Anyone here actually think Elon uses autopilot?
Its got a couple scenarios in my experience where it shines - chiefly long drives on clean clear interstates and stop-and-go traffic - but its got suicidal tendencies in others.
Its not unlike being driven by a tipsy friend or a teenager - there are enough indications that it can't be trusted.
Unlike those situations, its easy enough to take control back once you realize that.
Marketing it above its capabilities surely isn't helping, though.
This is what Elon's personality cult, and the psychological need to defend a large purchase, does to people. You are making excuses for a clearly defective product that wouldn't be acceptable if this was anyone other than Tesla.
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough about the two use cases I cited, but the car performs excellently (and entirely soberly) in those situations.
It's a tool that has significant utility and significant footguns. I'm not advocating whether you should use it or not - I'm sharing my experience with where the system delivers and hoping users are looking past the hyperbolic marketing.
Its abundantly clear (even to us in the Elon personality cult?) that Tesla and Elon have done themselves a disservice with how they handled this tragedy.
Autopilot is a wonderful system when used properly. It's lousy when it's abused. Applied responsibly, it is very obviously a safety improvement to anybody who uses it. Used as a substitute for human attention, it's very easy to see how it can turn tragic (as we are discussing/witnessing).
The way Elon talks about these situations frustrates me to no end. The data are on his side, yet he continually resorts to half-truths because they are simple to present. Pretty obnoxious for a dude who is on a tear about media dishonesty. But: that is a knock against Elon, not against Autopilot. At the end of the day, I believe Autopilot does much more good than bad, and results in in more people staying alive than would without it. I'm glad we have NTSB and NHTSA to keep Tesla honest, and I'm also glad that they are more thorough and tempered than a lot of folks here on HN would like them to be.
Parent clearly outlines the limitations, as well as where AP works well, and you tear into them with "fanboi" trolls? Given that you know nothing more of the parent's psychological state than a name on a screen, you might try dialing it back a bit.
and then one day you get an update that breaks your mental model you have been familiarized with, your Tesla crashes and you die.
You're giving too much credit to the average driver. Just because they're richer than the average driver doesn't mean they're going to be more discerning about the car's advanced features. Addtionally, Tesla still advertising Autopilot as "Full Self-Driving Hardware" is borderline negligence.
a) Tesla making enough money to make Space X work
b) Being able to establish a colony on Mars, using Space X
I think he's super honest about the Mars stuff. I also think he's being super deceptive about the Tesla stuff. Is that ethical or not? I don't know. From his larger point of view (risk of earth annihilation vs a bunch of rich americans dying in Tesla failures)... who knows.
If he is super deceptive about X, then there is really no reason to believe, or incredible naive to believe that he is super honest about Y for all Y