CatastrophicFailure

IIRC, this is more or less what happened with the couple of cases of a Tesla going under a semi trailer. The radar is pretty neat, it can bounce waves off the road to see the car ahead of the car in front of you, but that makes it too low to see that trailer. The other scenario I've heard is a trucking coming at you on a cross-street. Radar says it's clear, vision says stop! Which to believe? Conventional wisdom seems to say the best system combines vision and something else, radar, LIDAR, etc. But Tesla has arguably the best AI people in the world working there, if they say pure vision is best, I can give them the benefit of the doubt. Humans, after all, manage to drive with nothing but vision. Now, get the basics down, then we can talk about something like IR cameras in addition to visible light to see through smoke and fog. I'm wondering if the Hardware 4 mentioned for Cybertruck will begin to incorporate just that. I think the hardware and software will get to FSD alot sooner than the, er, wetware (ie: regulations). SAE Level 4 should be "relatively" easy, making that step to true Level 5 is gonna take rethinking a whole lot of legalese. Or, by that point, we just let the Tesla Robots figure it out. And yet, with over a million Teslas on the road, these kinds of incidents remain extremely rare. As @tater often says, they're nothing but noise. The same kind of people getting distracted while using Autopilot would probably be distracted and/or otherwise doing dumb things with or without it. The vast majority of people, after all, are quite capable of safely operating an automobile. I would posit that Autopilot makes anyone a better, safer driver: if you're already a good, safe driver, AP just give you that extra layer to make you more so, if "you're" an incompetent, irresponsible moron, Autopilot may make you a better driver, but you're still way below the control. I hate it when that happens. I hate it when that happens, too...

It's got forward automatic emergency braking. You can set it to warn early, medium, or late, and then it should stop the car before an impact, up to a point. Would probably be good on a lower-speed city street, but I dunno about an interstate. More on that in a sec. I think I've only had actual braking kick on maybe once in the last couple years, I keep the warning set to Early and that's gone off a number of times, usually right about the time my foot is heading for the brake pedal. It'll also automatically reduce power and acceleration in a congested area, like a parking lot, to hopefully reduce those "hit the gas not the brake" incidents. Like @RCgothic's truck, it's also got lane-departure safety, it'll beep, vibrate the wheel, or physically move you back into the lane even if Autopilot is not enabled. And the usual round of blind spot warnings and such. One thing it definitely lacks, which others do have, is rear-cross-traffic alerts. Tesla has had to recently "recertify" it's auto-emergency braking software, as they're transitioning from radar+vision to a pure vision approach. I've read lots of back-and-forth on this, and there's a compelling argument for pure vision, but it is harder, that's why there haven't' been a lot of updates until recently. I'm wondering how many of these "hit a thing on the side of the road" type incidents happened because of confusion between radar and vision; if the radar says one thing and the cameras say another, which one should the car beleive? From what I've heard from others, the pure-vision approach does indeed seem to be working better overall, and has drastically reduced if not eliminated the obnoxious phantom braking. I can't speak to that myself, I'm 99% sure my Model X is still using radar. I think the wife's 3 has the newer vision-only software, but I haven't really driven it in months to compare. And that's where it gets tricky, since Autopilot can actually work in snow if the ruts are apparent enough, but it will shut down in really heavy rain. This is the only data available, AFAIK, but the point that "Autopilot is already safer than the average human driver" remains true even if Tesla's data is off by a factor of almost 9. This is how evolution works. It's literally the only way make a functional system, there is no other way to gain the billions of data-miles to make autonomy work. If "you" are uncomfortable with that, then don't use it. If you do choose to use it, then you accept the responsibility that comes along with that. I'm old. I drive for a living. I've spent decades now wrenching on everything from motorcycles to big, loud diesels, sports cars, lawn mowers. I'm more than happy to finally have a ride that requires almost no maintenance from me, and will be quite happy when it can also drive me 95% of the way to work, so I can do drive someone else to work, knowing full well that sooner or later it's gonna put me out of a job, too.

Likely less than a control group of non-Tesla drivers being distracted: The solution, then, is to integrate the GPS right into the car itself, which every single manufacturer has done to some extent, by now, and the bigger the display screen, the better. Then eventually you take the driver out of the loop entirely. Ive had one experience, to this point, driving with Navigate on Autopilot in a strange city. NoA will take you from on-ramp to off-ramp, even handling lane changes, (presumably) with no interaction beyond paying attention and keeping a hand on the wheel. In every single case where I second-guessed the car and disengaged it… the car was right, and I took the wrong exit.

Also because fighting a lawsuit is almost always far more expensive, even if you win.

But you see, it's not. Consumer Reports recently demonstrated how "easy" it was, in that doing such required deliberately ignoring or flat out disabling multiple safety features. There were follow up videos from other sources demonstrating the same behavior from other manufacturers' systems, too. Eye-tracking could be circumvented just with sunglasses on the headrest or even googly eyes.

Eh, speak for yourself. *suicide burns into docking port* ya wanna know how I got these scars this username?

It's telling that so much criticism levied against Autopilot comes from people who've never used it at all, based on hearsay on what it's "supposed" to do. Like anything, it takes a bit of learning, for the moment. My wife loves the traffic-aware cruise control but pretty much never uses auto-steer, if she does she sends up unintentionally disengaging it by tugging the wheel a bit too hard. I've found you have to trust the system about half a second father than you want to. Where it's meant to work, it works really really good. Even where it's not meant to work, it still works pretty good. But you've got to know and accept its limitations as an incomplete system. I do a lot of long driving on nearly-deserted roads in the middle of the night, even as it is now, it's dang near perfect for that. Not really, no. They are all things which have a specific set of circumstances where they can be used safely. If you deliberately-deliberately-ignore warnings and use them outside of those circumstances, that is on you, not on the item. You have made that choice and need to own that mistake. Except, it's NOT that. And it's not marketed or sold as that, either. Those warnings I posted above demonstrate that. Autopilot is a driver assist system, not full autonomy, and no one familiar with it actually thinks otherwise. Full Self Driving is coming, but it's not here yet, safe for a handful of carefully chosen beta test volunteers. And this remains its primary use and selling point.

I use Autopilot near constantly, and almost entirely on winding country roads. I’ve had a while now to get used to its quirks and features, and figure out where it works well and where it doesn’t. It’s an absolute Godsend when I get off work after a long day of, ironically, driving, and now have to drive home when I’m a virtual zombie. Autopilot handles the basic tasks of keeping speed and staying in the lane, so I can focus my admittedly compromised attention entirely on watching the road, not the minutia of driving itself. And even on long road trips where I’m not compromised, just like airplane AP it greatly reduces my mental workload, so at the end of the day I don’t have that drained feeling nearly as much, and you’ll hear this same sentiment echoed by other frequent Autopilot users. Yes, it’s extremely surreal the first time you engage it, and that wheel starts moving on its own. It does take a while to learn how to trust it, but for the vast majority of users, that trust that leads to responsible, proper use comes fairly quickly. It does extremely well on winding highway-speed (50-60mph) two-lanes, on some tighter 30-40mph suburban windies it’s struggled a bit in the past, but I’ve seen it improve remarkably over the last year or two. It even slows down for cyclists or walkers on the side of the road. I trust Autopilot far more than the rando coming the other way and inching closer to the centerline. The blame for blatant misuse of a product remains, as it always has, sorely on the shoulders of the user, not the manufacturer. Ever hear that gag about the guy with the wrecked RV who set the cruise control then went in back to make a sandwich? If you take a hair dryer into the shower, despite being warned not to, and get electrocuted, that’s on you, not the hair dryer. If you spill hot coffee on yourself, after being warned it’s hot, and get burned, that’s on you, not the coffeemaker. If you stick your hand in the garbage disposal… well, you get the idea. This is the warning you have to acknowledge before you can ever engage Autopilot: This is the warning you get every single time you do engage it: If you choose to ignore all these warnings, and fail to pay attention to the point that you don’t even see the flashing lights of an emergency vehicle ahead, that is YOUR fault, not the machine’s. Every single Autopilot-involved accident up to this point has been a result of user error, pure and simple, full stop. And they remain extremely rare, because the vast majority of people are not, in fact, blithering idiots, and can responsibly operate a piece of equipment after sufficient “education.” But, “another Autopilot crash!” is sensational, and sensational gets those sweet sweet ad clicks. Double bonus points for Tesla, too, since anything negative involving Tesla is also sensational (it’s almost like someone(s) somewhere has a vested financial interest in all this sensationalism, hmm…) Pretty much every automaker has their own driver-assist system available now that kinda-sorta approaches what Autopilot can do, yet you never hear about those crashes, because those crashes are so unsensational that no one is even keeping data on them.

Oh, we’re singing now? Um, ok, how bout… I clicked a thing and I liked it, That satisfying click-noise I clicked a thing just to try jt I hope @Vanamonde don’t mind it…

I remain highly skeptical as to such validity.

I clarified my position already, but let me do it again: I used that term very specifically, to refer to a very specific subset of people: those for whom SpaceX can do no right, for whom it's mere existence is an affront not to be tolerated, largely because of its ties to Elon Musk. There is literally nothing SpaceX could do to please such people short of-maybe-completely disbanding, liquifying its assets and distributing them to some group or another, after, of course, completely un-making every construct it's made. For such people, rockets are bad, and civilization is bad, because humans are bad. The same kind of people who love to harp on Tesla for this or that, completely dismissing that actual good they're doing for the environment, because humans are bad. Based on all the information I've seen, everywhere, Spacex (and Tesla) is doing it's realistic best to be a good neighbor. Is it perfect? Of course not. There is no perfect. The perfect is the enemy of the good enough. I've come to look on a great number of "environmentalists" with great cynicism, as if one pokes their motivations just a little, once finds them laced with, shall we say, conflicts of interest. Yes, my opinion on the matters at hand is absolutely biased, but remember, so is yours. "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with..." well, you know...

I had nothing to do with anything, I swear! I was never even in same state!

Yes, I am still here. After too many run-ins with the Kraken, I have spent these many months inventing a new method of Kerbal propulsion! The Fahrten Drive. It's German.

There’s literally nowhere they can go on the east coast that isn’t going to rustle someone’s jimmies. It’s either protected land of one sort or another, too close to populations, or too far from road access, which would require its own sessions of jimmy rustling to build the needed roads. See @tater’s post up-thread for a proper dissertation on perceived (by a certain set of people) impacts to sensitive areas vs actual impacts. The wildlife at KSC ain’t exactly teetering on the brink…

Problem here is environmental impact. Most of the closures are simply for outsize load transport, the "easiest" solution would just be to drastically widen the existing road or build an entirely new, private road for SpaceX use only. But to do either one, especially the latter, they'd be doing some serious encroachment into the surrounding wetlands, which would no doubt drive the "local" environmentalist NIMBYs apoplectic, if such projects could even get approved. So in the end, the real-world "path of least resistance" model might indeed be a finicky tunnel. Convenient that Musk also just so happens to be connected to a fledgling tunnel-boring company, which might even welcome to chance to expand its knowledge on how to build such a difficult tunnel, since dealing with such situations will no doubt become a factor in their expansion plans down the road... or through the tunnel...

This keeps up and Tory is gonna show up at Jeff Who's door with a lasso and a branding iron, mark my words. Where are my engines, Jeff?

Split the rest of the wood today. Everything huuuuuurrts. But found some disgusting cool bugs: *pokes @cubinator with a stick*

Got my Dishy up & working today! Some “real world” observations:

Finally found the load limit on the tractor. Could lift this basket of alder but juuuust barely. Check how squooshed the front tires are, I could barely turn the steering wheel, either. Yup, split the whole load by hand, too. And of course by “by hand” I mean my hands worked the levers on the wood splitter. Yet I still somehow feel like I got hit by a truck. And that’s not even half of what needs splitting. Also, this finally happened: Temporarily “installed” our Dishy in a horrible location on the perennially dirty squirrel porch table. And right off the get go, Comcast decided to plotz and not stream anything so we broke it in with the first episode of Loki, which worked perfectly well despite the app reporting disconnects every few minutes. yes I drink the Kool-Aid, and it is sweet

Oof. ...and then it gets worse.

Circa 2023, after Fedor goes missing…

What @Silavite said. Y'know, like how in-game you hit 70km and pop the service module only to have it come flying back moments later all "oh, hai Mark Bob!" What's getting critiqued aren't boilerplate half-completed, ahem, mockups tho, pokes @kerbiloid with a stick, it's mission-ready hardware that's "supposed" to be finished. If Boeing was blowing up test articles and then being even remotely transparent about it, that would be different entirely, as would a "finished" Dragon capsule that suddenly experienced potentially life-threatening errors.

Until, perhaps, they burned up on reentry cuz a certain engineer didn't remember Scott Manley's Golden Rule at the last minute and checked the staging. That kind of error is "not supposed" to happen on a mature design. Again, there's that difference. "Move fast and break things!" Breaking things is an inherent, and necessary part of the process. "Go slow and don't break things!" is an equally valid, if frustrating for spectators, design philosophy too, but in that case things are not "supposed" to break. Breaking things is bad. Something has gone wrong when things should not go wrong. I think, perhaps, what you're seeing is not so much a double standard as much as (rightfully earned) criticism towards certain other players for very certain things, not just simple tribalism. Most SpaceXers are very supportive of Rocketlab, for instance, through their recent tribulations. But Boeing has been really, really screwing up lately. What began as light rivalry for many of us has turned to frustrated consternation, because a, if not the, major aerospace company should not be making such "rookie errors" as not doing integrated system tests and checking they staging software. Not to mention something as mundane as stuck valves. Boeing should be better than that, it's Boeing for Jeb's sake! And then the Chosen One of NewSpace flat out turned to the Dark Side and went full Vader on us...