Tesla in autopilot mode crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser

I keep wondering what the customer benefit of Level 2 autopilot is if not to lower your attention and relax your mind. Tesla&#x27;s &quot;out&quot; is that drivers are supposed to retain full attention and oversight of the autopilot system -- but then if you strictly follow this rule, what is the benefit of autopilot?<p>I can see the benefit <i>to Tesla</i> and future Tesla customers of essentially crowdsourced fleet learning. But what is the benefit <i>right now</i> if you strictly follow the rule of remaining alert enough to intervene at a second&#x27;s notice?<p>In previous threads the best explanation I got from Tesla owners was that it frees you from the &quot;details of physically driving&quot; so you &quot;can now supervise instead.&quot;[1] That just seems suspect. Supervising autopilot to the degree required to correct sudden mistakes seems, to me, to be probably very close to the mental load of the details of steering yourself.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17151116" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17151116</a>

Is the article available to Europeans somewhere? All I&#x27;m getting is a message with this:<p>&gt; Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.<p>On the other hand, I&#x27;m wondering how much I want to read an article from a website where they <i>must</i> track me to when I just want to read something...

I don&#x27;t get it, why is it so hard to detect stationary objects in front of you? wouldn&#x27;t that be the &quot;hello world&quot; of any self-driving tech?<p>Every time I ask this question, the response is &quot;radar as a technology has too much noise, not accurate enough to detect stationary objects&quot;.<p>But it DOES detect stationary objects. Otherwise no one would even turn on Tesla AP at all.<p>Why is it so hard to detect stationary objects in front of you?

People always lament about how Tesla tries to mislead customer&#x27;s about its capability, but is there actually data that shows this is truly the case among Tesla owners? How many times does &quot;attention needed&quot; beep is needed before customer can be considered reasonably informed that it is not fully self-driving?<p>Even among non-Tesla cars, whose manufacturers don&#x27;t try to &quot;mislead&quot;, 71 percent of people believe automatic emergency braking can avoid all crashes [0]. Is this percentage higher or lower for Tesla, and is that difference warranted?<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newsroom.aaa.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;08&#x2F;hit-brakes-not-self-braking-cars-designed-stop&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newsroom.aaa.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;08&#x2F;hit-brakes-not-self-braking...</a><p>[1] Quote from above &quot;When traveling at 45 mph and approaching a static vehicle, a scenario designed to push systems beyond the stated limitations, the systems designed to prevent crashes reduced speeds by 74 percent overall and avoided crashes in 40 percent of scenarios. In contrast, systems designed to lessen crash severity were only able to reduce vehicle speed by 9 percent overall.&quot;

How many non-Autopilot cars have crashed into parked vehicles? It happens a lot, to the extent that a lot of states have “move over” laws explicitly designed to reduce it.<p>Does Autopilot actually make the problem worse, or is it just more newsworthy?

Has Tesla blamed the driver yet? They might get away with that here. The road was not divided and unsuitable for their lane-keeping system. The pavement markings are unusual.[1]<p>Of course, as usual, their obstacle detection failed to detect a stationary obstacle that didn&#x27;t look like the rear end of a car in the same lane. We need a minimum standard for a vehicle which takes automated control of steering and braking. It must reliably stop for obstacles.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;goo.gl&#x2F;maps&#x2F;BjqTZoD5Yws" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;goo.gl&#x2F;maps&#x2F;BjqTZoD5Yws</a>

I remember reading people saying that insurance premiums will plummet for Teslas because of how much safer they will be on the road.<p>Today I read Tesla is getting into the insurance business because premiums are getting out of hand. It makes some sense since internally they’ll have more data they can use to deny claims.<p>It’s interesting how reality plays out.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;electrek.co&#x2F;2018&#x2F;05&#x2F;29&#x2F;tesla-insuremytesla-insurance-model-s-most-expensive-car&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;electrek.co&#x2F;2018&#x2F;05&#x2F;29&#x2F;tesla-insuremytesla-insurance...</a>

I live in Laguna, cycled by this accident today, own a Tesla, and can attest to consistent autopilot issues in this section of the highway. The road widens with a turnoff to the right, and in my experience that is exactly the direction autopilot wants to go every time, rather than follow the center line, even when it is tracking a lead vehicle that does so. There are no lines to the right, so I’m not quite sure why it does this. But, I can understand how an innattentive driver might end up in this situation because until this point in the road autopilot works great.

I really wish all the car manufacturers would stop with this bullshit &quot;you still have to be driving it&quot; self driving nonsense.<p>Claiming that the driver is still responsible for driving the car, while using a system designed to encourage the &quot;driver&quot; to not pay attention is a dumb idea, and all I can see is this kind of thing leading to regulations the delay actual self driving cars.<p>I&#x27;m not a self-driving car fanboy or anything. I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s just around the corner, but it&#x27;s clearly going to happen &#x2F;eventually&#x2F; and I can&#x27;t imagine it being more dangerous than regular drivers. But this kind of &quot;self driving but not&quot; features feel like the sort of thing that calls to government agencies for regulation, and sufficiently &quot;dumb&quot; mistakes from these systems seems like the sort of thing that triggers a reactive over-regulation.

“Come check out our really awesome manual auto-pilot! It’s fully manual automatically!”

Assuming that every major AP collision, it is pretty amusing that the latest non-fatal ones have all coincidentally involved emergency vehicles. I imagine it must be related to how such vehicles have the right to park just about anywhere, including on roadways in which drivers do not expect parked vehicles.

One way to avoid these types of crashes IMO is anomaly detection. It&#x27;s quite simple to do anomaly detection in pixels using modern deep pixel prediction nets like PredNet. In my experiments you get a few seconds lead time on something like a car cutting you off (the car starts to head out of the lane before actually crossing it for example). This allows alerting the driver, and with a full windshield HUD you could even highlight the anomalous pixels on the windshield. The nice thing about this is that it can be trained in an unsupervised manner on all the available data. Some important details are to find anomalies in object bounding boxes, using something like Tensorflow&#x27;s object detection pretrained net. Otherwise buildings with lots of striations would light up the anomaly detector. Also, you should detect anomalies in a human colorspace like CIELAB so that white cars (#fff) are not artificially weighted as more anomalous.<p>Finally, you could use this as input to a planner like Model Predictive Control where a higher cost is incurred for approaching anomalous objects.

Elon Musk has constantly underestimated the difficulty of autonomous driving.<p>This video (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;wsixsRI-Sz4?t=1h18m28s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;wsixsRI-Sz4?t=1h18m28s</a>) shows Elon Musk, two years ago, saying the following:<p>&quot;I basically consider autonomous driving to be a solved problem&quot;.<p>&quot;A Model S and Model X can drive with greater safety than a person, already. Right now.&quot;<p>&quot;We are less than two years away from complete autonomy&quot;.

Totaled? Maybe insurance totaled, but that police cruiser looks relatively in fact from the picture. The driver&#x27;s side door is open and and it doesn&#x27;t look like it was crumpled in any way in that zone. The rear driver&#x27;s side passenger door looks like it took more damage, and the entire frame of the cruiser still looks like it&#x27;s in relatively okay condition. The Tesla is in the same shape.<p>I&#x27;m not trying to downplay the impacts of the driver or Autopilot here, but even if a police officer was in the cruiser, it doesn&#x27;t look like it would have been as catastrophic as the article implies.

From TFA:<p>&gt; &quot;Tesla has always been clear that Autopilot doesn&#x27;t make the car impervious to all accidents, and before a driver can use Autopilot, they must accept a dialogue box which states that &#x27;Autopilot is designed for use on highways that have a center divider and clear lane markings,&#x27;&quot; a Tesla spokesperson said in an emailed statement.<p>Does this dialog box appear every time the car is started or is it a one time thing, just like terms of services?

If you need to stay alert and have your hands on the wheel, why is the damn thing called &quot;Autopilot&quot;!? This should not be legal.

Los Angeles Times blocked Europe because of GDPR. Here&#x27;s a link we can read from there <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;us-tesla-autopilot&#x2F;tesla-hits-parked-california-police-vehicle-driver-blames-autopilot-idUSKCN1IU2SZ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;us-tesla-autopilot&#x2F;tesla-hit...</a>

Good reading: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vanityfair.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;business&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;air-france-flight-447-crash" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vanityfair.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;business&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;air-france-...</a><p>Basically this is a well-known issue in aviation. As automation gets better and better, humans rely on it more and more and get less and less able to handle even minute failures in it. Additionally humans are <i>absolutely terrible</i> at being able to be dropped into a complex situation and have to make immediate rational decisions about it - thus the failure mode of &quot;in case of error, tell human to handle it&quot; is a bad idea if time between &quot;tell human about it&quot; and &quot;crash into things&quot; is under ten seconds or so. This has been the subject of many NASA studies and NTSB reports and the above article does a good job presenting this info in a form a layman can understand.<p>There are currently no known easy solutions, sadly.

I enjoy how &quot;EU&quot; means &quot;outside of us&quot;. I&#x27;m in South Africa and it&#x27;s blocked for the eu

2 fire trucks, 1 police cruiser.<p>Tesla really is sticking it to the man!

They should name the feature smart cruise control. Case closed. IT does not imply self driving capability but rather more advanced cruise control system. Which is basically what it is.<p>Nobody is going to set a cruise control to a certain speed and look away from the road!!!

Tesla could still salvage this somewhat by loudly rebranding Autopilot to &quot;Cruise Control 2.0&quot; and issuing a serious apology.<p>But somehow they (or just Elon?) seem unreasonably averse to doing that. The man is losing hero-status by the minute.

“You are about to hit a solid object. Stop.”<p>Why can’t we solve the most basic use case? We don’t have the sensors and it’s all done with cameras?

Articles like this should really include incident rates per miles driven for the self driving vehicle and compare that against human rates. Without that this feels a lot like an intentional effort to mislead. What matters are the crash rates. E.g. - how many humans crashed into an unmoving vehicle yesterday? An immense number but of course they also drove far more miles as well. So the question is exactly how many miles?<p>The first milestone for vehicular automation is not perfection, but to simply be better, and in the worst case - comparable, to humans. Given the media&#x27;s tendency to try to make big news out of every single self driving vehicle crash, it seems like we&#x27;re already approaching (if not passing) this first milestone, as these articles are relatively rare while these vehicles have driven hundreds of millions of miles in autopilot. I can&#x27;t find the latest number, but back in October 2016 Tesla already had 222 million miles under autopilot. It&#x27;s safe to assume it&#x27;s now some substantial multiple of that.<p>Some time it would be interesting to see media releases around the time we transitioned from horses&#x2F;carriages to automobiles, to see how the state of the media has changed. Or perhaps it has always been this way. &quot;<i>I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods &amp; errors. - Thomas Jefferson, 1807&quot;</i>

Tesla Autopilot doesn&#x27;t see stationary objects. It sees moving objects with its radar, and tries to avoid hitting them. It sees lane markings with its camera, and it tries to stay between them. Sometimes lane markings are confusing, worn, or inconsistent. If that happens, your Tesla will smash you at 70mph into a concrete barrier&#x2F;police car. It will not slow down if it is uncertain about the lane markings, it will not beep if there is a stationary object ahead.

Let&#x27;s make the roads out of rubber and the wheels out of pavement. I feel like this is the backwards mentality with autonomous vehicles. I wrote a while ago about how they simply cannot solve the transportation problem, at least not in a way that&#x27;s cheaper than just building mass transit:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;penguindreams.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;self-driving-cars-will-not-solve-the-transportation-problem&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;penguindreams.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;self-driving-cars-will-not-so...</a><p>I realize this particular case is different with us talking about assistance&#x2F;safety features, but I still feel we&#x27;re going the wrong direction here. These features reduce your awareness. They&#x27;re like a teenage driver you constantly have to monitor, but worse.<p>They teach people to be comfortable and less alert with systems that have potentially fatal bugs that we can&#x27;t yet identify.<p>We can build mass transit now, at a fraction of the cost of developing the tech for automated vehicles. There are so many corner cases, with highways, city driving conditions that simply cannot pan out for autonomous vehicles without a lot of testing; and a lot of people getting injured and dying.<p>I wish people would shelve this pipe dream for now. Maybe once we have really solid rail transport again in the US, like we use to decades ago, and rich and poor people can have a means to work even in smaller cities; then we can work on frivolous junk that will benefit the few that can afford it. Right now we just run the risk of killing more people who can&#x27;t.

Another auto pilot crash. List so far: 1 Hebei, Fatal China crash <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jalopnik.com&#x2F;two-years-on-a-father-is-still-fighting-tesla-over-aut-1823189786" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jalopnik.com&#x2F;two-years-on-a-father-is-still-fighting...</a> 2 Florida, Fatal Joshua Brown crashes into truck. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jalopnik.com&#x2F;tesla-driver-in-fatal-florida-crash-got-numerous-warnin-1796226021" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jalopnik.com&#x2F;tesla-driver-in-fatal-florida-crash-got...</a> 3 Mountain view, Fatal Model X crash. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mercurynews.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;30&#x2F;tesla-autopilot-was-on-during-deadly-mountain-view-crash&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mercurynews.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;30&#x2F;tesla-autopilot-was-o...</a> 4 Reference to auto-pilot crash in Hayward. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;abc7news.com&#x2F;automotive&#x2F;i-team-exclusive-tesla-crash-in-september-showed-similarities-to-fatal-mountain-view-accident&#x2F;3302389&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;abc7news.com&#x2F;automotive&#x2F;i-team-exclusive-tesla-crash-...</a> 5 You You Xue crashes in Greece <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;abc7news.com&#x2F;automotive&#x2F;millbrae-driver-says-tesla-model-3-was-in-autopilot-when-it-crashed-in-greece&#x2F;3525746&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;abc7news.com&#x2F;automotive&#x2F;millbrae-driver-says-tesla-mo...</a> 6 Utah autopilot crash, Tesla driver injured, Firetruck driver injured. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sfgate.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;technology&#x2F;article&#x2F;Unclear-if-Tesla-s-Autopilot-engaged-in-crash-12913423.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sfgate.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;technology&#x2F;article&#x2F;Unclear-i...</a> 7 Texas autopilot crash &#x27;Car crashed, then continued to accelerate&#x27; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dallasnews.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;autos&#x2F;2016&#x2F;08&#x2F;25&#x2F;dallas-man-says-tesla-crashed-continued-accelerate-using-autopilot-kaufman" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dallasnews.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;autos&#x2F;2016&#x2F;08&#x2F;25&#x2F;dallas-...</a> 8 SF VC autopilot crash, she took over control just before the autopilot crash, Tesla blamed her for being in control when the crash happened. In her words &#x27;its your fault if you take control, its your fault when you do not take control&#x27;. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.digitaltrends.com&#x2F;cars&#x2F;tesla-autopilot-related-crash-dispute-california&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.digitaltrends.com&#x2F;cars&#x2F;tesla-autopilot-related-c...</a> 9 Laguna Canyon road crash into a parked vehicle. Driver injured. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;LBPD_PIO_45&#x2F;status&#x2F;1001541486146547717" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;LBPD_PIO_45&#x2F;status&#x2F;1001541486146547717</a> 10 FenderBender Crash video on youtube. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qQkx-4pFjus&amp;feature=youtu.be" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qQkx-4pFjus&amp;feature=youtu.be</a> 11 Wisconsin Model X crash <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.carcomplaints.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2018&#x2F;insurance-company-sues-tesla-model-x-crash.shtml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.carcomplaints.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2018&#x2F;insurance-company-su...</a> 12. Culver City crash into Fire Truck <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;abc7.com&#x2F;traffic&#x2F;2-federal-agencies-investigate-tesla-crash-in-culver-city&#x2F;2985342&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;abc7.com&#x2F;traffic&#x2F;2-federal-agencies-investigate-tesla...</a> 13 Autopilot crash in Germany <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;tesla-germany-crash&#x2F;tesla-crashes-into-bus-in-germany-driver-says-used-autopilot-idUSL8N1C55Y7" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;tesla-germany-crash&#x2F;tesla-cr...</a> 14. Model X crashes into Semi in California. Not many details. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;electrek.co&#x2F;2017&#x2F;03&#x2F;27&#x2F;tesla-model-x-autopilot-crash-semi&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;electrek.co&#x2F;2017&#x2F;03&#x2F;27&#x2F;tesla-model-x-autopilot-crash...</a> 15. Laguna Canyon road crash into semi at same spot as (9) april 10, 2017. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ktla.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;05&#x2F;29&#x2F;tesla-on-autopilot-crashes-into-laguna-beach-police-patrol-vehicle&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ktla.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;05&#x2F;29&#x2F;tesla-on-autopilot-crashes-into-l...</a> There are probably more crashes that have not been reported prominently and not disclosed by Tesla either.

I can&#x27;t figure out the geometry of this accident. It looks like the Tesla hit the cruiser near the left rear wheel. And the cruiser was pushed sideways over the curb. But its right rear tire looks to be inflated.<p>So why would the Tesla have been heading toward the roadside? Was the cruiser perhaps parked in the middle of the roadway?

How does Tesla fail so badly at basic collision avoidance?? Surely the LIDAR is able to detect an imminent collision, but at least in the recent fire truck and lane-split barrier incidents, the cars didn&#x27;t even slow down?! That seems really fundamental.<p>Edit: so they don&#x27;t use lidar... Is this a machine vision failure, then?

I really wish everyone had a chance to use the autopilot feature and judge themselves. I use it every single day and trust the machine.<p>Issue is, with every complex system, there are few ins and outs that users need to know - like lane merge buffer lines, sharp lane merges by another vehicle in front of view, etc. Within your first few rides(below 10), users could pretty much guess when it works and when it might have issues.<p>On labeling the feature, it is marked clearly BETA and wiggle prompt is shown pretty much in all the confusing cases - so alert is never missed for me.<p>My only gripe is with all these incidents, Tesla is forced to update the feature to make it less user friendly or take out completely. I genuinely feel safe and come home every single day with less stress. Elon&#x27;s tantrums are not helping the situation either.

I liked a comment from the hosts of The Grand Tour (paraphrasing): &quot;When the owners of the car companies that promote these self-driving cars will allow the cars to drive them along the Yungas Road in Bolivia without a steering wheel, then it can be classified as safe.&quot;

This is another problem with the “imperfect specialist”. Fortunately and unfortunately we don’t need to grow our own vegetables anymore. Most of us have adopted the concept of buying vegetables from “specialists” who grow them more efficiently then we can. So, we use these specialists and detach ourselves from the growing process altogether. Then we receive a batch of Romain Lettuce comes with ecoli and die. This doesn’t happen often but we’ve delegated this task to someone else and inherited the imperfections of their process. I’d argue vegetable growing is pretty damn safe these days. I’m ok with that risk. But I don’t think Tesla is anywhere near worth the delegation of my driving. I’ll keep my brained turned on for now.

Step 1: Stop calling it autopilot.

In the car&#x27;s defense... I think the police cruiser looked a lot like a highway median.

The fix is to implement self driving bumper cars.

I wish all those advanced assist functions in today&#x27;s upper middle-class cars would trickle down to cheaper cars faster. That would give us much more safety now.<p>It seems Teslas autopilot cannot reliably do much more than conventional lane assist etc.<p>Tesla could disable autonomous lane changing and autonomous changing of streets, requiring driver&#x27;s input for all changes of direction (that are not smoothing out, but staying in lane), and it would be really good.<p>But Tesla needs the impression of game-changing, not just best-in-class for financial markets reasons.<p>I believe authorities should order call-backs and force Tesla to disable all traces of autonomy.

Tesla and the driver are at fault here. Tesla for not prohibiting operation on the types of roadways where it is not designed to be used and the driver for using it where it’s not designed to be used.

Why they not partner with Google? I think they have much better talent pool at AI to handle this. I hope they are using all the crash data to make it more robust.

Pay up the nose to be a billionaires guinea pig so he can go can down in history as a pioneer of robot cars while while you go up in flames...HELL NO!!!

All I see is this:<p>&quot;Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.&quot;<p>Maybe we should develop a habbit here on HN not to link to geo-fenced sites?

&quot;Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.&quot;<p>I can&#x27;t read the article. Weird. is this because of GDPR?

&gt; The Palo Alto-based automaker, led by Elon Musk, has said it repeatedly warns drivers to stay alert, keep their hands on the wheel and maintain control of their vehicle at all times while using the Autopilot system.<p>That Tesla is taking so long to learn what &quot;human factors&quot; are is painful, especially since HF has been part of other industries for decades.

Also discussed at the RealTesla <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;RealTesla&#x2F;comments&#x2F;8n20d9&#x2F;this_morning_a_tesla_sedan_driving_outbound&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;RealTesla&#x2F;comments&#x2F;8n20d9&#x2F;this_morn...</a>

My sinister side is tingling...<p>How convenient for non-autopilot auto manufacturers... to have a competitor out there boasting semi-autopilot capabilities...<p>I wonder how many of these &quot;autopilot crashes&quot; could be machinations... if not already, then in the future perhaps?

To successfully develop self-driving cars, without spending NASA moon mission like time and money, we need to put a value on a human life. Maybe even different values for passenger, driver, pedestrian, other motorists, policemen, etc. Then the risk, time, and money to spend will be easily defined. If some task will take a software engineer (paid $150k&#x2F;year) half year to develop but only increase safety enough to save 1 pedestrian per decade, and a pedestrian is valued at $50k, then maybe the dev can work on something else. Numbers are made up just to illustrate the point. But this is how Tesla, or any other self-driving car-maker can quickly bring self-driving tech to the public in a cost-effective manner, and within reasonable time-frames.

That disclaimer wears thinner each time someone does something stupid like this. Tesla can keep repeating it until a third party gets killed or maimed, or it can act responsibly.

&quot;Elon Musk, has said it repeatedly warns drivers to stay alert&quot;<p>Its AutoPilot, why the hell are all those people expecting it to Pilot the car Auto matically? ....

Just like humans are self driving and self crashing the car, &quot;auto-pilot&quot; is doing the same. Machines are too good at learning from humans. &#x2F;s

&gt; Cota said. &gt; Cota said. &gt; Cota said.<p>Three times in a row, has this article been written by a robot? It doesn&#x27;t feel like something a human would write.

they need to reign this in fast before the NHTSA forces their hand. supposedly they already on that agencies bad side and the last thing Tesla needs is a big recall or stop sale. they will upset some of their fans but in the end it may be safer to OTA restrict its usage.

When will the right mirror be replaced with a camera and dedicated screen. Until the 1980s cars didn&#x27;t even have a mirror on the right side. Getting rid of the mirror will make cars more aerodynamic. It will also make cars safer, no more knocking over cyclists with the right side mirror. It will make cars cheaper to maintain, mirrors are expensive to maintain.

In the last 24 hours, 100 people died in car crashes - but 2 crashes a year apart and its &quot;why does this keep happening&quot;. I realize the numbers are not comparable - however, 100 people dying a day is seen as act of God, but 100% driver-less society and getting 1 person dying a week will get these cars banned probably.

I could be wrong but that looks like an autopilot 1 car which is an older version of the tech that they&#x27;re not really developing anymore. The newer autopilot 2 and 2.5 is what they&#x27;re going forward with for now. That also doesn&#x27;t look like a highway and autopilot isn&#x27;t designed to handle that yet.

Tesla made a huge mistake naming this feature &quot;Autopilot&quot;.

More overpromising and deadly consequences. He has overpromised on delivery dates, autopilot abilities, he has underestimated capital requirements, and timeline trips to Mars.<p>Perhaps Tesla should consider a new CEO and Elon take a move to a more figurehead position?

Elon Musk: „Fake News!“

Unavailable in most European countries. #GDPRproductivity

Sounds like Tesla has the right idea?

Acab :D

how is autopilot feature still allowed to be called auto pilot? it mistakenly leads people to believe that it can drive itself. The name literally means - a system used to control the trajectory of an aircraft without constant &#x27;hands-on&#x27; control by a human operator being required.<p>After multiple deaths now the head of marketing at Tesla should be criminally prosecuted (or whoever is the big shot who signed off on this name).

Autopilot is like the steering wheel, brake, stickshift, etc. You don&#x27;t get to blame an accident on it. Airplanes have autopilot as well. We live in a world where movies like jackass are made, based on real people and their attitudes. It&#x27;s not reasonable to suggest that safety labels or terminology can fix everything. Some people are plain irresponsible and foolish.

Everybody is so hard on Tesla. And I do agree that the name &quot;AutoPilot&quot; gives the wrong impression of what it can do.<p>But think about it like Elon Musk would: If AutoPilot is <i>statistically</i> saver that a car without AutoPilot then it&#x27;s good enough to be sold on production cars. Tesla cars are saver that normal cars statistically.<p>Off course, picking one crash and saying AutoPilot sucks is statistically not the right approach. I do agree that Tesla should improve on this. But crashing into a parked car probably means that the driver was playing with his phone, or the cars touch screen too much. Tesla should have systems in place that detects the driver not paying attention. (something better than touching the steer)