Consumer Reports tricks Tesla to drive with no one at wheel

There have always been an infinite number of ways to deliberately behave unsafely in a car. Why did we only start caring now?

Edit to propose an answer to my final question: what we have here is a confounding prior. If your prior is "Tesla Autopilot is Inherently Unsafe", then the driver nag feature becomes understood as a safety feature ("Tesla Autopilot Needs Supervision"). Thus, a failure of the driver nag becomes evidence for your prior, magically ("Tesla Autopilot is unsafe BECAUSE the Driver Nag Can Be Defeated"). And thus the clickbait.

(And FWIW: I continue to believe that this recent crash did not in fact involve autopilot at all, but we'll see.)

I am surprised Tesla isn't using the seat weight sensors as an input to this as well. Maybe that can be done through a software update, but then someone would figure out they could put some dumbbells on the seat. This is a cat-and-mouse game, but it makes sense to have higher barriers so blame can clearly be assigned to people who go out of their way to abuse the system. If someone puts weights on the accelerator pedal, the car would still move forward.

1. https://www.consumerreports.org/autonomous-driving/cr-engine...

"Guys, I have the best idea! How about we make the car put the driver to sleep?

No, no, hear me out this is great. It only sounds dumb to dumb people without enough vision.

The way it works is, you make the car do almost all the work of driving for hours at a time, so that the driver can't help but fall asleep or get distracted by something else. BUT, here's where the really genius part comes in: The car can't really do the whole job of driving so, inevitably, cars will just plow right into things because the drivers will never be already alert and engaged in the task of driving when the totally expected unexpected happens.

... I know right? Right?

And just to make sure no one mistakes what the driver should do and what we want to happen, let's call the feature "Autopilot". It's not an autopilot, it's not even a co-pilot, because even a co-pilot is a full pilot in their own right and fully able to do the complete job and handle all situations on their own, but that's the genius part! Don't let the engineers call it "driver assist" or "extra eyes" or anything dumb like that.

This is gonna be awesome."

The fact is, Tesla has oversold their level 2 driver assistance system in countless promos over the last 4 years. It is trivially easy to put the car in autopilot with no one in the driver seat. We have seen dozens of YouTube clips of people doing exactly this, not to mention sleeping. Tesla has been begged over and over and over and over to attach the existing weight sensor in the seat to autopilot activation and to add eye tracking. They have the tech to do this. The only reasonable conclusion, even if it sounds cynical, is Tesla encourages these videos because they make good marketing stunts and make people think they are close to full self driving, which they are not. Don’t forget Elon made a joke about the porno that was filmed on autopilot.

And I don’t care what Elon says on Twitter, I trust the eye witnesses and the officers at the scene who say they are 100% sure no one was driving the Tesla that crashed outside of Houston. Those men were 60 and 70 years old and they believed the hype about their car that Musk and the media have been pumping for years. Yes they were foolish to put the car in this mode, but it was foreseeable and Tesla could have built reasonable safeguards, but they chose not to.

CR Engineers Show a Tesla Will Drive with No One in the Driver's Seat (consumerreports.org)

25 points by camjohnson26 1 day ago | 33 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26904097

Either CR has old software, or did the test for a very short time.

"It's impossible to make anything idiot proof because idiots are too ingenious"

Perhaps Tesla just stopped trying...

The fact that the driver's seat weight sensor isn't used to disable AP is a silly oversight and should be fixed. Multiple people have suggested that the internal camera above the rear view mirror could try doing eye tracking, but I actually doubt it would work effectively from that angle.

I learned to drive in the days before texting, moved to NYC and stopped driving for 15 years or so. It's been amazing seeing the people texting&driving and just full on distracted driving nowadays.

I hope that driver assist tech does not get hampered by American litigiousness because some a percent of people are going to going to misuse it.

If you are a thoughtful driver to start with, these technologies provide an extra layer of protection and reduction to driver fatigue. If you are an idiot, you will continue to be an idiot. No software is going to fix idiots. If you drive with your hands on the wheel.. as the instructions say, the screen tells you every single time, and the sensors attempt to confirm and remind you every 30-60 seconds.. it's another layer of safety beyond your own eyes&brain.

Some people were buying or fabricating devices to provide sufficient torque to trick the sensor to believe hands were on wheel. These are the same galaxy brains which will buy a defeat device for the next safety check that is introduced - weights to trick seat sensors, googly eyed sunglasses to trick cameras, fake heat & capacitive touch to trick the wheel to believe a human hand is there, etc.

Elon Musk says this will be fixed in a future software update.

Huh?