Tesla bows to pressure, stops allowing drivers to play video games while driving
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
There used to be a lot of crashes attributed to "playing with the radio" in the 90's / 00's. Maybe all those buttons on the wheel and a display centered in the drivers cone of vision were actually huge advancements in safety...
They are truly, as that one book title went, unsafe at any speed.
It's possible to get some kind of tactile response mimicking the edges of buttons well enough. I'd say a good implementation of this technology would be safe IF the position and availability of the controls would be static. I'm not sure what you'd get out of a touch screen with those constraints (less parts?), especially with the added cost and research, but that's the only way I can see a touch screen in a car that should ever be legal.
A Tesla driver in Germany already got fined for using the touch screen of his car while driving. It's strange how this obvious flaw of a car design has ever been allowed onto the roads.
Agreed -- this was also why the Apple Touchbar failed, IMO.
Typically keyboard use relies on a lot of muscle memory, and so the touchbar's "you get a different set of controls with different shapes and sizes that do different things depending on which app you're using" design ethos didn't really fit with how people actually use keyboards.
If buttons are too expensive and you want to reduce the count, if I press radio and then F1, that could be radio preset 1, and if I press fan and then F1, that turns the fan speed to 1 of 6 (which could be off, I don't really care), that would be fine, and then you don't need quite so many buttons. Otoh, if I'm paying $20k or more for a car, you can afford some buttons.
It's strange that anyone thinks it's even desirable. Touchscreens aren't even pleasant to use in this context.
When phones can run at 30 fps and have no noticeable lag, it's infuriating to switch to a car which stutters on some ugly, unnecessary graphics and takes 0.25 seconds to respond to a touch input. Not to mention the whole "you're supposed to be driving a car" aspect.
It's such trivial things that people risk their lives for too. A sort of trashy naivety. Like smoking at the gas pump.
>I have zero sympathy for any of the edge cases people tend to bring up except checking your speed.
You're saying the speedometer is the only instrument that needs to be scanned regularly?
I would've said that the speedometer really isn't needed - if you go with traffic and don't hang out in the passing lane, you're never going to get in trouble.
It's a lot more important to me to know if I've lost oil pressure or am overheating.
And if the HVAC controls are unnecessary to mess with while driving, they are still not an "edge case". Nor is the radio.
This may be naive, but I've assumed that it is practically impossible to enforce laws that a majority of the population habitually breaks.
> I would've said that the speedometer really isn't needed - if you go with traffic and don't hang out in the passing lane, you're never going to get in trouble
That's really location specific, and situation specific. We can't go over ~5kmph faster than the limit here without getting fined by speed cameras. Also 10kmph faster on a highway versus 10kmph faster in town are very different. 10kmph faster in town could be the difference between killing someone or not hitting them at all.
I do somewhat agree though, I think "driving to the conditions" for me personally would be totally fine, I'd probably trend to driving slower than the speed limit. But if you had no limit and no enforcement, people would be abusing it all the time. Someone in a hurry in town would easily cause trouble. The tradeoff for limiting that is having to check your speedometer.
10kmph = 6.2mph.
I think of the difference between hitting someone and not hitting them as measured in distance, not speed.
Doesn't sound like heaps but that is actually your margin for error, just 4m. If something jumps out in front of you at 28 meters away, at 50 you will have had 4 meters to stop, which modern cars can do, and at 60 you will hit them at the full 60kmph. The Australian government has some great road safety clips on the subject, I might try and find them.
In practice, I'd hazard a yes.
Keyword: regularly...unless you're driving something that's pissing oil all over the place and/or has a cooling system that's out of service, at which point you clearly have much bigger maintenance problems and probably shouldn't be on the road with that vehicle anyways (perhaps even in a lawful sense).
> I would've said that the speedometer really isn't needed - if you go with traffic and don't hang out in the passing lane, you're never going to get in trouble.
The obvious naivety here is a dependency on another driver ahead of you both maintaining situational awareness and doing the right thing...never mind sparse traffic scenarios, e.g. super late/early hours, neighborhoods, small towns, rural areas, etc. In the case of incident, the police won't care; your insurance provider won't care.
> It's a lot more important to me to know if I've lost oil pressure or am overheating.
Contrived. There's a reason why high-contrast event indicators (termed "telltale" as defined by US FMVSS statutory regulation[1]) baked directly into every passenger vehicle which control for permissible location, identification, color, and illumination targeting driver visibility. These discrete telltales are explicitly designed to ping a driver's peripheral vision with the intent of eliminating a need for active monitoring in practice.
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-49/subtitle-B/chapter-V/p...
I never had to use it as an excuse.
> And if the HVAC controls are unnecessary to mess with while driving, they are still not an "edge case". Nor is the radio.
I forgot to address these sorry.
I've driven some pants cars in my time so I get it, but I'd say you be the judge of just how distracted you are with mechanical worries and if that's a safe amount or not.
I think HVAC being on tactile controls makes the difference here, but ultimately you could check them when you've stopped if it's too much of a hassle. Sometimes I try to get it set, but can't figure it out quickly, so give up and just set it at the next point I'm idling.
If it weren't for the ability of the car to alert lane departures, cars braking ahead of you, etc., I likely would have had many accidents already, just using the touch screen for things should be physical controls.
Best bet is to engage autopilot then do whatever you gotta do.
btw: I had the exact same experience with another brand (rental car) where the touchscreen was so ill placed, that basically any interaction with it messed with the steering.
They presumable thinking was that autopilot/fsd would be driving the car so the driver could play games. At the same time they’re claiming that they aren’t responsible for autopilot crashes because the driver is always meant to be able to instantly be in control of the car.
You can’t really do both “the driver can be focused on non driving tasks” and also “the driver must be focused on driving”. That is obviously impossible.
Arrgh. It was a feature for the passenger to play games while preserving the driving UI. Absolutely no one intended for this to be used by drivers. There isn't even any evidence of a driver being caught doing this. The coverage is basically clickbait, and you appear to have bought it exactly as it was intended.
Whether it's really a good idea or not? I mean, the driver can pull out a phone or iPad and game/text/whatever to their hearts content already. And many do. And lots of them die. Why exactly are we treating this any differently?
Elsewhere in this very discussion, a driver admitted to doing this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29670414
Also the rule seems to be that you can bring a distraction into a car but you can't build the distraction into the car. Which seems totally reasonable to me. I mean, even after Tesla got rid of the games, passengers can still play any non-Tesla-exclusive game on their iPhone, so it seems like no one is really harmed.
The upthread comment was from someone who clearly assumed that this was intended as a driver feature, even to the extent of supposing that it was designed to be used under autonomous control. And that's clearly not the case.
That mistake is a direct result of headlines like the one here, which talk about "allowing drivers" to play games. It's technically true, but it leads to the wrong conclusion. And that's the intent!
The car is filled with distractions already, and we accept that it's broadly safe even if some drivers are distracted[1]. Why is this one in particular such a big deal for everyone, except for the somewhat obvious reason that it's new and Tesla did it.
[1] To be fair: by far the most fatal distraction in the vehicle isn't even the device UI, it's the phone in their pocket.
They didn't show you the games you could actually play, they showed you what they thought would make you upset. And it did. Seriously, the whole media ecosystem in this space is one intentional deception after another. Do you really not see that?
There is no justification for having these stupid features in the car other than marketing. Tesla should stick to the "Fart mode" and other such gimmicks, which do not endanger other people on the road and give enough for the fans to talk about the "superior technologies".
I feel like this is really a reach. The passenger is using their hands to move around those little cards, and I don't think that sounds any more distracting than half the things they could be doing like gesturing while talking or fidgeting slightly.
Sonic would be bad, solitaire on a touch screen isn't bad unless the driver tries to play.
Depends on the model. Though that's a stupid design even without any games.
> navigation indications
Not a critical feature, and can be done without a screen. Also, huh, that's constant movement you'd be getting rid of isn't it.
High-movement games are in a different category entirely, of course, but apparently those only work stopped.
A passenger playing a game on the screen which are also where your only instruments are located seems like an unnecessary added distraction so I’d say they made the right call.
I think this is the most important fact to note here. If the primary instruments were on a separate display, this would not have been as severe of a concern.
It's another reason why having a single touchscreen as the interface of a car is a horrible idea.
I've seen a lot of newer cars where the instruments are all in the center instead of immediately behind the wheel, and I always thought that design was less usable and more distracting --- a glance downwards is easier than one sideways and down.
Fast forward a few years and the Raspberry Pi was released. My first RPi project was to built a new in car entertainment system. I used Go v1.0 (at that time even methods weren’t supported) and built a media player with text to speech. The entertainment system had 6 buttons:
1. Previous artist 2. Previous album 3. Previous song / replay song 4. Skip song 5. Skip album 6. Skip artist
The media centre would then use text to speech to read the artist, album and song details out over the speakers before playing the tracks.
This system was designed so I never needed to take my eyes off the road and it worked amazingly.
Unfortunately I’m not an electrical engineer so the device was ugly and started to fall apart quite quickly. I think it only lasted < 1 year. But I learned a lot from that experiment: there is a lot of missed opportunities for innovation in the car entertainment domain.
I'm still annoyed by this when texting while driving and having to look at the screen.
Downvote all you like, your moral judgement is not gonna change what I do.
I loved the T9 keyboard in my right hand and steering wheel in the left. I'm good at steering with my left knee (unless we're talking slow speeds and bendy road) so taking my hands off is not an issue - the issue is taking my eyes off the road, constantly switching between road/phone/road/phone, which is annoying as fuck.
>I think this is the most important fact to note here.
I think the fact that you are encouraging the "driver" to actively be distracted and not paying attention is a much larger issue than if the speedometer is visible or not. Nobody pays attention to the RPM gauge in automatics. Maybe they look at a fuel gauge, maybe. For a Tesla, the fuel gauge is the battery gauge, so no need for that one either.
Ensuring the "driver" is not paying attention though, that's never a good idea.
Makes me think of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TCeR_SWZM0, just adjust Chandler's line to "0-60 in 3 seconds, top speed of 160mph, 500 mile range!"
If you are a customer of a company, you're paying for what that company thinks is best for you. Whether they're right or not is another thing entirely.
In this case, Tesla decided that what's best for you is a car with a touch screen with no tactile feedback that serves as the car's only interface for everything: current speed, tire pressure, potential collision warnings, HVAC status and controls, an app that makes fart sounds, and so on. The list of what it's used for probably has over 100 possible items, with one of those items being "play games."
All of those features, including that last one, are features Tesla decided are best for its customers.
Giving their customers a choice to play games or not while driving wouldn't even be up for debate if they never shipped software with games in the first place.
Increasing a vehicle's safety isn't disrespectful and doesn't undermine responsible adult behavior. Adding features that invite drivers to be unsafe seems far more disrespectful. No one dies because their passengers can't play video games while driving on a vehicle's only interface.
I think that "respecting responsible adults" is also just silly. Why make laws that punish drivers for texting and driving? Can't we just allow people to be responsible? History has made it crystal clear that when given the chance, people will choose to not be responsible often enough to be disastrous.
i have a hard time with this issue of what is permitted in a car. personally i feel like a good driver, like i will handle things fine. but i also once was going up an icy highway late at night & ended up spinning 360 around (thankfully with no one around me & staying on the road) because i spent about 1 second going for some last fries in a take out bag & couldn't re-stabilize. it had just so happened to be the wrong moment.
in driving, mostly things are boring & unexciting. but secretly we are surrounded by just the wrong moments, dotted here & there amid the boring. typically there's enough slack to navigate & avoid the little hazards, to prevent catastrophe or damage. but a little compounding factor can matters a lot. it's hard to impress onto drivers- who typically see such boring, easy, unassuming tasks, endlessly playing out- that this is serious work, that it requires vigilance. eternal, unrelenting, persistent vigilance. to believe in the hazardousness of the situation, especially whenever there is another human soul anywhere in a couple hundred meters. human's aren't built for hyper-vigilance, for attentiveness in such fast moving, high energy situations.
so i don't know what we can do, but keep locking down on driving. anyone in charge of over 0.5kg of moving mass: sorry, but society has a moral obligation to clamp down on, to restrict potential distractions. whether it's your passenger playing a game or them just futzing with bluetooth. there's so so so many hours lost to driving, and having such a spartan existence at the wheel, having machines that refuse to interact (be it passenger or driver) or distract, that monitor the driver conditions... it just seems mandatory. i don't like it, don't want it for myself, it feels stupid. but i don't see that we have any other choices to pick from, given what absurd catastrophe driving enacts, every single second on this planet.
What do you think of the people to whom automobiles are art, pastime, recreation, lifestyle?
Saying there was pressure just makes it sound like regulators are completely impotent.
(On the off chance that's the actual situation, all my hours of GTA Online griefing mean I probably owe quite a few people an apology. :) )
Though, your comment on latency did give me an idea. What if we were to co-locate the person monitoring the system within the car itself? That would free up the driver to do other tasks, and would avoid the latency issue entirely.
Granted, there would be costs associated with having a co-located monitor of the driving, but that's something we can solve by scaling the problem up. Similar to running multiple virtual containers on the same physical host, we can have several virtual cars, each with their own driver, instantiated on the same physical hardware. This setup would only require a single co-located monitor per physical hardware instance, rather than needing a monitor for each virtual system.
Extending this analogy to no-server solutions, there's probably a market for no-car solutions. If I have a sudden need for transit, but don't have a car available, I could rent a virtual car on top of existing physical hardware, without needing to bring my own car.
Sure, but not everyone values their time the same.
Why would we want to do that if it's not necessary?
https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1474238289355943949
>Look like no more pretending you are a passenger to play games while driving. The car will now ask you "Adjust the passenger seat controls to verify you are a passenger."
>Suddenly that passenger lumbar control becomes super used I guess?
If we need software to kindergarten us against endangering ourselves and others, we have much bigger problems as a society.
Out of the same philosophy, Tesla allows you to set Autopilot speed slightly above the applicable speed limit. You can cry out that that’s illegal. But then again, try to drive exactly the speed limit in real world situations. You might actually be creating more dangerous situations than you avoid. Hence Tesla treats you as the driver. It’s your ship, and you are the captain. The tech is just there to assist you.
This sentence is confusing to me - at the risk of sounding curt, we obviously do need to protect people from idiots. Given a game to play while driving, some people will. The more convenient and present it is, the more people will do it. I'm not sure how one could formulate an argument that these people don't exist. The key here is of course that they endanger others - if it were just themselves, the conversation would be much more subjective.
But they might as well drink and drive. Or text on their phone.
Cars are dangerous weapons. But we trust the public to use them.
I have no interest in playing video games while driving. But I do appreciate Tesla for treating owners as adults. That is to say, I think I can see where they’re coming from. They don’t want people to get into accidents because they’re playing a video game while driving. But they also don’t want to be their customers’ nanny. I like that. To me, that’s a very human touch. Especially for a tech company.
Perhaps I also resent the implicit attempt at shifting the responsibility. If someone crashes into my car because they’re playing a video game I’m gonna sue them. Not Tesla. It’s the driver who made the choice. To say “But Tesla put the screen in front of him. They enabled it”, to me, is to say that people are just automaton consumers, reacting to cues in their environment like some dog to clicker training.
Especially if that feature comes from a company that’s known to overhype their self driving abilities?
Comparing that to kindergarten from software is like complaining that when you build new house you need to put right electrical cables in the wall. And that just a sticker on the outlet that says “use only for table lamb with 1 led light” should be enough.
Why are they not doing the easier thing?
But that these companies specifically (fraudulently) market these assisted driving capabilities as providing more safety / autonomy than they actually do.
By giving these features names like "Autopilot" when it's just L2 for example.
It isn't the drivers, but rather the companies that need to be "kindergartened". Or in my view simply shut down by this point.
Self driving is hard. Nobody has ever done it. It’s akin to the first moon landing. You can’t fault the people trying to get there for missing deadlines.
When I build an app, I always underestimate how long it’s going to take. I get to some local maximum and think “one more week and I’ll be there”. Then I discover that, to get from 80% perfect to 90% perfect, I need to backtrack and try a completely different angle.
I own a Tesla. I paid for Autopilot. I love what it can do today. And I know that even Elon cannot predict when we can take off that steering wheel.
I also know that their Autopilot team is pushing the envelope. Look up Andrej Karpathy on GitHub. Do you really think that guy is driven by money? That he has even the faintest I interest in participating in some marketing scheme?
These people are geeks. They know they are right. They are wrestling not public opinion. They got no time for that. They are wrestling Nature. That is to say, physics, AI, and the bandwidth of human-computer-interaction.
I also haven’t heard of anyone who bought a Tesla because they believed the car could do more than it actually can. Buyers today are extremely well informed. They watch all the YouTube reviews. That story that Tesla over promises features in order to sell more cars makes for great headlines. But to believe such headlines is to miss the real reasons why people buy Teslas.
I'm not worried about Karpathy, but rather Musk, whose public conduct is positively unhinged.
And I know that even Elon cannot predict when we can take off that steering wheel.
Which must be why he said that autonomous driving was "basically a solved problem" back in 2016. Less than a month after that Model S plowed into an oncoming truck, which Autopilot thought was a stretch of bright sky -- killing its driver.
They know they are right.
This being the very worst kind of hubris - which has always led to outcomes far more foolish and destructive than the simple lust for money.
They are wrestling Nature.
And as we have seen, regulations (what you seem to refer to as "public opinion"). And per the article below, with the advice of his own engineers, as well.
From: https://archive.fo/psSYR :
As the guiding force behind Autopilot, Mr. Musk pushed it in directions other automakers were unwilling to take this kind of technology, interviews with 19 people who worked on the project over the last decade show. Mr. Musk repeatedly misled buyers about the services’ abilities, many of those people say. All spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation from Mr. Musk and Tesla.
For years, Mr. Musk has said Tesla cars were on the verge of complete autonomy. “The basic news is that all Tesla vehicles leaving the factory have all the hardware necessary for Level 5 autonomy,” he declared in 2016. The statement surprised and concerned some working on the project, since the Society of Automotive Engineers defines Level 5 as full driving automation.
More recently, he has said that new software — currently part of a beta test by a limited number of Tesla owners who have bought the F.S.D. package — will allow cars to drive themselves on city streets as well as highways. But as with Autopilot, Tesla documentation says drivers must keep their hands on the wheel, ready to take control of the car at any time.
Regulators have warned that Tesla and Mr. Musk have exaggerated the sophistication of Autopilot, encouraging some people to misuse it.
“Where I get concerned is the language that’s used to describe the capabilities of the vehicle,” said Jennifer Homendy, chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, which has investigated accidents involving Autopilot and criticized the system’s design. “It can be very dangerous.”
Pretty inconvenient during road trips to have to pull off the highway, because the car doesn't trust that it's the passenger working the center console...
I understand people usually drive alone but its gonna be hard to police this long term unless we start solving the real problems like why are touch screens being used in cars at all??? they are the worst possible ux for maximum distraction!
Sometimes bluetooth just seems to get itself in a state where things won't connect and you have to start again. It happens on pretty much everything with me eventually, be it my bluetooth keyboard with my laptop, my phone and my car, my headphones and iPhone...
Sure, save the user from themselves while driving. Still, I wish Tesla was much more open on the car. For example I wish it had Chromecast/Airplay so I could play movies from my phone (fine if it's only when parked). I also wish it supported iOS CarPlay and Android Auto, even if was just in 2/3rd of the screen in a window. I don't use the self driving feature and I'd rather use the full google maps experience than their limited built in version. And, I wish they allowed apps (heavily sandboxed).
The problem is that those people are driving a ton of steel around and are likely to kill someone other than themselves. And people have proven to be irresponsible when using cars - alcohol, text and drive, stupid ideas are abundant. So that’s not saving the users from themselves. It’s saving me and you from idiot users.
I am not saying this is the stronger argument. It's still an argument, though, and it surprised me to find this sentiment missing from the comments (granted, we're at only 7 comments right now). Why would something we want applied to smartphones and PCs not apply to cars?
For Apple iPhone, for example, you just have to assert that you aren't driving to use it while driving (assuming the iPhone could be used by a passenger instead, so they can't really tell).
Cars are inherently dangerous, mostly to the people around you. Modern car safety makes sure you can practically drive into a wall and come out fine, but any people you might hit on the way won't share your fate.
You should have control over the stuff you buy, but to use that stuff on public roads you'll have to get it certified for safety. If you want to build your own race track to play video games on, be my guest, but keep your mods off the streets.
When you try to use an iPhone while driving, it will ask you if you aren't driving (i.e. a passenger) but otherwise the choice is yours to obey the rule or not. Tesla is getting in trouble for offering the same thing, but it is different, because the panel is attached to the car, so is considered part of. If it was an iPad tapped to the dashboard, no one would say that you should be automatically locked out while driving (since...it isn't a part of the car, it is just something stupid).
There are actually proposals to change that: if the iDevice can detect that it is in a moving car, that it should be disabled just in case it is the driver using it, with exemptions for people on buses and such.
We have minimum requirements for licensing, but otherwise we still have the freedom. Of course you are still liable for any damages caused, but that's called personal responsibility.
Also, I'm pretty sure most people don't care one bit what that community wants. When I hear "aftermarket and performance tuning", I think of idiots street racing, overly aggressive drivers, and obnoxiously loud cars. (I don't care if it's a straightpiped Civic or a freaking LFA, it's still obnoxious for everyone not driving the car.) Not exactly what most people want on public roads.
There sure are, but the idea of getting tweaks certified would be a big change.
This comment seems to confirm my biases.
This is a democracy people.
But the government owns the roads, so the same applies to them. If they say you can't drive and game... you can't drive and game.
And let's be fair here, you buy a car to drive on public roads.