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Tesla Removes 'Self-driving' From China Website After Beijing Crash (reuters.com)

Posted by msmash on from the amid-controversy dept.

Last week, a Tesla owner in China blamed electric vehicle's "autopilot" feature for a crash. Amid the reports, Tesla quietly removed the term "self-driving" feature from its Chinese website. Reuters report: The Tesla driver crashed earlier this month while on a Beijing commuter highway after the car failed to avoid a vehicle parked on the left side but partially in the roadway, damaging both cars but causing no injuries. It was the first known such crash in China, although it follows a fatal accident in Florida earlier this year that put pressure on auto executives and regulators to tighten rules for automated driving. A check of Tesla's Chinese website on Sunday showed that the word "autopilot" had also been removed. But that term was subsequently reinstated on Monday. "At Tesla we are continuously making improvements, including to translations," a Tesla spokeswoman said in an emailed statement to Reuters when asked about the removal of the terms "autopilot" and "self-driving."

52 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. Adds "Self Crashing" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    nt

    1. Re:Adds "Self Crashing" by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 1

      I'd be happy with self cleaning.

  2. only works if everyone play by the same rule by Lead+Butthead · · Score: 1

    In China, traffic signs and regulations are mostly for "reference" only.

    --
    ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
    1. Re:only works if everyone play by the same rule by ADRA · · Score: 1

      I was in a Chinese district where they honk continuously when they pass other vehicles and when they passed through tunnels. Interesting system... very noisy though.

      --
      Bye!
    2. Re:only works if everyone play by the same rule by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

      The soundwaves expand the air in front and make it easier to drive through. Totally legit.

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    3. Re:only works if everyone play by the same rule by I4ko · · Score: 1

      India is the same.. Echo location at its best.

  3. Huh?!? by fluffernutter · · Score: 1

    I thought Autopilot didn't mean self-driving?!?

    --
    Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
    1. Re:Huh?!? by fluffernutter · · Score: 1

      So what is the new english translation? Drives while you stay fully alert and attentive by going through the motions of driving?

      --
      Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
    2. Re:Huh?!? by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 1

      I thought Autopilot didn't mean self-driving?!?

      The secret is out, and the Chinese are on to us. It clearly means, automatic piloting. Which refers to the algorithm Netflix uses generates new series. Very confusing I know. I can't even guess what term will we use when we have flying cars.

    3. Re:Huh?!? by AikonMGB · · Score: 2

      That isn't what autopilot in an airplane means at all. Stop spreading misinformation.

    4. Re:Huh?!? by fluffernutter · · Score: 1

      The interesting thing is, obviously the people who worked at Tesla China were comfortable calling it self-driving; so while Slashdotters were scoffing at people for thinking Autopilot was self driving, apparently this was the impression that Tesla China was under as well.

      --
      Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
    5. Re:Huh?!? by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 1

      What does autopilot on a drone mean?

    6. Re:Huh?!? by jellomizer · · Score: 1

      It doesn't but a lot of people don't realize that.
      A commercial airplane has autopilot however they need at least 1 pilot in the cockpit at all times. Autopilot doesn't replace the need of a pilot or a driver for the case of Tesla, but a tool that can deal with a lot of the monotony in driving.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    7. Re:Huh?!? by fnj · · Score: 1

      Get the hell over it. Teslas are NOT goddam self-driving, full stop, end of story. If they advertised self-driving, that was a massive boo-boo in the translation. Autopilot, that's something else altogether; sure, they have an autopilot.

    8. Re:Huh?!? by clonehappy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      They've since corrected the error in translation to better convey the meaning behind the English "autopilot".

      You're referring to the meaning that, to the 95% of the English-speaking population who have never flown an airplane or have any background or knowledge of aviation, means "self-flying", no?

    9. Re:Huh?!? by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The function of the Tesla autopilot is exactly like that of autopilots in boats and airplanes, they couldn't have chosen a more accurate term.

      Why do folks keep saying this when in airplanes autopilot specifically allows the pilot to take his hands off the controls for extended periods of time, and allow in increases and focus on instrumentation? Neither of those do you want in a car. Tesla expressly says you should NOT take your hands of the controls. There are very clear differences.

      Anyhow, I laugh over the argument effort. For Tesla, Autopilot means whatever Tesla markets it as, expressly or preferentially.That includes both the fine print and they hype.

    10. Re:Huh?!? by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 1

      ^inferentially, not preferentially.... damn autocorrectpilot

    11. Re:Huh?!? by clonehappy · · Score: 1

      I'd say most everyone doesn't realize that. If anything, the vast majority of people's only experience with autopilot is in an airplane they've seen in a Hollywood movie flying itself while the pilot goes to the john or uses a stewardess. I don't know why Musk continues to call his system autopilot when it clearly means "adaptive cruise control with lane detection system". Even Cadillac was smart enough to call it "Super Cruise".

    12. Re:Huh?!? by michelcolman · · Score: 1

      The "common meaning" of the word is exactly what I described. Maybe Tesla should educate people more about what the word means (and not make hands-free demos during test drives and in youTube videos), but "most people don't understand the word, therefore you are wrong when you use the word in its correct meaning" is hardly a valid argument. The word means what it means.

    13. Re:Huh?!? by michelcolman · · Score: 2

      During an automatic landing, we do have our hands on the controls. Cruise flight, with lots of empty air around us, is obviously a lot less critical.

    14. Re:Huh?!? by michelcolman · · Score: 1

      See, autocorrect needs monitoring too. Go sue whoever made your autocorrect software.

    15. Re:Huh?!? by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 1

      Cars don't land, so that isn't relevant, except maybe parking. But at no time in a car, even on an open empty highway, are you allowed to take your hands off with Tesla Autopilot. At least according to Tesla.

    16. Re:Huh?!? by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 1

      but a tool that can deal with a lot of the monotony in driving.

      Hold on thar pardner! No no no. Autopilot does not help you deal with the monotony. If anything, it adds to it as it takes over some of the driving task. Maybe you just chose the wrong words to imply making it safer for those whose attention drifts during monotonous driving.

    17. Re:Huh?!? by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 1

      Maybe the fact that it gets debated here on every related submission should be clue enough as to public interpretation.

    18. Re:Huh?!? by WegianWarrior · · Score: 1

      Just because so many are wrong don't change the meaning of the word. Still, Tesla could have used a more descriptive term for their system - I suspect they went with "Autopilot" since it sounds snappier and more sexy than "adaptive cruise control and lane departure warning with semi-autonomous drive and parking capabilities".

      --
      Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
    19. Re: Huh?!? by kellymcdonald78 · · Score: 1

      Ahh, so Cadillac's can exceed the speed of sound without the use of afterburners

    20. Re:Huh?!? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      As others have pointed out, this is completely untrue. I'm a pilot. I have an auto-pilot on my aircraft. It can easily kill me if I allow it. Auto-pilot means to offload tasks from the driver. It still requires oversight at every phase. This is why pilots are still part of cockpits.

    21. Re:Huh?!? by vux984 · · Score: 1

      A commercial plane autopilot is a fundamentally different animal.

      In a plane someone has to be in the cockpit. But the majority of the flight is a straight trajectory through largely completely empty space, with nothing at all 10,000 feet in any direction. They can stand up and stretch in the cockpit. A 3-4 second response time is fine. The pilot can read flight manuals, do paperwork, study a map, play cards, stand up and stretch (in the cockpit)... etc. He also has a copilot to hand-off too so he can even take a nap.

      In a car, at least with Tesla's autopilot, its completely different. There are potentially other cars within a dozen feet to either side, and few dozens feet ahead or behind. There can be trees and poles, dividers, whizzing by to the sides. And the driver is expected to be there continually on much higher alert, "hands on the wheel".

      Yes, a pilot needs to be 'ready' at all times, but not nearly as 'ready' as a Tesla driver. A tesla driver needs to be fully engaged, hands on the wheel... almost but not quite driving the entire trip. A pilot just needs to be there, alert, but he can doing paperwork, following the flight along in an atlas, and all kinds of stuff that a Tesla driver can't do. He also has a copilot and can take breaks.

    22. Re:Huh?!? by Drethon · · Score: 1

      Cars don't land, so that isn't relevant, except maybe parking. But at no time in a car, even on an open empty highway, are you allowed to take your hands off with Tesla Autopilot. At least according to Tesla.

      How is it different? Only when landing is an aircraft ever supposed to be within miles of something it might run into. Sounds like landing is closer to the environment cars operate in, rather than flying.

    23. Re:Huh?!? by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 1

      So, you want to select how it applies to cars? Maybe that tells us something about the nature of the pointless attempt to define autopilot for cars in terms of planes. After all, autopilot was never defined for cars. To say it means exactly the same thing....then follow with a "but only the landing part"....makes it silly. OTOH, autopilot for missiles typically mean autonomous.

    24. Re:Huh?!? by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      I thought Autopilot didn't mean self-driving?!?

      You've never been to China have you? You'd be amazed what something means once someone translates it into Chinese and then translates it back again.

    25. Re:Huh?!? by swb · · Score: 2

      I don't know about planes, but marine autopilot seems much more sophisticated than Tesla's at high levels of integration.

      Dumb systems will simply hold heading to a specific compass bearing. Sightly smarter ones will hold heading to a bearing and maintain a desired speed (and in dumb systems usually only throttle position).

      Smarter systems integrated with a chartplotter will pilot an entire trip based on waypoints, maintaining course and speed the entire way with no input. Even smarter systems integrate radar for avoiding static and moving objects and can even incorporate sonar devices to avoid shallow areas in areas where water levels may vary or where charts are poor.

      Now, you can't really go take a nap in a busy area, bad weather or while docking, but a modern marine autopilot can cover long distances and complex courses with near zero input. I don't think you can input waypoints into a Tesla and sit back for 8 hours while it does all the work.

    26. Re:Huh?!? by Jim+Hall · · Score: 1

      Just because so many are wrong don't change the meaning of the word.

      I disagree. Definitions of words change all the time because a large number of people agree to a new meaning. One example is Decimate. Originally, this meant to kill 1/10th of a population - from the ancient Roman use of Decimation as a means of punishment of a group at once, such as punishment for desertion. Over time, people at large associated "decimate" with a disaster affecting large groups, and later the assumed meaning shifted to "destroy almost all of something."

      And I watched that definition change over my lifetime. When I was in middle school, we learned "decimate" meant "one in ten" (hence "deci").

      So over the span of thirty or forty years, "decimate" has changed from 10% to something like 90%.

      The current definition:

      Decimate
      verb (used with object), decimated, decimating.

      1. to destroy a great number or proportion of:
      The population was decimated by a plague.

      2. to select by lot and kill every tenth person of.

    27. Re:Huh?!? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Yes, they do have a system that controls the trajectory of your vehicle without constant hands-on control by a human operator being required. Even if the operator takes his hands off the controls and stops paying attention.

      And unlike an aircraft's autopilot system, the Tesla will usually avoid obstacles as well.

    28. Re:Huh?!? by I4ko · · Score: 1

      I'm not sure about that. Americans redefine English in ways they see fit, but are not what English means. In every Slavic language autopilot means automatic&autonomous pilot, which means self-driving.
      If it is not self-driving (automatic) but it provides some assistance, it is assisted driving/piloting, but not automatic piloting (autopilot).

      You can also check what autopilot means even in English - a device for automatically steering ships, aircraft, and spacecraft.

      Stop saying autopilot isn't autopilot, when you have arbitrary substituted the meaning of autopilot with driver assist.

    29. Re:Huh?!? by I4ko · · Score: 1

      You are confusing autopilot with fly-by-wire control.
      With autopilot you enter the entire flight plan, and you have the computer land the plan in ILS. Don't assume lack of stuurwiel, wheel or control column is autopilot. Airbus doesn't have a control column, yet the pilot can fly manually by turning knobs.

      With autopilot you just program it, and let it run the program, and you don't touch it, unless your pants are going to suddenly go brown.

    30. Re:Huh?!? by SvnLyrBrto · · Score: 1

      Tesla's autopilot exceeds the capabilities of many, perhaps even most, autopilots in use in aviation. The fact that it's not completely hands-off and capable of engaging in witty banter in the voice of William Daniels does not change that fact.

      And Hollywood movies? Really? The Hollywood movie I saw the other night claimed that flying DeLoreans and hoverboards are available right now and that the Cubs won the World Series last year. Just because I saw it on TV doesn't make it so.

      --
      Imagine all the people...
    31. Re:Huh?!? by lgw · · Score: 1

      Not all aircraft autopilots are that fancy, many aren't that safe for landing, and almost all will cheerfully fly into an obstacle. The technical sense seems correct for Tesla - it's somewhere in the range of things that get called "autopilot". Terrible choice for a marketing term, of course.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    32. Re:Huh?!? by marquisdepolis · · Score: 1

      Not sure the comparison holds. For one thing, you're not driving the boat in a lane surrounded by other boats, like in a motorway. The marine autopilot is child's play by comparison.

    33. Re:Huh?!? by mrclevesque · · Score: 1

      Then tell Tesla to tell people they must keep their hands on the wheel at all times and keep their attention on the road same as if they didn't have autopilot.

    34. Re:Huh?!? by EEPROMS · · Score: 1

      I always thought Tesla was asking for a lawsuit by using the term "autopilot", persoanlly i think they should have called it "driver assist".

    35. Re:Huh?!? by mea_culpa · · Score: 1

      Autopilot is actually an accurate name for it.

      Autopilot was primarily invented for aircraft and even today, autopilot will still happily fly an aircraft into terrain without human interaction if you let it. There have been numerous CFIT fatal crashes of aircraft with over 9000 deaths. Each of these incidences brought more knowledge of how to improve technology to help prevent future occurrences (I expect the same to happen with autonomous vehicle technology so longs as government allows it to exist). Autopilot was never intended to replace the human pilot or alleviate the responsibility of the human pilot to maintain constant situational awareness. Likewise, autopilot in the Tesla was never intended to alleviate the driver of the responsibility to maintain continuous situational awareness. The driver actually has to agree to this when using it.

      I think Hollywood may have warped people's perception of what autopilot actually is and its limitations.

    36. Re:Huh?!? by mea_culpa · · Score: 1

      That's interesting. I never looked up that word before but I always assumed in meant to cause a disaster on such a scale that the decimal place is moved a certain number of places. Like only 100 surviving out of 10,000, or 50,000 of 5,000,000,000.

    37. Re:Huh?!? by michelcolman · · Score: 1

      Airbus does have sidesticks that work just like a control column. And we can't program the autopilot to do an entire flight including landing. Autoland requires quite a bit of manual actions (engaging approach mode when close to the airport, selecting flaps and landing gear,...) and we are trained to always be ready to take over when the system malfunctions.

    38. Re:Huh?!? by aix+tom · · Score: 1

      One common definition that would apply to both cars and planes would probably be "the vehicle has to have at least X seconds unobstructed travel path before it, so that it is save to take the hands of the controls" Then that would also somewhat fit missiles and rockets, although in their case the human intervention is mostly confined to an "abort and self destruct" button.

      That way a highway scenario could one day become "hands of wheels" territory, for example when there are autonomous vehicle only lanes.

  4. Just two links ??? by martiniturbide · · Score: 1

    ..Slashdotters are getting lazy to post more links on the articles. I would put a link over "fatal accident in Florida".

    1. Re:Just two links ??? by michelcolman · · Score: 1

      What about the fatal crash in Southern California last monday morning?

  5. Re:This is so silly by NotInHere · · Score: 1

    Yeah, I think the number of deaths caused by driver stupidity is far larger than those two deaths that were caused by the autopilot feature.

  6. Re:This is so silly by jellomizer · · Score: 1

    People are more scared to fly than to drive, or walk across the street.

    The general fear is from a loss of control. The more control a person has the less they are afraid, because they can make decisions about their life. While if you intrust it into technology or someone else. The risk is that other person just will not care as much... Even though the numbers show that they are safer.

    The same with many people with cloud computing. You hear about a major outage or problem once a year, however if they were administering their own local systems there would be problems happening a lot more often. However the scale of the problem will not make the news.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  7. Re:This is so silly by michelcolman · · Score: 1

    Here's one.

  8. in other news by zlives · · Score: 4, Funny

    VW to change the definition of emissions compliant on their website, lawsuit averted.

  9. You dumb fuck by Ryanrule · · Score: 1

    Learn to actually translate Chinese you asshole.