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Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

The day that Musk decided to call his driver-assist system "Autopilot" he lost my respect as an engineer and my business as a consumer.

It's a great brand for a L4 - L5 system, not for Tesla's realistic capabilities as a L2 (1) - it sets a dangerous precedent in the consumer's mind.

Their tepid response to this incident outlining that the driver was not fully engaged so Tesla is not at fault, is EXACTLY how the system is used by the average consumer due to the way it's branded and marketed.

(1) https://www.caranddriver.com/features/path-to-autonomy-self-...

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The right brand for this should've been "Child driver". Because if a driving system needs to be controlled all the time it's very much like a child sitting on dad's laps and trying to drive the car.

I would say it’s pretty accurate if you are familiar with how plane autopilots actually work.

How many car drivers do you think are familiar with the details of how plane autopilots really work?

If Tesla had called this something like "lane-assist adaptive cruise control" I think your average Joe would have had much more realistic expectations around how the technology actually functions.

> If Tesla had called this something like "lane-assist adaptive cruise control" I think your average Joe would have had much more realistic expectations around how the technology actually functions.

Which would be foolish on their part, since it would equate their system with that found on other cars. The systems found on other cars are garbage to the point of being unusable. The system that Tesla has is in a different class.

If by "unusable" you mean that they actually work, and do not actively try to kill you, then yes, that's what they have.

Tesla's system is exactly the same thing, except that it is marketed as some fancy "autopilot" with "self-driving hardware" or whatever BS Musk is pushing to fanboys blinded by the whole "look, ma, no emissions" thing.

But of course Tesla can't call it that, and not something fancy like "autopilot" because otherwise what could they market? A glorified golf cart (granted, a pretty fast golf cart) that combines a luxury car price with a Yugo quality? That's not a winning combo.

Well, it's either a "glorified golf cart" or you're a short seller with a financial incentive to spread the nonsense in your post. I'm going to bet on the latter =)

Certainly your right. Alas, no financial involvement with Tesla either way.

Also, it is a very expensive golf cart, although less comfortable than some.

Is this true? I thought other luxury car brands are now shipping with self driving of similar capabilities to Tesla at this point.

Or maybe it's just the sensors being the same...

Not just luxury cars, even economy cars are shipping with adaptive cruise control, automatic lane-keeping, and automatic collision avoidance, and (at least the ones I've tried) work fantastically. On the highway you really don't have to do anything.

Luxury car brands ship with a limited feature set that reflects an appropriate conservatism. For example, they can detect cars in your blind spot and warn you, and they can put the brakes if someone short stops ahead of you. They have many of the required sensors but are waiting for the tech to mature

This is not true. BMW 5 and 7 series have adaptive cruise control and lane centering. I had a Tesla and now have a 5 series and the 5 series Lane centering is on par with Tesla’s autopilot. The only thing it lacks in the US is auto lane change (but it works in other countries).

Non-luxury cars (Subaru) are shipping with more than that (lane following, adaptive cruise control).

Mercedes' system is quite good, to the point that I got tired of waiting for my Model 3 reservation to come up and got a Mercedes plug-in hybrid instead. It's really close to Tesla's AP.

Yep. Drive pilot on Mercedes and The driver assistant plus packages on BMWs are just about as good as AP1 on Teslas

The system that Tesla has is in a different class

Indeed! The Tesla system appears to have a much higher probability of killing you! I don't see headlines about "$carbrand cruise control out of control, kills driver"

You don't see those headlines because short sellers aren't obsessed with those brands like they are with Tesla. Not because those brands are actually safer or don't have accidents.

"Tesla is, by a wide margin, the No. 1 short stock in terms of money at risk and exposure within the global auto industry"

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/teslas-roaring-start-to-20...

But what does it have to do with there being quite a few (better selling, cheaper) models with 0 fatalities?

Hell, cruise control in a Hyundai actually alarms and brakes if you try to drive into a stationary object. But they don't have Saint Elon at the helm...

> But what does it have to do with there being quite a few (better selling, cheaper) models with 0 fatalities?

Pretty sure there are no car models out there with 0 fatalities that have been released for more than a year.

How much are you getting paid to spread this FUD? I genuinely want to know. If the gig is sweet enough, I might want to get in on the racket =)

This breaks the HN guidelines and is a bannable offense regardless of how wrong some other commenter is. Please don't do this again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Alas, there were statistics posted here on HN in one of the Tesla accident threads [0]. And these were even for cars older than Tesla, cheaper than Tesla, and selling possibly order of magnitude more vehicles (quite possible for Hondas and Toyotas on the list) than Tesla.

Wouldn't it be sad if you had invested your life's savings in TSLA upon hearing Saint Musk preaching his BS, and now need to defend that investment against all facts?

(yeah, there is some sarcasm above, but your accusations of FUD and being paid for it strongly smell of spiked Kool-Aid)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16723782

> Alas, there were statistics posted here on HN in one of the Tesla accident threads

3 year period, 6 years ago. Zero citations, just a blank statement.

Not only that, it's not believable. The Honda Odyssey sells in the hundreds of thousands per year. Nevermind the other cars.

There are over 30,000 vehicle fatalities per year in the US, but those models that have been around for years and are extremely popular with consumers ... have had zero fatalities?

Let me guess, it's because they're not Teslas. Who's really drinking the Kool-Aid?

> your accusations of FUD and being paid for it strongly smell of spiked Kool-Aid

I'm happy to admit when I'm wrong, but I'm getting tired of the lying.

Yes, sure, everybody is lying, only Saint Elon tells the truth.

To go straight to the source, http://www.iihs.org/iihs/sr/statusreport/article/50/1/1

And we are talking about older cars that might not even have all the supposed safety features a "luxury" (not that it really were one) golf cart like Tesla supposedly has.

Sorry, but you really should lay off the Kool-Aid. Not to say that Tesla were a death trap, but it is fart from being a safest car on the road, no matter what electric fanboys might want to believe.

I chided the user who accused you of being a shill, but I need to chide you as well. You've been using HN for flamewars, which is really not what we want on HN. You've also crossed into personal attack in this comment, and in others previously. Would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site to heart when commenting here?

Sorry.

You don’t see the headlines because cruise control is an old technology. There were news about people misusing it when it became mainstream.

Almonst no one is familiar with how plane autopilots work. And in a plane you don't drive into a barrier or off the road if you don't pay attention for a few seconds like you can do in a car, unless you're flying very close to the ground. A plane can be said to be flying itself if it's just keeping it's course but to drive a car you need to pay more attention to the surroundings.

>Almonst no one is familiar with how plane autopilots work.

OK...

>And in a plane you don't drive into a barrier or off the road if you don't pay attention for a few seconds like you can do in a car, unless you're flying very close to the ground. A plane can be said to be flying itself if it's just keeping it's course but to drive a car you need to pay more attention to the surroundings.

I think you just proved your first point here.

Actually, no.

For most of the flight, pilots have enough time (and are often required) to go over paper checklists. With the Tesla Autopilot, taking your eyes for 5 second off the road gets you killed.

The skies and the seas are a lot different than the roads. They're mostly empty, while land is full of obstacles.

You can tell a drone autopilot to circle at 600ft and go to lunch. It will be there when you get back. The equivalent for a Tesla might be circling the block for an hour unattended.

The Tesla is far more advanced, but it achieves less, because the environment requires more.

Flight paths used while aircraft autopilots are engaged tend to have significantly fewer solid-object barriers.

That should be sufficient reason to not call it Autopilot.

We aren't flying here, it's a ground vehicle.

Unfortunately, most people attribute the word 'autopilot' with the way Otto performed in the movie Airplane!...

What % of Tesla owners have a pilot's license?

If Tesla's "autopilot" is turned into a martial arts master

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_vvI26NnwE

Airplane autopilot is designed to drive cars into solid barriers? That's news to me.

Or a boat autopilot.

To be fair this is mostly a problem with the general public's understanding of the term autopilot and not with the actual systems that have used that name before. Aeronautical autopilots would probably only be classified as level 1 or maybe level 2 when that term was first coined and used to describe them. Even now I am not sure if we would classify the average autopilots you find on a commercial airliner as being fully at level 4.

Modern aircraft autopilot systems are often used in an L1-L3 way by that scale, but are capable of at least L4.

The flight-management systems of modern commercial aircraft can, for example, receive a flight plan expressed as a set of waypoints and information about the destination airport, and then fly the plane along that route and conduct a fully automated landing at the destination.

I think the concepts of L1-L4 don't have much meaning in the absence of an environment where the machine is constantly reacting to the behavior of other actors and environmental hazards.

> this is mostly a problem with the general public's understanding of the term autopilot

In other words, it's the customer's fault. And it's arguable that Tesla benefited from this misunderstanding.

There is a difference between the customer being at fault in controlling the car and a customer being at fault for not learning the basics about features of the car. I don't think we can make the first a universal rule, but I wouldn't think it is controversial for the second to be universal.

I agree that customers should learn how their cars work.

But if we all engineered products based on how customers should behave, the human race would be extinct.

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