Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Read the fine print though.

They do disable the system in complex situations.

And they give ten seconds warning in advance of this happening.

Which sounds great until you think it through…

It means they schedule the disabling of the system way earlier in the progression of any potential traffic complication. Ten full seconds is long before incidents even start unfolding. The car has to be psychic, but it's not. So in order to accomplish the ten-second warning, what that means is those warnings need to be on a hair trigger with many false positives.

The driver, if they have it enabled, will be constantly getting warnings that the system may disable itself in ten seconds when the car sees even the very slightest possibility that things may potentially get complicated way down the road. I don't see this being endurable for most people.

So my conclusion is this is just marketing hype, until they can get rid of the auto disabling thing.



I haven’t read the fine print but you can have ten seconds of warning without predicting complications ten seconds in advance.

That 10 seconds simply means that the car must handle any situation safely for at least that amount of time. In practice, this means decisions such as emergency braking and steering must be autonomous but possible more complex scenarios (e.g. moving for emergency vehicle on a tight street) can be delegated to a human (or the system can simply pull over and stop).

They disable the system in cases of rain but at least from the marketing and videos demonstrating it, there’s no prediction of complex scenarios like you described.


No, you are not understanding what I explained. There is a moving horizon of time during which the ten seconds is continually extended, and the system needs to draw the line somewhere. When does the final ten seconds before cutoff begin? Your examples don't explain this. This is not easy stuff to solve without some compromises.


If it’s limited on what roads it can run on the 10 second window makes perfect sense. Just enable when you’re entering an unsupported roadway.


> And they give ten seconds warning in advance of this happening.

which is infinitely better than the <1 second that tesla gives you.

> those warnings need to be on a hair trigger with many false positives.

unless it is actually reasonably good at tracking threats and traffic. look, if you have multiple sensors of different types, then you are able to take firm action when things turn south quicker than a human.

A lot of tesla's problems are because they have shit sensors, and a stupid approach to designing the system (no lidar, no radar, no multiview cameras, no high res GPS or maps) They also have an overwhelming pressure to just yolo shit, rather than test, and redesign.


>which is infinitely better than the <1 second that tesla gives you.

Not at all. With Tesla you are constantly paying attention, or should be to the same level that you are with any other car.

Meantime it is actively intervening to keep things safer with better follow distance, collision avoidance, lane departure detection, and automatic braking. Most scenarios leading toward accidents are entirely avoided due to all this.

So the <1 second scenarios (which are not talking about warnings, but about when the system was in a complete outlier situation it does not know how to deal with and disabled itself) are very unusual things.

Like "a Prius driver drove off a bridge and is now landing on our hood." Of course the system will disable itself in that situation; what else would you expect? What sensors do you suggest for that?


> With Tesla you are constantly paying attention, or should be to the same level that you are with any other car.

you should be paying attention, but you are not. Human attention is a difficult thing. from what I recall, in a driving it takes about 7-14 seconds to re-gain situational awareness. This means that 1 second isn't enough.

> Like "a Prius driver drove off a bridge and is now landing on our hood." Of course the system will disable itself in that situation;

I'd expect that the system would slam on the brakes, not disengage to avoid liability. Thats the point here, its not about tech, its about legality. Thats the worse part, the entire system appears to be designed to stop tesla being taken to court.


That’s a paranoid and particularly uncharitable view which ignores the perfectly valid reasons that it’s best the system behaves as it does.

The human has responsibility for the safe operation of the vehicle, whether they step up and fulfill it or not. If they don’t fulfill their responsibility, all bets are off.

There is no other (equally good or better) way this could work in practice. You can imagine other ways, and I’m guessing you will, but they are imaginary, not practical.

> I'd expect that the system would slam on the brakes

It can and it does, even while they autopilot system is disabled. Who said it wouldn’t?

You should learn more about the cars before hardening your opinions so much.


> paranoid

I doubt its paranoid, I am not worried about it, just rather annoyed that driver's aids are being marketed as something they are not, cheapening an entire industry.

> There is no other (equally good or better) way this could work in practice.

We are literally discussing a company that has another way.

> It can and it does,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45XMhMzMDZY

suggests otherwise.

>You should learn more about the cars before hardening your opinions so much.

I work in machine perception, this is my bread and butter. more over I have worked with life critical infra, and I know corner cutting when I see it.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: