The percentage of drivers who think it's safe to nap is small but nonetheless frightening. What are these people thinking?
You have to actively disable safety measures in order to get the car to drive for any kind of extended period without applying force to the wheel.
Anyone caught doing this intentionally should be cited for impaired driving same as a DUI.
Then there are the people who legitimately fall asleep at the wheel and AutoPilot saves their lives, which is a different matter.
Rotating the wheel just a nudge with one finger is enough to let it know you’re there. You can also rotate the volume or cruise speed adjutant wheels —- sometimes I will tweak it up and down a click (meaning you end up with no change in setting) instead of rotating the wheel.
They're worse. People who drive drunk don't necessarily make a fully conscious decision to do that. Their judgement is already impaired.
But if they think that sleeping with autopilot on is reasonable, that's 100% on them. It's something they decided ahead of time.
The perceived definition is far from the real definition.
People hear things like "planes can basically land themselves" which is sort-of-true, and they think the planes can actually land themselves when the reality is that the pilots need to set up ILS properly, make sure the engine thrust is at a reasonable level, do the proper communication with Air Traffic Control, and only then (maybe) can the plane land itself.
Note: I'm not actually a pilot, so my details on landing with ILS might be a bit off.
That's why a relatively simple mechanism can autopilot a plane, but the same mechanism will crash a car in an instant.
(for instance, I couldn't help but think the "sex" bill clinton was grilled about could not have led to pregnancy)
How autopilot actually works in airplanes is unimportant, the public perception and Tesla's intentionally ambiguous play with the word is what counts.
It’s unfortunate that there’s a disconnect between what autopilot means colloquially vs what it actually does on a plane.
> The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.
It's the first video on their "Autopilot" page. There's absolutely no mention of features that don't exist yet in the video.
You have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page for any mention of full self-driving. I'd believe your claim if the video was under the headline of "Full Self-driving", but it isn't.
When you pull up the video in vimeo, the title is
"Autopilot Full Self-Driving Hardware (Neighborhood Short)"
...Flies the plane safely with zero input from the pilot (hands off the yoke) indefinitely? Lands the plane on its own [1]? I'm well aware that autopilot systems need input directions for desired altitude and air speed, but the semantic distinction people try to draw between "real" autopilot and Tesla's autopilot capabilities have never made sense to me.
The goal of Tesla's Autopilot is to take you from your garage to your parking space with zero input. Therefore it's exactly the same as a plane's which takes you from runway to runway.
Just because it's a work-in-progress doesn't mean it's named wrong.
Tesla autopilot is theoretically capable of indefinite highway driving and emergency 'landings' (on the shoulder).
Pretty close in actual capability. The difference is the environment.
It is very possible to hit people in the air if you aren’t paying attention
>Lands the plane on its own
Autolanding is not autopilot, it’s autolanding.
Typical airliner autopilot flies along a list of 3D waypoints and manages airspeed to avoid falling from the sky or overstressing the airframe. It's a fairly trivial system since it does not have to find its way around a complex, constantly changing environment like a car does. It will happily fly into mountains, other airplanes or dangerous environments like thunderstorms.
All decision-making depends on pilots. Autopilot itself is nothing more than a simple cruise control that relieves pilots from things like manually maintaining constant altitude over six hours on a transatlantic flight. Any hobbist with a Raspberry PI can built a similar GPS-based waypoint following and speed scheduling for a car, but it's useless for road traffic, because roads are not straight, long empty stretches that can be navigated by driving from one waypoint directly to another waypoint 100 miles away.
Car autopilot must be able to make decisions (follow the road, react to obstacles) to be useful, and that makes it fundamentally more complex than any existing airliner autopilot.
So while the technology may be the same, calling it "autopilot" is not; in the one case it can run on auto, in the other it can not.