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Comment by SketchySeaBeast | Hacker News Reader

"Those using Smart Summon must remain responsible for the car and monitor it and its surroundings at all times. "

Does this come with an "oh god, stop!" button of some sort?

You have to keep pressing the button. As soon as you release the button or the car looses the connection to the phone, it stops.

I believe it's controlled by a sort of dead man's switch, i.e. you must continuously hold down a button for the car to move.

Literally - you stop holding it until after you are dead.

There must be additional safety features in the software to avoid collision with obstacles? Sonar sensors?

Yes, the 'hold the button' is a final liability layer on top of all of the onboard collision avoidance.

The newest version of Summon uses the cameras and I'm guessing the ultrasonic/radar to actually avoid obstacles, but is controlled by the app (you have to be holding the button down in the app)

They are one digital steering knob away from turning the whole thing into an 500 Hp RC car.

Like the car from Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), 22 years later.

Well, there's a cross-promotion I really hope one day happens. Tesla and a 20 year old movie! Yeah!

Er, the entire autopilot sensor and NN stack…

Witness the contradiction right in Tesla's own material:

> You can use this while being distracted by a fussy child[1].

> [1] You must be paying full attention to the car.

Look, if you don't like the car, you can just not buy it. Why piss on other people's experiences?

Because it's hip and edgy to hate on Elon/Tesla it seems.. Even though these types haven't even experienced driving the cars.

The experience has been eloquently put by Chamath Palihapitiya in this video:

https://youtu.be/lx6GJADrflk?t=255

Yes, the company is not perfect, but at least they are trying to accelerate the transition to renewables.

Does smart summon have a mechanism to avoid sleeping pets (or children) lying under the wheel base? Is that just the 'operator's responsibility?

Are you literally asking about how the feature performs if there is a child hiding under the car?

Maybe not children, but in my city it's not uncommon to find cats and other small animals sleeping under cars during winter.

Yes. Because if there aren't any undercarriage sensors this will eventually lead to deaths.

And what prevents you from climbing into your car and doing the same thing? Do you check under your car every time before you drive off? I know I certainly don't and never have.

You might notice legs sticking out from under the car, and your getting in is going to cause a fair bit of alerting noise - doors opening and closing, you moving around. Without even a motor to start, the Tesla will just start moving.

I wonder what happens if your phone freezes and you can't push the "oh god, stop!" button? Would you still be at fault?

It’s not an “oh god stop” button.

It’s a “continuing going” button. And if the connection to the car is interrupted even briefly then Summon deactivates.

This is how Summon has always worked. I’ve had my phone die while using it. The car stopped before the shut down spinner graphic even showed up.

I guess it's an "keep going" button that you have to hold down, but still, if you're phone freezes - is there a fail state we can be absolutely certain of between the phone and the car?

More than likely, as the driver holds the button on the phone, the phone sends a message with the command, at a decently fast rate. If the message stops coming in, doesn't come in within an acceptable interval, comes in out of order (possibly indicating a bad line of site), or signal strength is low. If any of this happens, the car exits summon and the driver has to re-enable it if they want to.

You hope the car relies on continuous signal from the phone to proceed. It's certainly possible that the phone freezes in a way that the "keep going" signal continues to be sent, but it's probably not the more likely failure mode. Definitely a good thing to be concerned about!

I may be just a bad developer but my first thought when I see or build a new feature for anything is "how could this go wrong, and who will it kill if it does?" Thankfully, I don't make self driving vehicles, so the second question is usually at worst a handful.

That sounds exactly how a good engineer would think...

It's not a bad mindset to have.

> we can be absolutely certain

Such a thing does not exist. You can only add more nines (e.g. heartbeats, check sensor jitter etc.). At some point you're more likely to be ran over by another car than the tesla slowly, patiently crushing you at 2km/h.

Of course that doesn't mean tesla is actually that reliable.

Heartbeats won't catch UI freezes, which I've seen on phones. Hopefully, those would result in a drop of the input signal rather than it locked in its prior state, though.

Heartbeat would hopefully also include a counter, so that a locked input signal would result in the vehicle rejecting the heartbeat (sees that each message is the same instead of incrementing the counter).

No guarantee that's how they implemented it, though.

They could mitigate such a failure mode by requiring a constant motion, like swiping a knob back and forth continuously

"keep going" button = Dead mans switch [1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch

I could easily imagine a failure mode where the UI stops responding to input (that is, doesn't pass the "touch end" event to the app) and the app continues to send the "keep going" signal to the car.

That could definitely happen, but it would have to happen at the same time the car's normal collision avoidance systems fail. Certainly possible to happen, but probably pretty unlikely.

Im picturing a tesla creeping through someones garage wall and into their living room as the owner dashes their phone against the driveway

Followed by the Allstate mayhem guy: "and with your cut-rate insurance, you could be paying for this yourself."

Or the Farmer's guy "It happened, and we covered it".

Tesla would undoubtedly want you to be. Who has more money to hire lawyers, you or Tesla?

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