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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Is there enough info yet to know if the lane change was initiated automatically? That's apparently possible. Tesla support site:

Auto Lane Change

To initiate an automated lane change, you must first enable Auto Lane Changes through the Autopilot Controls menu within the Settings tab. Then when the car is in Autosteer, a driver must engage the turn signal in the direction that they would like to move. In some markets depending on local regulations, lane change confirmation can be turned off by accessing Controls > Autopilot > Customize Navigate on Autopilot and toggle ‘Lane Change Confirmation’ off.

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I believe the car was in "Full Self Driving" and not "Autopilot"?

It’s unclear because FSD is supposed to switch to autopilot on highways. The driver said it was in FSD mode but they may just not realize that switchover occurs.

In any case, navigate on autopilot can change lanes on the highway without user intervention so it seems like an insignificant detail.

Not sure what you mean. If autopilot has a bug then there is a good chance a lot of other cars do too, since (afaik) autopilot is not at its core Tesla proprietary tech like FSD.

I think it is proprietary. Other cars have similar features, but I don’t think they run the same system.

My point is that as an end user, there is basically no difference between autopilot and FSD if the FSD beta is enabled on the car. It's a technical detail that doesn't seem significant.

If the end user said they were driving on FSD, it likely means they are enrolled in the FSD beta and were using autopilot - in the car there is no distinction between autopilot and FSD. They are the same thing in the car if the FSD beta is enabled.

Sure my point had nothing to do with the user experience but the post-mortem on what to make of what actually happened and what needs to be done about it. In that context it is highly relevant. The person I was responding to seemed to be asking about which actual system was being used to navigate the vehicle.

What's the difference if you have a Tesla that is FSD capable but it is disabled? I bought into FSD because I had the cash but disabled it.

FSD is basically navigation on city streets. If you disable FSD beta, then you have plain autopilot on city streets (TACC + steering to stay in your lane).

And here is the whole problem. It’s not good UX.

Automatic switching between FSD and Autopilot is not any kind of UX problem. There is no reason the driver needs to be aware of it. The driver does not need to take any action at all. The only difference is the type of road. But which software was in use is relevant here because people are trying to blame this on FSD. Whenever you're on a freeway, Autopilot is used automatically instead of FSD, so FSD had nothing to do with this regardless of whether the car had FSD installed or not. This is the same Autopilot software that has been available and in use for many years.

When responsible for overseeing a multi-ton vehicle, I like to know how it will behave. Cruise control and lane assist I understand. I need to know which one is in control and how it will behave if they can respond differently.

There is no difference in behavior when switching from FSD to Autopilot or vice versa. And there is never any ambiguity about which is active because it is completely determined by road type which you're obviously aware of while driving.

Then, other than pedantry, is their a meaningful difference?

Yes, FSD is essentially a complete rewrite of Autopilot which will soon replace it for freeway driving too. Autopilot has been available for many years and FSD is new. This accident could have happened years ago and is not evidence of any issue with the new FSD stuff.

But since there's no behavioural difference, it doesn't matter if it's a complete rewrite or not.

They currently operate on disjoint sets of roads, so they can only be roughly compared, and in rough comparison they do not behave differently. Of course if operated on the exact same road (which, again, is currently impossible) their actions would not be the same in every detail, just as different humans or even the same human driving the same road multiple times wouldn't. But that doesn't mean that there's necessarily any consistent difference that would enable a driver to use the information of which one is active to improve their predictions of the car's behavior.

I guess it matters because a full rewrite is much more likely to have serious bugs.

I like how my 25-year-old Range Rover has neither of those. Power steering and ABS is all you get.

Technically it does have cruise control, but I've never worked out what kind of road conditions it would be useful for and until I replace a 25-year-old dry-rotted vacuum hose under the bonnet it's not going to control a damn thing.

This sounds similar to Boeing's reasoning for not documenting the MCAS system on the 737 MAX.

> There is no reason the driver needs to be aware of it.

If the person operating the vehicle doesn't need to be aware of the difference, then the general public shouldn't need to either when analyzing an accident.

It seems baffling to me that we could imagine a scenario where it's less important for the driver of a vehicle to be aware of the difference, than it is for the public when reacting to a news article.

I don't think you get to have your cake and eat it. Either there is no relevant distinction, in which case the "well actually" response that "it's not FSD" seems unnecessary, or the distinction is important, in which case it seems problematic that drivers would be confused about it.

The difference comes when drawing inferences about the future development of Autopilot/FSD as these articles invariably do. This is completely different than day-to-day usage of the system. If you believe this was a failure of FSD, then maybe it's evidence we should stop the rollout of FSD or whatever. If it's a failure of Autopilot, then it is not evidence about the future behavior of FSD at all. FSD is a complete rewrite of Autopilot and is planned to soon replace it entirely including for freeway driving.

If FSD automatically turns into autopilot on higways and driver is not supposed to know, then it is fault of SFD.

> The difference comes when drawing inferences about the future development of Autopilot/FSD as these articles invariably do.

I guess I just didn't take that away from this article at all.

It seemed like a more general complaint about Level 2 automation using this instance of a crash with FSD/Autopilot as an example. The distinction seems, to me, relatively irrelevant to the main point of the article. A key paragraph for me was this one:

> While, yes, Tesla’s system was the particular one that appears to have failed here, and yes, the system is deceptively named in a way that encourages this idiotic behavior, this is not a problem unique to Tesla. It’s not a technical problem. You can’t program your way out of the problem with Level 2; in fact, the better the Level 2 system seems to be, the worse the problem gets. That problem is that human beings are simply no good at monitoring systems that do most of the work of a task and remaining ready to take over that task with minimal to no warning.

So, I guess I don't see the point in distinguishing between FSD/Autopilot when the thesis of the article isn't specific to Tesla, but rather applies to Level 2 systems across all cars.

It matters not to the driver or to the general public but to audiences like this one where knowing if a 10+ year old mature system not based on ML did this or a beta, in progress neural network based system did this makes a difference in thinking through the implications of such an error.

I’m not familiar with Teslas but to me the UX problem is that Autopilot and FSD sound like they should mean the same thing

CHP also said it was in FSD mode.

That this is even being discussed means it needed to be covered in ground school. Autopilot mode setting errors are a serious problem in aircraft operations. Read NTSB crash reports.

That's the trouble with this semi-automated mode. It re-creates a known problem in aircraft automation. And without the training pilots receive.

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