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Comment by jsjohnst | Hacker News Reader

I couldn’t agree more. It baffles me how Tesla can get away with such blatant false advertising (it’s anything but “autopilot” in any layman sense), especially in light of there being multiple incidents of bad accidents which showed them at fault.

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Couldn’t agree more. People who argue for Elon’s meaning of auto-pilot are wrong. Unless 100% of Tesla drivers are 100% aware of the limitations calling it auto-pilot is dangerous.

I would be curious about the stats though, If accidents are less frequent, is it at fault for accidents, or did it save us from a bunch of accidents?

> or did it save us from a bunch of accidents?

I do not believe Tesla’s are equipped with the necessary hardware to scientifically show beyond a reasonable doubt they assisted in preventing accidents.

Part of the problem is that whether an accident would have occurred is partially dependent on the human driver. While some accidents are unavoidable and some are completely preventable, there's a gray area in between those that depends on driver skill to a degree.

266 Billion Miles are driven on US roadways each _month_. It's going to be a while before we have a predictive dataset.

There's also those other issues:

Tesla has not been counting collisions caused by the driver having to brake hard because the autopilot was about to happily slam into another vehicle/object/person? Tesla's summation of those is that they were not a failing of Autopilot, because it was not active at the moment of impact. That's ... disingenuous ... at best.

And then:

"It would have avoided this accident [by braking, steering]", and studiously saying nothing about the future, "... but it would still have been in a collision 0.42 seconds later".

For all the collisions it would have avoided, there's another subset where it would only have "delayed" the collision. But that won't be mentioned. Because it doesn't fit the narrative.

Source? I've seen people speculate about the first, but just speculation. And that Google/Waymo does the same thing. I don't think it's true for either: public companies get sued for lies like that, and the NTSB is not stupid.

And yet when we get stuck in thought and don’t think about where we’re going and drive to our office on the weekend by accident we say “oh, I got stuck in autopilot”

These accidents are not people mistaking the purpose of autopilot, they are people slipping into false confidence that the car will handle the driving for them because it has in the past.

From Elon's interview, he mentioned that 'autopilot' was a name akin to the flight autopilots. Pilots are never expected to get their eyes off the controls.

This crash is unfortunate and should be investigated. But autopilot naming is something I don't think is the problem.

That's only a reasonable explanation if that were the common understanding of what the term means. It is not.

> Pilots are never expected to get their eyes off the controls.

Pilots do so all the time, because airplanes aren't flying in a congested 2D space. Airspace is mostly empty, with very large distances between planes and features, allowing for plenty of early warning.

And an airplane's "autopilot" has nothing to do with Tesla's Autopilot. Their purpose and working mechanisms are completely different.

The airplane analogy is pure bullshit.

The aircraft autopilot is pretty much the same thing. It steers on the designated lane, maintaining attitude, and relies on the pilot to be aware of conditions.

It operates the controls but relies on the human operator for supervision. Pilots talk about “flying in the magenta” and exactly the same thing applies to Tesla Autopilot.

Believing that autopilot means something different is the bullshit attitude that has to change.

Warren Van Der Burch gave a classic presentation, Children of Magenta: https://youtu.be/pN41LvuSz10

I think the main difference is that, on an airplane, a momentary (less than 5 seconds) lapse in judgment isn’t going to down the plane. Pilots know when they have to be heavily engaged — during takeoff and landing — and when to let autopilot take over. Here, if you zone out for a few seconds at any point in your trip you could easily kill yourself and others.

A lapse of judgement is potentially going to cost lives in a plane too. You have an overly romanticised notion of air safety if you believe otherwise. Pilot Error is what they call it, including euphemisms such as “controlled flight into terrain” meaning the pilot was in control and doing everything wrong.

There are two people flying the plane, with rigorous training and controlled work hours. Air safety, as they say, is no accident.

An aircraft autopilot is not designed to automatically avoid collisions with other traffic or animals. It's purpose is only to maintain course, speed, and altitude. In VFR conditions while autopilots are useful continuous scanning of your surroundings is necessary.

Meanwhile a Tesla "autopilot" is designed to drive in traffic with other vehicles.

The aircraft autopilot can also fly a route and handle everything from takeoff to landing, but pilots don’t rely on it to do so.

Tesla Autopilot can keep pace with surrounding traffic and stay between marked lines but does not recognise stationary obstacles.

They are very much the same in that they automate the mundane parts of the operation of the vehicle. They are also the same in that they do not know how to handle conditions outside their operating envelope.

> An aircraft autopilot is not designed to automatically avoid collisions

The A380 begs to differ...

http://www.airbus.com/newsroom/press-releases/en/2009/08/eas...

Yes I was aware of TCAS. There are some cool technologies out there. I am pretty sure out of all aircraft with autopilots, the amount with this technology is extraordinarily low. Especially if you are considering only personal aircraft and not ones designed to carry over 1,000 passengers.

The topic of conversation in this thread is about the system that the general population thinks about when they hear “airline autopilot”. Most folks would naturally think of commercial passenger planes and their (believed) capabilities.

Just a quick note - most of the larger aircraft with autopilots are most often flown under IFR (Instrument Flight Rules), which means that there is someone else (Air Traffic Controllers) managing all of the routing and collision avoidance for them.

Even pilots in IFR conditions are doing little more than maintaining a particular altitude and heading.

This means that a aircraft and vehicle autopilot have very different requirements. They are not, at all, doing the exact same things.

Which is silly, since pilots can absolutely take their eyes off the controls at cruising altitude and not slam into something. If, for some reason, the system disengages they would have ample time to take control of the plane. That is absolutely not true with an automobile, where in some situations, an action must be taken in milliseconds.

> From Elon's interview, he mentioned that 'autopilot' was a name akin to the flight autopilots.

Then he failed, as they are completely unrelated.

> Pilots are never expected to get their eyes off the controls.

This is also false. They need to be alert, but they most certainly do not need to be as attentive as keeping their hands on the controls unlike with Tesla.

Unlike the sibling comment below alluded too, many commercial airplane autopilot systems are advanced enough to land the plane completely on auto as well as some even automatically respond to TCAS alerts to avoid nearby aircraft.

> it’s anything but “autopilot” in any layman sense

To be fair, an autopilot, in the traditional sense, just maintains a heading and an altitude.

Most commercial airline autopilots in use today could land the plane on auto if desired by the flight crew, so no, they don’t “just maintains a heading and an altitude”.

I think we all know that such technology exists. That is why I specifically said "in the traditional sense", to point out that I'm talking about what the word was invented for.

But you missed speed. “In the traditional sense”, that’s also handled.

Autopilot can refer to everything between a "wing leveler", and a full-on automated landing system. So no, even in aviation there is no standard definition of what autopilot does.

There's lots of autopilot systems that smash into shit, sailboats are one of them, you can put your sailboat on autopilot and it's going to smash into stuff.

Samething with an airliner, autopilot will not avoid another aircraft.

> Samething with an airliner, autopilot will not avoid another aircraft.

Wrong! There are autopilots which integrate TCAS into the autopilot (A380 among them).

Source: http://www.airbus.com/newsroom/press-releases/en/2009/08/eas...

They exist. But collision avoidance is far from a necessary retirement. E.g. my father in law's private single engine. Autopilot is basically cruise control, but you know...for a pilot

There’s Autothrottle, which is more like cruise control. Autopilot controls attitude aka steering.

Tesla Autopilot is a combination of both steering and throttle control.

True. The point remains though...collision avoidance is not a requirement for autopilot in the context of planes (or boats)

GP didn’t say “not a requirement”, the poster said “will not avoid”, which is factually incorrect.

TCAS in a plane is like Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) in a car. It's active 100% of the time in cars, not just when you're using super-cruise-control or other automation.

Of course TCAS is always enabled while in flight and is technically unrelated to autopilot. That doesn’t negate the point that many Airbus planes will automatically follow RAs when on autopilot if that is enabled by the flight crew.

Airliners have Air Traffic Control to route them, removing all but the rarest of edge cases for "smashing into stuff".

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