Stop the comparison to planes just because it's named autopilot in both cases.
There are always 2 highly trained professionals in a cockpit and both are familiar with emergency situations because they regularly train for it. They are in constant contact with ATC that keeps other planes far away from them. In case of a crash or even a deviation there are entire agencies all over it with sometimes international investigators present. All communication is recorded.
A driver is not only alone, they can have very poor skills in general which were last tested 40 years ago. They are on the road with dozens of vehicles around them, tightly packed and often separated by less than a vehicle width between them. If a crash occured there may be a few police officers present that pick up the pieces and fill out forms to satisfy the insurance.
I think you are being dismissive of the claim because who would think that "autopilot" doesn't mean everything is done for you.
Comparing a pilot to a regular car driver is just completely off point. You are basically throwing out all the training pilots have to do just to make your point.
The difference is when a plane's autopilot goes wonky you typically have minutes to realize it and take over manually. In a car you often have less than a second. Pilots also are highly trained and rehearse emergencies. Drivers put on makeup.
Anything less than a truly 100% autonomous car autopilot is 1 massive lawsuit away from failure.
The big difference between car drivers w/ "autopilot" and airline pilots with autopilot is that the airline pilots have massively increased training requirements, regular re-certification, and physical fitness requirements.
Even if plane vs automobile autopilots are equivalent in functionality, the difference in operator training is separated by multiple orders of magnitude. Not to mention the frequent presence of a second pilot in commercial airlines and a dedicated ATF crew on the ground to monitor their situation.
Obviously people believe that autopilot represents a net benefit to air travel, but there are far fewer planes in the sky than cars on the road, a lot more open space that is not impregnable by most foreign objects, and a ton more money per plane allowing for more sophisticated sensors and systems. There is a dedicated traffic coordination system for aircraft and each pilot takes instruction as given by the ATC. Planes are also constantly monitored by highly-trained pilots and mechanics and operations are closely supervised by multiple regulatory bodies.
A great deal of the required operations for autodriving are offloaded or irrelevant in autopiloting. I know we were talking about an isolated case of the unexpected failure of an automated piloting system, but if we consider all of these additional complexities in typical road driving * millions more cars with barely-trained operators, it's reasonable to suppose that those types of problems would occur much more frequently with autodrivers than autopilots.
Aircraft autopilots also rely on experienced and licensed pilots to operate them and be responsible for the aircraft at all times. Self driving cars have assume the operator is not particularly capable nor paying attention to anything happening on the road.
That's a poor comparison, autopilot is a borrowed name. Planes are not cars, there are no intersections in the air, collision avoidance is a slower game unlike in a car.
Airline pilots are professionals, car drivers are just trying to get somewhere... paying attention isn't their full-time job. Also building autopilot software for a near empty 3-dimensional space is much easier than for complex roads of varying shapes, moving obstacles, country regulations and different road markings...
Yeah autopilot is similar in airplanes to what autopilot is on Teslas. Not sure what else you could call it without it also being confusing. Autopilot is a tool to stay in your lane and prevent common scenarios like keeping speed, avoiding obstacles and keeping distance, though there are still possible edge cases like this one appeared to be that can be more dangerous than not using it as the systems are not fully autonomous.
Even with airplanes, if something gets in the way, autopilot won't always save you and can only alert you when the situation gets bad i.e. oncoming airplane or obstacle, altitude, speed etc. We fly in planes with autopilot and we are safer for it, but pilots/drivers still need to be alert and operating the plane. Teslas aren't fully autonomous and probably can't truly be until everything is connected and more cars on the road are autonomous for expected behavior. I trust autopilot in planes but still want a pilot. Most likely autopilot will be more useful in large buses, trucks, shipping, boats, airliners than individuals as you will still need a driver most of the time. Even the Uber crash could have possibly been avoided with a more alert driver.
One area that may cause more crashes in the interim is trusting the software too much, autopilot that does work six sigma 99.999999% of the time may lead to a possible issue of driver comfort with the technology that may still have edge cases that can endanger them. This issue was a factor in the Tesla crash and the Uber crash
I think a huge overlooked part of the failure here was the previous accidents at this part of the road and the lack of repair. We have a serious infrastructure issue with disrepair, non automated/untracked driving of humans probably ends up badly in these areas but goes unnoticed or is suppressed as road design can be a big factor, this automated crash highlighted an issue here at this offramp/fork that probably would go unnoticed and cause more issues. If nothing else, automated driving will have the data to fix these bad areas of our infrastructure and double down on safety and protections.
Apart from the training and the fact that pilots work in pairs, there’s a host of differences that make a planes autopilot task and behavior fundamentally different from what Tesla misleadingly labels autopilot:
Planes operate in a space with good visibility, any obstacle will be visible with ample lead time.
Planes operate in controlled space, with dedicated and verified spacing between traffic participants, allocated by an external traffic control. Collisions are not rare because pilots jump in within split seconds to avoid them, but because traffic control routes planes away from each other if they converge.
The planes autopilot is in fact less capable than what the teslas autopilot pretends to be. Its limitations are fairly well understood by pilots.
A planes autopilot doesn’t dump the pilot into a “you’ll crash in a second” situation. Handover from autopilot is a different process than what Tesla expects. The planes systems are designed with human psychology and limitations in mind, because of the comparatively high regulatory bar.
The analogy is still technically correct. Autopilot can’t fly the plane for you. The fact that drivers require less training doesn’t invalidate the analogy.
I think a good comparison here is TCAS [0] - installed on every airliner today, it's a system that could be summarized as 'you're going to hit another plane, do XYZ NOW to avoid death'. It doesn't take the actions for you - just tells you what to do, even if the aircraft was operating under autopilot at the time.
And yet autopilot on cars is expected to intervene in those cases and far more. (Of course, cars are often in those situations far more often, which is partly why the expectations are different)
But aircraft pilots are of course very different from typical car drivers: more educated, much more strenuously vetted -- and much more likely to understand and act in accord with the caveats you're describing.
Regular car drivers? These are the ones yakking on their cell phones, texting, doing conference calls, eating take out -- and falling asleep in droves at the wheel, already. Inasmuch as the distinction between Autopilot and a truly automated control system may be crystal clear to you -- you can be dead sure it won't be, to many of these people.
This comparison really only works if you mean engaging autopilot with a bunch of other planes flying in close formation and if clouds were made of steel and concrete. Most of the time that autopilot is engaged on a flight there is next to zero risk of a collision. Commercial pilots also get a lot of training specifically related to what autopilot is and isn’t appropriate for.
I’m not a pilot, but my impression is that the reaction time required to take over in a dangerous situation is much less strict with planes than with cars. Except when the plane is close to the ground, I suppose, but pilots know when this is happening and can specifically pay more attention for that brief period. The plane autopilot physically can’t cause you to crash within a second at any point mid flight, AFAIK, unlike with a car “autopilot”.
Yes, it is obvious. What do you think a plane pilot does when autopilot is on? He watches to make sure everything is alright, and intervenes when necessary.
There are always 2 highly trained professionals in a cockpit and both are familiar with emergency situations because they regularly train for it. They are in constant contact with ATC that keeps other planes far away from them. In case of a crash or even a deviation there are entire agencies all over it with sometimes international investigators present. All communication is recorded.
A driver is not only alone, they can have very poor skills in general which were last tested 40 years ago. They are on the road with dozens of vehicles around them, tightly packed and often separated by less than a vehicle width between them. If a crash occured there may be a few police officers present that pick up the pieces and fill out forms to satisfy the insurance.
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