Elon Musk Rolled Out Autopilot Despite Engineers' Safety Concerns, Says Report (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: When Elon Musk announced last fall that all of Tesla's cars would be capable of "full autonomy," engineers who were working on the suite of self-driving features, known as Autopilot, did not believe the system was ready to safely control a car, according to the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ report sheds more light on the tension that exists between the Autopilot team and Musk. CNN previously reported in July that Musk "brushed aside certain concerns as negligible compared to Autopilot's overall lifesaving potential," and that employees who worked on Autopilot "struggled" to make the same reconciliation.

A major cause of this conflict has apparently been the way Musk chose to market Autopilot. The decision to refer to Autopilot as a "full self-driving" solution -- language that makes multiple appearances on the company's website, especially during the process of ordering a car -- was the spark for multiple departures, including Sterling Anderson, who was in charge of the Autopilot team during last year's announcement. Anderson left the company two months later, and was hit with a lawsuit from Tesla that alleged breach of contract, employee poaching, and theft of data related to Autopilot, though the suit was eventually settled. A year before that, a lead engineer warned the company that Autopilot wasn't ready to be released shortly before the original rollout. Evan Nakano, the senior system design and architecture engineer at the time, wrote that development of Autopilot was based on "reckless decision making that has potentially put customer lives at risk," according to documents obtained by the WSJ.

Comments

Someone always has to make the tough call

[RhettLivingston]

I've been in engineering organizations releasing new products that had life saving or threatening potential. It is always an agonizing, scary hard call as to when you've passed the threshold of risk.

There is a bell curve with a peak. You rarely hit the peak. If you make the call too late, you cost the lives of those you might have saved - too soon, you cost lives of those who might have saved themselves.

Even if you hit the peak perfectly, you'll always be able to truthfully argue that some people are being saved who would have died and some are dying who would have lived. The peak is a point of balance between the two - not a perfect elimination.

I can remember many times hating my bosses when they released a product that I didn't feel was ready. As an engineer, I have to be over-focused on the problems and stand no chance of seeing when I am perfectly perched on that probability peak. They had to pry the projects from my hands to get them out the door. I actually begged in tears once. But, in retrospect, I can't think of any case where my bosses weren't right in releasing the product that I was concerned about releasing.

What we need to force progress is for attorneys to get smart and start figuring out how to file more effective suits for lack of progress toward autonomy. How many are dying today because we don't have it? We need to focus hard on that.

Re:Not surprised

[Rei]

It's a lot simpler than that:

This article is bullshit.

Sorry to be so blunt, but it's journalistic malpractice. The author is confusing Enhanced Autopilot (EAP) with Full Self-Driving (FSD). To be clear:

  * Some safety features related to autopilot, such as automatic braking and the like, are available to everyone for free.

  * EAP is an optional add-on available today ($5k on the Model 3 if purchased at the time of buying the vehicle, $6k as an over-the-air upgrade) which provides lane-following (requires hands on the wheel and driver attention) and driverless summon features (very low speed, "back out of / into a tight space / drive down the parking lot" stuff without a driver in the car). More to the point, there are two entirely different versions that have existed over the year. AP 1.0 was used on earlier vehicles, based on software and hardware from Mobile Eye. Tesla and Mobile Eye split in a contract dispute. Mobile Eye claims that Tesla wasn't using their hardware right. Tesla says that Mobile Eye found out that Tesla was working on an in-house Autopilot system and demanded that they stop as a precondition to get to continue to use their hardware. Mobile Eye says they knew about Tesla's internal work but didn't feel threatened by it. Regardless, Tesla was forced to switch to their internal version, AP 2.0, which was a step backward. AP 2 is just now catching up to the features of AP1.

  * FSD is Tesla's current goal, where the vehicle can drive itself without you having to have your hands on the wheel or paying constant attention. You cannot use FSD, even if you buy it. It costs $3k on the Model 3 ($4k as an over-the-air upgrade later). The article is talking about FSD being rolled out before engineers think it's ready. To reiterate: you can only buy FSD right now, you can't use it until it's ready. Tesla apparently tried to clarify this for the author:

When reached for comment, a Tesla spokesperson referred back to the company website, where a disclaimer for Autopilot reads that “self-driving functionality is dependent upon extensive software validation and regulatory approval.”

The author apparently nonetheless still failed to understand what that means. You Cannot Use FSD. Period. If engineers are complaining about FSD being rolled out too soon, they're complaining about Tesla selling something that its drivers aren't going to be able to use for too long of a period of time. And you know what, I fully agree with the engineers in that regard - I think it's wrong of Tesla to sell something that there's a big question as to whether they'll be able to get it working reliably enough or pass the serious regulatory barriers in its way.

But if engineers are complaining about FSD, then it's not complaints about EAP. Because the two are very distinct things. EAP isn't perfect, don't get me wrong - and the 1.0 / 2.0 switch was a big setback (they still don't use all of the cameras on the vehicle). But it also pesters drivers enough if they show signs of not paying attention to the road (e.g. not holding onto the wheel) in order to overcome its imperfections (the level of pestering was significantly increased after AP1's fatal accident, in which the driver was apparently watching movies during most of his trip).