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Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

Why doesn't Tesla have an eye tracking camera that ensures the driver is watching the road? It would cost hundreds of dollars at most. Basic eye tracking is a solved problem and would ensure drivers are actually paying attention.

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It's definitely not a solved problem in the real world. Eye tracking in the lab works great but in the real world there are lots of challenges. Low light levels at night, drivers wearing sunglasses, drivers squinting etc.

That's solvable: if it can't see your eyes, then you can't use Autopilot. That should still let the majority of people use Autopilot the majority of the time.

I want to wear sunglasses.

Further than that, if you're driving west at sundown it's much safer to be wearing sunglasses than squinting.

Then you can't use Autopilot. Where's the confusion.

Making sure you're at least facing in the correct direction (chin up, facing forward) would help even if sunglasses prevented locating the actual gaze target.

If you still want to use your phone, it'll be easier for the cops to catch you doing it.

Your desire to wear sunglasses is a lower priority than the health of the people you share the road with.

So being blinded with autopilot on is safer than being able to see, but allowing the possibility of inattentiveness? That's ridiculous.

No. Your assumption that I'm saying that is, frankly, ridiculous. If you're being blinded, put the sunglasses on and turn Autopilot off. Of course, I doubt that eye-tracking works particularly well if you're squinting and averting your eyes anyway: the act of being attentive precludes being blinded in itself.

Why would the attentiveness monitor be tied to autopilot? Some modern cars without autopilot already have attentiveness monitors. It's ridiculous to require people not to wear sunglasses. Just for the sake of attentiveness monitors. Anybody driving east to west in the afternoon or west to east in the morning wouldn't be able to use it at all.

GM's Super Cruise has eye tracking [0]

[0]: http://www.cadillac.com/world-of-cadillac/innovation/super-c...

GM's Super Cruise uses an infrared camera so it can effectively see through most sunglasses. Some glasses do block infrared light too so the Super Cruise system doesn't work in all cases [1].

[1] https://eu.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/columnists/henry-pa...

I believe Mercedes lane assist does this with via the steering wheel. They test whether you are actively driving. As soon as you take your hands off or don't move enough the system beeps after a few seconds to put your hands back.

Tesla does that as well but it's a poor proxy for determing if the user is paying attention. It would be much better to check if the driver is actually watching the road. The user that crashed into this firetruck was not watching the road which the Tesla could have easily recognized through eye tracking.

Tesla does it after three minutes. I can't think of any good reason an attentive driver would need their hands free for that long. It only takes a person thinking they can get away with checking their phone, or eating food, or looking around the footwells to result in deaths and, crucially, that person doesn't have to be the fatality.

It is more complex than that. I analyses your corrections and compares it to its own data of the road. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A66zgJ4Oj8o

The Model 3 does have a driver-facing camera, but would require a software update to enable eye tracking, assuming the resolution and angle are good enough.

Someone asked this and Musk replied that it wasn’t effective. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/996102919811350528?s=21

I call bullshit, eye tracking works fine. If more information is required to determine if a driver is paying attention there are many other factors that can be added. For example Mercedes-Benz Attention Assist works fine and doesn't use eye tracking.

> "Eyetracking rejected for being ineffective, not for cost."

Simply saying that it is ineffective is not an answer at all. Anyone with access to YouTube can see eye trackers working remarkably well.

Maybe he simply wasn't willing to disable Autopilot for users that could not be eye tracked accurately (glasses, etc), but that seems like a very bad reason. They should start with the ideal cases and add support for wearing glasses or low light over time.

It's not as complicated a problem. Turning off the feature when hands aren't at the wheel, or not calling it "Autopilot" so people don't assume it's smarter than it is, IMO, should be enough.

Should we be allowed to call autopilot autopilot?

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