I’ve often wondered why the FTC allows it to be marketed as “Full Self-Driving”. That’s blatant false advertising.
As is “autopilot”. There’s no automatic pilot. You’re still expected to keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road.
I am so sick and tired of this belief because it’s clear people have no idea what Autopilot on a plane actually does. They always seem to assume it flies the plane and the pilot doesn’t do anything apparently. Autopilot alone does not fly the damned plane by itself.
“Autopilot” in a plane keeps the wings level at a set heading, altitude, and speed. It’s literally the same as cruise control with lane-centering, since there’s an altitude issue on a road.
There are more advanced systems available on the market that can be installed on smaller planes and in use on larger jets that can do things like auto takeoff, auto land, following waypoints, etc. without pilot input, but basic plain old autopilot doesn’t do any of that.
That expanded capability is similar to how things like “Enhanced Autopilot” on a Tesla can do extra things like change lanes, follow highway exits on a navigated route, etc. Or how “Full Self-Driving” is supposed to follow road signs and lights, etc. but those are additional functions, not part of “Autopilot” and differentiated with their own name.
Autopilot, either on a plane or a Tesla, alone doesn’t do any of that extra shit. It is a very basic system.
The average person misunderstanding what a word means doesn’t make it an incorrect name or description.
Flight instructor here.
I’ve seen autopilot systems that have basically every level of complexity you can imagine. A lot of Cessna 172s were equipped with a single axis autopilot that can only control the ailerons and can only maintain wings level. Others have control of the elevators and can do things like altitude hold, or ascend/descend at a given rate. More modern ones have control of all three axes and integration with the attitude instruments, and can do things like climb to an altitude and level off, turn to a heading and stop, or even something like fly a holding pattern over a fix. They still often don’t have any control over the power plant, and small aircraft typically cannot land themselves, but there are autopilots installed in piston singles that can fly an approach to minimums.
And that’s what’s available on piston singles; airline pilots seldom fly the aircraft by hand anymore.
“But one reason that pilots will opt to turn the system on much sooner after taking off is if it’s stormy out or there is bad weather. During storms and heavy fog, pilots will often turn autopilot on as soon as possible.
This is because the autopilot system can take over much of the flying while allowing the pilot to concentrate on other things, such as avoiding the storms as much as possible. Autopilot can also be extremely helpful when there is heavy fog and it’s difficult to see, since the system does not require eyesight like humans do.”
Does that sound like something Tesla’s autopilot can do?
https://www.skytough.com/post/when-do-pilots-turn-on-autopilot
I’d wager most people, when talking about a plane’s autopilot mean the follow waypoints or Autoland capability.
Also, it’s hard to argue “full self driving” means anything but the car is able to drive fully autonomously. If they were to market it as “advanced driver assist” I’d have no issue with it.
“Autopilot” in a plane keeps the wings level at a set heading, altitude, and speed. It’s literally the same as cruise control with lane-centering, since there’s an altitude issue on a road.
Factually incorrect. There are autopilot systems on planes now that can takeoff, fly, and land the flight on their own. So yes, “autopilot” is EXACTLY what people are assuming it to mean in many cases. Especially on planes that they would typically be accustom to… which is the big airliners.
Now where you’re missing the point… There are varying degrees of autopilot. And that would be fine and dandy for Tesla’s case if you wish to invoke it. But considering the company has touted it to be the “most advanced” and “Full self driving” and “will be able to drive you from california to new york on it’s own”. They’ve set the expectation in that it is the most advanced autopilot. Akin to the plane that doesn’t actually need a pilot (although one is always present) for all three major parts of the flight. No tesla product comes even close to that claim, and I’m willing to bet they never do in their lifetime.
It’s not even the closest thing to self driving on the market, Mercedes has started selling a car that doesn’t require you to look at the road.
Only works under 40 mph. Only available in 2 states. Not available until the end of this year.
Because they’re doing shit responsibly.
For the target audience they chose that thing is a fucking bargain. Do you know how many people making damn good money sit in hours of 4 lane bumper to bumper traffic every day? “You don’t have to drive and we assume liability if our system fucks up” is a massive value add.
(Not enough that I’d ever consider dealing with that kind of commute no matter what you paid me. But still.)
Level 3 in the S-Class and EQS has been available since may 2022. And the speed limit is there because that is part of a UN regulation that the Mercedes is certified for. The regulation has been updated since the release of Mercedes Drive Pilot to allow speeds up to 140km/h but Mercedes needs to recertify for that.
You can literally type in an address and the car will take you there with zero input on the driver’s part. If that’s not full self-driving then I don’t know what is. What FSD was capable of a year ago and how it performs today is completely different.
Not only does these statistics include the way less capable older versions of it, it also includes accidents caused by autopilot which is a different system than FSD. It also fails to mention how the accident rate compares to human drivers.
If we replace every single car in the US with a self-driving one that’s 10x safer driver than your average human that means you’re still getting over 3000 deaths a year due to traffic accidents. That’s 10 people a day. If one wants to ban these systems because they’re not perfect then that means they’ll rather have 100 people die every day instead of 10.
It also fails to mention how the accident rate compares to human drivers.
That may be because Tesla refuses to publish proper data on this, lol.
Yeah, they claim it’s ten times better than a human driver, but none of their analysis methods or data points are available to independent researchers. It’s just marketing.
This is the part that bothers me.
l’d defend Tesla when FSD gets into accidents, even fatal ones, IF they showed that FSD caused fewer accidents than the average human driver.
They claim that’s true, but if it is why not release data that proves it?
You might find this page interesting -
I’m not claiming it is 10x safer than a human - I’m saying that even if it was there would still be daily deaths despite that.
Tesla has published the data - people just refuse to believe it because it doesn’t show what they think it should. There’s nothing more Tesla can do about it at this point. It’s up to independent researches from now.
You can literally type in an address and the car will take you there with zero input on the driver’s part. If that’s not full self-driving then I don’t know what is.
Who is responsible if there is an accident, you or Tesla? That is the difference from true FSD and regular driver assistance features.
Regarding driving regulations -
If we had better raw data, I’m sure we could come up with better conclusions. Knowing the absolutely tremendous amount of BS that Musk spews, we can’t trust anything Tesla reports. We’re left to speculate.
At this point, it is probably best to compare statistics for other cars with similar technologies. For example, Volvo reported that they went 16 years without a fatal accident in their XC90 model in the UK (don’t know about other places). That was a couple of years ago, I don’t know if they have been able to keep that record up. With that kind of record that has lasted for so long, I think we have to ask why Tesla is so bad.
Move fast, break shit. Fake it till you sell it, then move the goal posts down. Shift human casualties onto individual responsibility, a core libertarian theme. Profit off the lies because it’s too late, money already in the bank.
They just recalled all the Cybertrucks, because their ‘smort’ technology is too stupid to realize when an accelerator sensor is stuck…
The accelerator sensor doesn’t get stuck, pedal does. The face of the accelerator falls off and wedges the pedal into the down position.
Pedal, not petal.
Not trying to be an asshole, just a nudge to avoid misunderstandings (although the context is clear in this case)
Given the number of other issues in the post I’m going to guess it was hurried and autocorrected wrong. Happens to me all the time.
I realize it’s the pedal that gets stuck, but the computer registers the state of the pedal via a sensor.
The computer should be smart enough to realize something ain’t right when it registers that both the accelerator and brake pedals are being pressed at the same time. And in that case, the brake should always take priority.
The stories I’ve heard around the recall have been saying that the brakes override the accelerator in the cyber truck.
Accoring to the math in this video: :
- 150 000 000 miles have been driven with Teslas “FSD”, which equals to
- 375 miles per tesla purchased with FSD capabilities
- 736 known FSD crashes with 17 fatalities
- equals 11.3 deaths per 100M miles of teslas FSD
Doesnt sound to bad, until you hear that a human produces 1.35 deaths per 100M miles driven…
Its rough math, but holy moly that already is a completely other class of deadly than a non FSD car
a human produces 1.35 deaths per 100M miles driven
My car has been driven around 100k miles by a human, i.e. it has produced 0.00135 deaths. Is that like a third of a pinky toe?
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That number is like 1.5 billion now and rising exponentially fast.
Also those deaths weren’t all FSD they were AP.
The report says 1 FSD related (not caused by but related) death. For whatever reason the full details on that one weren’t released.
Edit: There are billions of miles on AP. In 2020 it was 3 billion
Edit: Got home and I tried finding AP numbers through 2024 but haven’t seen anything recent, but given 3 billion 2020, and 2 billion in 2019, and an accelerating rate of usage with increased car sales, 2023 is probably closer to 8 billion miles. I imagine we’d hear when they reach 10 billion.
So 8 billion miles, 16 AP fatalities (because that 1 FSD one isn’t the same) is 1 fatality per 500,000,000 miles, or put into the terms above by per 100mil miles, 0.2 fatalities per 100 million miles or 6.75 times less than a human produces. And nearly all of these fatal accidents were from blatant misuse of the system like driving drunk (at least a few) or using their phone and playing games.
If Red Bull can be successfully sued for false advertising from their slogan “It gives you wings”, I think it stands that Tesla should too.
