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Comment by Traster | Hacker News Reader

Let's ignore the larger point (which is that this is just one of a million possible edge cases where autopilot could systematically fail), I could absolutely see Tesla just bodging in a "If you see emergency vehicle lights flashing disengage" - it'd perfectly reasonable to say that you shouldn't be using autopilot in that situation because you should be paying attention and ready to react to the emergency vehicle.

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I don't think you're wrong policy wise specifically.

I do think that this 'auto pilot ... but you have to manage it' system is not workable for most humans. Paying attention when you sorta don't have to ... is just not paying attention for most people.

It's a space I don't think we manage well outside of say a real pilot in a plane trained to do his thing (and there's actually a lot of cases with trained airline pilots losing situational awareness and auto pilot does the wrong thing and the pilots don't notice soon enough / auto pilot makes bad choices for a surprisingly long time before anyone notices).

I think this might be a space where it is all or nothing auto pilot wise.

Ultimately a human problem.

If the driver isn’t paying attention already, this can’t work in the worst case. The roads and their speed limits are designed for the driver to safely come to a stop if there’s an obstacle in the road. If you add another 3-10 seconds for the system to disengage, warn the user, have the user focus in the road and act appropriately, you are crashed into the emergency vehicle again.

It should warn and turn off in a LOT of situations imo; there was another accident in a construction zone where the car hit a barrier, for example. And there's the shared videos of people literally sleeping or sitting in the back seat of a Tesla on autopilot; the car should detect that and disable autopilot for an X amount of time.

Of course, at the same time the car should not play police; if someone is caught doing that, their license should be taken away from them.

It should warn and force the driver to confirm to keep autopilot going at set speed. Same way it handles traffic lights and autopilot.

As much as it would be a solution to Tesla's problem, it would impact Tesla's overall plan and strategy. Automatically disengaging when emergency vehicles are detected is a huge barrier in their selling strategy ("It can drive itself, it's just not allowed yet to for legal reasons, but soon").

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