This is for the better, given the number of collisions occurring with Autopilot engaged or recently engaged. It's too bad the Adaptive Cruise and Autonomous Braking can't be enabled without the Lane Assist.
Adaptive Cruise in a Camry Hybrid is a serious benefit and a life-changing amenity. I'm no longer willing to drive cars that don't have Adaptive Cruise.
I think this is very misguided. Tesla owners aren't suicidal or some big idiot collective. They understand Autopilot's practical intricacies (from experience) better than any other group. They continue to use it because they know it massively reduces driving fatigue.
> It's too bad the Adaptive Cruise and Autonomous Braking can't be enabled without the Lane Assist.
ACC and emergency braking work just fine without Lane Assist! One pull on the stalk for ACC; two for Autopilot.
https://twitter.com/zedd/status/1002244316087992320
This person attributes AP to saving his life when he fell asleep at the wheel. But AP is not meant to be some kind of fail-safe for impaired driving. Had he crashed, wouldn't Tesla blame the driver, as they have in every other AP crash?
I don't see a contradiction in your questions. Yes, Autopilot appeared to save this person from injury or death. Yes, Tesla would blame him if it hadn't. And yes, they'd be justified in doing so, because it would be his own fault for falling asleep at the wheel. Autopilot, like emergency braking, can mitigate a bad situation. But should it fail, it doesn't relieve you of responsibility for getting yourself into that situation in the first place.
> but all things equal, a driver who does this will fare better with Autopilot than without it.
There's no science or evidence for this yet. Tesla has had the opportunity to release data but has declined, to the point where the NHTSA had to disown a misleading stat that Tesla kept citing in the wake of recent crashes:
https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-safety-statistic...
It's not that I have an inherent distrust of automation (being a computer engineer myself), so I don't have a problem with AutoPilot in theory, and I can accept that AP may be better than its current peers. But what Tesla has presented, in lieu of studies and statistics, is a non-falsifiable claim: that AutoPilot increases safety.
We already have well-known examples of AP actively steering off the roads, because of ambiguous road paint. But besides those (perhaps relatively few) incidents in which AP arguably caused the crash, we have many instances where AP didn't prevent what seems like easily preventable crashes. Such as the Utah driver who drove 60mph into a parked fire truck. In those cases, I would agree that the driver was an idiot, but the question for overall safety is: does AP result in a net increase of accidents because drivers are too over-confident?
In the tweet that I mentioned, that's a guy who clearly has the means to call an Uber. Would he have attempted to drive himself if he didn't have Autopilot? Did AP make it easier for him to doze off? I've had a few instances of highway sleepy driving -- thankfully, the feedback from rumble strips or the rough shoulder was enough to jolt adrenaline in me, and get me to pull off at the next rest stop. AP's advantage seems to be that it will just stay within the lane as you sleep. But there's really no evidence that results in a net increase in safety, if Autopilot emboldens drivers who would've otherwise not tried to drive.
The main difference between AP and other safety measures is that, based on Tesla's defenses so far, there is literally no situation in which AP should be assigned blame, because it's ultimately the driver's responsibility. Whereas when an airbag fails to deploy, or just randomly blows up in a driver's face, there can be agreement that the airbag "failed".
While we don't have a statistically significant data set to pine over, I do think we have evidence that "a driver who [falls asleep at the wheel or texts and drives] will fare better with Autopilot than without it." I use Autopilot on my way to and from work each day. It's pretty typical for AP to handle a ten minute stretch with no input from me. For any given minute of driving, there is a very high probability that I haven't given any input to the car. It follows then, that for any given minute on Autopilot during that stretch, I'd probably be fine if I were not paying attention. This stands in contrast to the alternative: if I gave no input to the car for an arbitrary minute without Autopilot, there is virtually no chance that I wouldn't cause an accident. This is where my intuition derives from.
> The main difference between AP and other safety measures is that, based on Tesla's defenses so far, there is literally no situation in which AP should be assigned blame, because it's ultimately the driver's responsibility. Whereas when an airbag fails to deploy, or just randomly blows up in a driver's face, there can be agreement that the airbag "failed".
I understand why this sounds like passing the buck, but I think this is the right policy (for the driving public's sake). People need to be responsible for how they use any L1 or L2 system, period. Again, I would liken it to Automatic Emergency Braking. There is no situation where a failure of AEB to brake would render a driver not responsible for an accident. The system adds a layer of protection, but it does not make any guarantees. I suppose if AEB or Autopilot acted in such a way that it overrode driver input -- say AEB braked hard on the highway and ignored the gas pedal input -- then you could blame AEB. And I'd say the same for Autopilot -- if it e.g. veered toward an object and overpowered a human trying to avoid it, I would blame AP for that. But as far as failures of logic, I think the driver owns that entirely until L3 systems are available.
> the question for overall safety is: does AP result in a net increase of accidents because drivers are too over-confident?
This is a good question, and I hope Tesla releases its data as promised so we can put it to rest. My own experience is that Autopilot makes it much easier for me to pay attention to my surroundings because I don't get fatigued and I'm less stressed than when I'm driving manually. I recognize that my experiences could be atypical, but having seen hundreds of similar sentiments on TMC over the years (and very few counters), it would take data to convince me otherwise.
I read r/teslamotors pretty frequently. It seems a common theme in the threads about AP-related crashes for users to argue whether the road conditions were right for AP. Seems like there's a lot of assumptions and confusion about what AP can actually do, and ambiguity about computational features can lead to problems of its own. Hopefully the safety stats that Musk said they would start publishing will give us a better place to evaluate things.