Help me understand. How does it lower the strain of driving if you have to remain 100% as attentive anyway? Or are you actually less than 100%.
Again the only significant reduction would seem to be in the mental load of paying attention.
Even if you're driving on a perfectly straight road, you're not just resting your hands on the steering wheel, you're constantly adjusting it to keep the car travelling straight. Most roads aren't even that straight to begin with, so even more constant adjustments are required.
Thus if you’re feeling a big relief, it’s because you’re paying less attention to the road. No?
Also there are long stretches of driving which are with no or few cars around, where the car doesn’t do much interaction with other traffic, and stop and go queues where the speed is very slow. In both those situations not much happens where you would need to intervene. It is less effort driving.
Citing the “long stretches with no cars” case really worries me that you are in fact paying less attention. It is not only traffic that you need to worry about hitting.
When using the cruise control I find I actually have to pay /more/ attention to the vehicle actively, as I need to be aware of when to cut off an external (otherwise) uncontrolled system. If I'm controlling acceleration it's handled by more unconscious portions of my mind.
I'm also a much more alert driver and far more aware of my present state of tiredness when I have to maintain interaction with the vehicle directly, including minute adjustments in speed with the accelerator.
This is not the benefit of autopilot because this task requires virtually no effort to begin with and you still need your hands on the wheel anyway. The real strain in driving is the mental strain, and that is why people turn it on.
The reality is that Telsa is using humans to iron out the bugs in their fully autonomous vehicles and legal clauses to get them out of the fact that they are killing people.
I have a car with all of those new safety features like warnings about cars to your side as you change lanes, warnings about cars driving past as you reverse out of a car park and so on. The reality is that you stop performing the roles that the car starts performing. You stop looking as much when you reverse out of a car park because you trust the beeping noise will occur if a car is coming along, and so on.
It is just human nature to start relying on something that works every time you use it. I don't really feel sorry for anyone driving a tesla though. They are the ones choosing to be Tesla's bug testers.
They're only doing that if it's an informed choice. I think Tesla's marketing is to blame, and think it's not an informed choice, so I do feel bad for the people getting in accidents (and the few dying) because of it.
It seems impossible to go from manual driving to fully autonomous without killing a lot of humans. The companies making these technologies know it. Everybody who buys one of these cars should be aware of it. I would never buy one. I don't even want the end product. I want control over my life. In a manual car, there is a bit of control because you can drive safely and so on. You are still susceptible to other drivers though. In an autonomous car, it can kill me on an empty road.
Maybe a) Tesla's tech isn't as good and b) Tesla's customers are more likely to be tech nerds / Tesla fans and so more likely to overestimate the capabilities of the car.
Exactly. If people were actually complying with autopilot’s TOS it wouldn’t actually be more relaxing. But then it wouldn’t be a compelling feature. You’d just be volunteering to help with fleet learning, which is a noble goal, but probably not something people would do en masse or pay thousands more for.
Tesla is implying it’s a lower mental load to get more people to use it.. while having TOS that holds you responsible if you pay less attention.
When I activate ACC I do not have to pay 100% attention to the distance between my car and the one in front of me and the speed. The car does all the work for me. I only have to keep steering and make sure that if the car in front of me stops in an emergency way that I start breaking myself because in certain cases it is too late for ACC to notice it.
In traffic jams (< 30 km/h) ACC takes away 90% of the work.
The difference is that my car got marketed with ACC as a driver assitance and not "self driving autopilot."
But that TOS thing is kind of weird. What is "not paying attention"? Looking at a sign while the car in front of you slams the breaks? Technically you are not paying attention to the car at that moment and breaking the TOS.
Yeah, you’re absolutely not supposed to do that (in a Tesla at least). You’re supposed to pay 100% as much attention to stuff you might hit as without autopilot. If you hit the car in front of you because autopilot motivated you to look more at other cars around you, Tesla will say you misused the feature.
Ergo, what is the benefit? I’m only hearing benefits that result from violating the TOS.