Mobileye Says Tesla Was Dropped Because of Safety Concerns 218
An anonymous reader writes: On Wednesday, Mobileye revealed that it ended its relationship with Tesla because "it was pushing the envelope in terms of safety." Mobileye's CTO and co-founder Amnon Shashua told Reuters that the electric vehicle maker was using his company's machine vision sensor system in applications for which it had not been designed. "No matter how you spin it, (Autopilot) is not designed for that. It is a driver assistance system and not a driverless system," Shashua said. In a statement to Reuters, Tesla said that it has "continuously educated customers on the use of the features, reminding them that they're responsible to keep their hands on the wheel and remain alert and present when using Autopilot" and that the system has never been described as autonomous or self-driving. (This statement appears to be at odds with statements made by Musk at shareholder meetings.) It is also emerging that the crash which cost Joshua Brown his life in May of this year was unlikely to have been the first such fatal crash involving Tesla's Autopilot. In January of this year in China, a Tesla ploughed into the back of a stationary truck at speed, killing the driver.
Unreasonable (Score:5, Interesting)
Asking customers to remain alert while the car drives itself for hours on end is unreasonable. Psychologists know that, NASA warned them about it... Human beings simple can't concentrate for that amount of time with nothing to do.
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Exactly. If you call something autopilot, then people expect it to be an... autopilot.
Re:Unreasonable (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. If you call something autopilot, then people expect it to be an... autopilot.
... unless they are actually a Tesla owner. I use Autopilot, and Tesla repeatedly and emphatically makes the capabilities of the system and the responsibility of the driver very clear.
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If the driver has to keep his hands on the wheel, and pay attention, then... it's not an autopilot.
(Not that I'm shocked or anything by deceptive marketing practices.)
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Yes, yes I am.
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Except everyone who casually reads tech news, only vaguely paying attention to headlines written by tech writers, has a completely mistaken impression of what it is and does.
Seriously, I've seen everyone from random friends to strangers on the street assume the car could basically drive itself. (Yes, even before they released the feature.)
The capabilities of the system, and the responsibilities of the driver, are quite clear... if you actually drive the car or read past the headlines. Unfortunately, most
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Except everyone who casually reads tech news, only vaguely paying attention to headlines written by tech writers, has a completely mistaken impression of what it is and does.
It only takes 97% of the 90K Tesla drivers doing the right thing for there to be thousands of Tesla drivers not doing the right thing.
Hilarity ensues.
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It only takes 97% of the 90K Tesla drivers doing the right thing for there to be thousands of Tesla drivers not doing the right thing.
Stupidity and ignorance are two different things. The idiots posting Youtube videos [youtube.com], filmed from the backseat, of driverless Teslas, are fully aware that their behavior is reckless. They were not "tricked" by the name of the software.
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are fully aware that their behavior is reckless. They were not "tricked" by the name of the software.
Yet how many are thinking, "telling us to keep our hands on the wheel at all times is just lawyer CYA"?
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They can make it as clear as daylight, but its human nature to begin doing the exact opposite after a period of time. It's human nature to not pay attention when you're not doing anything. Read the NASA opinion on this, explains it well.
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Re:Unreasonable (Score:4, Informative)
Exactly. If you call something autopilot, then people expect it to be an... autopilot.
The problem though is actual "autopilots" are in airplanes and they range in complexity and features.
Some are simple 2 axis affairs that can maintain heading and altitude, sort of, as long as your DG doesn't drift and the altimeter works. Some are fully automatic, land in a fog bank worthy of a mystery novel affairs that literally do everything but talk on the radios from departure to arrival with little more than a few button pushes. Most fall in between the extremes.
Using an autopilot in an airplane requires the pilots be fully aware of the automation's limitations and be monitoring the flight's progress. It's purpose is two fold, 1. to lower the pilot workload and increase safety at critical phases in flight, by automating the more mundane tasks like controlling altitude, heading and speed, and 2. Increase efficiency by keeping the aircraft operating in its most efficient way possible.
Tesla's "autopilot" is something totally different. It's not about efficiency, and it's not about safety, it's about convenience. Though they call it an autopilot, it's most certainly isn't one. It's built for a totally different reason.
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It's not about efficiency, and it's not about safety, it's about convenience. Though they call it an autopilot, it's most certainly isn't one. It's built for a totally different reason.
Exactly.
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Exactly. If you call something autopilot, then people expect it to be an... autopilot.
I know. Tesla's system isn't an autopilot. It's far better than that. Autopilots as we traditionally know them can't cope with anything, they can only maintain direction and heading and drop back to the pilot control everytime someone looks at them funny. It'll happily fly into a storm or into a mountain.
I propose we name the Tesla system the drunk chauffeur, much better than an autopilot system but it may still get you killed.
Re:Unreasonable (Score:5, Interesting)
>Asking customers to remain alert while the car drives itself for hours on end is unreasonable.
It is also be unthinkable to have your "backup" to evaluate the performance of the autopilot watching only the output. I have hundreds of hours logged in autonomous vehicles, but I would review the data, see all the diagnostics logged, all of the GPS signal lost, or drifted, etc for the week. I thus have never completely trusted them. All of the operators, even when told by engineers of running a beta release with big untested changes would spend all of their time working on their phones. Without knowing when every backup and sensors have failed to read something wrong. You cannot evaluate the maturity just off of, well it stopped the other 5 times someone stepped in front of the vehicle, why would I have to worry about walking in front of them. If you don't know 15 times in the last mile the cameras failed to maintain the road edge monitoring, and 20 times during that same period that sensor was the only thing that kept you on the road. Only dad those 2 events overlapped, which they eventually will, would the failures actually show up in the output.
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Archer (Score:2)
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Asking customers to remain alert while the car drives itself for hours on end is unreasonable.
Asking drivers to remain alert while they drive for hours on end is unreasonable. That's why we have rest stops, and why everyone and your mom (literally!) will tell you to pull over and take a break occasionally.
Perhaps Autopilot will, in the future, require that drivers do the same, and offer to drive them to a rest stop.
Human beings simple can't concentrate for that amount of time with nothing to do.
Except when you're in traffic with a bunch of fuckheads and your life is being threatened every few minutes (or seconds, as is more likely around say the Bay Area... or any big city in Te
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Except when you're in traffic with a bunch of fuckheads and your life is being threatened every few minutes (or seconds, as is more likely around say the Bay Area... or any big city in Texas, or lots of other places) driving is already well below that threshold for anyone who has any actual business driving. Hence the need for more automated driving features...
The idea that driving is too dangerous so machines should do it instead is a nice philosophical concept.
In the real world details matter, implementation quality matters, technological capabilities matter and philosophy is in fact worthless.
Technologies like AEB have a proven track record of significantly improving safety. Others such as LDW/LKS have yet to make the case or shown to be a liability in terms of safety in the aggregate.
The question at hand does feature 'x' provide a benefit or is it in fact a
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The idea that driving is too dangerous so machines should do it instead is a nice philosophical concept.
In the real world details matter, implementation quality matters, technological capabilities matter and philosophy is in fact worthless.
Yes, this is why I am opposed to additional proliferation of roadways, and support instead revising transportation to use a combination of PRT and pathways suitable for cyclists, pedestrians, riders of horses, et cetera. We have had the technology to have vehicles steer themselves since the 1800s and it is called rail. There are many reasons why cars are a stupid way to get around. Roads are crap, tires are crap, people are great drivers except when they aren't, and making a self-driving car that can litera
Re:Unreasonable (Score:5, Insightful)
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And did you remain alert all that time or did you just imagine that? The problem with losing concentration, dozing off etc. is that there's a good chance you don't notice it at all.
Re:Unreasonable (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Unreasonable (Score:4, Funny)
I admire and envy your bladder.
Well... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Statistically insignificant. Tesla stats will only matter when tens of thousands, if not millions, of trips have been made under autopilot.
The problem with waiting around for better data is that you're asking consumers to be the guinea pigs for an untested and potentially dangerous device. Through their overreaching marketing, and their lack of transparency, most would not trust Tesla with their life, and those that do, do so at their peril. A safer (albeit slower) approach would be for Tesla to demonstrate safety through public testing data.
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> The problem with waiting around for better data is that you're asking consumers to be the guinea pigs for an untested and potentially dangerous device.
Counterpoint: You HAVE seen the roads being filled with potentially dangerous and unqualified meatbags driving multi ton objects at lethals speeds, yes?
An autopilot car has never crashed because it was doing its makeup, talking on a cellphone, had too many at the local bar, fell asleep, argued with its wife and jerked the wheel around to punctuate a sal
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Except that the rope and brick method isn't intended to be an autopilot. More of a kinetic payload strike, so the fault would lie with the meatbag who sent the brick car on its course.
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Re: Well... (Score:3)
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Statistically insignificant. Tesla stats will only matter when tens of thousands, if not millions, of trips have been made under autopilot. Then compare accident rates. If Tesla turns out to be safer, it won't be because of AI, because we have no idea how humans drive in the first place. It will be because of image processing and predictive algorithms, combined with pre-ordained decision trees. And there may well be major unforeseen consequences, such as cascading failures and catastrophic feedback loop interactions between vehicles.
Apples to oranges - almost no one uses autopilot in the most adverse conditions where many If not most driving fatalities occur such as icy roads.
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http://www.ford.com/trucks/f15... [ford.com] suggests you're at best being disingenuous.
Most people spend a fuck of a lot less than $60k on a car.
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Statistically insignificant. Tesla stats will only matter when tens of thousands, if not millions, of trips have been made under autopilot. Then compare accident rates.
How few trips do you imagine have been made under autopilot so far? the 100 million mile mark was passed back in May [theverge.com]. 100M/10k=10k. Since a Tesla can only go 300mi on a charge (assuming the best case) that means that they have to have had at least 333,333 trips. In actuality, of course, the number has to be much, much higher than that. Odds are beyond good that with 100M miles, there are more than 1 million trips.
Re:Well... (Score:4, Informative)
Nope.
That's not what "statistically significant" means. What it does mean is that the result is unlikely to happen by chance. If there have only ever been two fatalities while driving on autopilot, there really isn't enough data to be confident it's not a random cluster and so the number is not statistically significant.
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What's the fatality rate in South Carolina for luxury sports sedans?
How do South Carolina's collision rates compare to others were Tesla's are (or are you suggesting that all Teslas are in South Carolina)?
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Re: Well... (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Musk is a Silicon Valley software guy. They have no concept of making things and they are used to an industry where you can sell people defective crap, have them find the bugs and then sell them a new version that fixes the crap that shouldn't have been shipped in the first place. Also SV people have this knack for over-hype that leads people to have expectations that the product cannot deliver.
AND, Musk has Space X and Tesla going.
Even if he were a competent manager, he is stretched too thin.
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And on a 'SUV'. Some sports utility vehicle that you can't put a kayak on the roof.
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To be fair, less vehicles with Kayaks on the roof is a net gain for society...
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Not that again: Once again, the only stats that show Tesla safer than human drivers compares Tesla divided highway driving (the safest kind of driving) with human driving in general.
It's an obvious statistical lie. Stop repeating it. If you're going to repeat it, go for the gusto...include driving in Mumbai, compare it to the world accident rate.
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Not that again: Once again, the only stats that show Tesla safer than human drivers compares Tesla divided highway driving (the safest kind of driving) with human driving in general.
And that is also the only stat that matters for the Tesla Autopilot. The system was only designed to be used on divided highway driving. Any other usage is not supported or encouraged. Just because early versions of the system didn't prohibit the driver from engaging it on unsupported roads, doesn't mean that those use cases are supported. They clearly state that the driver is responsible for paying attention, and that it should only be used for highway driving.
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So what? There is no justification for comparing the Tesla highway 'autopilot' accident rate to the human general driving rate. Except statistical lies to make Tesla look better.
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Re:Mobileye understands lit. Musk doesn't. (Score:5, Interesting)
Expecting Tesla to survive the avalanche of product liability suits that are coming is crazy. Musk appears oblivious to the problem. This is not a PR issue. There are numerous chinks in Tesla's armor that will be pried open and exploited by plaintiff lawyers. The company is toast.
I'm glad you mentioned this. Just this weekend I telling (another pilot) that I don't understand the strategy. The goal of Tesla was to bring electric vehicles to the masses. How are they going to do that when they get sued into oblivion? A conservative approach would have been to offer assist technologies similar to what their competition (other luxury brands) was offering. Instead, Elon has acted like it's Autopilot that's selling Tesla cars. I think people like Autopilot, but would buy the car if it had a much less aggressive auto-drive system because the real value is in the electrification of the car, not the autopilot system.
It's not all that dissimilar to his falcon wing door misstep, except that falcon wing doors did not present an ongoing risk of expensive lawsuits.
So far the accidents have been such that the Tesla driver was the one who got hurt. What happens when a Tesla hits another car and kills everybody inside? How is Tesla going to avoid the liability? Yeah, sure, the driver should have been paying attention, but at least in the US Tesla will still get named in the lawsuit, and when they lose guess who is going to have to pony up the majority of the settlement? Hint: it won't be the driver.
The good news is that Elon may have already jump-started the electric car industry and even if Tesla gets sued out of existence we may have enough momentum for the other car companies to keep moving forward.
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I think he may actually have an inkling of the fact that Tesla is doomed already and that's why the Mobileye announcement. Typically, if they thought they could weather this, they would join at the hip and offer a common defense and probably announce more cooperative deals.
Tesla is a niche player in the automotive industry, and no supplier wants to be married to a niche player. So... no.
Mobileye is now blaming Tesla for its implementation, to absolve themselves of liability.
Which is what they would do as an independent supplier no matter what.
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Tesla is a niche player in the automotive industry, and no supplier wants to be married to a niche player. So... no.
They might not throw Tesla under the bus if the business was valuable enough. Apparently it isn't.
Yes, very good, that's what I said. On one hand, they've got Tesla, which is selling a tiny handful of cars compared to the other hand... potentially, everyone else. They might even wind up supplying Tesla again someday, since this kind of dialogue is SOP for the industry. Nobody wants to be at fault for anything, predictably.
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Re:Mobileye understands lit. Musk doesn't. (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll agree with the suggestion - although think Musk has enough influence to survive and make it go away. If real problems began he'd probably leave to pursue other opportunities and new management would right the ship.
As a person who works in a regulated environment - you can't make claims about something that aren't proven. The product must be specifically designed & tested for these *Uses*. Read the back of a Tylenol / Aspirin bottle : "This product intended for the temporary relief of pain caused by ....(etc)" It doesn't cure cancer. If a salesperson tried to hint that maybe it did - they'd be strung up and fined (the drug industry has many examples of this).
However - apparently Tesla isn't regulated in this space. They can hint and suggest. The can say, "It is so good that most of the time it works as an autopilot self-driving system... but don't try it at home." It wasn't specifically designed to do this - so they shouldn't be able to hint at it. Customer's don't understand what this means - the darn thing works most of the time and they get used to it working.
Since the auto-pilot is designed to Assist the driver - the computer should monitor the driver and verify they are paying attention or pull the car over. Or NOT take over the wheel for indefinite periods of time. Consumers get used to this "not an approved use" behavior and begin to trust it - even make up their own uses ("hey look I can take a nap").
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Saving face? (Score:2)
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Any computer vision system that does not use LIDAR as its primary sensor does not belong in a vehicle capable of causing harm. Each death that has occurred in autonomous vehicles thus far is due to inadequate sensors being used.
I am baffled that someone really thought it was a good idea to install these on production vehicles knowing these limitations.
I haven't looked, but I'd imagine that even Mobleye intended for these to be installed in vehicles.
In other words.... (Score:2)
Translation: Tesla dropped our product. We Mad (Score:3)
Sour grapes from a former vendor. Mobileye would sell cameras to blind people if they could. Vendors are not leading any auto program in the industry... 2nd and 3rd tier vendors are even worse, and require constant attention, or they will deliver poor quality and unsafe products.
More likely they raised their prices and Tesla balked at the price and moved to another vendor.
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Sour grapes from a former vendor. Mobileye would sell cameras to blind people if they could. Vendors are not leading any auto program in the industry... 2nd and 3rd tier vendors are even worse, and require constant attention, or they will deliver poor quality and unsafe products.
More likely they raised their prices and Tesla balked at the price and moved to another vendor.
It was actually space aliens because this seems like most likely reason to me.
Symantics (Score:2)
Re: Symantics (Score:2)
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reminding them that they're responsible to keep their hands on the wheel
If Tesla were serious about they they would put a dead man switch on the steering wheel.
Autopilot works on Airplanes.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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And aircraft use radar for collision avoidance.
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AI's a Lie (Score:2)
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We don't need to, because the program doesn't need to make the decision in the same way, it just needs to come to a correct outcome. Basically it needs to be able to process the images/radar info/other input and come to a decision as to whether its about to hit anything and if so what to do about it. That is something that we're becoming capable of doing (and improved image recognition will push this along). But the path taken to get there can be completely divergent from how humans think.
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How do you tell the difference between a blowing plastic bag and a bouncing kid's ball on a side street?
Highways are the easy part of the automated driving problem.
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Distract from a buggy product (Score:3)
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He is not lying. Mobile eye is not for that. (Score:2)
Musk (Score:2)
Prepare for the onrush of /. Musk worshipers defending Teslas and everything Musk does and says...
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Will they balance the mountain of mouth-breathing ignorant knee-jerk haters?
So...the burn? (Score:2)
How hard did Elon fuck this guy's company that he comes out with this publicly?
My guess is this company said "you can't really do what you're trying to do with our stuff", Elon said 'make it work or else' and then implemented the 'or else' when they either failed or declined.
Liability is not for everyone (Score:3)
One of the few things I will take for granted from Elon, is his vision that if EVERY car on the road follows SOLIDLY PROGRAMMED RULES (and the sensors, of course, do not all catastrophically fail, frequently), you will have a drastic decrease, maybe even statistically eliminate car accidents. Everybody has this misconception that automated "piloting", whatever its form, will eventually create harm either by outright failure or for being so right it eventually acknowledges the "crew" is "a" harm. Fact of the matter is, everybody is just afraid of acknowledging their own imperfection, and of losing their jobs and their economy, because the definition of automation is exactly that: replacing people with a better, cheaper and easier process. We have robots flying millions of miles to other planets without much issue. Yet the main reason we don't send humans to first missions of anything is not because they're worse - it's just that they're a liability to lose in a complexity of aspects that cannot be controlled at all - public opinion is very powerful into downing any idea it preempts wrong..
I believe Elon is damn right that it is necessary to take risks in driving automation, and the holy grail in that field is to move human brain and action 100% out of the equation, for the simplest reason of them all: the driver, unlike computers, does not always have his safety as the first priority, be it by will to do something else or by distraction. Were talking big car companies here, not a service provider of a yet small car producer. Small companies cannot phathom the handling of such liability, oftentimes they don't even have the financial or legal capacity to handicap themselves with an established legal defense: ultimately the driver is liable for 99% litigation that happens about accidents TODAY because HE IS MAKING ALL DECISIONS IN REAL-TIME. Drivers don't stand a chance really. Judges will minutely side with the driver in litigation "against a car", and when they do, it usually makes it to national television.
Elon has been risking it with both Tesla and Space X because he knows he has, to some extent, the money (or the ability to direct others' money) into something bold. This is not courage like Apple likes to call it, it's calculated risk assessment with a very high return and smaller than usual probability - nobody wants that kind of bet, unless they're either truly altruistic or they're in the business of not having a standardized existence in this world. And guess what, that is just fine by me and I won't blame him for trying to be great.
Rename it ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Rename it to something like Copilot or Driver Assist. They can say what they want about how Autopilot should be used but the name suggests otherwise.
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Troll much? I disagree that they would be more misleading. I guess we should rename it "Not Autopilot"
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Troll much?
It's pretty sad that you can't tell the difference between a troll and an opinion even when provided with an extensive comment history. Work on your parser.
I disagree that they would be more misleading.
Try a dictionary. It might help.
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Your comments "spectacularly brain-damaged suggestion" and "drug-fueled" are why I consider your post troll like. Have a great day.
Humans (Score:2)
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Bad move...
Re: I'm short TSLA (Score:5, Funny)
Shorting a Tesla is generally a bad idea. 60-85kWH batteries tend to react vigorously to that sort of treatment.
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Right, nor do they want to be named in the inevitable lawsuits...
Re:Gives new meaning to computer crash (Score:5, Interesting)
Or not. I love the weasely " In January of this year in China, a Tesla ploughed into the back of a stationary truck at speed, killing the driver. Should that incident prove to be related to Autopilot...". Well, yes, in the same way that if a train were to crash tomorrow you could write "Should that incident be related to the Galaxy 7..." without any evidence that it was involved at all.
Here's a Google Transmangle of the original article in Chinese:
https://translate.google.com/t... [google.com]
Basically, the evidence that autopilot was in use was... um... his dad thinks it must have been because his son is a good driver and wouldn't have hit that truck. And he wants to "prove" it by... showing that the car's speed wasn't changing.
Whether the autopilot was on or off in a given situation is logged and easy to recover. Any reporter who suggests that an incident was "due to autopilot" without at first finding out whether the system was even on is being grossly irresponsible.
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Then Tesla has obviously been lying to everyone about Autopilot. From the way they described it, it was practically a self driving car.
Well... It IS a self driving car... Until it crashes into something...
How's that different from and airplane which flies... Until it hits the ground?
How practical this all is, is left up to the reader to decide.
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Then Tesla has obviously been lying to everyone about Autopilot. From the way they described it, it was practically a self driving car.
It is "practically" a self-driving car, for the typical value of "practically" — in colloquial English, it is a common substitution for the word "almost". Which is to say, not practical at all. But what's actually far more relevant than stupid word games (which is all you're playing at) is that Tesla forces a substantial safety lecture onto drivers who want to use Autopilot. You can't actually turn it on until your vehicle has been blessed, which doesn't happen until after you've been lectured to. It'
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Ok. Tesla. Next?
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