Tesla Autopilot Safety Defeat Device Gets a Cease-and-Desist From NHTSA (autoblog.com)

schwit1 writes: The National Highway Traffic Safety Association (NHTSA) is cracking down on a device that was designed to trick Tesla's semi-autonomous Autopilot feature into thinking a driver is paying attention, in order to extend the amount of time that it will operate without anyone touching the steering wheel. NHTSA announced on Tuesday that it has sent a cease and desist letter to the makers of Autopilot Buddy, and has given the company until June 29 to end sales and distribution of the $199 product.

The device is a two-piece weighted hoop with magnets that wraps around a steering wheel spoke and registers with the car's sensors as a hand on the wheel. Autopilot is programmed to disengage after a short period of time if the driver is not touching the wheel and ignores a series of alerts to take control.unity.

Comments

Re:Liability...

[dgatwood]

This product didn't kill anyone. It can only do one of two things:

• Keep the Tesla from falsely nagging someone who does have both hands on the wheel.
• Keep the Tesla from uselessly nagging someone who isn't going to pay attention anyway, and at best will just tap the wheel when the nags happen.

Neither of these has any meaningful effect on driver or vehicle safety. The odds against a device like this causing a fatal accident are astronomical, because for the car's autosteer to shut down, the driver has to be so completely oblivious that he/she fails to respond to three nags WITH SOUND within a one-hour period. This is a relatively rare occurrence, short of someone dying behind the wheel....

More importantly, any claim of reduced safety relies on the assumption that the nags somehow make the car safer, when in my experience, the precise opposite is true. The nag system takes an insane amount of time to detect when the driver doesn't have his/her hands on the wheel, most of the time, but constantly nags at highly inappropriate times (such as during acceleration) when the driver *does* have both hands on the wheel.

As best I can tell, the main purpose of the nags seems to be to make the autosteer feature more annoying than driving by hand so that folks will spend more money for the self-driving package when it finally comes out. The nags have gotten so annoying that I'm finding myself using autosteer less and less frequently as the nag rate increases. In other words, assuming autosteer really is improving safety, then statistically speaking, the nags are making the car LESS safe, not more.

Worse, because of the way Tesla detects hands on the wheel — by measuring the torque provided by your hands against the autosteer, the nags are actually more frequent when gripping the wheel tightly with two hands than when loosely hanging one hand on one side of the wheel. So the nags actively encourage drivers to do the exact opposite of what it claims to be doing. Again, the nags make the car LESS safe.

So I don't know what NHTSA is smoking, but I'd like some of that. Obviously nobody involved in that C&D has ever actually driven a Tesla, or else they would not have sent it. The nags should die in a fire. They make the vehicle less safe, and any technology that can be used to render them harmless makes Tesla vehicles safer to drive, not less safe.