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by simondotau
244 days ago
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I agree it's a bad choice of name, though I think the controversy is somewhat overstated. In Tesla's view, "full" is an antonym to "limited", where Autopilot designed to work on a limited class of roads. In this way, "full" was intended to describe the system's intended ability to perform the full task of piloting a vehicle, not that the system has achieved some unspoken threshold of engineering perfection. In its current state, FSD can perform complete drives without intervention almost every time. (Yes, "almost" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. But the same is true of some human drivers who hold driver licenses.) And to be fair, it's important to disambiguate technical and regulatory achievements. It is "supervised" because "unsupervised" would necessarily mean Tesla's software is the legally licensed driver of someone else's privately owned vehicle, which is a situation regulators are nowhere near contemplating. And it would require a vastly different insurance product to what is currently sold by insurers. |
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Externalising the blame to regulators is pretty embarrassing, because regulations are flexible with respect to how well self driving cars work.
Why would Tesla be scared of having liability for a self driving car that drives better than humans? Shifting the liability to the driver who is merely sitting in the car and only exists for regulatory reasons and never controls the car is illogical in the case of the car never getting into an accident or violating traffic rules.
Additionally, it is still illogical even in the case of an accident as the driver did nothing to bring about the accident or traffic rule violation. Their existence as a backup can only prevent such things from occurring.
Assuming adversity from the driver is just one more reason to take control away from humans. E.g. the driver disengaged the self driving features to produce an accident on purpose as liability was shifted to Tesla.
Supervision appears to be extremely suboptimal for Tesla with no conceivable upside if we trust your word that regulations are holding them back from full self driving without the supervision disclaimer.
If anything, they have an incentive for locking out drivers from driving their cars manually. You should be paying for manual control instead of paying for full self driving.