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Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

> I’m not sure how the phrase “full self-driving” could mean anything other than that.

There is some room to argue about the conditions under which the car can drive itself. If the car couldn't handle a high-grade, winding mountain road with an inch of snow on the ground and yet more coming down, I don't think too many people would be fussed is a "full self-driving" car said "uh, no" (especially as a good fraction of drivers couldn't handle that either).

To my end, if the car can't handle any condition that doesn't make me go "I think I should stay home," that should disqualify it.

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Humans often drive in conditions were it's unsafe -- icy roads, dense fog, heavy rain, strong winds. We take the risk, and most times it's okay, except for the occasional pile-up on the highway.

But I don't think a "full self-driving" car refusing to drive in those conditions would be a deal breaker. I'd prefer it if autonomous vehicles were more conservative and just refused to drive in unsafe conditions.

Right. But you then end in a sport where driver barely does any driving 99% of the time but the 1% they do need to drive, they are out of any practice for normal driving, let alone in hard conditions.

We already had problems back when people started coming back from mandatory WFH and accident rate spiked, this would be essentially similar or worse, a bunch of drivers that might do 10k miles a year but drive 500 of them and have extremely rusty normal driving skill, let alone driving in bad conditions.

It would be essentially like letting your kid drive your car only in blizzard and pouring rain...

I'm not sure that experience with driving in normal conditions actually helps when driving in dense fog or on icy roads. People are overconfident and drive just like they normally would, which is why the pile-ups happen every time we have worse than usual road conditions.

Well then, call it, self driving under perfect conditions but not as a star modifier

A lot like a git merge, then :)

There is not room to argue. Unless we call it “Full self-driving*”.

Full describes the set of use cases the car can drive in. All of them, not some with conditions and exceptions.

Not many people can fully drive a car then. Which makes sense.

I think excluding off road / hazardous mountain roads etc. might be OK for the definition. And still cover many 9s of actual trips.

Driving into a parked ambulance is definitely a no no though.

Sure... regardless calling a Tesla self driving is blasphemous at best, though personally I find is criminally negligent.

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