> Anyone who has driven with autopilot, how quickly might it react to a perceived obstacle? Would it take a hard turn into a median faster than a person could reasonably react if it thought there was something in the road or that the road took a hard left?
The only thing my car has ever abruptly/unexpectedly done was brake, usually in response to an overpass it mistook as a stopped car. It's happened maybe 10-20 times in 10,000 miles. Not enough to cause a rear end collision or even an angry honk. I've always had time to take over.
It's never taken a hard turn. The only times it catastrophically failed were when I knowingly put it in confusing situations: winding roads, poorly marked lanes, city driving, etc. In those cases I always have a death grip on the wheel, and the software seems to literally loosen its hold when it's feeling uncertain.
>removing radar sensors to transition to a camera-based Autopilot system
A few weeks back, I had a terrible experience while using auto pilot. I was driving on a highway (in CA) with autopilot engaged. For the most part, there was a concrete median on the highway. Suddenly, a section came with no concrete median and a new left only turn lane gets added. For whatever reasons, autopilot thought it is a great idea to suddenly move the steering wheel to left while there is oncoming traffic. I immediately took control of the navigation but the car did wobble a bit. My heart kept racing with an adrenaline rush for the next half an hour. I haven't engaged autopilot since then. I can't trust auto pilot anymore- it couldn't deal with a dead-simple scenario of a clearly marked lane getting added.
> What's the point of an autopilot if I have to spend my entire drive watching it like a hawk to ensure it doesn't steer me into a wall?
If you fall asleep while driving, it may prevent you from driving into a barrier or on-coming traffic. It's not meant to take over the act of driving from you, but to provide assistance.
> Autopilot in a Model Y … the way it disengages completely when you make even just a small correction is really annoying.
Wait, so Autopilot disengages if you don’t apply enough torque to the steering wheel and disengages if you apply too much torque to the steering wheel? That doesn’t sound like an enjoyable autonomous driving experience.
> If you set an autopilot to hold a heading, it will hold a heading. You don't have to supervise it, you can concentrate on other stuff.
Not _strictly_ true; faults can occur and the system always needs monitoring. Strong turbulence will also disconnect the autopilot (with appropriately attention-grabbing aural and visual alerts).
> So it's steering... but you're supposed to leave your hands on the wheel anyway? But not actually steering, just resting there just in case? I'm not sure how realistic this is in terms of human behavior.
I have an Acura, so no autopilot, but it allows my car to steer, accelerate, and brake automatically within its lane. Also, if I don't apply control to the steering wheel (let alone have my hands off of it) for more than N seconds, it will warn me that it will disengage. The value is then more safety (the car keeps the lane by itself if you don't bother steering for some reason), which does reduce some fatigue, I guess.
> If your hands are on a steering wheel, you’re watching the road, and autopilot begins turning towards an obstacle, you should be aware enough to grip the wheel fully and prevent the incorrect turn.
> End of story.
No, not true at all. If you’re in a car, paying complete attention, and holding the wheel, but keeping your arms loose enough that the car is fully controlling the steering, you somehow need to notice the car’s error and take over in something on the order of a second or perhaps much less. Keep in mind that, on many freeway ramps, there are places where you only miss an obstacle by a couple of feet when driving correctly. If the car suddenly stops following the lane correctly, you have very little time to fix it.
It seems to me that errors of the sort that Autopilot seems to make regularly are very difficult for even attentive drivers to recover from.
This isn't true, and there's any number of YouTube videos demonstrating that. At the very least, it knows how to navigate highway interchanges, how to change lanes, how to avoid other cars that would otherwise collide with it, and to avoid/slow down for pedestrians and cyclists.
The last feature is perhaps overly sensitive in my personal experience. It used to slow down dramatically whenever it was passing a cyclist, that has improved in recent versions.
That’s cool. I wonder if they’ve stopped disengaging autopilot milliseconds before crashing to evade legal liability.
Context: “On average in these crashes, Autopilot aborted vehicle control less than one second prior to the first impact.
The way NHTSA describes this, Autopilot may have been designed to disengage whenever it senses an imminent impact risk. That would be a way for the system always to present flawless numbers and never to be blamed for anything.“
> but perhaps the messaging needs to be clearer that autopilot is more akin to advanced cruise control
Maybe. Here's the thing. The feature, by its very nature, does not punish inattention like normal driving. If you let go of the wheel and focus on your phone -- even using your knee to hold the wheel, chances are the longer you are distracted the more likely you are to have a minor wakeup that says "don't do that." Maybe your car starts to hit the bumps between lanes. Maybe your peripheral vision picks up something and you get an adrenalin jolt as you refocus attention on the road.
AP is not like that. 99.9% of the time it does a pretty good job on the expressway. (95% if you are in traffic and have defensive driving tendencies where you are projecting ahead 10-15 seconds and moving lanes accordingly.) So you literally can look at your phone for 15 seconds look up and find your car at reasonable distances from other cars and properly in the lane. All of the normal "don't do that" feedback loops for inattention are removed.
But then there's that unusual case, like this one, where AP gets it wrong and the consequences are extreme. Is this different from normal inattention? I think yes because normal inattention often leaves you feeling "I just took a risk" due to the natural, and usually small, consequences.
My point is this: It may not be that the labeling of the feature is dangerous. It may be that the feature itself, by its very nature of removing the less serious consequences of inattention, is dangerous.
>The autopilot will avoid obstacles it can detect and the driver is expected to avoid others
I'm sorry, how is that supposed to work, exactly? How does the driver know? Sounds like the driver has to avoid every obstacle - to avoid the case where the autopilot fucks you, like this one - and in that case, what is the autopilot doing?
Yes, of course. Autopilot will disable itself.
Here's how race cars do it. A reel of plastic film, to always allow a clean view. A broken camera, showing the reels: https://imgur.com/a/Hzxg7pt
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