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Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

I suspect a lot of commenters will miss this part, so it's probably good to emphasize it.

> In the footwell of the car, the officers found what is known as a steering wheel weight, which is used to trick the security systems. It attaches to the steering wheel and gives the car the illusion that your hands are on the wheel.

This seems pretty clear-cut, and Autopilot's capabilities and other safeguards (or lack therefore of) are irrelevant. The driver was mitigating safety features. It'd be pretty much the same story with adaptive cruise control and lane-keep assist.

At the end of the day, there's only so much you can do to stop someone from shooting themselves in the foot. Once you have to deal with drivers mitigating the driver awareness detection, it's probably a lost cause.

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Considering that human lives are at stake, shrugging at the issue is not a good solution. I think two solutions are 1) criminal liability for drivers disabling safety features that endanger others (e.g. on traffic stops) and 2) adversarially strengthening against safety workarounds.

> Considering that human lives are at stake

This has always been the case with cruise control.

EDIT: or one ton death machines (cars) with imperfect logic machines (humans) driving them, actually.

I'm sure GP is talking about in the context of what is really Tesla's fault here, as the article clearly is trying to bait a reaction on it. Not sure about criminal liability, but at the very least there should be a fine for using it.

I also wouldn't want the AI to decide i'm not touching the wheel because my hands are cold that day or something said AI training might end up.

That's why most of the other systems use eye tracking but tesla decided against it.

Well, yeah. It should be a crime. In fact, I'm pretty sure it IS a crime in some places. That's the point though. You can do anything you want to try to bring the number as close to zero as possible, but there's going to be a non-zero amount of people who make unbelievably irresponsible, potentially deadly decisions. I'm pretty sure that's a fact of life. It's not exactly shrugging it off.

I seriously doubt the person in the vehicle was not aware that they could lose their license for this...

Why aren't Tesla's ensuring that the drivers' eyes are open and on the road when using AP? They have driver facing cameras.

Tesla currently have visual driver monitoring in beta. Right now they are relying on steering torque sensing. People have worked out how to trick the torque sensor with weights. People will work out how to trick the visual monitoring too.

In pretty much every car on sale today, the driver's seat seatbelt sensors can be trivially defeated. Should Ford be blamed if people realise that you can latch the belt before sitting down and the car will operate as though your belt is on? Surely Ford should be responsible if they failed to correctly interlock the occupancy (weight) sensor and seatbelt sensor?

If a known exploit exist against safety features the car should not pass inspection and the feature be grounded for however long it takes for the company to fix it, this beta bullshit with actual living being taking part of the test environment by should be stopped.

As I said, there's a known exploit against seatbelt sensors. Where is your outrage about that?

This incident has nothing to do with any beta.

Seabelt exploit is dangerous for the driver, not people outside the car.

Driving wheel weight is dangerous for anyone else on the road.

Super simple line to draw.

So what about Nissan ProPilot, Honda Sensing, Mercedes-Benz Active Steering Assist and other systems? Your super simple line would include half the cars on sale today.

Whataboutisms won't change my opinion this topic and you don't know my position on these other topics

The fact you called those “other topics” even though they’re exactly the same topic says it all, really.

Do any of those systems regularly plow into parked vehicles, medians, and people? if not then i’m significantly less concerned about them.

I see in your viewpoint how we could end up in a truly suffocating biosecurity state, with the government tasked from preventing every possible danger.

You could say that about seatbelt mandates, too, but the world hasn't ended yet with such mandates and safety features in place.

people can trivially disable the seatbelt security features and the world doesn't come crashing down, so it would seem by your logic they do not actually need to do more of this...

i think as soon as it's possible "autopilot" that relies on the driver should be banned outright and we can stick to a binary full self driving vs manual driving. The in-betweens do not work well, humans adapt to ignoring the road too quickly to be a useful security override for a faulty system.

There are countless illegal things people can do while sitting in the driver’s seat of a moving vehicle. Many of them are dangerous for others. This isn’t any different.

Is Ford selling cars with the tagline "the driver is doing nothing, they don't even need a seatbelt" and implementing seatbelt sensors such that a wink and nudge is all it takes for car owners to receive the seatbelt-less features they were sold in marketing?

Because right now, Tesla vehicles are being sold with the promise that the "driver is there only for legal reasons, the driver is doing nothing" with a figleaf of driver monitoring that makes it incredibly easy to bypass and access the driverless features drivers were sold via Tesla's marketing.

If you know your driver monitoring is faulty and lets drivers easily operate vehicles while asleep, then yes, you have a duty to address that as a vehicle manufacturer.

> People will work out how to trick the visual monitoring too.

I believe you are right. The DMS (Driver Montering System) needs to work on so many outliers: damaged face, porslin eye, niqab and other health related issues. It is more important that the system let these people be able to drive the car than it is to stop abuse.

Many car manufacturers test the DMS alot regarding of how to trick them when they select the supplier but so far they don't want to pay for better protection (to my knowledge). (Well. they don't want to pay for anything to be honest but still have all the features)

I believe there will be a cat and mouse situation for a while until it get to expensive to catch them or to inconvenient/costly/looking stupid for the driver to trick the system.

But I am sure it is harder to trick DMS system than Teslas system today. And harder means fewer people will do it.

disclaimer: one of many engineers working with this.

(It is btw one of the most interesting problems I have encountered. Just think for a second of all engineering expertise you need: biological, optics, electronics, medecin, high performance computing in C and assembly (you need to get it to run on a "toaster") , AI (a lot), etc. etc. Just collecting ground truth of drowsiness is a tricky topic by it self... if someone here has a boring job, I highly recommend to think about this field)

> Autopilot's capabilities and other safeguards (or lack therefore of)

The car had an incapacitated driver and no one got hurt! Surely that particular capacity is very relevant here. If all incapacitated drivers had autopilots that drove safely, the world would be a safer place, right?

I really don't understand the resistance to this feature.

> The car had an incapacitated driver and no one got hurt!

But had Autopilot not been available would he have driven? Or would he have taken a taxi?

The problem (IMO) is the promises Tesla is making even with the name “autopilot”. It makes people think it’s a whole lot more capable than it is.

Tesla didn't invent DUI. Consider it this way: if your friend were to stumble out of the pub drunk and drive home, would you rather they did it in a civic or a model 3?

Not the point I’m making. If you misunderstand the capabilities of a product named “Autopilot” you might choose that over a taxi in a way you wouldn’t a totally manual drive. So the scenario would be “your friend stumbles out drunk and drives Autopilot, drives manually or takes a taxi” I’d rather they took a taxi. But if I were similarly mistaken about what “Autopilot” does I might not stop him driving home when I might otherwise.

I question the claim that there are people who are misled. Anyone who has used Autopilot for more than a few minutes will be left in no doubt that it is nothing more than adaptive cruise control with lane centering. Its behaviour describes itself.

The problem in this instance wasn't the driver misunderstand the capabilities of Autopilot, it was the driver being irresponsible with drugs, fatigue and the installation of a safety defeat device.

“The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.”

It's literally right there on the front page of Tesla's Autopilot site: https://www.tesla.com/autopilot

On a page titled “Future of Driving”. The page goes on to be very clear about the features of current cars.

While I think this is a solid point in general, if someone has installed weights to trick autopilot into thinking they're awake and holding the wheel, they probably know that they're supposed to be awake and holding the wheel.

False premise. The driver might not have been on the road if he couldn't rely on autopilot.

It's clear from the steer weight what it's intentions were.

You cannot compare it just with the worst case scenario. The driver, knowing his condition as demonstrated by the weight, could have taken a different form of transport, or none at all.

So you need to compare the pretty high chance of a unsupervised tesla crashing into a highway divider or parked lorry with the other modes of travel safety.

Instead you're picking an anecdote and running wild with it.

Only solution is to regulate the companies. Musk is using his army of cultish followers to do QA with other people's lives. In my opinion this should be highly illegal, and prosecuted.

Imagine your kid gets killed by a Tesla influencer trying to prove that autopilot is everything Elon promised them.

[disclaimer] i worked for a while at Cruise, and that company cares deeply about security and works hard with the government to move regulation forward as we move the technology forward.

> Only solution is to regulate the companies. Musk is using his army of cultish followers to do QA with other people's lives. In my opinion this should be highly illegal, and prosecuted.

In this case, relevant to this news story, what do you think should be regulated? I agree driver assistance systems, especially ones like Autopilot that are clearly not near human levels of driving proficiency, should prevent operation from drivers that are not aware. It seems such measures were taken, but they were defeated intentionally.

> Imagine your kid gets killed by a Tesla influencer trying to prove that autopilot is everything Elon promised them.

I suppose that would make me rather upset, but I'm struggling to make the connection to this news story. It doesn't seem to talk about the driver in question or their intent. I'd had guessed it was less about being a Tesla fan and more about being able to sleep while driving.

> It'd be pretty much the same story with adaptive cruise control and lane-keep assist.

Incorrect. This just continues to show that the gap between adaptive cruise control/lane assist and real full self driving is incredibly dangerous.

It's the gap where the user can feasibly relax and ignore the road for a decent period of time, but it's not safe to do so.

We should be jumping right into real full self driving (which is not autopilot or Tesla's "FSD"). This in between state should be illegal.

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