from the be-extra-careful-about-the-other-"driver" dept.
"Oh Jeeeesus": Drivers react to Tesla's full self-driving beta release
Last week, Tesla released an early version of its long-awaited "full self-driving" software to a limited number of customers. It was arguably Tesla's biggest Autopilot update ever. The software enables Tesla vehicles to autonomously navigate the vast majority of common roadway situations and complete many trips from start to finish.
[...] In another video, Brandon's Tesla was making a left turn but wasn't turning sharply enough to avoid hitting a car parked on the opposite side of the cross street. "Oh Jeeeesus," Brandon said as he grabbed the steering wheel and jerked it to the left. "Oh my God," Brandon's passenger added.
"That was a good example of this is still beta and how important it is to have control at all times," Brandon said. "It just steered directly into the back of this parked car, and it wasn't going to brake."
To be fair to Tesla, we don't know that either of these incidents would have necessarily led to a crash. Maybe the software would have realized its mistake and hit the brakes at the last second. And Brandon's overall impression of the technology was positive.
Minutes earlier, Brandon had raved about the software's performance. "Compared to when we did the drive two days ago, it's so much smoother," Brandon said. "The improvements from two software releases ago is incredible."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 01 2020, @06:13PM (2 children)
"Move fast and break things" gets a whole new meaning when it's applied to Tesla (instead of Facebook).
Seriously though, they just did an OTA update to some yokels and went "here... try this out when you're surrounded by other, moving, one-ton vehicles".
This sounds like another case of not having to follow norms and rules because it's "got a computer in it".
Dumb
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday November 02 2020, @03:08PM (1 child)
> not having to follow norms and rules because it's "got a computer in it".
Just to be clear, the reason they can get away with this is because the EULA says "you must be ready to drive the car at all times" i.e. "it is YOUR fault if the computer crashes the vehicle".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02 2020, @04:13PM
I'm not saying you're wrong, and my complaint is not with you, but with the EULA; that being said, this whole EULA requirement is similar to "Why are you hitting yourself, why do you keep hitting yourself?"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Sunday November 01 2020, @06:33PM (1 child)
So is it BETA or Google-Beta? Where it stays in beta more or less forever until it just gets removed. Still it's nice of people to want to be crash test dummies for Musk.
(Score: 2) by leon_the_cat on Sunday November 01 2020, @10:50PM
Fuuny thing is they of are just marketing men pretending to be normal consumers. I mean alphago is great but put it in a losing position and watch the fireworks of insanity fly high.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 01 2020, @06:47PM (4 children)
Is there a Turkish midget hidden inside the autopilot?
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Sunday November 01 2020, @06:55PM
Of course. What else did you think they meant? If you offer him a turnip as a treat, he'll suck you off.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02 2020, @01:29AM
A Mechanical Turk?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02 2020, @02:27AM (1 child)
> Is there a Turkish midget hidden inside the autopilot?
Yes, but she was never allowed to learn how to drive, back in her home Arab country.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday November 02 2020, @03:30PM
Turks, Arabs, whatever. They all look the same to you, eh?
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday November 01 2020, @06:54PM (1 child)
I almost died from Covid, but luckily i got the Black Plague!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2) by legont on Sunday November 01 2020, @08:38PM
AIDS would look better on the lucky side. Especially given the vaccine efforts.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday November 01 2020, @07:28PM (1 child)
The headline was misspelled is all.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02 2020, @09:18PM
Hmm, good point - those foolish enough to beta test it for them are probably the ones the (foolish) beta software can outperform.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 01 2020, @10:44PM (3 children)
This is afterall how machine learning works, by process of elimination:
Swerve to the right, nope parked car;
Swerve to the left, nope bottlebrush, nope airplane, nope squishy thing;
...several iterations later...;
Drive ahead..end;
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02 2020, @02:24AM (1 child)
By now, it works perfectly...on Elon's commute(s). YMMV if you drive in other places.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday November 02 2020, @04:38PM
Does he even use that feature? I'm not sure I would. In fact, if I was him, I would have a chauffeur. Not some some random Chauffeur, either. Someone I knew I could trust and paid well. Then again, I just don't much like to drive.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by rigrig on Monday November 02 2020, @01:58PM
Send slightly different versions to every car, score them on how long it takes before they hit something?
No one remembers the singer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fakefuck39 on Monday November 02 2020, @12:57AM (15 children)
and this is where tesla has finally crossed the line. they first put out the auto-pilot, and a bunch of idiots said they're making ridiculous false claims that the car can drive itself, and it's illegal false marketing. those people had no idea auto-pilot does exactly what it did with tesla, does not mean fully self-driving, and has been used for airplanes since like 1920.
but now tesla has crossed the line and are calling what is still an autopilot "full self-driving." so now it's illegal false marketing, it's purposely misleading, and I hope they get their asses sued into the ground.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02 2020, @02:14AM (6 children)
Congratulations, you're a useful idiot. People know auto to mean self and pilot to essentially mean operate, it does not matter that the aviation industry uses it differently. Not knowing that is hardly stupid. It was intentional on the part of Tesla to take advantage of the confusion to make people think it could do more in order to boost the status gained by buying one.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by fakefuck39 on Monday November 02 2020, @11:55AM (5 children)
using a term that's existed for 100 years that perfectly describes the product is taking advantage of people who don't know what the common term means? you know who would be a useless idiot? someone who created a word for something that already has a word.
did it take you a while to brainstorm (raining brains) that one? sit there poking your fingernail (nail that does not need a hammer) into your forehead (the head in the front, not the second head in the back)? did fireworks (a place that creates fire you can buy) go off instead of a lightbulb? I got this long tube in the kitchen and it makes light - I'll call it a lighttube.
you're not a retard in the sense that you clearly knew what an autopilot is. you're a cuck. like a person who likes to watch a nigger rail his wife. and you've gotten so used to being a cuck, you actually defend peoples ridiculous levels of stupidity, and say it's the fault of the ones doing everything fine.
tell me cuckmaster, is 40Gb internet from comcast and your 10Gb/month phone plan misleading consumers too because they don't know the difference between bit and byte? Or is it that they're stupid, because we've used bits for network bandwidth since before consumer internet? Should we all keep using bits for network bandwidth, and start using bytes just for the stupid people? Would you like comcast to change your bill to say bytes instead of bits?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02 2020, @06:58PM (4 children)
You're really proving my point for me. No, that's not what the word means to normal people. You can pretend otherwise, but you're just revealing yourself to have no friends and never talk to anybody. At this point, the auto pilot in a plane can basically do everything a pilot would under normal conditions. It's not until you have weird conditions or sensor malfunctions that the autopilot can't handle things.
The fact that I'm not backing Tesla's ridiculous stance makes me the cuck? Where I come from is the other way around. You're the one sucking Musk's cock, not me.
Also it's laughable to claim that the use of the word in the '20s is still relevant when autopilot can fyi basically everything from take off to landing under normal circumstances.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Monday November 02 2020, @09:28PM (3 children)
your point appears to be that an established industry term should be changed because "normal people" (meaning people who don't know the technology) should have a new term created. So again, when comcast sells you 40Gb/s internet, you are arguing it should be changed to 5Gb/s. Or actually 4.66GB/s, since they're used to windows using 1024 bytes per kilobyte.
Or, you know, since network bandwidth has always been measured in base10 instead of base2, and in bits, the people buying network bandwidth should learn the terminology of the thing they're buying. Just like the people buying autopilot should learn what autopilot means before they buy it.
guess what sherlock, autopilot on tesla can also do everything under normal circumstances. Because neither the plane nor the car can handle abnormal circumstances is why it's called autopilot, and not fully self driving.
strange how proving your point for you actually means you proving my point for me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02 2020, @10:53PM (2 children)
Autopilot is a industry standard term for aircraft. What does it mean for an automobile anyway? Automobiles are driven. They aren't piloted. An automobile doesn't need to maintain altitude, and if they maintained a strict heading you'd end up stuck in a field. So an "autopilot" system for a car is like saying a self-driven airplane. It implies some form of autonomy but it actually makes no sense with regards to what those terms actually means so it is left up to interpretation (or RTFM). And Tesla knew that people were going to interpret the term in their favor as part of their marketing. So yes, Tesla would have been better off just creating a new term for their system, rather than purposely misusing an aviation term as a marketing buzzword for an automobile. Clearly you must have been dropped on your head a few times when you were a baby because you're too fucking retarded to understand that.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Monday November 02 2020, @11:26PM (1 child)
your smartphone is not a phone and your laptop is not a computer. your car door is not a door because doors were around before cars. your refrigerator is not a refrigerator because it's not cooled by dumping a huge block of ice into it weekly. i gotcha. you're trying to be technically correct by being purposely dense. thing is, you're not even technically correct.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02 2020, @11:59PM
An to summarize your argument, a Tesla is an airplane, which is the only way it could have an autopilot and have it be perfectly clear what exactly the system does and doesn't do.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Monday November 02 2020, @01:48PM (7 children)
Actually, I'd dispute even that:
So, while a "real autopilot" may not let the pilot get up, snog the flight attendant or go hunting for snakes, it is intended to let them let go of the stick and direct their primary attention elsewhere.
Unless it is likewise safe to crack out the road atlas, or start re-programming the GPS while Tesla Autopilot keeps the car on course, it is not equivalent to aviation - because, of course, a plane is not continuously passing within inches of other oncoming planes, kids don't leap out into it's path chasing after their kite and there are no 4-way stops or traffic lights to blow past at 30,000 feet. There's a reason that aviation autopilots have been around since 1920 (probably earlier if you count marine autopilots) but self-driving cars haven't**: the tasks are not remotely comparable.
A self-driving car isn't ready for public use until you can get into one three sheets to the wind and settle down to a game of Kandy Krush, because that is exactly what some people will do. Of course, if car accidents only ever killed the idiot behind the wheel, you could leave it up to Darwin, but sadly they're a mortal hazard to everybody. Trying to crowd-source the development of self-drive is horribly dangerous.
*if they don't think it causes an inflatable dummy in pilot's uniform to appear and engage in visual innuendo then you're comfortably ahead of the game :-)
** pedantic reference to 1918 patent for a self-directing horseless carriage in 3, 2, 1...
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Monday November 02 2020, @02:28PM (6 children)
you can let go of the wheel in a tesla and direct your attention elsewhere, like using the gps. it beeps at you after like a minute.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Monday November 02 2020, @04:10PM (5 children)
Which is approximately 58 seconds longer than the time it takes you to hit the car in front if it stops suddenly and the autopilot doesn't catch it.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Monday November 02 2020, @09:14PM (4 children)
Not sure what your point is. Mine was that autopilot does not mean "fully self-driving." You seem to agree yet are posting like you disagree. The autopilot in tesla is designed so you can take your hands off the wheel for over a minute. After a minute it beeps, after another minute it slows down and stops the car. This is a fact. I'm guessing your solution is the second someone takes their hands off the wheel while going 65 on the highway, the car should pull over on that highway?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02 2020, @10:38PM (2 children)
No, the autopilot in a Tesla is designed with the idea that the human driver is supposed to be ready take over at any instant in case the autopilot does something wrong. That's exactly how Tesla tells people how to use it. If you crash a Tesla because you took your hands off the wheel and the autopilot fucks up - it doesn't matter that it's within 60 seconds. Your retarded ass will get blamed for the crash because you are too fucking stupid to use the system improperly.
Yes, it behaves the way you describe, and Tesla has gotten a fair amount of criticism for that (rightfully so), just like how they have gotten a fair amount of criticism for calling it "autopilot" in the first place (also rightfully so).
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Monday November 02 2020, @11:19PM (1 child)
so you're agreeing with me that tesla's autopilot is the same as a plane autopilot - not fully autonomous, like autopilot has meant for 100 years, and saying it shouldn't be called autopilot, because it matches the characteristics of the autopilot not being fully autonomous. damn man, your mental gymnastics are easy to get lost in, but I figured it out. You're saying not to water wet because the presence of water means something is wet. I got it now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2020, @12:05AM
No, the difference is that an autopilot in a plane lets you safely divert your attention elsewhere for a bit, whereas an autopilot in a Tesla does not allow you to do that. Well, using it safely as per Tesla's instructions, not using it in the way that Tesla allows you to get away with. Several people have tried, and utterly failed, to drill that simple point into your stupid brain.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Tuesday November 03 2020, @12:56PM
...but you made Tesla's use of "fully self driving" your line in the sand, and seemed to be defending their previous use of "autopilot" (which the average moron in the street will take to mean "fully self driving" anyway) via the aviation analogy. There's no comparison between driving within inches of other cars along winding roads at constantly changing speeds and an aviation environment where you're following fixed courses for hours at a time and in which passing within a few seconds flight time of another aircraft would be a notifiable incident.
No - the one minute limit is the figleaf that Telsa uses to defend it's reckless promotion of autopilot.
...and eject the driver onto the verge, lock the doors and call the police. The day that it will be safe to take both your hands off the wheel while driving will be the day that someone releases non-beta, no ifs, no buts autonomous driving that has been so completely tested and proven that the driver is no longer held responsible for any accidents while using it.