No snark intended, but doesn't having to constantly pay attention and be ready to take over control negate a lot of the benefit of the self-driving features? It seems like you'd have to apply just as much mental energy to the task as if you were actually driving, so the only real benefit is that you don't have to physically make the motions. In fact in some ways it seems mentally worse, since when you're driving you aren't surprised by sudden turns in front of trams and the like. With self-driving, there's a constant possibility of those kind of surprises, so I would think it would feel a lot like riding in the passenger seat with a new teenage driver.
Worse: it's like driving with an alien driver. The teenage driver at least shares your language and some "human" cognitive patterns with you. You may communicate with it, you may receive its feedback, and you may even understand when he struggles with something so that you pay more attention to correct him (i.e. because it's highly likely he struggles at the same places you do)
No such luck with this ridiculous software. An incoming train that any human (with normal sight) would have no problems to detect? The car drives right into it. You literally have to pay full attention during even the simplest of situations because there is no way to understand how this piece of software actually thinks, much less to predict how it will misbehave.
Today it's an incoming train that's painted white, tomorrow is a cricket on the road that causes it swerve onto oncoming traffic, or a small paint chip on a traffic sign that causes the OCR to read "speed limit 200" instead of 20.
> An incoming train that any human (with normal sight) would have no problems to detect?
To be fair, failing to yield to oncoming traffic when turning left is an extremely common mistake for human drivers to make as well.
In fact, earlier in the video, the car correctly yielded to an oncoming car, the human driver overrode it, then complained that the oncoming car "cut him off"! https://youtu.be/yxX4tDkSc_g?t=494
Because your brain is freed up from taking in all of the data points for constantly steering and speeding up and slowing down, it's incredibly less exhausting. Instead, you can focus on observing a lot more of the road and capturing things that you previously would have been unable to focus on. It's not often it deviates from expected behavior and catches you off guard with some radically unpredictable maneuver. When driving longer distances between cities, it's a night and day difference compared to my car that only has radar cruise control but still requires steering. Perhaps it's something you have to experience firsthand to truly see how much less exhausting of an experience it is.
By taking away throttle control and steering, you leave yourself with only decision making. It's reducing major components of normal driving behavior. It's not perfect, but knowing its strengths and weaknesses allows for better driving in my opinion.
It could definitely be one of those experience it to understand it things, since I've never driven very far in a car with more advanced self-driving (trying it in a colleague's Tesla on a short drive to lunch is about the extent of my experience).
I'm a private pilot though and what you're describing sounds a lot like the autopilots on small planes. It handles keeping course and altitude for you, so you can focus on the rest of the flight and it is indeed way less taxing than hand flying a longer distance. And like Tesla, a plane autopilot will occasionally do something weird so you can't entirely ignore it. I would think the difference though is that in a plane, nothing the autopilot does will be fatal or dangerous very quickly, so you have plenty of time to notice and correct it as long as you aren't sleeping or something. When you're driving a car though, a second of steering in the wrong direction can quickly turn into an accident, so you as the driver have to be constantly ready to immediately take over. Even in the chance is low, as long as it's often enough to be a factor, you still need that instant readiness.
I wonder if the value is more on longer drives, as you said, vs city driving. The fatigue factor driving between cities is a bigger issue, and the driving tasks are simpler with less opportunity for the car to do something crazy than in busy city driving.
> By taking away throttle control and steering, you leave yourself with only decision making. It's reducing major components of normal driving behavior. It's not perfect, but knowing its strengths and weaknesses allows for better driving in my opinion.
Assuming you know its strengths and weaknesses. See next post, below.
I'm wondering if "reducing major components of normal driving behavior" is such a good idea?
What I'm getting at-- the delusion/illusion that the brain/mind is somehow separate from the body-- that learning can all be in the abstract without any connection to tangible reality.
How can you make throttle decisions if you don't have throttle control? Wouldn't having throttle control at all times mean you have more awareness of the machine you are controlling and can thus decide faster and act better? Because this control is already part of your thoughts?
Throttle control and steering _are_ decision making. If you can't do these as well as every other task you need to do, you don't belong behind a wheel, period.
And before i hear a "That's exclusionary", yes, excluding people unable to be safe while driving 2 tons of steel launched at high speeds is a good thing
I can see how that might be the case for a very new driver, but for anyone who has driven for any period, "throttle control and steering" is completely autonomous and requires negligible consideration. Instead my focus is entirely on exceptional situations. The current FSD seems like I now have to focus on throttle and steering and the exceptions just to keep guard that the system doesn't do something disastrous.
As others have said, I cannot fathom how having to babysit an occasionally suicidal driving system is better than having no system at all. It seems perfectly balanced at the absolutely worst point of both being reliable enough that you stop paying attention, but unreliable enough that it catches you not paying attention.
If an FSD system really let me sit and watch a movie or read or book or something -- if it was that good -- then I 100% get it and would be signed up. But one that you have to babysit seems worse than pointless.
> for anyone who has driven for any period, "throttle control and steering" is completely autonomous and requires negligible consideration.
As someone who has driven a Tesla 10s of thousands of km now and was driving for decades before, I disagree. I can see why you'd think that, however it's like a muscle that's been tight for years. You're so used to it, you don't noticr it anymore. Once it loosens, you're surprised how much better it feels.
I used a Comma 3 (somewhat close to FSD, just simpler) and I found that it allows to you look forward in time more then you normally would. Normally you might be looking at the first 50ft for issues, now I find I'm able to expand out to 200ft and look around more for traffic.
It's not that I say 50ft is the only zone, but its my main focus, that and traffic around me (Mind you, this is all highway) With the Comma, it moves out a good bit, Allowing me to process more of the future traffic going on and the more edge cases that might come up at highway speeds. Also its vision and radar based so it keeps me 250ft+ from the car in front of me and keeps speed, it won't ever change lanes. This is why its more of a LKAS with better settings.
Of course there are cases the system doesn't work at all and is not well suited for surface roads very well.
Its behavior is very predictable and easy to feel when its seeing something I'm not. (Slowing down to match speed 1:1 with the car in front of me when they let off the gas is a common example)
50 ft is 15 meters and change, at regular car speeds that is much shorter than your reaction speed. It's essentially an accident waiting to happen. At highway speeds you should be looking about 200 ft ahead of you for safe driving. See the 'two second rule', and that's for clear skies, daylight:
Every day I drive, I see dozens of incidents where I think someone should be ticketed for reckless driving: tailgating, excessive speed, unexpected lane changes, etc
They never, ever are. We do not enforce good driving except after people die (or even then, vehicular homicide has low sentences).
If you can't keep your visual scan out further without relying on a driver assistance system then you're incompetent and shouldn't be allowed behind the wheel in the first place.
