Hacker News Reader

Comment by comte7092 | Hacker News Reader

A lot of discussion in this thread about the technical meaning of “autopilot” and its capabilities vs FSD.

This is really missing the point. Tesla could have called it “unicorn mode” and the result would still be the same.

The true issue at hand is that Elon Musk has been banding about telling people that their cars are going to drive themselves completely for over a decade now and overstating teslas capabilities in this area. Based on the sum totality of the messaging, many lay consumers believe teslas have been able to safely drive themselves unsupervised for a long time.

From a culpability standpoint, you can’t put all this hype out and then claim it doesn’t matter because technically the fine print says otherwise.

View on HN

> it doesn’t matter because technically the fine print says otherwise.

Every time you engage the system it tells you to pay attention. It also has sensors to detect when you don’t and forces you. If you have more than N violations in a trip, the system is unavailable for the remainder of your trip.

I don’t know how much clearer it could be.

I would argue that the system is actually so good (but imperfect) that people overestimate how good it is, and let their guard down.

If a system were more error prone, people would not trust it so much.

Which is kind of the entire problem. It’s Tesla bringing this grey-zone product to market that the Jury/Judge found to be problematic (and thus ruled against Tesla).

Tesla has always been blasé about safety.

Look at what Elon and even Tesla official account are publishing daily on Twitter. The tweet suggestions like your car can drive you even when you have a health emergency and need to drive to ER or that you can make an espresso while your car is driving itself.

Can you point to any other automaker that even come close to this level of false advertising ?

> I don’t know how much clearer it could be.

Maybe not give it a misleading name that implies full self-driving capabilities. Also not have the CEO publicly make grandiose claims of the performance over 8 years.

> If a system were more error prone, people would not trust it so much.

Unfortunately not. Youtube is full of videos of FSD trying to crash into oncoming traffic, parked cars etc, but then at the end of the video the driver goes “well that was pretty impressive” and just ignores all the suicide attempts.

The car in question didn't have FSD as far as I can tell.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com