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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

If this was happening as often on Volvos or GM vehicles don’t you think they would be looking into it too?

Other automaker AEB (automatic emergency braking) systems have the same stationary object detection deficiency and specifically indicate that the system can fail under these circumstances [1].

Tesla gets called out because their autosteer is so good at lane keeping, comparatively speaking. Their new high resolution radar [2] (Phoenix) they’ve registered with the FCC, as well as a retrofit campaign across the fleet, will likely resolve this gap. If so, I’m unsure what happens when other automakers continue to have this deficiency as their autosteer capability improves but they don’t have high res forward facing radar. Will NHTSA hold legacies to the same standard?

[1] https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a24511826/safety-featu...

[2] https://www.autoevolution.com/news/tesla-backpedals-on-the-u...

> Their new high resolution radar [2] (Phoenix) they’ve registered with the FCC, as well as a retrofit campaign across the fleet, will likely resolve this gap.

Is a retrofit confirmed or is it just your assumption? They even sold hundreds of thousands of "vision only" cars (including mine) with Musk and Karpathy claiming radar is useless for them. Funny how they've walked it back with this new radar news.

I was always _shocked_ that Musk was such a genius that he figured out how to do self driving without RADAR or LIDAR. If only the hundreds of engineers at Google and Cruise could have made the same discovery. /s

Strong assumption NHTSA will issue a recall due to the severity of the issue and Tesla offers up sensor fusion as the fix.

Tesla Vision was a successful strategy to keep shipping units during supply chain issues (inability to source radar units), but it is clearly not sustainable based on the Vision codebase maturity reflected by operational performance.

AEBs and lane-keeping systems on other automakers vehicles are much more conservative in their function, and therefore aren't as conducive to passive driving behavior.

The driving dynamics of different vehicles result in different outcomes not just due to those dynamics themselves, but also in the driving behavior they elicit. (and even further, in that drivers of different driving habits often exhibit selection bias in the vehicles they choose)

>Tesla gets called out because their autosteer is so good at lane keeping, comparatively speaking.

Yeah, Tesla gets "called out" because their technology is so good, not because their implicit marketing claims the cars can drive themselves.

There are full time shills whose entire focus is demonstrating on YouTube how the cars can drive themselves. You don't think that has something to do with this? Arguing "That's FSD this is Autopilot" misses the entire point. Elon has 100M followers on Twitter; go scan through any thread. People think they've solved FSD, people think they have humanoid robots, people think he already owns Twitter for crying out loud.

So, yes, if Mary Barra got in her Chevy Bolt and told a reported the car can drive itself and someone died doing the same thing, I think GM would be held to the same standard.

GM's "Super Cruise" uses lidar map data, radar, cameras, and has an interior camera monitoring the driver to make sure they are paying attention.

Tesla's don't.

It’s not just the feature that’s unsafe, it’s the feature plus the marketing.

If the other manufacturers start throwing “full self-driving” around to describe their cruise control/lane keeping/automatic breaking, and people start crashing because they rely on that, then yes. I expect there would be some regulatory activity.

I don't. You rarely see crashes of other vehicles make the press, but with Teslas you do.

Tesla articles get views because of both the Tesla haters and fanboys, makes financial sense for news sites to publish them. That increased press leads to increased investigations.

Tesla is building "full self driving" using a feature called "Autopilot". You're playing stupid but nobody is fooled by this sophistry.

Doesn't Ford call their version Co-pilot360 or something? What are your thoughts on that?

If that system is suffering from errors that cause accidents it should be investigated, and if dangerous enough, banned.

How might the average person see the difference between a copilot and autopilot?

I think most people understand that a copilot is fully able to fly the plane themselves whereas an autopilot requires being monitored.

Interesting, that makes sense. I view it differently at first. In the front seat passenger of a car people are sometimes called the CoPilot and that’s what I thought of, someone is who looking out.

I don’t think the average person knows that an aircrafts autopilot requires constant monitoring.

Tesla has sold more self driving cars than all other manufacturers combined. Of course you would hear more about Tesla.

Hahahaha Tesla has sold zero Level 5 cars. They've sold a bunch of Level 2 automated cars, same as VW, GM, Volvo, Subaru, etc.

Those other manufacturers have more robust legal teams, so they advertise their cars capabilities a bit more honestly.

There are robot vacuums with better self driving capabilities than teslas.

0 > 0*n == false

To be fair, they didn't say Tesla has delivered any self-driving cars. Everyone knows a huckster is at their happiest with an internet horde making excuses for their incapacity to fulfill their promises.

Heh, good point. The best correct is technically correct and all that.

Do neglectful people turn on cruise control and then rear-end other cars in their Volvos and GMs? I'm going to guess that there's plenty of such instances, but they're not as headline-prone as crashing Teslas. Hence, why this data would be useful for comparison.

Is Autopilot different than cruise control? Is it used differently?

If they're not the same thing why equate them?

They are very similar in my view: they automate part of driving to reduce load on the driver. Traditional cruise control just maintains velocity. My Subaru's adaptive cruise control maintains velocity and controls distance relative to the car ahead. Tesla also keeps your car centered in lane, but is otherwise just adaptive cruise control. There's some more features in the "self-driving" cars, like auto-parking and overtaking - I don't have much experience with those, I've only used non-self-driving Tesla autopilot. For the normal Tesla autopilot, though, "adaptive cruise control plus lane-centering" seems to accurately describe it.

Yes so technically, and as marketed, they are not the same. A dumb setting that fixes velocity is not the same, in any way, as a sophisticated self-driving mechanism that aims to recognize the world around it and adjust multiple parameters dynamically. More surface area for errors, and a misguided sense in the driver that their car is smart and can manage this process itself without the same attention as a fixed-speed (and nothing else), dumb cruise control

> A dumb setting that fixes velocity is not the same, in any way, as a sophisticated self-driving mechanism that aims to recognize the world around it and adjust multiple parameters dynamically.

Except plenty of modern cars don't just have fixed velocity cruise control. They have adaptive cruise control that will speed up or slow down to match the velocity of the car ahead of you. They also have lane centering that will keep your car in its lane. That sounds an awful lot like Teslas.

Expectations matter. Even if the exact same thing would be sold under different names, calling it autopilot/self-driving is the one that should be called out.

Probably not. Volvo and GM are in with the crowd in charge of who gets investigated. Must is not.

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