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Comment by leesec | Hacker News Reader

Road trips are a joy with autopilot.

Really? Autopilot seems like it would make for a pretty boring road trip. You need to pay attention to the road but you’re not driving.

The pleasure of driving for me does not come from making thousands of micro-adjustments constantly, in fact that's what makes a road trip exhausting.

Autopilot reduces the stress and decision fatigue.

I don't get this. Isn't it nightmarish since no one has any idea when it will veer into some random object?

I'm not closing my eyes and going to sleep. I'm paying attention I just don't have to gas/break/adjust steering wheel every single second.

MIT just did a study and found the warnings and driver vigilance in Autopilot was sufficient enough to maintain safe driving.

https://hcai.mit.edu/human-side-of-tesla-autopilot/

Not at all. The only place they ever "veer" is when the lane markings are lacking, which isn't very common. It is especially uncommon on the long, boring stretches of interstate that seem to drag on forever when driving.

It's extremely common to have worn out lane markings in the snow belt. New paint only lasts one winter before the plows scrape off most of the reflective beads. Rain driving in the dark then becomes a guessing game no machine can handle.

"when"?

It'd only be nightmarish if the driver (and passengers) have no faith in autopilot.

.. in which case, I doubt the road-trip would be driven entirely on autopilot.

Users of autopilot probably have faith in it, although in some cases (like the guy running into the concrete divider) this caused their deaths.

I guess your mindset is different to the grandparent poster's mindset. He thinks autopilot is as reliable as a human chauffeur, to you (and probably to me too) it'd be like having a driver which you can't communicate with and might suffer epilepsy and fatally yank the wheel at any point, so you have to keep paying attention to his driving.

Interestingly this mindset difference also exists in Tesla, the marketing department promotes 1 version, and the legal department says the other...

I hear a lot of this from people who've never tried Autopilot, and yet everyone who has tried Autopilot loves it.

My best guess here is that "babysitting an epileptic chauffeur" may sound scary, but in practice it's a lot less stressful than actually driving. Not needing to focus on lane-keeping and maintaining safe following distance is probably a lot nicer than you might expect – you still have to pay attention to lane-keeping, but that might even be easier when you're not forced to focus on the mechanical part of it.

> everyone who has tried Autopilot loves it.

I would like to bet the guy who hit the concrete barrier would disagree... sadly he's dead.

It doesn’t do that.

And your still driving - you just don’t micromanage trivia (which turns out is pretty exhausting). That increases your cognitive capacity to observe the road ahead at a higher level. You now see things you could have missed when focusing on low-level steering, especially when tired. You notice a weirdly behaving card ahead of time and take over. You see the road is getting a bit more complicated, or congested, ahead and take over. Traffic too heavy for Tesla’s cautions lane changes or overtaking, you take over.

For my last roadtrip I got a rental car with Subaru's EyeSight adaptive cruise control and lane-keeping. After a day of driving with that I was noticeably less fatigued, and could afford to actually look out at the scenery every now and then.

Definitely worth it, I imagine Tesla's system is even better.

Actually not. Subaru's EyeSight is currently the best system available. Especially in local traffic on detecting bicycles, kids and all those things even at night time.

Nobody else comes close.

Depends on your definition of Best. Consumer Reports called GM's SuperCruise "best".

Actually yes. Try going hands free with Eyesight for a few minutes, it is significantly less smooth and stable than Autopilot.

Actually don't, you might die.

I found fatigue mostly depends on the other traffic. In my 2003 Volvo S60 I can do 800km [500mi] of Autobahn with virtually zero fatigue (basic cruise control and better seats than in my living room) -- with little traffic and mostly cruising at 110km/h [70mph] (or faster if traffic demands it). Though there is not much difference to 140km/h [87mph] besides 20% better fuel economy.

Now, same car, same weather, but 50km (read: fifty) of heavy stop&go on a three lane Autobahn -> Kill me, please.

I'm looking forward to my next car with adaptive CC, that should eat a lot of the stop&go stress (also on my daily commute). But - to get to the point - I don't think that Autopilot will make things much better than that, since I still need to be aware of traffic and anticipate potential stupidities committed by other drivers -- and that's what's causing most of the fatigue for me.

I'm sure traffic makes a huge difference. I drive very rarely (once every 2-3 months?) so every time it's pretty exhausting.

That makes sense, haven't thought of it that way.

It also makes things more comfortable - you can stretch and change position on long drives. In three hours of motorway driving on Sunday, I was only driving for about three minutes - the rest was Autopilot.

Many other manufacturers have the same functionality that tesla calls autopilot. It is called "lane assist". The car steers itself and keeps inside a lane. Tesla's might be 10%-20% "better" in terms of which roads it will stay on, but since a human needs to keep attention on it anyways, it is basically same functionality.

Did you actually drive with it or are you just armchair experting?

I don’t need SSD, my hard drive is fast enough. Qi charging is pointless, I just plug it in. 4K HDR is waste of bits. It’s just another lane assist.

It’s upgrading, and then going back, that makes it apparent.

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