered safe enough without having an alert human to fall back on.

I took a look through the level descriptions for a level where the human is driving but is being monitored by the system, but they all seem to be versions of having the system drive while being monitored by a human. Maybe we can do more in the way of collision avoidance as the technology progresses towards true autonomy.

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