"Full Self-Driving" doesn't imply autonomy, Tesla engineer says
cleanenergyrevolution.co
cleanenergyrevolution.co
> While testifying last week, Tesla engineer Eloy Rubio Blanco repudiated the allegations that the name “Full Self-Driving” was chosen to deceive the public. Blanco stated that Tesla drivers did not believe that their vehicles were autonomous.
It doesn't say anywhere else how he thinks the public is supposed to interpret "full self-driving." As a native speaker of English, I'm baffled to think of what else it could be intended to mean.
100% agree. Furthermore, if neither "Full Self-Driving" nor "Autopilot" are meant to imply autonomy, what term of art would imply that?
Both of those terms imply autonomy IMHO, and if we're proposing to (eventually) introduce a 3rd term which Tesla agrees would imply autonomy, then it feels like splitting hairs to try and argue that the first two don't but the 3rd does.
Airplane autopilots still require a large amount of pilot input to operate.
True or not, few people know that.
Autopilots have been around a long time, and have a very specific meaning. They require training, knowing what their limitations are, constant monitoring, and frequent manual input.
I’m not sure what Tesla thought they were doing by billing it as a “hands off” term.
Because, the Tesla autopilot feature is actually rather similar to a simple aircraft autopilot, with very similar limitations. At its core, it's really just a lane following driver assist, combined with adaptive cruise control. If you ignore the "adaptive" part, it's roughly equivalent to an aircraft autopilot in heading mode, plus autothrottle.
Tesla marketing did lean into that misconception, benefited from it and might have made it worse. But they didn't create it, and the public misconception predates Tesla by a long margin... it just didn't really matter before then.
From what I can tell, the misconception arises from the fact that the public know flying an aircraft is hard, the fact that pilots do so much training proves that. Therefore, they assume an aircraft autopilot must be advanced to handle the perceived complexity of keeping an aircraft stable in the air.
The introduction of autoland, and the way it was presented in magazine articles by journalists, probably made the problem much worse.
It’s basically a glorified cruise control for airplanes. It will fly a general route, but anything beyond that requires manual input (at least for small plane autopilots).
A good example might be a cop rerouting traffic. This would be an ATC route change in the airplane world necessitating you to reprogram waypoints. I’m afraid of what Tesla’s “autopilot” does in this situation.
One last addition edit - in the airplane world, the PIC has ultimate control and responsibility over the airplane. There are a ton of disclaimers and training that goes along with a real autopilot that makes sure you know what its limitations are. Tesla also has failed here IMO.
A simple autopilot will do nothing more than hold the wings level so the pilot doesn't need to continually keep their hands on the controls. From there, more functionality is added as layers.
Heading mode makes the autopilot always point towards a compass heading. Nav mode is a computer that changes requested compass heading every time it reaches a Nav point.
A more advanced autopilot will add modes for speed-hold and altitude-hold that trade between altitude and speed. When combined with the auto-throttle, the autopilot can implement constant rate climbs and decent.
The autoland mode simply updates to heading mode and constant rate decent to follow the glide slope.
While it's true that a modern autopilot can takeoff, fly to a destination and land without the pilots touching the flight controls, the pilot is required to constantly switch between the various modes, feed nav points, and adjust the autopilots mode. At the same time, the pilots are doing a bunch of other tasks to keep the plane flying and safe.
The simplicity is very intentional. Pilots are expected to know what the autopilot is doing at any point and understand why the autopilot is doing that. They are expected to spot when it's doing something weird very quickly and disconnect it.
The names all imply that the car is doing something to help you drive, but none of them imply further meaning about their capability or even suggest anything about their autonomy. Tesla is pretty much the only company to embrace names--Autopilot, and later, "Full Self-Driving"--that come loaded with cultural and linguistic meaning.
Doing so allowed Tesla to borrow the excitement and prestige of future developments: look not so much at where we are, but where we're going and how some small pieces of that future are there in the current system. Which worked great for their marketing efforts, but didn't do so well in educating drivers about what their cars were actually capable of or doing.
Anyhow, the SAE eventually developed a taxonomy with six levels of driving automation, which were later adopted by the Department of Transportation.[1] It's not a perfect taxonomy, but it does illustrate that autonomy is a spectrum. But it's definitely intended more for the industry and regulators rather than consumers; if a car has "level three conditional automation" systems, that needs additional context to be useful to consumers.
0. https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-safety/active-drivi...
0. https://www.nhtsa.gov/technology-innovation/automated-vehicl...
https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/26/musk-on-tesla-network-its-...
I don't see any other way of interpreting it.
From the other excerpted testimony it does not seem like he is covering for Tesla in general so further context would be helpful.
This is important from a legal standpoint because forward looking statements do not constitute fraud in the legal sense
>>FSD controls speed, steering, braking, obstacle avoidance, traffic maneuvering, parking, navigation in a manner that, yes, I would call "Full Self Driving." It is very far from perfect, and Tesla has certainly communicated it as being better than it really is. there's a high dose of caveat emptor, but this FSD does a lot more than any other car I've ever driven or owned. The fact that I will not let it attempt to navigate certain intersections, either out of embarrassment or risk of getting hit, does not diminish the fact that my car will give it the ol' college try.
I think it's reasonable, certainly not baffling, to call its performance "Full Self Driving." As noted below, I also think Tesla should be obligated to a generous refund/trial program, which to me absolves the ticky tackiness of "what the definition of FSD is"
He said this:
> “Do I think our drivers think that our vehicles are autonomous? No,” Blanco told the court.
Autopilot is great. It does the boring repetitive parts of driving. It behaves predictably in response to stimuli, and generally errs on the side of caution. This causes it to be suboptimal in ways that the driver can account for. As an example: when making lane changes, Autopilot is very sluggish, to the point that if there's any traffic at all, you have to give it a kick on the accelerator to complete the move.
FSD is a trashfire. I'd say the closest description is like you're constantly supervising a 15 year old learning to drive for the first time. Where I live, it'll disregard no-right-on-red and creep past stop lines that are set back from a light. It'll try to take turns and then lose track of which lane it wanted. The cognitive load of babysitting FSD is worse than just doing the driving myself.
This is precisely it. It'll work a lot of the time, deceptively well, but you need to be as attentive as a driving instructor to intervene when it makes a mistake.
For long distance driving it's a super relaxing experience
This all sounds like a typical driver. I imagine it's matching the training set pretty well
Rented a Tesla for a day a couple years ago, and can confirm. I spent the day experiencing a car repeatedly trying to murder me for the first time in my life, and mainly during what's supposed to be easier highway driving at that.
No doubt that lead to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34327763
Always-On display goes dark when you don't need it
To save battery life, the display is completely dark when:
• Your iPhone is lying face down
• Your iPhone is in your pocket or bag
• [...]
• You haven't used your iPhone for a while
(your iPhone learns your activity patterns
and turns the display off and on accordingly,
including if you set up an alarm or sleep schedule)
What makes it frustrating more than anything is the feature's name: "Always-On display." If not for that, I think its actual best-effort behavior is fairly reasonable.
Why this change? Was double tapping to select a word too difficult to understand for most users. It’s not like tap and hold to get a cursor to insert words/punctuation is any more intuitive.
I guess the words soon will have no meaning.
“Hey, come to our new casino! Everyone wins always”(by winning we mean everyone has a great time so even when they lose they actually win).
And then in fine print, “*-up to 20 minutes”
*) Disclaimer: neither "verified" nor "fact" implies by any means that somebody believes that the stated and/or expressed sentiment or observation is actually true.
**) Neither "somebody" nor "nobody" imply the presence, existence, or absence of existence of a sentient being, nor does "believe" imply a cognitive process or state of mind. Neither do "observations" or "express" imply an activity by any sentient, semi-sentient, or algorithmic agency, nor is "true" an expression of judgement.
It looks like iOS, on the other hand, just dims your lockscreen slightly? I can see why they'd have to get smart with how often they leave the display on. It'd be distracting while you're trying to sleep and sounds like a battery killer. In a way, Apple may be using the phrase "Always-on display" more literally than you'd expect, even if it is less practical.
I always turn off any of these “learning” features, if possible. They are never correct. The worst part is when you do something different one day, and suddenly it thinks you’ve permanently changed your behavior.
I’ll never understand where the confidence in these features comes from.
I don't have a time machine, so it's a bit untestable but what do you, reasonable HN readers think the person in the street would say if you vox-pop'd "what does FSD mean"
Fully is pretty well understood.
Self has a really specific meaning.
Driving.. is what happens to make cars move safely, or not.
But "Fully self driving" actually means "not fully self driving" .. ok.. how did the "not" get in there?
Words have no meaning anymore. Up is down. Left is right.
What a dangerous fraud.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-sel...
Musk has been saying that you will be able to have your Tesla earn money for you as a robotaxi lmao.
Maybe I should “fully pay”(make a deposit) on their car then refuse to actually fully pay because that doesn’t imply fully paying.
Absolute donkeys.
Timely prime day deal:
There's been much written about how fake the video is as well, including it actually getting into an accident during one of the many takes.
Let's not defend blatant fraud.
> Full Self-Driving Capability
> All new Tesla cars have the hardware needed in the future for full self-driving in almost all circumstances. The system is designed to be able to conduct short and long distance trips with no action required by the person in the driver’s seat.
> The future use of these features without supervision is dependent on achieving reliability far in excess of human drivers as demonstrated by billions of miles of experience, as well as regulatory approval, which may take longer in some jurisdictions. As these self-driving capabilities are introduced, your car will be continuously upgraded through over-the-air software updates.
It is certainly easier to make your case if you look only at that one video from 2016 which was released as a tech demo and pretend that is the only thing Tesla has ever said about it and that anyone mistook that for something your car could do at the time. (A Tesla can in fact do that today, other than transitioning from self-driving to parked.)
Why?
Sorry, that's against the site rules and all. But what else is there to say about such colossal delusion and doubletalk?
If they'd said, for instance, 'full driving' we'd have thought sure, it has all the features but still, take care it might be buggy.
If they'd said 'self driving' again we'd think, it can do it but maybe not in all circumstances.
But they said it all; 'Full self-driving' means it does the whole enchilada. It can mean nothing else. It's normal English, well-understood by anybody who is listening. No ambiguity. No wiggle room.
These guys ought to be enjoined to stop selling their irresponsible death machines.
> "The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself."
No reasonable person would interpret that as coming with the implied caveat of "but that person might need to intervene at any moment".
And don't get me started about the doubletalk ! Musk clearly thinks he's above the law now (and for some reason, this seems to be the case for now). There are countless other examples, some are not even debatable. For example, when he bought the first 9% of Twitter. Legally, he should have disclose that at 5% threshold - which he did not. It's estimated that it saved him ~$150 million. There is nothing to debate - the law is clear, and he intentionally did not disclose his buying. One would think that it's not a complicated case, yet still 1 year after there is nothing done ! Nothing. SEC is suing him now, but ... not really for wrongdoing ! They want to bring him to testify. I don't know what's going on, but clearly he's getting a lot of free passes.
Unfortunately this is the math I believe the enforcement agencies have to do.
Still doubletalk. Still indefensible.
One can wish FSD means perfection in every circumstance all the time, and Tesla certainly implied in its marketing that it is. In reality, FSD is really amazing at times and 'what-the-hell was it thinking' at times. But it does control speed, steering, braking, obstacle avoidance, traffic maneuvering, parking, navigation in a manner that, yes, I would call "Full Self Driving." It is very far from perfect, and Tesla has certainly communicated it as being better than it really is. there's a high dose of caveat emptor, but FSD does a lot more than any other car I've ever driven or owned. The fact that I will not let it attempt to navigate certain intersections, either out of embarrassment or risk of getting hit, does not diminish the fact that my car will give it the ol' college try.
I do think Tesla should get a substantial hand slap though, and should be required to give an extended free trial to everyone to see exactly what it is that FSD can and cannot do, and also give those who purchased FSD outright an extended refund window.
Taking your initial analogy, it's the difference between not sleeping well in the 787 Dreamliner, vs said Dreamliner crashing before landing.
I believe people are being overly dramatic and think they are entitled for Elon's overcommitment. I agree that Tesla overpromised and underdelivered. Meanwhile, I am happy to use and optionally pay for FSD as delivered. It is really an amazing technology and significant.
If I asked 100 people what it meant for a car to be "full self-driving," 99 would say it means the car could fully drive itself. The final one is too busy sucking up to Elon.
If there are regularly occurring street driving situations it can't be trusted in for safety reasons, even (perhaps especially) it if it "will give it the ol' college try" in those circumstances, I suppose you can argue whether that indicates that it is fraudulent to describe it as "Full Self-Driving" or if it is merely defective Full Self-Driving, but I think that that's a fairly fine distinction in what Tesla has done wrong.
> and should be required to give an extended free trial to everyone to see exactly what it is that FSD can and cannot do
That seems to be exactly the wrong solution for a system which, by your own description, is unsafe in some of the situations one would reasonably expect "Full Self-Driving" to handle.
I mean, I pay $200/mo for FSD because I like it so much.
Go read the comments on any Tesla story here circa 2015-2018 [0] for a good laugh. The majority of people here were delusional re: Tesla and Musk.
[[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1514764800&dateRange=custom&...
Even if there was not skepticism before, it would be naive to think that it is the same crowd as today.