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Comment by SeeDave | Hacker News Reader

I don't mind marketing puffery in the sense of "world's most innovative [X] ever," but I agree with your view that "Full Self-Driving Hardware" is dangerous, and branding the integrated system as AutoPilot™ only amplifies this.

And I mean this without any gratuitous negativity about Tesla or Elon... but branding lane-following/collision warning/adaptive-cruise control as "AutoPilot" is far more dangerous and has far more serious real-world consequences than Apple calling their backup application "Time Machine."

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Here's how people interpret his statements:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vNH-Q7fu7A

Yes, I'd say there's a problem.

Musk is following the tried and true tradition "Move fast and break things". Only in this case "things" include people's lives :/

It is even worse since they have a good product without the hyped autopilot, when I read about Musk wanting to use only cameras then I was sure Tesla self driving is not safe.

The initial cruise control software was an afterthought, that ran on spare cpu cycles taken from the door lock control system.

Humans drive only with cameras. Vision provides all the information needed to drive a car safely. Maybe the software isn't there, yet, but it will be.

Humans drive with vision + the experience and intuition, so we have an intuition about the laws of physics, we know what the other cars and the pedestrians are, that they have goals and they are similar to us, with imperfect visual information we can interpolate and get a full picture fo the information, an AI would need to be intelligent as a human to be able to drive as good as a human with only 2 cameras. Having radars, maps and other extra input for the self driving car will compensate for the missing intelligence, and a good radar and some deterministic software should prevent hitting static objects.

In my country drivers are tested for eye sight, hearing,reflexes before getting the green light for the driving school(so sound is also important) and self driving cars should have mandatory tests to pass after each small update, at least to not allow DIY cars made by students to just test on public roads.

No we don't. Humans use sound for a lot of context clues (like "oh there's a motorcycle in my blind spot") and use their sense of orientation to gauge how hard they're turning (among other things).

Hopefully self-driving cars use a lot more than just cameras, too.

Agreed. I rented a Model S a few weeks ago and drove it around southern California. The autopilot was a nice gimmick, but I really only used it in the stop-and-go traffic jams SoCal is famous for. There it was a godsend.

The rest of the time, the pleasure of driving such a responsive machine made the autopilot superfluous.

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