Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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