As I’ve said before, I can’t imagine any tech investment with less bang for the buck than driverless cars. The technological challenges are enormous, and would still require decades and trillions more to make commonplace for most people. And the result for many is a difference of getting to play games on the way to work. The sooner we collectively abandon the idea and instead invest some of those resources in public transport and tech that replaces cars entirely the better we’ll be
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I say that every f’ing day while commuting on my motorcycle. No BS folks, put the phone down, and drive.
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The problem is that nobody uses the word “autopilot” in everyday life a way that reflects the actual function of an airplane’s autopilot system. They use it to mean “acting automatically without the need for input”. They think of it like the autopilot from Airplane!, not “fancy cruise control”.
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I keep having to re-inflate my autopilot…
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TIL:
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Any ‘driver enhancement features’ need to take into account that people do a lot of really dumb shit while driving. When driving the 5 hours back to college in southern Utah, I used to read a paperback on the steering wheel. In fact, the less someone is engaged with driving, the more likely it is that their brain will nag them to add another activity to the mix.
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Tesla does have a feature that requires your hands to be on the wheel. If you remove them, reminder alarms sound and I believe the “autopilot” eventually turns off.
Can the NTSB tell Tesla to STOP SELLING UNSAFE THINGS TO UNSAFE PEOPLE, as they tend to crash into the rest of us?
Or, maybe Teslas are anti-plutocrat evolution in action …
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Good to know, i do know that it did require people to have their hands on it but i don’t know enough about all the details on how it works
DH and I use the Waze app on trips to see if we need to circumvent traffic problems ahead of us. The first thing Waze asks is if the operator is a passenger; presumably it will not activate if the answer is negative, or demand to be put on voice activation. I’m okay with this.
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The “nose area”? That’s a little on the gore.
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A lot of cars already have things like this. They will detect when your hands are off the wheel for a certain period of time and some hand driver facing cameras to detect when your eyes are off the road or if your head is tilting a certain way. I’m sure Tesla has all this stuff but that doesn’t mean people don’t find ways to defeat it.
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You must be a pilot, or at least interested in aircraft. This topic comes up everytime about Autopilot. And while all the experts (I’ll call you an expert here) point out that this is all an aircraft autopilot does, it’s not what the general public hears or understands from movies and TV.
The general public thinks: Autopilot flys the plane, it does EVERYTHING, and can practically do it all from takeoff to landing while the pilot sits there and just waits for an alarm between takeoff and landing taxi.
Doesn’t matter that this is completely wrong. 
From the article:
We don’t hear about the same issues with other cars that have adaptive cruise control system and lane-keeping assist services. Presumably because they don’t have a CEO broadcasting that the car can drive itself using its Autopilot system, playing into the false understanding about what Autopilot means.
I will never buy another car without adaptive cruise control. It’s wonderful on the highway anytime there are other cars around. It does super well with cars traveling at roughly the same speed. Slowing down and speeding up, keeping a consistent distance between cars. At least in the two cars we have, it’s not very good at drastic differences. It’s poor at overtaking cars that are traveling substantially slower. For instance, driving 65 with nothing in front, approaching cars doing 45, it doesn’t know to slow down early enough. Traveling 65 locked on a car in front, they break and it slows down wonderfully.
It’s an assist though, I don’t expect it to automatically drive the car on it’s own. Still a nice upgrade from plain cruise control. The biggest problem is the follow distance I set, is large enough that people tend to pull into it.
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To me the real question I want addressed in these articles about autopilot crashes is are you more likely to crash with this tech on or off. Clearly this tech won’t stop all crashes, but the second it is statistically less likely someone to crash with it on than off we should flip the switch on. Obviously it is not ready for watching movies, sleeping or playing video games but these examples are outliers. I am sure you could find outliers where seat belts caused someone to die but for the most part they make driving safer.
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Cars don’t kill people…
There’s something particularly ignominious in not only dying because you were playing a video game while driving; but in playing relative dreck at the end.
There are “he died doing what he loved” cases; and there are “he died playing some pay-to-win clicker with a rating hovering a trifle over 50% in the app store”.
According to the NTSB analysis; it was the latter.
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I’m not saying the driver isn’t also responsible- no matter what they called it, the car’s driver should have known what it actually did and used it in a responsible manner. But driving a Tesla isn’t the equivalent in skill, responsibility and knowledge to being an airplane pilot by any means, and to the average Joe, the word “autopilot” promises a lot more than the car actually delivers. Companies should make at least a token effort to idiotproof their products, especially if it’s something like a car where the consequences could be fatal for both the idiot and anyone unlucky enough to get in their way.
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In 30 years we’ll have trouble explaining to children how things like this happened. It’s already hard enough explaining we had to use pay phones to call home and hope someone picked up to give us a ride.
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It’s GM’s Super Cruise that does the eye tracking. I don’t think any other manufacturers do that yet.
