They want to pretend you'll only need to actually intervene in 'edge case' situations, but here we have an example of perfect conditions requiring intervention. Regardless of the buzzwords they can attach to whatever methods they are using, it doesn't feel like it works.
... wait, do they actually claim that? I mean that's just nonsense.
For automated tools like CNC machines, there is a reason it’s just ‘emergency stop’ for instance, not ‘tap the correct thing we should do instead’.
But doing an e-stop on a road at speed is a very dangerous action as well, which is why that isn’t an option here either.
The alternative is taking control of the car all the time. Something nobody is going to practically do.
Passively monitoring a situation continuously and reacting quickly when needed is something humans are not good at. Even with airline pilots, where we do invest a lot in training and monitoring, it's a well-understood issue that having to take over in a surprising situation often leads to confusion and time needed to re-orient before they can take effective action. Which for planes is often fine, because you have the time buffer needed for that, but not always.
And then when something goes wrong, you are unceremoniously handed a plane with potentially some or all of those protections no longer active.
As an analogy, imagine your FSD car was trying to slow down for something, but along the way there is some issue with a sensor. So it gives up and hands control back to you while it's in the middle of braking, yet now your ABS is no longer active.
So now the situation is much more sudden than it would have been (if you had been driving the car you would have been aware of it and slowing down for it youself earlier in the game), you likely weren't paying as much attention in the first place because of the automation, and some of the normal protection isn't working.
So it's almost three levels of adding insult to injury. Potentially related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43970363
It does have the same problem - if 99.999% of your flight time is spent in normal law you are not especially ready to operate in one of the alternate laws or god forbid direct law, which is similar to the case of a driver who perhaps accustomed to the system forget how to drive.
But I think we have a ways before we get there. If the car could detect issues earlier and more gradually notify the driver that they need to take control, most every driver at present retains the knowledge of how to directly operate a car with non-navigational automation (abs as you mentioned, power stearing, etc)
I was thinking of something similar to XL Airways Germany 888T. I was trying to find it and came across this thread making a similar comparison so I'll link that: https://www.reddit.com/r/AdmiralCloudberg/comments/18ks9nl/p...
But I think there was some other example with an engine asymmetry (an autothrottle issue?) that the autopilot was fighting with bank, and eventually it exceeded the bank limit and dumped a basically uncontrollable aircraft in the pilots' lap. It would have been more obvious if you were seeing the yoke bank more and more. (Though it looks like this was China Airlines 006, a 747SP, which contradicts that thought.)
I agree that we can make the situation less abrupt for cars in some cases (though people will probably get annoyed by the car bugging them for everything going on)
> "In trying to explain why Ho never took this critical step and subsequently failed to notice the plane’s increasing bank, the NTSB looked at two areas: fatigue, and overreliance on automation. Regarding the latter, investigators noted that during cruise flight, the job of a Boeing 747 pilot is to monitor the automation, not to fly the airplane. Studies have shown that humans are naturally poor monitors of automation, because it’s boring and does not actively engage our brains and bodies. As a result, when something goes wrong, the brain has to “wake up” before it can assess the situation and take corrective action. Therefore, when flying on autopilot pilots have increased reaction times to unexpected events, as opposed to flying manually, when a sudden change in the state of the aircraft can be instinctively assessed using physical cues transmitted via the control column."
So who knows what we can do. I've definitely experienced this to varying degrees with the fancier cruise controls (e.g. "Autopilot"). It's one thing to just take pressure off the gas and/or steering wheel, but another entirely when you aren't actively "driving the car" at full attention anymore.
The level of training required to oversee full automation is non-trivial if you have to do more than press a stop button.