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Comment by dubyah | Hacker News Reader

The problem with the no hands-on-steering-wheel detection claim Tesla keeps bringing up is that it's quite fallible and not as conclusive as they insist. A light touch(like one might expect while driving a freeway with cruise control and lane-keep assist, for example) may not provide enough torque for the sensor to detect it. Plenty of people have complained about it in the past.

https://forums.teslarati.com/threads/hands-on-the-wheel-dete...

https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/hands-on-steering-wh...

https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/tesla-autopilot-not-se...

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> The problem with the no hands-on-steering-wheel detection claim Tesla keeps bringing up

I don't get why it matters. Why is Tesla's responsibility greater or lesser based on the position of the driver's hands? The driver could have had one hand on the wheel while mousing around on a laptop with the other. Or he could have been intensely focused on the road ahead with his hands resting on his legs, inches away from the wheel.

I'm neither defending nor attacking Tesla here, because I don't think I have sufficient information to have an opinion either way. But I'm pretty sure that learning the answer to this particular question wouldn't have any bearing on any opinion I might eventually form.

It's a dead man switch. If the dead man switch is not working it's a system malfunction.

That might be technically true, but it's irrelevant. Nowhere does Tesla ever describe it to the customer as a dead man switch.

And it wasn't malfunctioning. He wasn't a dead man. He was very much alive, understood the warnings, understood that the car expected him to keep his hands on the wheel and keep paying attention to the road. He understood the warnings so well that he was capable of avoiding them with such proficiency that he did not receive one for 15 minutes.

It's driver responsibility to drive the car and pay attention to the road.

By representing the car to come with an auto driver, they implicitly take on that responsibility.

By naming it "Autopilot" they take on that responsibility.

Imagine a driver driving down a parkway at speed and thinking "I'm on a parkway, so I should shift the car into Park."

That's how dumb that argument is.

If a driver ignores the requirements of their driver license AND the vehicle's clearly worded warnings, then the driver is entirely responsible. Claiming that the driver is not at fault because they interpreted the word "autopilot" to mean "I can disregard my responsibility as a driver and ignore the vehicle's very clear warnings" is absurd.

Any idea why torque is used, as opposed to reliable methods like capacitive? I think you're absolutely right about torque being minimal on straight ways.

One guess is that capacitive would be problematic if the driver is wearing gloves.

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