Some features are definitely useful. I miss having adaptive cruise control which was on my last car, which slows the car down below your desired cruise speed if required to maintain distance behind a car in front of you. It always worked great, but even if for some reason it didn’t, you’re still steering so you’re paying attention & can quickly take over if needed. It made being in traffic (where stakes are lower at slow speeds, and you’d otherwise constantly be braking & accelerating yourself) a lot more tolerable in particular.
Personally I’m completely onboard with autonomous driving once it’s designed and developed to be used, but until then I don’t even use cruise control. I want to be fully alert/controlling the driving situation at all times in case something unexpected happens.
Now things like back up cameras, blind spot alerts, automatic emergency braking are all great in my mind because they aren’t going to lull you into being half asleep or distracted.
I drive a two seater with a huge blindspot. my driver assist will beep when I turn on my blinker and there’s a car anywhere near the lane I’m merging into.
however, it makes mistakes at just a low enough frequency that you become overly reliant on the tech and less reliant of your own human senses, and the times it messes up you get in a crash. guess how many crashes I’ve been in because of that? 1. guess how many crashes I’ve been in in 20+ years of driving? just this 1.
pass. humans will grow to trust the tech too much and it’ll cause more horrible accidents than fewer.
maybe we live in some dystopia where the net accidents will be lower because most accidents with fatalities involve alcohol and even the worst ai assisted driving will be better than none with that kind of a driver, but I dunno, still seems 20+ years away.
see the problem is musk calls these features deceiving things like “autopilot” when it’s like 3 levels below whatever fully autonomous is classified as, and acts all surprised pikachu when people are laying down in their backseats getting rimmed by a hooker on the bay bridge while they’re supposed to be like, driving a car.
He could have just called it “driver assist” like other car companies are doing but instead he kept telling his idiot stans that fully self-driving cars are just around the corner, knowing full well his idiot followers are going to kill themselves.
Autopilot enables your car to steer, accelerate and brake automatically within its lane.
So basically adaptive cruise control.
Chevrolet has Super Cruise that they flat out advertise as hands free driving
Super Cruise is the first true hands-free driver assistance technology for compatible roads, and it’s now being offered on more Chevy vehicles than ever before.
but it only works on preplanned routes and requires a subscription.
“Autopilot” is traffic aware cruise control with lane steering for use on controlled access highways. So any highway with lanes and on/off ramps. No intersections, cross traffic, stop signs, etc. When you turn it on it will maintain your lane, speed, and desired following distance.
Tomorrow marks one year since I got my car. Just over 13k miles, and a few thousand of those using “autopilot”. Zero issues, and it makes highway driving much less annoying, less stressful, and less tiring.
If every driver on the road used this tech we’d all be way safer.
I really like Adaptive Cruise Control and Lane Keep Assist when I’m driving on the highway. I don’ thave to worry about accidentally speeding, and I think the LKAS is helpful to prevent drifting. I sure as shit would never drive a tesla though. holy shit.
I guess it comes down to what you personally consider “self-driving”. I would say that I have personally seen/experienced self-driving already in my life, in that I sat in the driver’s seat of a car, used the touch-screen to select an address 45 minutes away, pulled out of my driveway and engaged Tesla’s Full Self Driving mode (FSD latest beta) and 45 minutes later I reached my destination while only having to rest my hands loosely on the wheel and never touched the gas or brake pedal.
While my route was certainly not as tricky as navigating dense urban areas, it was a mix of suburban, highway and rural roads. Pretty darn impressive, imo.
If you consider “having self-driving” to mean you buy a car and all you ever do is plug in GPS destinations and never need to provide the vehicle inputs in any conditions/situations, then I definitely agree I won’t see that in my lifetime and unless you’re but a mere baby you probably won’t either.
Disclaimers: Elon is a turd ferguson, much more development is needed to be suitable for all locations/conditions, not a replacement for an attentive driver, etc.
It says on their About page “OpenAI LP is governed by the board of the OpenAI nonprofit, comprised of OpenAI LP employees Greg Brockman (Chairman & President), Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist), and Sam Altman (CEO), and non-employees Adam D’Angelo, Reid Hoffman, Will Hurd, Tasha McCauley, Helen Toner, and Shivon Zilis.”
I guess that the LP is a for profit Limited Partnership? Other news articles made it sound like the nonprofit was the full owner but maybe that was bullshit or maybe it changed with this last round of investment. I really don’t know what stake Musk has but he was an initial seed investor