The real crime is marketing the driver assist capability under the name autopilot when it is anything but that.
Oh no, it’s even worse than that.
It’s the CEO and other staff repeatedly speaking of the system as if it’s basically fully capable and it’s only for legal reasons why a driver is even required. Even saying that the car could drive from one side of the US to the other without driver interaction (only to not actually do that, of course).
It’s the company never correcting people when they call it a self driving system.
It’s the company saying they’re ready for autonomous taxis and saying owner’s cars will make money for them while they aren’t driving it.
It’s calling their software subscription Full Self Driving
It’s honestly staggering to me that they’re able to get away with this shit.
I love my Model 3, but everything you said is spot on. Autopilot is a great driver assist, but it is nowhere near autonomous driving. I was using it on the highway and was passing a truck on the left. The road veered left and the truck did as well, keeping in its lane the entire time. The car interpreted this as the truck merging over into my lane and slammed the brakes. Fortunately, I was able to figure out what went wrong and quickly accelerated myself so as to not become a hazard to the cars behind me.
Using Autopilot as anything more than a nice dynamic cruise control setting is putting your life, and other lives, in danger.
Holy shit. My car doing that once and I’d be a nervous wreck just thinking about using it again.
The road veered left and the truck did as well, keeping in its lane the entire time. The car interpreted this as the truck merging over into my lane and slammed the brakes.
Even dynamic cruise control must never do such dangerous mistakes!
You should claim that they fix this on warranty, and they should prove that this is never going to happen again.
Tesla should be playing wrongful death suits every time autopilot kills someone. Their excuses don’t excuse the blatant marketing that leads people to believe it’s a self driving car.
But you see that wasn’t the vehicle’s fault. It’s been programmed perfectly. What happened was the fault of the pedestrians and driver for not properly predicting what the car would do.
maybe /s maybe not.
Do we need to go through what autopilot in a plane or boat actually does again?
It doesn’t matter, Tesla cars are marketed to the public which isn’t expected to know these things. To probably 90% of people “autopilot” means “drive automatically”.
To probably 90% of people “autopilot” means “drive automatically”.
Based on what?
If we do, then they shouldn’t have picked a name that most people think does something it doesn’t.
do we need to go through the differences in training, aptitude and intelligence between pilots, captains and your neighbor Greg again? Marketing it as “autopilot” to anyone who can sign a car loan is reckless and has killed people and will continue to kill people until they stop
It’s a common misunderstanding that an autopilot system in an airplane does everything or even a lot of things. The most basic ones keep the wings level and nothing else. Of course Tesla is probably counting on that misconception to sell this feature, but actual pilots using any kind of autopilot are still on the hook to pay attention 100% of the time.
