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Comment by jhall1468 | Hacker News Reader

Twice now people using absolutely stupid arguments to defend the driver here. He knew what Autopilot was and STILL took his hands off the wheel.

Autopilot is a name in the same way Amazon.com isn't a damn rain forest. It's a term taken from aviation, but "autopilot" in a plane and "Autopilot" in a Tesla aren't even remotely the same thing. And literally everyone understands that, yet any time this occurs we start blaming semantics.

This guy wasn't confused. He explicitly stated his car was having trouble with this section of the road and he trusted his car to handle it. It got him killed. The word "autopilot" did not get him killed.

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> STILL took his hands off the wheel

That's not clear. The car didn't detect his hands on the wheel, but that doesn't mean his hands weren't on it. Tesla's implementation of hand detection (like many of their other systems) is rather unreliable.

So he had his hands on the wheel and took no action for 6 seconds while driving straight to the barrier. Doesn't make it look any better for the driver TBH.

Well, the Tesla had the same amount of visibility and drove straight into the barrier. Victim blaming doesn't get Tesla off the hook.

Tesla is a fucking computer. The dude that took his hands off is a human. One of those has actual intelligence. You don't get to blame user error on the computer because someone died.

He. Took. His. Hands. Off. The. Wheel.

> took no action for 6 seconds while driving straight to the barrier.

Did it say the 6 seconds was immediately prior to the crash.

> 6 seconds while driving straight to the barrier

You mentioned "straight" -- do we know that?

Is it possible that the car steered toward the barrier during those 6 seconds, like in this video? https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/8a0jfh/autopil...

> Twice now people using absolutely stupid arguments to defend the driver here. He knew what Autopilot was and STILL took his hands off the wheel.

And you guys miss the forest for some shrubs. Yes, the driver was negligent. But do you not see the constant barrage about autonomy for Ap2, Tesla network, FSD, coast to coast drives constantly misleading people? Do you not see why the driver was negligent? Or are you too biased to blame Tesla and need to blame the driver?

Nobody is being mislead. This guy told his wife, specifically, that the Tesla was having issues with this barrier and still managed to drive the car straight into that exact barrier. This wasn't being mislead, this was pure unadulterated negligence. I'm not biased. While I like Tesla's I think their autonomy is absolutely the wrong tech and Waymo is on the correct path.

The response here has been absolute in its blaming of Tesla for its marketing. If Tesla really were the problem here we'd have vastly more fatal accidents as a result of people being mislead. We don't have that, entirely because every Tesla owner knows that this isn't autonomous driving.

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