Tesla owner who drove with 'arms folded' cleared of dangerous driving

This wasn't true ten years ago.

To be blunt, "sucks to be them". They want to make billions from the technology, there's going to be some tough problems along the way. That doesn't make it incumbent on anyone else to allow, excuse, or otherwise give them a pass.

    if (isSafeToMergeRight and not rightLaneTrafficPaceAddsTimeToEstimate):
        mergeRight()

Mercedes is actually being cautious about slowly rolling things out, not just yeeting it over the fence like Tesla.

Little things like:

> Mercedes shows us an EQS with an important visual indicator that is not yet legal: in the hopefully very near future, when Drive Pilot is active, the headlights, taillights, and side mirrors will have turquoise marking lights so other drivers know the Level 3 system is in use.

and

> Drive Pilot also has redundant braking and steering actuators and a separate onboard electrical system just in case one of them fails.

are good things.

And it drives better than Autopilot, despite being "glorified cruise control":

> It does feel more precise and accurate in how the car stays in its lane and reacts to surrounding traffic, with fewer jerky movements and constant tiny adjustments. Drive Pilot even reacts to larger trucks or motorcycles that are lane splitting by moving slightly over in the lane without crossing the lines, and not only does it work in carpool lanes but also it can tell the difference between the carpool and FasTrak lanes and will let the driver decide which to use.

This doesn't sound like Tesla at all:

> and there’s not a single moment where Drive Pilot makes a mistake or reacts badly to a situation, even when surrounded by nightmarish LA drivers.

Some of us applaud these kind of things.

Remember the whole phantom braking thing a while back? And then it disappeared with an update, but another phantom braking problem arose, so then they reverted that update, and then released another update that fixed those two problems...

A safety culture where a component manufacturer had firmware that took around 36 hours to work through the full test suite... released a new firmware to Tesla in response to issues. Got an email from Tesla 3 or 4 hours later saying "Thanks, this is working so much better", and when they responded with confusion about the test suite, etc., "Oh, we just flashed it onto one of our cars here and took it out on the road and tried".

To me, more sensors means faster implementation. Quicker to get on roads. Less total deaths. At least in theory, and in what successes i'm seeing.

If it get's cheap enough it will be.

But the AI isn't human and things a human would recognize, like a a large grey truck up ahead doing a turn on an overcast day an AI can just miss.

> if you say we can't have automation until its 100% perfect,

That's why we need the lidar.

99.99% of daytime highway dashcam frames don't include a firetruck stopped in the lane, dealing with an accident.

But let's say, hypothetically, that a self-driving car accelerated into a clearly visible, stationary firetruck in clear daylight. Despite being 99.99% perfect.

Legislators might feel in order to be an above-average driver the vehicle shouldn't hit any clearly visible stationary objects in clear daylight, because the median human driver doesn't do that.