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Comment by simondotau | Hacker News Reader

Remember 27 days ago when Hacker News was flooded with comments insisting that the underlying problem was the "Autopilot" name? The argument, best as I can tell, is that the name of their cruise control system somehow convinces innocent, everyday consumers into having deadly high speed crashes on short cul-du-sacs.

Then Consumer Reports published a video showing how to defeat Tesla's multiple safety protections by intentionally misleading the vehicle's driver occupancy sensors. Tesla was blamed for having sensors that couldn't detect intentional misuse.

Turns out that Occam's Razor holds: this whole saga was nothing more than a moron doing stupid things in a high performance vehicle. It's a shame that so many people had such wildly different assumptions because it happened to be an electric car made by a company whose CEO is an eccentric nerd and twitter troll.

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I don't know, if they just called it co-pilot or wingman it'd still be cool, but also more accurate. I thought the big thing was bringing an electric car to market, this feature got overblown and it's become dangerous.

> got overblown

Musk was very intentional about promoting Tesla’s autopilot as equivalent of self-driving L4 (if I remember right), even getting into fights with people who questioned the validity of the claim.

Citation? If your description of Elon's statement is accurate, if he ever described the contemporaneous shipping Autopilot system as the "equivalent of self-driving L4" then I would change my mind on this matter immediately.

I'm not sure if this is enough for you to change your mind, but I remembered his claims from last year, and they were virtually as exaggerated

"U.S. electric vehicle maker Tesla is “very close” to achieving level 5 autonomous driving technology, CEO Elon Musk said on Thursday, referring to the capability to navigate roads without any driver input.

“I’m extremely confident that level 5, or essentially complete autonomy, will happen, and I think will happen very quickly,” Musk said in remarks made via a video message at the opening of Shanghai’s annual World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC).

“I remain confident that we will have the basic functionality for level 5 autonomy complete this year.”

Obviously not exactly the same as making a definite statement about the capacity of current cars, but we all know what part of the message sticks with the public.

https://venturebeat.com/2020/07/09/elon-musk-says-tesla-is-v...

Elon being utterly delusional around the timeframes of future Tesla product releases isn't interesting to me, as I don't think that's ever been disputed. But I would change my mind if Musk made an egregiously misleading statement about currently shipping technology. This is something frequently attributed to him—but always in vague terms. I've never actually seen it.

How are those more accurate? Colloquially, to be "on autopilot" describes how one can mindlessly perform familiar actions which don't require novel thought. For example, walking home from the train station. I'm sure plenty of people have been injured or killed while walking around "on autopilot."

In the context of a software feature, "autopilot" implies a computer control system which is capable of maintaining rudimentary ongoing control of the vehicle.

Whereas a co-pilot is a whole other pilot. Surely that's worse, implying equivalence to a human sitting next to you, with comparable levels of training and skill, intuitively capable of taking over at any time. I wonder what would happen if Ford developed a system and called it "Co-pilot". We might never know.

“Autopilot” is literally an airplane term and refers to systems that can take-off, cruise, and land the plane even in many adverse conditions without any human input.

You are describing features available on a small minority of aircraft with autopilot features. The vast majority of aviation autopilot systems only control heading and basic flight stability.

Literally the opening paragraph of Wikipedia:

”An autopilot is a system used to control the trajectory of an aircraft, marine craft or spacecraft without requiring constant manual control by a human operator. Autopilots do not replace human operators. Instead, the autopilot assists the operator's control of the vehicle, allowing the operator to focus on broader aspects of operations (for example, monitoring the trajectory, weather and on-board systems).”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopilot

> The argument, best as I can tell, is that the name of their cruise control system somehow convinces innocent, everyday consumers into having deadly high speed crashes on short cul-du-sacs

Musk has been hyping Tesla's "full self driving" capability for years (see xvector's comment from a couple of months ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26519357). Musk does it so much that people believe the system can do more than it really can.

Musk says this with a megaphone to his 54.7 million followers: https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/22/18510828/tesla-elon-musk-...

But then Tesla privately tells regulators that "full self driving" is only level 2: https://www.thedrive.com/tech/39647/tesla-admits-current-ful...

And then Tesla privately says that Musk's comments don't match engineering reality: https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/7/22424592/tesla-elon-musk-a...

At what point does "eccentric nerd" really just mean "huckster"?

The most responsible thing Musk can do here is to very publicly admit that autopilot can't do what he's been selling. Or will his eccentricity prevent that from happening?

I don't think anyone disagrees that Elon's forward-looking statements about future autonomous driving capabilities have been consistently egregiously optimistic. But forward-looking statements about future product timelines aren't relevant to what customers believe Autopilot's capabilities are today.

It is strange to claim that the autopilot feature "can't do what he's been selling" by pointing to statements containing qualifiers such as "I think we are less than two years away" and "I think probably by end of next year".

What would your average person think "full self driving" means? And what does Tesla's "full self driving" actually do?

I'm not talking about the "full self driving" optional feature. Personally I agree with criticism of the FSD product name and I think it's an inappropriate and misleading name. But that's not relevant here, because the car did not have the "full self driving" feature.

This is actually very important, because it means the customer explicitly declined Tesla's repeated prompts to option "full self driving" features into their vehicle. Therefore this customer will have been acutely aware that "full self driving" is a feature their car did not have and thus the car could not be capable of any such "full self-driving".

It had "full self driving". He said so himself:

https://insideevs.com/news/507038/nhtsa-investigate-tesla-cr...

It is amusing that this comment thread came to an abrupt end once you were contradicted about what is "actually very important".

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