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Comment by belval | Hacker News Reader

The title feels a bit misleading. Sure there was no one sitting in the seat but there was weight applied to the steering wheel to simulate hands...

Should they have a sensor in the seat as well as one in the steering wheel? I think so. Is this article partially clickbait? I'd tend to say yes.

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How does the title feel misleading? It says directly and exactly what was done, and it appears that you agree that this happened.

From what I understand, it seems that it's entirely possible for this scenario to be replicated "in real life" by a driver losing consciousness or being in a state of partial consciousness.

That would cause a crash in non self driving vehicles as well.

The non self driving vehicle wouldn’t fake it though by auto steering, anyone who does this in a standard vehicle knows they will crash, people in the Tesla think it’s ok as countless videos have shown.

"Driving with no one in the seat" is much wider than "driving with only hands on the steering wheel". The former implies that a kid on the backseat could turn on autopilot and drive away without anyone else in the car, while the reality is that that hypothetical child would actually need to hold the steering wheel.

> From what I understand, it seems that it's entirely possible for this scenario to be replicated "in real life" by a driver losing consciousness or being in a state of partial consciousness.

How would a driver losing consciousness suddenly have no weight in the driving seat? This is just saying that there should be a pressure sensor in the seat combined with the sensors in the steering wheel. In both case nothing prevents people from falling asleep here.

I think a sensor in the seat is pretty standard thing nowadays in almost every car. It is used to alert you when you or your passenger has forgotten to fasten a seat belt.

I agree completely, this seems like an oversight for sure, but the title seems to imply that you don't need anyone in the drivers seat to turn on autopilot. This is false since you obviously need someone or something to "hold" the steering wheel.

It's simply not as big of a deal safety-wise if you still needs hands on the steering wheel.

I think they were standard even back in the day. My 2004 Mercedes had one since when I was moving and had boxes on the front passenger seat, it actually deactivated the airbag since I guess the weight was just in the "there's something but it's not a person -> possibly child seat" range.

Yeah. Even my small lawn tractor has a seat sensor...

I don’t think there is a feature to avoid warning you if the seatbelt is not fastened in case there is no driver.

They already do have a sensor in the seat. It's one of the ways the car knows when to turn on.

Well then I suppose we will see a software update soon to address this.

I'm gonna bet they're intentionally going lightweight on the driver checks because all the ticktocks are free advertisement for their 8k$ "autopilot" option

I believe they're working on using the rear-view mirror camera to watch for driver attentiveness, which would solve both this issue and the issue of their current driver attentiveness system sucking so, so bad.

I feel like we would enter in a problematic part of driver monitoring with that feature though. Tesla has shown that they were willing to use their data to protect themselves when a customer would crash their car so they might have access to a constant video feed that could be used by the police.

I am probably reading too much into this, but I just don't like possibly live cameras recording me...

On the positive side, though, if you get accused of being distracted and causing an accident when you were paying attention, the camera inside the car would prove that for you.

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