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Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

Tesla cars are far from being autonomous. Autopilot (including the so called "full self driving") is level 2, meaning that the driver has to pay attention at all times.

From a driver responsibility point of view, it is a fancy cruise control, there is no question about autonomous certification because the car isn't autonomous.

If one day, Tesla thinks it is OK for drivers not to pay attention and wants to make it legal, that's when the question about what kind of tech is reasonable will be asked. But for now, it looks like we are far from it. There is a huge gap between "works well most of the time" and full autonomy.

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This day came and passed years ago. It's evident from their marketing that there is no attempt to discern fancy cruise control from "zomfg your car will drive you around in a year!!"

Whether this is false advertising or even just moral is up in the air, but Tesla is making no attempts at educating consumers about the limits of their autonomy other than the bare minimum (yeah you technically have to keep both hands on the wheel, but that mechanism is easily defeated and you can even buy clips on Amazon that do it for you). I'm pretty sure Elon even liked a tweet about a Pornhub video where someone banged a model on the highway with autopilot. Which is an excellent day for PR and a disastrous day for legal.

The point being, sure, academically they are a far way away, but they are trying to convince consumers Level 5 is just around the corner.

I'm coming around to agreeing with you about the deceptiveness of Tesla's marketing of Autopilot. I recently bought a new car from a non-luxury brand that's quite popular in the US, and a few days after buying it I was a bit surprised to realize that its "dynamic cruise control" and "lane keep assist" features amount to roughly the exact same thing as Tesla's current Autopilot offerings. I am still shocked at how undersold these features were, both by the dealers and the car's literature. I was driving for several days before I realized that, in addition the the dynamic cruise control I was familiar with, a simple button press could get the car to steer itself to stay in its lane.

Driving on the freeway is fairly easy right? Stay in your lane, keep distance. Of course there was that one guy who crashed into a divider on autopilot and died. But I could see it being not-that-unsafe to have your attention elsewhere.

I've said it for a long time but: Tesla implementing level 2 is dangerous and irresponsible. Calling it "autopilot" is even worse (and has been ruled as misleading in at least German courts).

If a human has to sit there and monitor the car without interacting with it, then we shouldn't allow it on the roads. That means skipping level 2 and probably level 3. Go the Waymo route and go straight to full self driving cars.

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