At the moment, there remains some bugs to work out, as last night Autopilot decided to slam on the brakes at 150 km/h on the autobahn for no reason, but given how close it is to perfection on freeways, and how many improvements I see in the updates, I'll go so far as to say we should be requiring this technology in all cars like we now require emergency braking and backup cameras.
Holy shit! That's a hell of a caveat!
Indeed it is. To make it clear, it slams on the brakes bringing me down from 150 to 120 km/h, it doesn't come to a dead stop, so unless someone is seriously tailgating, then it's not creating any danger, it's just uncomfortable.
No! That's a "game changer!"
That's the problem with Tesla. They show autonomous driving, make big claims, talk about "autopilot".
And in the fine print they say in legalese that few people understand or even notice that this all isn't available right now and you must never leave your autopilot unattended.
Only if it works and has a better than human average driving.
Which might not even be enough itself.
If someone is a better than average driver themselves, then by using a "better than average" but lower than his capacity auto-pilot, they increase their risk, not decrease it.
Consider that the "averages" in accidents per miles also include drunks, elderly, people never really knowing how to drive well, people crashing in bad conditions (e.g. snow and heavy rain) and so on.
The average accident/miles for a fit good driver that usually drives in good roads in a state with good weather can be bigger than the average of the above.
So having an autopilot be merely better than the general average is not enough to make it "as safe".
>At the moment, there remains some bugs to work out, as last night Autopilot decided to slam on the brakes at 150 km/h on the autobahn for no reason, but given how close it is to perfection on freeways
Yeah, who cares if it can kill you at any moment with some bizarro sudden move, since it's "so close to perfection on freeways".
Thankfully, early adopters will help improve both the autopilots of the future and the human evolutionary pool.
This isn't a lowest common denominator issue, but rather addressing the swiss cheese model of driving safety. Autopilot catches problems that I, as a driver, might miss. At the same time, I catch problems that Autopilot might miss. The best example is emergency braking with this or any emergency braking system is truly superhuman. On the other hand, anticipating drivers that are about to veer into my lane is something I'll see before the car will.
Sure, if a great driver is not paying attention, then the safety of the car is completely left to the computer, but there's no evidence that this is done in large numbers. You can point me to some counterexamples on YouTube or that crash in Mountain View, but there's no evidence that this is done at scale.
> Yeah, who cares if it can kill you at any moment with some bizarro sudden move, since it's "so close to perfection on freeways".
I never said anything about almost killing me, and a blip of the brake pedal would only kill you in the event that someone is tailgating to an absurd degree, which is illegal and reckless by itself.
> Thankfully, early adopters will help improve ... the human evolutionary pool.
This is an unfounded statement. The death rate while using autopilot is still significantly lower than when not using it.
Autopilot seems to be around those numbers which is promising assuming continued improvements. Though it's not currently dramatically safer their is reasonable expectation it will improve over time.
That will be a huge adjustment that they seem to not be doing.
So any numbers of DUI deaths riding an 1990s semi-broken car is compared to an autopilot death in an expensive state of the art car with great engine, speed, and breaks.
How about we get the deaths per miles for non-coke users driving Tesla-like sports cars?
I'd rather err on the side of underselling it by calling it ACC than overselling it by calling it Auto Pilot. But I'm not in marketing so what do I know?
As someone who heavily uses cruise control, and lives in an area with curves, it makes for unjoyed driving with patrons with adaptive cruise control, or non-cruisers.
The engineers that tested it undoubtedly turned it up to 11 and hauled ass around a track before dialing it back to a more "consumer friendly" setting.
This is what happens when people enter a new market: They look for metrics, any metrics, and then optimize on those (because that is how business usually makes money in well understood fields) even if they are not really representative.
I want to know how many miles are driven (both IRL and in simulation) per software release?
If you accept that the Autopilot software improves over time, then you accept that it changes over time. If it's changing, then there will be situations that will behave differently in the future. The implicit assumption is "the software will only make better driving decisions with each point release", but that doesn't follow! There's no proof that a situation that was driven safely by version 1.1 will also be driven safely by version 1.2 (unless it was tested in simulation).
If this means the pace of self-driving development would slow down, then so be it. I wouldn't let a driver turn on Autopilot with me in it.
