Tesla Driver Banned from Highway After Being Caught in the Passenger Seat | Hacker News Reader

Tesla Driver Banned from Highway After Being Caught in the Passenger Seat

jalopnik.com

37 pointsourmandave33 comments

Please change link to the BBC story[0] this Jalopnik article links to, as this is riddled with errors.

"Note that this took place in England, so the left-hand side is the driver side"

No, in UK we drive on the left, the driver side is the right of the car.

He was not banned from the M1, but banned from driving for 18 months. ie he got his driving licence suspended.

Neither does one pay the Crown Prosecution (a clue to their role) Services (also CPS is Crown Prosecution Service singular) one's fine.

That's enough proof reading :)

[0] http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-43934504

That's just one of the reasons why some intermediate levels of autonomous driving are scary.

Drivers get a false sense of safety and stop paying attention. This case is just one extreme example, but I'm sure that many of the drivers that stay in their seat are just as absent as this guy.

Seems like a huge oversight that Tesla didn’t make autopilot conditional on sensing a person in the driver’s seat.

I've never been in a Tesla, but they have that prevention by detecting hands on the wheel. There are ways around that using e.g. oranges and sticking them into the steering wheel

I have a tesla and until recently I misunderstood how the hand detection works. It actually doesn’t detect grip, rather it sense slight resistance to its motors moving the wheel.

Also, there is another safeguard... it will warn you when you disconnect the drivers seatbelt.

I think the earnings are adequate. There are not much alternatives, as deactivating autopilot could potentially be more dangerous

I really don't understand why the only response to a driver being hands-off is a "reminder". It should immediately start decelerating and moving to the side of the road, coming to a complete stop if safe to do so, "limping" if not.

The M1 is a motorway. That means there's normally 3 lanes (but I think 4 here) and a hard shoulder, traffic travelling at 70 mph (if they're obeying the speed limit), and no stopping allowed.

I agree the reminder needs to be stronger, but it's not possible to safely slow or stop on English motorways.

Here's the road on Google maps: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.793955,-0.4119246,3a,75y,1...

I don't know which direction he was travelling.

From memory this part of the M1 is a 'smart motorway', which means that the hard shoulder is sometimes for breakdowns, but sometimes a running lane.

The speed limit on that stretch can vary depending on how heavy traffic is, as high as 70, but sometimes 60, 50, 40 or probably even lower.

> but it's not possible to safely slow or stop on English motorways.

Bullshit. Never broken down? It's perfectly possibly in the worst possible circumstances to safely pull over to the hard-shoulder.

Smart motorway? The left lane becomes hard shoulder with several miles of lane-closed warnings for other motorists.

Random dual-carriageway with no hard shoulder? Limp-home speed under control is far safe than inattentive driver at motorway speeds. Worst case, stopped in the left (or any!) lane is better than having the driver in the passenger seat.

Jeez!

Feel free to check back in when you pass the driving test.

He hasn't broken down though. That law exists because it's dangerous to stop on the hard shoulder.

Rule 264: You MUST NOT drive on the hard shoulder except in an emergency or if directed to do so by the police, traffic officers in uniform or by signs.

Rule 270: You MUST NOT stop on the carriageway, hard shoulder, slip road, central reservation or verge except in an emergency, or when told to do so by the police, traffic officers in uniform, an emergency sign or by flashing red light signals. Do not stop on the hard shoulder to either make or receive mobile phone calls.

does "Driver assumed not to be in control of vehicle" count as an emergency?

(I'd agree with the general point though that a system that can't handle driving alone is also going to have difficulties to stop safely, which in many cases is probably the harder problem)

"Safely" or "legally" slow down?

It seems that in cases like these there are two possibilities --either the driver is passed out/dead, so you definitely do want to stop as soon as possible, or the driver is a dangerous idiot, as it is in this case, so he also should be stopped quickly, and if he rack up another traffic violation in process, well, serves him right.

Practically speaking, of course, it is not obvious if Tesla is capable of safely navigating to a safe shoulder.

Looks like the legend of the Cruise Control RV[1] has become real.

[1]https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cruise-uncontrol/

A Tesla engineer who testified in the court case reiterated that autopilot is intended to assist a “fully attentive driver”

...which has a hard time being "fully attentive" when the car (mostly) drives itself. On the other hand, given the recent head-on-into-a-divider incident, I'd say using it has become worse than manually driving since you now have to correct it when it surprises you by suddenly steering into obstacles.

The Tesla in the recent accident you reference did not “suddenly steer into” the divider. As other owners have since shown, the car centered itself between what it interpreted as lane markers marking a lane but which were actually two outside markers diverging as the highway split.

Edit: while the end result of both “steered into” and “failed to avoid” an obstacle are the same, the method is very different. If a car suddenly steers into an obstacle, an attentive driver might not be able to react quickly enough to avoid it, whereas driving straight into something the car fails to see is very unlikely with an attentive driver.

You're splitting hairs on the definition of "suddenly". It only took a couple seconds for the Tesla to go off the main road's path and drive straight into the divider.

There's a video of someone reproducing this (and not crashing) on YouTube --- he managed to stop the car in time, but still came awfully close to the divider, and this is someone who was likely paying a lot more attention at the time than the typical autopilot user.

To have to fight the autopilot and correct the wrong decisions it sometimes makes is what makes it scarier than manual driving, since in the latter case you don't have to fight where the car goes --- unless the steering/suspension is defective or the road is very uneven, it will go in a straight line with no driver input.

> whereas driving straight into something the car fails to see is very unlikely with an attentive driver.

So then what is the point of Autopilot at all? I'm a big fan of Tesla, and I've wanted to try Autopilot for years, but after I saw that YouTube video of the driver needing to slam on the breaks to barely avoid hitting the divider, I thought "no thanks". If Autopilot dangerously lulls you into a false sense of security, I'd rather drive manually where I'm forced to be attentive.

What the hell is banned form the highway? They should simply take away his license.

Yea, seems like a pretty severe under-reaction to only ban him from that specific highway. And for only 18 months at that. An 18 month license suspension seems more reasonable.

He was indeed banned for 18 months - the article must have misinterpreted the story. Here's a BBC News article covering it http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-439345...

"The Queen's Highway" is an archaic a sounding but still valid way of referring to public roads ( and footpaths ) in the UK.

To be banned from driving on the highway is to be banished to private grounds.

And an investigation into tesla’s autopilot attention detection system

Following through to the associated BBC article, the language used there is “disqualified”, which, as I understand, is a license suspension. It’s often useful to drill down further to get closer to the actual source in cases like this to avoid reading too much into language that may be imprecise or used with journalistic license. In this case, I don’t know what technically it would mean to be “banned from the highway” other than to have one’s license suspended or revoked.

Not just imprecise, but outright incorrect: "He’s been banned from the M1 for eighteen months" (the M1 being a specific motorway). No, he's banned from driving.

He was actually banned from driving entirely, the jalopnik article is incorrect.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_consequence

A quick Google suggests that the disqualified in the original BBC story means he had his license suspended which makes a lot more sense.

The BBC article the original article links to[0] says he was disqualified for 18 months, which means he is banned for driving on any road for that time and has to reapply for his licence at the end of that period[1].

[0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-439345...

[1] https://www.gov.uk/driving-disqualifications

Why is it called "auto-pilot"? It should be "auto-COpilot"

Or even better, active lane control/assist, but of course Tesla is all about marketing to the hilt. If the “Gigafactory” were being honest it would be, “Panasonic with a Tesla sicker.”

Yeah, all those lies from Tesla about rewriting the code for the robots at the Gigafactory, and Grohmann shipping a big automated thing to the Gigafactory, they've confused everyone into thinking that all of the IP isn't Panasonic.

And the teardown guy who was raving about how awesome Tesla's part of the battery pack was, he must be in on it.

In perhaps a decade, lawmakers will mandate real time telemetry and remote emergency autopilot.

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