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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

I think the autopilot name is fine and reasonably accurate. My (actual) autopilot is perfectly happy to fly me into a mountain, ocean, or thunderstorm. All I have to do is fail to keep it from doing that.

The autopilot is just another control, albeit an indirect one. When I’m flying on autopilot, I’m still logging flight time as “sole manipulator of the controls”.

Marketing it as “full self-driving” is something else entirely, IMO.

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I’m not a pilot, but my impression is that the reaction time required to take over in a dangerous situation is much less strict with planes than with cars. Except when the plane is close to the ground, I suppose, but pilots know when this is happening and can specifically pay more attention for that brief period. The plane autopilot physically can’t cause you to crash within a second at any point mid flight, AFAIK, unlike with a car “autopilot”.

Yes, planes are actually a lot easier than cars because there's pretty much nothing else to crash into up there. If you get into a bad situation you've generally had a long enough time to identify it and stop it developing.

On the road you've always got the risk that a Tesla on Autopilot will freak out over the shadow of a telephone wire across the road and panic brake to a complete stop on a 70mph motorway.

Yes I'm a pilot too and I know what an autopilot does.

However the average user does have a different idea of this as others have pointed out, and Tesla is marketing this to the general public, not knowledgeable pilots.

Don't worry, they are learning one stopped truck at a time :)

Dead people don't learn, and an industry only learns from blood if you turn it into regulation

I'd say that half of the issue is that even if the term is accurate, people hear the word autopilot and expect it to be a lot more than what it actually is.

Which is why everyone buying a tesla with autopilot is required to complete hundreds of hours of training on it that help them understand these limitations and complications, and how to understand the opaque system.

Oh wait, no, drivers get half an hour to demonstrate they won't immediately kill someone when driving, and routinely don't even know how their car's mirror dimmer works.

So maybe these contexts should stop being compared, because it's dishonest to do so.

I got my pilot license in an airplane equipped with an autopilot and got exactly 1 minute of training on it. It was "here's the switch to make sure it's turned off." (That's literally true, no exaggeration.)

All autopilot knowledge I got was from my own reading the manuals. I assume there's the same information available from Tesla on it.

But you received hundreds of hours in training to fly, more than most car drivers get. Besides, you probably have a minute to turn the autopilot off and take over before anything disastrous can happen in the worst case scenario. A far cry from requiring sub-second response times.

Well, the minimum is technically 45 hours and then 12 hours practice every 2 years.

You can do it in that with an intensive course though if you take it slow it can take longer.

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