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Comment by justapassenger | Hacker News Reader

Tesla has no hardware for proper driver monitoring. Most of model S have no internal camera. And model 3 internal camera wasn’t designed for it (doesn’t work in the dark, cannot see through sunglasses, cannot see where your eyes are actually pointing, etc).

You cannot OTA HW deficiencies.

Now, will they be forced to have monitoring like that, to be on par with their competitors? That’s a different story, and given how weak USA regulatory agencies are, and how reckless Tesla is at disregarding them - I’m pretty sure Tesla won’t be hurt by it.

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> Tesla has no hardware for proper driver monitoring. Most of model S have no internal camera. And model 3 internal camera wasn’t designed for it

See. That has been my whole point for months that both Autopilot and FSD is still unproven safety critical software and it goes to show that if used in circumstances say at night it becomes even far dangerous to use at the worst time to drive, like I have said before [0][1][2][3]. Even worse that it lacks proper driver monitoring.

I guess they should be required to have this driver monitoring hardware installed on their cars as well as night vision cameras to avoid the crashes I have listed below. If the regulators enforce this, perhaps they might have saved another Tesla driver from losing control or avoided another crash.

Or perhaps if Tesla still finds it difficult to prevent further crashes using night vision cameras, perhaps they have to admit that they should have used LIDAR instead.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29639080

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30267710

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28732866

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29516199

Most driver assistance systems do not do any driver monitoring. I don't think it could be retrospectively required.

Systems with basic acc and lane centering, sure.

But for systems closer to AP (that claims to stop at the lights, take highway exits, etc), it’s de facto industry standard to have dedicated camera for monitoring.

Because that’s a stupid system. I will never accept being under camera surveillance constantly by the car, no matter what stupid name people come up for it (“attention monitoring”)

Playing the devil's advocate if I may - why would you oppose e.g. an internal, offline system that monitors your eyes for being closed and can save your spouse and kids from dying in a car crash if you doze off during a long night drive, by alerting you / safely stopping the vehicle?

I saw a similar reaction to Volvo's announced plans for such tech (it was a YouTube video) - it seemed to be a completely offline system, but people still read "camera" and reacted that they don't want "someone watching them" in the car.

Because you can never be sure it's 'completely offline' or that it actually can help. If you don't want to kill a couple dozen of people by driving into a fuel truck, just don't drive while about to pass out. It's that simple, but no electronics can ever replace responsibility.

Also if you don’t want to kill people don’t have a seizure or a brain infarct or a stroke or such while driving.

I have no real issue with a system that has no memory or logging of events and only exists to help me, not to cause liability to fall on me because the system, possibly erroneously, logged I took my eyes off the road for a split second 30 seconds before an incident. Or insurers using false positives as a reason to raise rates. And saving the video is right out.

But there's no such system, nor is there any trivial way of demonstrating that such a system works that way. Because all car companies and insurance companies want data.

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