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Comment by heavyset_go | Hacker News Reader

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

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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)

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