Hacker News Reader

Comment by molmalo | Hacker News Reader

Honest question, Can somebody explain me the use case for this feature? I don't get it.

I mean, if the summoned car came to me in a totally autonomous way, it would be useful in very large parking lots, like an airport, campus, etc... Or I could call it while still leaving my apartment/office, and the car would be there by the time I get to the door. But if I need to have the car in my line of sight, just standing still while watching it and holding the button, with me being aware and responsible of the car not bumping into any obstacle, then it means I'm pretty close to the vehicle, so why not just walk the very short distance to it?

View on HN

Minority rule: if a minority of disabled people can get around by summoning their car, then - all costs being equal - their families will always buy a Tesla. Apple's ecosystem also benefits from the iPhone having the best accessibility features, thus drawing in all developers working on accessibility software.

https://nassimtaleb.org/tag/minority-rule/

Why are people stating this ? You can not do basic things like zooming the page for a preset factor in Safari.

That's what you think is important.

Blind people for example don't care about zoom factors, but they care very much about the fact that they can completely control and use their iPhone using text-to-speech and certain gestures.

Exactly, I bought an android partilly for accessability features. Apples are better intergrted, but much more limited.

I've had a user complain the lack of a physical button on the new iphones making everything a guessing game for the seeing impaired now.

That happened with my Macbook Pro w/ touchbar.

There was an issue with the graphics, and it initially booted into an assistive mode for first-time setup, and I wondered how a visually-impaired person would use the touchbar.

Do you mean that this feature is marketed to disabled people, as a disability aid?

They won't have to. Disabled people and those caring for grandparents prone to falling will seek out a Tesla with summoning if it helps them get around or can drive them to the hospital.

My brother just had serious back surgery. We've been dropping him at the store entrance, and picking him up. He can sit fine, but walking is difficult. I can see this being a benefit for certain people with injuries or disabilities.

If it was major surgery, that's the only way they should ride in a car for now, as a passenger.

You still need to be in sight of the vehicle, so the car would still have to be located near the store entrance. And as this article shows, you have to have a good, unobstructed view of the car in order to not accidentally run into something.

And it doesn’t seem like you can leave your car at the entrance, which also means you are only saving yourself half of the round-trip.

You can tap a location on the map and have the car drive their... and it seems to generally respect the rules of driving in a parking lot (going up and down the lanes instead of through parking lots) - I wonder if you could get it to park itself...

If not that capability will probably be added in the near future.

Are there no dedicated parking spots for the disabled in the US?

If it's anything like the UK, plenty of non-disabled people use them regardless - because they drive a massive Q7 which doesn't fit into regular spaces, or just because they're closer to the store/school/whatever.

Pretty dispicable if you ask me, but there does seem to be a large segment of the population that just don't give a shit.

There are, and they're usually the closest spots, but picking someone up and dropping them off right in front of the store is usually closer. (Oftentimes, doing pickups/dropoffs there is explicitly disallowed, because stopped cars obstruct the view of pedestrians for drivers of moving cars.)

Most people won't use it everyday. However, maybe it's raining outside and you don't have an umbrella. Or you got a shopping trolley full of stuff. Or the spot is so tight, it's easier to get into your car after it pulls out.

I'm replying to this comment only because there are numerous other comments talking about the use of this for people who are in some way physically impaired.

What's the state of designated parking spaces for such people? Just yesterday I crossed the parking lot at my local supermarket and passed a dozen extra-wide spaces right by the door, all marked with the generic symbol, painted in blue, and clearly marked for use by such patrons only. As it was most of them were empty, but that's good; every shopper with that need, currently at that store, had been able to park right by the door.

A short way beyond those spaces, are spaces marked for those shepherding children, which is less vital but still helpful.

So what's the state of this facility - extra wide designated spaces right by the door specifically intended for the people who need it - across the US and other countries? If it's being done, then this "smart summon" seems more of a gimmick. If it's not being done, it feels a little like an unnecessarily high-tech solution to a low-tech problem.

In the U.S., there are laws that determine how many such spaces must be designated in parking lots, based on the size of the parking lot and/or venue.

I have a friend who is physically handicapped and very much needs to park in these spaces. The only problem he has ever told me about is finding a spot to park at work. Apparently it's somewhat common where he lives for middle-aged women (his description) to game the system and obtain handicapped placards. He says he knows they are not really handicapped because he sees them walking briskly through long corridors at work without distress. Sometimes too young people will borrow an older relative's placard to park in those spaces.

Incidentally, he would never be able to afford a Tesla. He buys three- to five-year-old Hondas and drives them till they can't be fixed.

While I can't comment on the exact instances of people using handicapped placards, I would like to bring up the existence of invisible disabilities [1]. These are disabilities that are not immediately obvious to onlookers. For example, people with xeroderma pigmentosum[2] have a very severe sensitivity to sunlight (sunburn within a few minutes, vastly increased risk of skin cancer). A handicap space would be needed to minimize time spent in the sun, but no issue would be present walking inside a building.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_disability

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeroderma_pigmentosum

Also, appropriate accommodation for a handicap helps keep one more functional. So when one gets appropriate accommodation, one can appear more or less "normal" for short periods, such as time spent in public spaces. Take away that accommodation and life can come apart at the seams.

> In the U.S., there are laws that determine how many such spaces must be designated in parking lots, based on the size of the parking lot and/or venue.

> I have a friend who is physically handicapped and very much needs to park in these spaces. The only problem he has ever told me about is finding a spot to park at work. Apparently it's somewhat common where he lives for middle-aged women (his description) to game the system and obtain handicapped placards. He says he knows they are not really handicapped because he sees them walking briskly through long corridors at work without distress. Sometimes too young people will borrow an older relative's placard to park in those spaces.

Firstly, it's very possible to be handicapped at any age, so this "too young" idea is pretty disgusting.

However, if people are using the placards of others, and if this is in the US, your friend should report these people to the police. The placard also comes with an identification card with the person's information on it, which can be used to verify their disabled status.

so this "too young" idea

He left out a comma.

Yes, sorry, and I'm usually a pedant regarding commas.

My friend has been handicapped since he was a child, incidentally. I'm well aware that some people have an entire life filled with difficulty.

My apologies for misinterpreting!!

The primary use case right now is pulling your car in and out of your own garage at your own house.

As a Model 3 owner, I also went and tested out the capabilities in a few parking lots, just for fun.

https://mobile.twitter.com/abgoswami/status/1177773811497721...

It doesn't seem like its even safe for that though.

I use summon every night to pull my car out and it works flawlessly. Based on that damage it’s not clear how that could be caused by anything in a garage.

I think parking-lots make more sense than a garage.

1. Garage is full of tight spots. If something "goes wrong", you have to lift your finger off the cell-phone (capacitive sensor, so its innately laggy to a few dozen milliseconds), that signal then has to be trasmitted over the internet, to the car which then applies the brakes.

2. Or... you could be in the car itself... and directly connected to the accelerator / braking system. No delays if something goes wrong.

------

At least with a parking lot, you can argue that you didn't feel like walking (even if you need to keep the car within visual range). But in a garage + visual range, it means that you're giving up control for what amounts to a party trick. Its not like Electric vehicles give off fumes, so there's basically no disadvantage to getting in the car inside the garage instead.

Tesla is well aware that people will use the feature in ways that you describe, and its main concern, as with its other statements to the effect that drivers should pay as much attention to what is going on as if they were driving, is to avoid liability.

It clearly is just the beginning of what is possible. And a cool thing to show people.

My father is almost 80 and had hip surgery. Part of the danger of getting old & feeble is becoming isolated.

Any chance to enable mobility without compromising safety, theirs or others, is a huge win.

It's to show your friends and colleagues, it has no practical purpose given the conditions and requirements for the use of the feature.

Your life circumstances may not present practical uses... But I can assure you they exist.

In what circumstances will you have 100%, unobstructed line of sight to:

1. Your car.

2. Your car's avenue of travel. [1]

[1] This is the important part. If you can't clearly see the entire path of travel, you could run a child over. Tesla obviously doesn't give a shit about that, because their collision detection doesn't work, and because the feature does not require this kind of line-of-sight to work.

The former is hard, but they want to be first to market, so they don't care about not building it right, and the latter would make this feature near-useless, so naturally, they don't ship this sort of fail-safe.

This is a critical part of the overall full self driving equation. Any vendor working on this problem will be spending inordinate amounts of resources on this as parking lots are one of the more challenging environments.

In certain locations (especially in winter) this will be a very nice feature. This is especially true to anyone with disabilities or extreme laziness. ;-).

This is a step in their progression toward self driving. No one should expect this to be flawless from the start, similar to Waymo's self driving work.

Tesla getting this out now should allow for the feature to begin improving at a quicker pace due to more data.

A lot of naysayers will certainly harp on the number of wonky videos to hit the web, but this will quickly decrease once the newness of the feature wears off and improves.

It’s worth noting that many of us consider self driving to he essentially analogous to full AI in its complexity and difficulty, and thus believe that we are literally nowhere near anything that fits this description.

No amount of “data” is going to solve the problem. Driving a car requires making a full mental model of the immediate world you’re in and creating accurate predictions of what everything else in that world is about to do, many of those things being sentient beings with whom you’re communicating through your own actions.

Nothing that Tesla is doing is getting much closer to that. The next major landmark on this timeline is a team successfully passing the Turing test, not a car moving across a parking lot.

If you share that opinion, that makes the Tesla a lethal toy.

What’s a “full mental model of the immediate world”? I’d argue that nobody has anything approaching “full”. You have “enough to get by” and that’s all computers need as well. This isn’t a full sentient AI, it’s just sensing the world and navigating a path, at an industrial scale.

No, it’s not path finding. The DARPA races were pathfinding and getting from point A to point B hasn’t been the problem for some time.

Driving around other people requires theory of mind in order to make decisions based on what the people around us expect to happen

I’m teaching a friend to drive right now - it’s all about eye contact, being waved through, stopping and starting predictably and without surprises, you’re always looking around for pedestrians and checking if they see you and predicting, according to everything you’ve learned about humans so far, whether they’re about to step into the street

Deep learning on photographs is not going to cut it.

Sure, but that's why there are armies of programmers writing rules for self driving cars. The "theory of mind" is being developed in the form of control code. It's not easy, but it is accelerated by the data collected in iterative development just like Tesla is doing.

It’s just not. How does it tell when the other car is waiting for them to move? What does it do when two people go into an alley at opposite directions and one has to back out? What happens when there aren’t any markings in the lot, or when people ignored the markings and parked in a different pattern? And so on.

These aren’t “edge cases” that “data” will sort out. These are common everyday occurrences in parking lots that require something like consciousness to navigate and involve subtle communication with other participants.

You could also argue that humans create such models in a way that is automated in confidence of predictability and familiarity. Familiarity and predictability being a byproduct of how the human chooses to make certain actions and judgements routine. Given this, humans exhibit quite a lot of overconfidence when it comes to driving: see phone use. Over time a human will make many more mistakes that any amount of paying attention would of prevented them.

If it isn’t fully functional it shouldn’t be in a consumer product which is capable of killing people when things go wrong.

Ever more want for Convenience.

My wife has recently had trouble with people parking so close to her that she couldn't get into the car. If her car could have reversed itself it would have been fantastic.

That, or jerks could not park people in (especially when they're heavily pregnant).

After that I just told her to either park in the disabled spots or the mother/child spots. She has more right to them than the lazy boomers and BMW drivers who consider them their private parking spots.

> After that I just told her to either park in the disabled spots or the mother/child spots. She has more right to them than the lazy boomers and BMW drivers who consider them their private parking spots.

I was with you till that statement. I know several people with disabilities who have been yelled at for parking in the handicap spot when they don't "appear" disabled.

People don't need to be wheelchair bounded to be disabled, and calling boomers "lazy" who use the spots (presumably legally) is in really poor taste imo.

Oh, absolutely, and those people have a big blue badge here in Europe. Like my grandparents, for example.

There are also plenty of people who should have a badge but don't and who never park incorrectly (like my father-in-law who can hardly walk now thanks to his terminal cancer).

However my complaint is legitimate; it's disproportionately people around the 60-70 age group or the suited twit in a big car who thinks she's better than anyone else. At least with the older group they have a small excuse - the bigger spots make it easier to get out of the car which can be an issue if you're older and unfit.

Your complaint is absolutely not legitimate - you're saying it's fine for your wife to park in disabled spaces just because some other people are arseholes too.

Can't speak for elsewhere, but in the UK there are disabled badges for (partially) this reason. And for parent and child spaces, you can tell by the lack of children with the 'adult'.

> And for parent and child spaces, you can tell by the lack of children with the 'adult'.

Can you? Is it not allowed in the UK for one parent traveling alone to use such a space for the purpose of picking up their spouse and children?

We can construct all sorts of hypothetical scenarios, but when a person arrives sans children, and with no booster seat, which is a legal requirement up until age 12 (or a certain height). Plus most of my experiences with parent and child parking is supermarkets, that tend to have drop off points anyway.

Come on, seriously? You really think it's OK to just park in disabled spaces just because some other people are arseholes too?

As someone with a disabled child, I frequently encounter this kind of self-entitled, selfish behaviour - and I just can't fathom it. How can you be that uncaring?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com