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Comment by dghughes | Hacker News Reader

And now today (Nov 6) there are news articles about the Tesla "Smart Summon" which was quietly activated. There are videos of dangerous near collisions of "summoned" driver-less Tesla vehicles very slowly driving among other vehicles.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/video?playlistId=1.4658613

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That’s very blatant sensationalist journalism that conveniently does not mention that there is a person holding down a button the entire time that the car is being summoned.

If that’s “dangerous”, well, so is piloting it manually.

A person who does always what is in front of the car and what is coming behind or on the sides, and who will probably be looking at the button rather than the car while it moves.

That is just as dangerous as using your smartphone while driving in a parking lot, which is forbidden for good reasons.

Do you stare at a button when you hold it? That seems very odd. If that were true, video games wouldn't exist.

The video shows the app with a radar-ish view of what the car is seeing of its surroundings and its planned route. It's more than just a button, and I could see why someone would be focused on the screen display instead of the car.

I have a similar sentiment about nuclear weapons. What's the problem if someone needs to be pushing a button?

Agree, a licensed human driver is in charge of a "summoned" vehicle. Any operation you might expect from such a vehicle is on the person holding the button.

So long as everything works perfectly, sure. But there's nobody in place to hit the brakes in an emergency scenario. Releasing a button as an emergency measure seems a bit unreliable, since humans tend to clench their muscles when there's an emergency.

Worse:

AT+RELEA

NO CARRIER

Unless the car brakes the very instant the connection drops (and not when the timeout propagates through the networking stack), now you have two problems.

Human drivers aren't usually licensed for, and license practical tests do not cover, remote operations of the type being discussed.

The linked video talks about updating laws regarding the legality of operating the smart summon feature on public roads. I don't see how that can be called "blatant sensationalism".

Someone inside the car has a better sense of the surroundings than someone operating it from a distance. They also don't have a skin in the game, which can impact the judgement

It is the same 'skin in the game' as being in the car. They are not concerned about their own safety if driving the car in a parking lot, they are concerned about their car getting into a collision. No different whether in the car or not.

That’s a red herring though. It shouldn’t matter if the person is paying attention if the self driving tech is working. (As Musk likes to say, the person is just there to tick off a legal checkbox.)

At what point do Musk’s statements represent a moderate legal risk?

For the sake of argument, could Musk’s statement, along with his very public insistence of being actively engaged in the design process, demonstrate a cavalier disregard for proper safety engineering at the management level (outside acceptable industry practice) and so a defective process?

Well, that's a big if. Moreover, an if that has "nope nope nope" written over it with literal human blood. RIP EH.

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