I thought the autopilot was always supposed to be combined with the human.
It’s not a self-driving car. It’s really an advanced cruise control.
It’s not a self-driving car. It’s really an advanced cruise control.
Why do we keep referring to something that we understand should require human supervision as "auto"? Stop the marketing buzzfeed and let's be real.
is there any point in saying that a hypothetical brain-dead, comatose bodybuilder is stronger than a starving man?
That would be great to live in the world of marketing people where everyone is so able to parse weasel words. That would solve the fake news problem overnight.
But that's not going to happen, because Tesla wants to deceive some people into believing that autopilot is "full self driving" so they will buy the car.
The point being that in the future the car _could_ get "full self-driving capability" via a software update. In contrast, a car that doesn't have the necessary hardware will never be fully self-driving even if we do develop the necessary software to accomplish that in the future.
Misleading examples of the genre:
My cell phone has the right hardware to cure cancer! I just don't have the right app.
The dumbest student in my class has a good enough brain to verify the Higgs-Boson particle. He just doesn't know how.
This mill and pile of steel can make the safest bridge in the world. It just hasn't been designed yet.
Your shopping cart full of food could be used to make a healthy, delicious meal. All you need is a recipe that no one knows.
Baby, I can satisfy your needs up and down as well as any other person. I just have to... well... learn how to satisfy your needs!
If we were well on the way to completing a cure for cancer that uses a certain type of cell phone hardware, maybe that first statement wouldn't sound so ridiculous.
a. When you buy a car why should you even care about that hw/sw distinction, and more importantly do you have the distinction in mind at all time, and are advertisement usually worded that way, stating that maybe the car could become self-driving one day (but without even stating the maybe explicitly, just using tricks)
b. It is extremely dubious that the car even have the necessary hardware to become a fully autonomous driving car. We will see, but I don't believe it much, and more importantly competitors and people familiar with the field also don't believe it much...
People clearly are misunderstanding what Tesla Autopilot is, but this is not, ultimately, their fault. This is Tesla's fault. The people operating the car can NOT be considered as perfect flawless robot. Yet Tesla's model consider them like that, and reject all responsibility, not even considering the responsibility that they made a terrible mistake in considering them like that. We need to act the same way as when similar cases happens for a pilot mistake in an Airplane: change the system so that the human will make less mistakes (especially if the human is required for safe operation, which is the case here). But Tesla is doing the complete opposite! By misleading buyers and drivers in the first place.
Tesla should be forced by the regulators to stop their shit: stop misleading and dangerous advertisement; stop their autosteer uncontrolled experiment.
I think I actually sort of disagree with your reasoning in precisely the opposite direction. Specifically, you state the following: "The people operating the car can NOT be considered as perfect flawless robot.".
I agree with that statement 100%. People are not perfect robots with perfect driving skills. Far from it. Automotive accidents are a major cause of death in the United States.
What I disagree with is your takeaway. Your takeaway is that Tesla knows that people aren't perfect drivers, so it is irresponsible to sell people a a device with a feature (autopilot) that people will use incorrectly. Well, if that isn't the definition of a car, I don't know what is. Cars in and of themselves are dangerous and it takes perhaps 5 minutes of city driving to see someone doing something irresponsible with their vehicle. This is why driving and the automotive industry is so heavily (and rightly) regulated.
The knowledge that people are not save drivers, to me, is a strong argument in favor of autopilot and similar features. I suspect, as many people do, that autopilot doesn't compare favorably to a professional driver who is actively engaged in the activity of driving. But this isn't how people drive. To me, the best argument in favor of autopilot is - and I realize this sounds sort of bad - that as imperfect as it may be, its use need only result in fewer accidents, injuries, and deaths, than the human drivers who are otherwise driving unassisted.
And if by some chance it turns out that more hardware was required after all they'll try to shoehorn the functionality into the available package. If only to save some $ but also not to look bad from a PR point of view. That that compromises safety is a given, you can't know today what exactly it will take to produce this feature until you've done so and there is a fair chance that it will in fact require more sensors, a faster CPU, more memory or a special purpose co-processor.
While the Tesla spokespeople are good at saying it's driver assist, their marketing people haven't heard - https://www.tesla.com/autopilot/. That page states "All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver." but as I noted above, we don't know how much of that safety should be attributed to the human. Tesla apparently knows when the driver's hands are on the steering wheel and I presume they can also tell when the car brakes, so they may have the data to separate those statistics. At a minimum, their engineers should be looking at every case where the autopilot is engaged but the human intervenes. They should probably also slam on the brakes (okay ... more gently) if the driver is alerted to take over but doesn't.
As an aside, just the name "Autopilot" implies autonomy.
This is perhaps a case of purposely confusing marketing. All vehicles have the hardware for full self-driving capability but not yet the software. The full self-driving is to be enabled later on through an over-the-air software update.
It's not merely purposely confusing. It's at best, not an outright lie only because they hope it's true.
People's eyes can detect individual photons, at much higher resolution and dynamic range than a typical camera.
The question of purposefulness is mostly irrelevant. It is their responsibility to avoid ambiguity in this domain because this could be dangerous. They are not doing it => they are putting people in danger. Now a posteriori if somebody manages to sue Tesla after a death a bad injury, maybe the purposefulness will be studied (but it will be hard to decide), but a priori it does not matter much as for the consequences of their in any case mislead attempts (even if it was only for an advertising harmless reason in the mind of the people who wrote it like that in the first place).
To finish, that they are carefully choosing their words to be technically true over and over, yet understood in an other way by most of the people, is at least distasteful. That they are doing it over and over through all existing channel makes it more and more probable that this is even on purpose, of course there is no proof but when we reach a certain point, we can be sufficiently convinced without a formal proof (hell even math proofs are rarely checked formally...)
This is Tesla's big lie.
In all their marketing, Tesla is comparing crash rates of their passenger cars to ALL vehicles, including trucks and motorcycles, which have higher fatality rates. Motorcycles are about 10x-50x more dangerous than cars.
Not only that, they aren't controlling for variances in driver demographics - younger and old people have higher accident rates than middle-aged Tesla drivers - as well as environmental factors - rural roads have higher fatalities than highways. Never-mind the obvious "accidents in cars with Autopilot" vs "accidents in cars with Autopilot on".
If you do a proper comparison, Tesla's Autopilot is probably 100x more fatal than other cars. It's a god-dammed death trap.
And remember, there are several extremely normal cars with ZERO fatalities: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/record-9-models-have-...
This is not a problem that will be solved without fundamental infrastructure changes in the roads themselves. Anyone that believes in self-driving cars should never be employed, since they don't know what they're talking about.
However, I don't see the evidence for the claim that "Tesla's Autopilot is probably 100x more fatal than other cars". The flip side of the complaint that Tesla hasn't released information to know how safe Autopilot really is, is that we don't know how unsafe it really is either. If this is merely to say "I think Autopilot is likely very unsafe" then just say so, rather than giving a faux numerical value.
As for the claim that self-driving cars can't work without "fundamental infrastructure changes" and everybody working on self-driving cars should be fired, I think you're talking way beyond your domain of expertise.
The truth is somewhere in between Tesla's marketing and your wildly absurd 100x more fatal claim, but its much closer to Tesla than you.
Tesla's statistics (i.e. real numbers, but context means everything) do involve a whole whack of unrelated comparisons (buses, 18-wheelers, motorcycles) that all server to skew the stats in various ways, we can ignore them claiming to be slightly safer than regular cars.
However comparing more like to like, IIHS numbers for passenger cars driver deaths on highways puts Tesla at 3.2x more likely than all other cars to be involved in a fatal crash (1 death/428,000,000 miles driven vs tesla's 1 death/133,000,000 miles driven).
Of course this too is an unfair comparison. A 133hp econobox/prius vs a sports car in terms of performance is considered equal in that comparison. If one was really interested in accuracy, a comparison of high power AWD cars in similar price ranges driven on the same roads by the same demographics would be needed.
So by even standards clearly biased against Tesla, they are no where near 100x more fatal than other cars. Tesla's own numbers claim autopilot reduces accidents, and supposedly NHS numbers back them up.
Its important and critical to not believe marketing hype and lazy statistics. If you want people to take you seriously, countering hype and bad stats with equal or worse hype and worse counter stats is not the way to do it.
I do believe "it's still safer than the average car" because there's not a big tank of explosive - I'm most curious to hear what caused such a massive fire in this crash. But you're talking about the autopilot and it's statistically incorrect to say it's safer than the average car. It's merely safer than a driver alone - this should be no surprise as you'll find that cars with backup cameras and alarms don't hit have as many accidents while in reverse as cars without them.
How does a Tesla get such good range? There's still a lot of energy in those batteries, and damaging them is far easier to cause a fire than leaking fuel --- the former can self-ignite just from dissipating its own energy into an internal short, while the latter needs an ignition source. In addition, the batteries are under the entire vehicle and thus more likely to be damaged; a fuel tank has a smaller area and is concentrated in one place.
It is extremely rare for fuel tanks to explode in a crash.
So far, experiential evidence with Tesla seems to be showing a lower than average risk of fires, though the breadth and nature of the battery leads to challenges in managing the fire itself.
All cases that I'm aware of proceeded at a slow enough pace to allow evacuation of the vehicle.
How often does a damaged and leaking fuel tank start a fire?
How often does a lithium battery that has been structurally compromised start a fire?
Fire safety is a major negative for lithium batteries. That much electrical energy in that form factor can only be so safe.