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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.
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.
They should be able to sell it, as long as they're willing to pay for the damages in any accident associated with its use.
The people this device is involved in killing might disagree with you.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Actually, we need a "Cease-and-Desist" order for drivers who refuse to pay attention to the road, despite the explicit instructions from Tesla.
Once again, the most dangerous part of an automobile is "The Loose Nut Behind the Wheel".
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Try to make something fool proof and the universe will make a better fool.
Because anyone that would pay $200 for a small magnet in a piece of plastic is too stupid to be trusted to drive themselves.
You can also knit a rope and hang yourself, but being on sale as a ready-made product will give it legitimacy in the eyes of some that it shouldn't have
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
This product didn't kill anyone. It can only do one of two things:
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Been there.
Texaco refinery, Port Arthur, Texas.
The operators stuffed red rags into the alarm horns and, sure enough, 8 people died on a unit where instruments showed there was sufficient time to get out of harm's way had the sound not been muffled.
I remember my dad pulling the wire of the "ding, ding," of the lap belt warning.
People take batteries out of smoke detectors.
I think the answer is for the goddam artificial intelligence to be fucking intelligent.
Until then, don't beta test the goddam thing in production.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
The thing that is flawed is that Tesla doesn't seem to be willing to acknowledge common human traits. A car is requires a human to interact with it properly in order to not kill or injure anyone. Humans have flaws, yet Tesla seems to think they can pick the ones that they should feel liable for even though these human flaws are well known and completely predictable. They are acknowledging technology can augment a human to make them a better driver, yet failing to acknowledge that their technology just brings out the flaw of having poor reaction times when not being completely engaged with the driving.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I think the answer is for the goddam artificial intelligence to be fucking intelligent.
Until then, don't beta test the goddam thing in production.
Get some perspective. 3000 people a day die in human caused traffic accidents worldwide. If by rolling out Autopilot and collecting real world data, they bring forward the transition to SDCs by even a single day, they will have saved a thousand lives for every one lost in beta testing.
This is the same as The Trolley Problem, except instead of throwing the switch to save five by sacrificing one, we save thousands, or perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands.
The needs of the many out weigh the needs of the few.