Tesla Autopilot and Euro NCAP

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/the-trashing-of-tesla-autopilot-by-euro-ncap-129683.html

by camtarn • 8 years ago

66 125 8 years ago

autoevolution.com

noisy_boy• 8 years ago

Tesla should just rename their ADS from AutoPilot to CoPilot.

samfisher832• 8 years ago

Its really Lane Keep assist and Dynamic radar cruise control. Its better than most manufacturer's systems.

whttheuuu• 8 years ago

This isn't true at all with Navigate On AutoPilot which was released a month or so ago.

You set your destination on the GPS and it will take you exit-to-exit on highways.

This is not lane assist or distance control you see on other cars.

moduspol2• 8 years ago

It will also change lanes for you if you signal, and wait for a safe opening if necessary.

sabertoothed3• 8 years ago

Not that discussion again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopilot

azag0• 8 years ago

It doesn’t matter what the technical definition is in aviation. What matters is what expectations about Tesla’s technology it creates for most people.

simion31414• 8 years ago

Do you think that most people know how airplanes autopilot works? What people know is that airplanes can drive and land themselves and human pilots are there as backup/safety.

Someone12346• 8 years ago

Euroncap literally flagged it as an issue in their report. So when you say "not that discussion again" are you asking people not to discuss the actual topic of this thread?

Piskvorrr3• 8 years ago

That assumes benign intent. All that we have seen so far is a sales pitch finetuned juuuust on the line "we won't say it's autonomous (or that it's not), but we'll nudge suggestively, point and nod." Of course, when anything happens, the old spiel "we didn't actually say it" comes out.

vinay427• 8 years ago

This would have also allowed for more fanfare with a fitting name if/when they eventually release a fully autonomous system.

ryandrake2• 8 years ago

Or link it with cruise control like other manufacturers are doing. The general public kind of gets what cruise control Does, and that sets the right expectation. The public really has no idea what an aviation or marine autopilot system is all about.

reubenswartz• 8 years ago

Yes, having tried it, I'm a big fan, but they should have called it "Ultra Cruise" or something like that.

amyjess• 8 years ago

I would be OK with regulations requiring them to call it "adaptive cruise control with lane assist" and forbidding automakers from coming up with their own names for it.

ginko• 8 years ago

Isn't the point of a copilot that it can safely fly and land a plane unlike an autopilot.

duiker101• 8 years ago

Maybe, but I think that's beside the point. The point is that it's about people's perception of what something should do from it's name. And 99% of the people will associate co-* with a help and auto-* with something that can do it on it's own.

Someone12346• 8 years ago

Planes can land entirely on autopilot.

Just requires the airport to have ILS, and a fairly modern autopilot.

hangonhn• 8 years ago

So rename it to "student pilot" and change "driver" to instructor? This is why I don't work in marketing...

simion31414• 8 years ago

This is about cars, in cars driving copilot means something different then airplanes.

emn132• 8 years ago

The point is that a copilot is there to assist the primary pilot, not be that primary pilot all of the time - even if in emergencies a copilot can take over.

Frankly - if you're asking for emergency "landings" I'd say modern driver assists are probably up to the task. Most have a pretty decent chance of bringing a vehicle to a safe stop. And if it's an emergency, and the primary driver cannot do so - then the currently still inevitable unreliability isn't much of an issue - it's still much, much better than nothing.

Copilot isn't a bad name change. Not that they'll ever do it.

aequitas• 8 years ago

Or don't borrow from other industries making meaning ambiguous and just call it for what it is: Driver assist

jononor• 8 years ago

Hopefully one of the (European) consumer protection agencies require them to reduce their misleading marketing soon.

slg• 8 years ago

I understand the argument that Tesla is generally misleading is their selling of Autopilot. I can also understand the argument that no company should be selling this type of semi-autonomous tech that can result in the worst of both human and autonomous driving. But I simply don't understand the argument that the only problem with this feature is the name. It just makes the whole thing seem silly.

We already put numerous requirements on people before they are allowed to legally drive. Why are we not blaming drivers for knowing nothing about their cars beyond the simple name of a feature? You literally can't turn the feature on in a Tesla without it warning you about its limitations. Doesn't the driver have some responsibility to pay attention to those warnings or at least spend a few minutes learning about this feature before they trust it with their lives (and the lives of others)?

simion31414• 8 years ago

I agree, drivers that do not pay attention share the blame too, but is not fair to blame only the drivers, the "autopilot" requires that the human driver maintain 100% attention but is the system monitoring the driver properly, is it trying the best to keep the driver engaged to the road ? No it does not do that because is not comfortable for the customer, so safety is sacrificed.

sabertoothed3• 8 years ago

Article from October.

taneq2• 8 years ago

Man, those six weeks completely changed the self-driving landscape, what with the... um... nah it's about the same but Waymo is now charging for rides.

sabertoothed3• 8 years ago

For those people with shares it matters. New information changes share price. Old information tends to be reflected already.

ralph84• 8 years ago

Airplanes have autopilot and no one thinks that means there’s no pilot in front. Sure some drivers test the limit of their Tesla, just like some drivers test the limit of their Porsche or Ferrari.

tacomonstrous• 8 years ago

This is a silly semantic argument. Many people drive cars; very few fly aircraft. The meaning of a word in the second context has little to do with the first.

paulddraper3• 8 years ago

Please elaborate. In what more common context does autopilot imply no standby human operator?

Barrin92• 8 years ago

I don't understand why you're downvoted. The reason we leave the plane nomenclature to the pilots is that we know that pilots are trained professionals and understand what 'autopilot' implies and what its technical limits are.

Unless we expect the same rigor of people operating a vehicle, advertising matters. There aren't exactly a lot of pilots who will take the hand of the wheel and read a comic because they mistake the capabilities of the plane

ummonk• 8 years ago

No one thinks the pilot has to be ready to take over at a moment's notice and be constantly paying careful attention to what is happening in front of the plane though.

smileysteve• 8 years ago

Except for maybe pilots, anybody who has trained to be a pilot, or family or friends of pilots?

The nicer thing in the air is that, if autopilot fails, you're typically thousands of feet up.

Nobody's mentioning that autopilot in airplanes does nothing for collision avoidance. GCAS is collision avoidance and had its issues, but is considered well past autopilot.

nradov• 8 years ago

Everyone who knows anything about aviation thinks the pilot has to be ready to take over at a moment's notice and be constantly paying careful attention to what is happening in front of the plane. Autopilots merely lower the pilot workload. Even with the autopilot engaged, the pilot is still actively flying the aircraft.

ryandrake2• 8 years ago

I think a lot of the general public thinks an airplane’s autopilot causes the airplane to do a lot more than it actually does. The name is not helping.

simion31414• 8 years ago

Some scientists did some "Teleportation" experiements with photons, this does not mean that when people think abut what teleportation means they think about photons instead of teleporting people like in Star Trek,

Similar autopilot for cars does not make people think about a card that drives itself but the driver must also be 100% concentrated on the road, the name implies something different and Tesla marketing knows that , the fans will try now to defend this bad choice with some bad examples from aviation, you need to go and ask people on the street what a car with an autopilot should be capable of.

leetcrew6• 8 years ago

I really don't want to live in a world where my moral character is judged by whether some random people on the street think of the right thing when they hear the name of my technical feature.

there is an inherent tradeoff between accessibility and precision in language. can we err a little bit on the side of precision in a technical field?

21• 8 years ago

In airplanes the pilot is never watching a movie on the phone while the autopilot is engaged.

raverbashing• 8 years ago

Autopilots have a very specific and determined role in aviation.

Pilots are also trained extensively on its capabilities and limits (and all other 'auto-' systems on airplanes).

michaelt• 8 years ago

Aircraft autopilot:

1. Maintains a planned course without responding to obstacles.

2. Allows the pilots to safely take their hands off the controls and focus their attention elsewhere, such as on the radio.

Tesla autopilot is similar in property (1), but different in property (2) because aircraft are 'protected' by the Big Sky Theory.

ddalex• 8 years ago

Aircraft autopilot can automatically avoid collisions based on TCAS data, for recent airplanes (https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/press-releases/en/2009/08/ea...)

bibinou• 8 years ago

Autopilot was a major factor in Air France's deadliest crash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447

ceejayoz2• 8 years ago

Airplanes have autopilot and no one thinks that means there’s no pilot in front.

If we're going to make that comparison, then we should also factor in the fact that you're not going to be allowed to use an aircraft autopilot without first being trained on its operation, limitations, etc.

ubernostrum• 8 years ago

Airlines have also had to do special training courses to teach pilots not to get over-reliant on automation. Tesla's "autopilot" seems to fall in that category of being just enough automation that it gets people complacent, but not enough to actually let them safely be complacent.

EpicEng• 8 years ago

That argument holds water the day Joe schmoe driver undergoes hundreds of hours of advanced training.

dmode• 8 years ago

What a clickbait headline. The trashing is...wait for it.. because of the name Autopilot and because it is too good. Saved you a click

leesec• 8 years ago

Overall, the results were satisfying. In Tesla’s case, they were disastrous. And not because ADS don't work, but because apparently they work too well.

Misleading title much?

thumb• 8 years ago

I don't know; they seem to be trashing Autopilot plenty in the article.

hn_throwaway_99• 8 years ago

I disagree. The article concludes "Tesla's Autopilot is a great technology, perhaps the most advanced ADS on the market". What they are "trashing" seems to be the hyperbolic marketing of Tesla, which I feel at this point has been discussed ad nauseum and has gotten so much press that this just feels like a rehashing of "Tesla greatly oversold this!" that tons of people (myself included) have already commented.

bdz• 8 years ago

Original article https://www.euroncap.com/en/press-media/press-releases/testi...

Test method and results with links to every model https://www.euroncap.com/en/vehicle-safety/safety-campaigns/...

Tesla (.pdf) https://cdn.euroncap.com/media/41590/euro-ncap-automated-dri...

make3• 8 years ago

the title is extremely inaccurate

jaysonelliot• 8 years ago

The article claims that the NCAP's problems with automated systems was that "apparently they work too well."

It then goes on to enumerate a host of problems with Tesla's Autopilot, including a lack of geofencing, poor monitoring of human attention, "late or no response" to cut-in-and-out scenarios, AutoSteer's resistance to human control, and the system's trouble with some curves, and of course Tesla's inconsistent and confusing messaging about what exactly Autopilot is meant to be.

Far from being a "trashing," it sounds like the Euro NCAP did exactly what it was supposed to do, which is to advocate for safety.

gonehome4• 8 years ago

I really don’t like geofencing or aggressive human attention monitoring so the lack of both of those things are features. The steering wheel attention requests are pretty frequent anyway.

The other complaints are largely remedied by being a safe driver - the car says all over the place what the limitations of autopilot are when you go to use it.

simion31414• 8 years ago

Did you read about the case where the driver was sleeping and the car did not stop because it did not realize it? Do you think this is a feature?

close04• 8 years ago

Some don’t like seatbelts. But if your concern is safety priorities change.

xondono• 8 years ago

Switch “advocate for safety” with “defend the interest of german car manufacturers” and then I’ll buy it

magic-chicken• 8 years ago

TL/DR

Tesla ADS is the best on the market but it is marketed as an autopilot, which is wrong and caused some overconfident owners to die.

oblio• 8 years ago

Your comment makes it sound like the two mistakes are equivalent.

They might have been overconfident, but if the misleading marketing leads to deaths, I don't think the finger should be pointed to "overconfidence".

dsfyu404ed• 8 years ago

Your comment makes it sound like the two mistakes are equivalent.

It's a TL;DR. Of course it sacrifices nuance for brevity.

They might have been overconfident, but if the misleading marketing leads to deaths, I don't think the finger should be pointed to "overconfidence".

I generally agree with you but there is a good argument to be had that the driver is responsible. These were personally owned vehicles, not rentals. It's not like the owners who died didn't have time to become familiar enough with the system to reach the same performance conclusions (i.e. "it's basically just really good lane keeping and adaptive cruise") as Euro NCAP did. I get that products for the general consumer are supposed to be stupid proof but everyone knows that marketing bends the truth by only ever showing the ideal case. Nobody expects fancy AWD and electronic nannies to let them navigate snow covered hairpin roads with 100% accuracy every time like in the car commercials. Nobody expects to rely on automatic braking or cross traffic detection to not get in accidents when backing out of a driveway. The same goes for Tesla's autopilot. It is unreasonable to expect Autopilot to perform the way the marketing implies in 100% of circumstances.

jlv2• 8 years ago

Having used it for about 24K miles, I think Tesla AutoPilot works incredibly well (using software 9.0 and AP2.0 hardware in my Model S).

And I'm really glad it isn't crippled with some geofencing that would limit it to where I could enable it.

Having said all that, the name is a terrible and implies something it isn't capable of yet. It's a dangerously bad marketing choice.

usaphp• 8 years ago

I own latest 5 series bmw and paid for all the driving assistance add-ons, and while the adaptive cruise control is awesome, the line keeping assist is completely useless and works absolutely terrible, not sure who decided to charge money for this incomplete piece of software, it's unusable, my friend has a model X and it's a day and night difference between the two, Tesla autopilot is just in a different league compared to bmw line assist thing.

Shivetya• 8 years ago

I found a use for it where I did not expect. When I took my first big trip with my TM3 I was on a two lane road in Western Ohio at night, in the pouring rain, on a two lane country road. Speed limit was 55mph and while exceeding it it was not uncommon to get passed.

The problem I faced was the glare from oncoming cars and trucks some not dimming their lights. So I set AP to the task for keeping me in the lane and when someone came at me too bright to see I could focus on the white lane much and the AP screen at the same time assured I was in my lane.

is it perfect, oh hell know. it will do tail of the dragon in North Georgia provided you keep it at the speed limit but it can be a bit sketchy as it likes the center line a bit on two lane roads. I do know its not meant for that but when safe I had to try.

General use I mostly rely on traffic aware cruise control to keep a safe distance and speed and do the steering only letting it steer when fumbling for something in the car.

edit: on tm3 it can be cancelled by tapping brakes or tapping right stalk up. it is so easy to cancel so I do not understand NCAP's issue there. did they not bother to read on how to cancel it?

decebalus1• 8 years ago

[meta] Whenever there is something remotely critical of Tesla, the comment section is a mess. Downvotes left-and-right, people are divided on bullshit semantics, etc.. I really don't get why. Same thing (but worse, actually) happens on Reddit.

Is Tesla PR so 'well connected' to astroturf basically everywhere or did their marketing succeeded in creating an army of people who emotionally associate Tesla with the future of humanity? It's just a car folks, take a chill pill.

Someone12346• 8 years ago

I don't think Tesla needs to astroturf, they have plenty of supports who will happily defend them for free.

Similar things happen in Apple threads, sports threads (elsewhere), and the games console wars. People just don't like their chosen sacred cow getting criticized.

QuantumGood• 8 years ago

You didn't specify which semantics are "bullshit", but I wouldn't lump discussion about autopilot into that.

For example, part of the argument over the feature being termed autopilot has been that it supports misleading statements from salespeople—the least "semantic" issue with the name I am aware of.

A feature designed to assist in life-or-death situations shouldn't be named in a Darwinian way, harming those who assume more than should be assumed.

ineedasername• 8 years ago

Their most important point stems from the name: "Autopilot". That right there begins the host of issues that arose from how Tesla marketed their features in a way that oversold them. And I am genuinely impressed by what Tesla has accomplished with their system, it's just that it's safe use-cases are much, much narrower a true "autopilot"

I wonder if there is even a safe "in between" phase between normal driving and truly, fully self-driving vehicles. Or will many people put too much trust in the tech to make it a safer alternative until it's much more mature. Think of airplane pilots, where "autopilot" is also not really a fully self-flying/landing/takeoff system: they have tons of specialized training to hammer home the limitations and work safely within the system. There's even a body of research literature on the topic of when too much automation makes pilots too complacent, and decades of engineering with that problem in mind.

It all just makes me think that Waymo may have it right in not targeting any type of transitional state between traditional and full automation.

labcomputer3• 8 years ago

To be fair, the Tesla Autopilot functions at a higher than an aviation autopilot.

In aviation, an autopilot follows a fixed path and makes no attempt to avoid other aircraft or terrain.

There is no such thing as an automated takeoff. Automated landings, in practice, require the pilot to hand-fly the last part of the approach (except at a fleetingly small number of airports with cat IIIc approaches, where a ground navaid, not GPS, provides a high precision signal to guide the autopilot).

State of the art automation of aircraft speed consists of the pilot dialing a different speed to the autothrottle, which is effectively a traditional, non-adaptive cruise control.

leetcrew6• 8 years ago

I wonder if there is even a safe "in between" phase between normal driving and truly, fully self-driving vehicles. Or will many people put too much trust in the tech to make it a safer alternative until it's much more mature.

the prevailing opinion on this forum seems to be that these semi-autonomous driver aids are inherently unsafe because the driver inevitably stops paying attention. but are they actually worse that a typical human driving manually? I know we've seen a bunch of high-profile news stories about tesla autopilot malfunctions and inattentive safety drivers, but is there any real data to suggest that these systems are as bad as portrayed?

njarboe3• 8 years ago

Tesla is going a different route to full automation than any other company. They seem to think the fastest way to full automation is going to be a gradual progression from where they are now (low level SAE 3) to level 4/5. Most others, and most importantly the leader Waymo (Google (Alphabet)), have decided the human society can't handle the risks of a level 3 system and won't deploy cars with those features. Waymo seems to have got to level 4 for the driving conditions around Phoenix so they are now starting to deploy the system to the public.

At level 3 humans aren't driving the car but are suppose to pay attention so that they can take over if a problem arises. In general humans are not good at that task. Some of them will fail at it, the car will crash, people will get hurt/die, and maybe in this "safety first" world, automatic driving gets a bad name and is "set back" a decade.

Elon Musk has stated that he believes more in a "safety third" kind of philosophy. In an interview I saw he stated that with his kids he tells them that "don't panic" is a good first principle for dealing with life and "safety" would probably go third. It's important but not the prime directive of life. What is second is still up for consideration.

So the love/hate for Tesla's Autopilot strategy probably comes down to how you feel about risking people's lives to possibly save many more. Here is a question to ask yourself. If Tesla's autocar strategy causes 100 deaths of people who volunteer to take the risk before really good automation is developed, but Tesla's courage/recklessness has a 50% chance of saving a million (choose your own number) lives due to the speed-up of the implementation of self driving cars, would you support that? I would and so would many others, but many would not. This is a deep difference in values and that is why I think there is so much love/hate around the issue.

Maybe Tesla wants to call it Autopilot because they hope they can incrementally improve it so that someday they get to level 4/5 and won't have the need to change the name at some arbitrary place along the way to full autopilot competency. Cruise control was a bit of a misnomer also but people seem to be fine with the word at this point.

YeGoblynQueenne5• 8 years ago

Autopilot is level 2 autonomy.

Noone has level 3 autonomy, yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_driving_system#Level...

Level 2 – Partial automation The driver must be able to control the vehicle if corrections are needed, but the driver is no longer in control of the speed and steering of the vehicle.[6] Parking assistance is an example of a system that falls into this category[7] along with Tesla's autopilot feature.[8] A system that falls into this category is the DISTRONIC PLUS system created by Mercedes-Benz.[9] It is important to note the driver must not be distracted in Level 0 to Level 2 modes.

njarboe3• 8 years ago

Reading over the SAE (J3016) Automation Levels here[1] it seems to me that the Tesla Autopilot is now into level 3, especially for highway driving. If you can go exit to exit without any direction from a human, I would definitely say level 3 has been reached. Fine details of the definition between one level and another should probably only interesting to lawyers and their clients.

Waymo not level 3? Seems they claim to be level 4 for their Phoenix rollout.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-driving_car

pound• 8 years ago

your wikipedia link 1) puts Tesla on level 2 based on an autopilot update from 2015 (check reference [8]). It's really outdated. 2) puts Google on level 4.

rconti• 8 years ago

The difference is, Tesla is a car company and Alphabet isn't. Tesla is hoping autopilot can help them ship units, and Alphabet is hoping they can make the tech first and either build a car around it, or, more likely, license it to people who know how to make cars. I'm not sure either is altruistic.

YeGoblynQueenne5• 8 years ago

This is going to be controversial perhaps, so I apologise in advance, but I'm continuously struck by the tendency of the tech industry (some sectors of it anyway) to overstate matters. Tesla's driver assistance system is an "autopilot"; Waymo's rides with human (safety) drivers are "autonomous"; DeepMind's AlphaZero that plays chess, Go and shogi [1] is a "general-purpose game playing agent"; Google translate that uses English as an intermediary language has developed an "interlingua".

I really don't get how this works. To me all this sounds like completely ridiculous. Yet, some of those claims appear in actual publications, in high profile journals. Otherwise, people fall over each other to buy that hot AI stuff. I mean, what the hell?

Perhaps we must persist in educating people about the abilities, and limitations, of current technology?

______________

[1] And nothing else. Not even tick-tack-toe. It has a model of a board with squares and of pieces making chess-like moves, so it can't deal with anything else.

Tesla Autopilot and Euro NCAP

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