[ydj]

I see the use of “autopilot” name bring brought up a lot. Thinking about what an autopilot in an airplane does, labeling Tesla’s system autopilot is actually pretty apt.

It’s unfortunate that there’s a disconnect between what autopilot means colloquially vs what it actually does on a plane.

[mdorazio]

> what an autopilot in an airplane does

...Flies the plane safely with zero input from the pilot (hands off the yoke) indefinitely? Lands the plane on its own [1]? I'm well aware that autopilot systems need input directions for desired altitude and air speed, but the semantic distinction people try to draw between "real" autopilot and Tesla's autopilot capabilities have never made sense to me.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland

[mopsi]

> the semantic distinction people try to draw between "real" autopilot and Tesla's autopilot capabilities have never made sense to me.

Typical airliner autopilot flies along a list of 3D waypoints and manages airspeed to avoid falling from the sky or overstressing the airframe. It's a fairly trivial system since it does not have to find its way around a complex, constantly changing environment like a car does. It will happily fly into mountains, other airplanes or dangerous environments like thunderstorms.

All decision-making depends on pilots. Autopilot itself is nothing more than a simple cruise control that relieves pilots from things like manually maintaining constant altitude over six hours on a transatlantic flight. Any hobbist with a Raspberry PI can built a similar GPS-based waypoint following and speed scheduling for a car, but it's useless for road traffic, because roads are not straight, long empty stretches that can be navigated by driving from one waypoint directly to another waypoint 100 miles away.

Car autopilot must be able to make decisions (follow the road, react to obstacles) to be useful, and that makes it fundamentally more complex than any existing airliner autopilot.

[Dylan16807]

Real plane autopilot is basically lane-following.

Tesla autopilot is theoretically capable of indefinite highway driving and emergency 'landings' (on the shoulder).

Pretty close in actual capability. The difference is the environment.

[Fizzer]

I think what you're missing is that Tesla's Autopilot is not done. It's clearly labeled "Beta" when you enable it in the car.

The goal of Tesla's Autopilot is to take you from your garage to your parking space with zero input. Therefore it's exactly the same as a plane's which takes you from runway to runway.

Just because it's a work-in-progress doesn't mean it's named wrong.

[ryanlol]

>Safely with zero input... indefinitely

It is very possible to hit people in the air if you aren’t paying attention

>Lands the plane on its own

Autolanding is not autopilot, it’s autolanding.

[jarfil]

You can safely take a nap while flying a plane on autopilot, the device is more than capable of navigating a course with no human supervision for extended periods of time... which is not possible with the same technology on the ground, with all the trees and stray children running around.

So while the technology may be the same, calling it "autopilot" is not; in the one case it can run on auto, in the other it can not.

[darpa_escapee]

From Tesla's Autopilot page, during the first 5 seconds of their video demo[1]:

> The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/autopilot

[m463]

But that's their full-self driving software that hasn't been released yet.

[darpa_escapee]

That's a strange claim without any evidence to back it up.

It's the first video on their "Autopilot" page. There's absolutely no mention of features that don't exist yet in the video.

You have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page for any mention of full self-driving. I'd believe your claim if the video was under the headline of "Full Self-driving", but it isn't.

[m463]

I guess the title doesn't show up.

When you pull up the video in vimeo, the title is

"Autopilot Full Self-Driving Hardware (Neighborhood Short)"

[fwip]

"Hardware."