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Comment by helloindia | Hacker News Reader

A more nuanced dissection of whose fault it was or could be[0].

"Huang was apparently fooled many times by Autopilot. In fact, he reportedly experienced the exact same system failure that led to his fatal crash at the same location on at least seven occasions." ...........

"Huang knew that Autopilot could not be relied on in the circumstances where he was commuting along the 101 freeway in Mountainview, California. Yet he persisted in both using the system and ignoring the alerts that the system apparently gave him to put his hands on the wheel and take full control." ..........

"Elon Musk and Tesla should be held to account for the way they have rolled out and promoted Autopilot. But users like Walter Huang are probably not the poster children for this accountability."

[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2019/05/01/the-pr...

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Or maybe, as I mentioned in a previous comment [1]:

   - Mr. Wuang knew about the bad spot
   - A Tesla OTA solved the issue for that particular spot
   - He got used to the car behaving properly in that location
   - A Tesla OTA introduces a regression for that particular spot
   - Mr. Wuang dies.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17141784

Yep, or it didn't happen all the time and he perceived it was fixed after reporting it. We do not have all the facts.

> Yet he persisted in both using the system and ignoring the alerts that the system apparently gave him to put his hands on the wheel and take full control.

"Hands not detected" does NOT mean "hands not on wheel".

Tesla relies on driver input (torque) to "detect" hands, which means you could have both hands on the wheel but sill get the warning to place your hands on the wheel.

It seems like most people are assuming it's some kind of magical capacitive system that can detect the slightest hint of contact, which couldn't be further from the truth.

I agree, but I'm also not sure that it is a particularly important distinction. He was repeatedly warned that attention is required with this system and yet clearly was not paying attention at the time of the crash.

> clearly was not paying attention at the time of the crash.

This is the fundamental point that I'm disagreeing with though. As far as I know, Tesla has a very crude system for determining driver attentiveness. They rely ONLY on steering wheel torque, which is an extremely unreliable indicator. They don't do any sort of head or eye tracking. So when Tesla claims a driver wasn't paying attention, all it really means is "we're not sure if their hands were on the wheel".

My car uses the same method, and I constantly get warnings to place my hands on the wheel even when they're both already on the wheel. It's possible to have your hands on the wheel without applying any torque, and that's where this system fails.

When a driver unintentionally crashes into a solid object for no particular reason, noone needs vast knowledge to realize that the driver wasn't paying attention at that time.

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