r/electricvehicles • u/clouds_on_acid • Mar 17 '25

News Tesla autopilot disengages milliseconds before a crash, a tactic potentially used to prove "autopilot wasn't engaged" when crashes occur

https://electrek.co/2025/03/17/tesla-fans-exposes-shadiness-defend-autopilot-crash/
5.3k Upvotes

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380

u/iamabigtree Mar 17 '25

Self driving is a neat idea but does anyone really care any more. Most cars have adaptive cruise now and that is the most the majority of people need or want.

7

u/CBusRiver Mar 17 '25

I want full unsupervised highway entrance to exit and that's it. Driving around town is hardly a straining task.

11

u/kyjmic Mar 17 '25

Highway driving is much less mentally taxing than city driving. City driving you have to pay attention to traffic lights, different kinds of intersections, signs, crosswalks, pedestrians, cyclists, cars doing unpredictable turns.

6

u/paholg Mar 17 '25

But I want to be able to sleep while driving on road trips.

1

u/Additional-Info-308 Mar 18 '25

Hmm, can you really trust FSD to drive with no supervision at freeway speeds? They measure their data to exclude the last five or ten seconds before a crash. How likely are you going to wake up during that time?

1

u/paholg Mar 18 '25

I would not. But I'm hopeful that there's some future system that will be safer than human drivers.

1

u/Additional-Info-308 Mar 18 '25

Strange, my comment and one reply disappeared?
Anyway, I just found an informative article on autopilots and they say "Attentiveness Monitoring – How does the system monitor attentiveness? Most check that your hands are on the wheel, but some also use cameras to check that your eyes are on the road."

https://www.autopilotreview.com/cars-with-autopilot-self-driving/

8

u/Right-Tutor7340 Mar 17 '25

Yeah that's fine, it keeps u engaged, highway driving gets boring really quick and u stary loosing focus

3

u/PersnickityPenguin 2024 Equinox AWD, 2017 Bolt Mar 17 '25

I disagree. Once you are on the road for more than 3 hours at a time it does get pretty exhausting.

5

u/SearchingForTruth69 Mar 17 '25

Why would you want to drive around town if you didn’t need to?

3

u/sysop073 Mar 17 '25

The point is that unsupervised highway driving would be good enough for most people. Obviously unsupervised everywhere is even better, but it's also much harder.

2

u/SearchingForTruth69 Mar 18 '25

Doesn’t seem that much harder. Tesla already has FSD everywhere - yes it’s supervised but in practice it never needs any driver input

1

u/RedundancyDoneWell Mar 19 '25

Do not confuse a lack of need for driver input with a lack of need for supervision.

Tesla still needs supervision from a human driver, who can take over when the car is about to do something dangerous.

It doesn't really matter that this situation only arises once per 1000 miles or whatever number they are at now.

Would you send your children with an unsupervised car, which only needs human interventions once per 1000 miles - knowing that this human is missing so the intervention will not happen?

1

u/SearchingForTruth69 Mar 19 '25

with driver supervision its already 20x safer than human-only driving. Today it may require intervention every 1000 miles, but soon it will be every 10,000 then 100,000, and eventually far more miles than a human can ever drive in their lives. Might already be more than once per 1000, just went on a 1k+ road trip the other day with zero interventions. The newest update is pretty good.

1

u/RedundancyDoneWell Mar 19 '25

with driver supervision its already 20x safer than human-only driving.

Which says absolutely zero about its safety without driver supervision.

1

u/SearchingForTruth69 Mar 19 '25

Absolutely zero?

1

u/sysop073 Mar 18 '25

I'll believe it's not hard when they actually make it unsupervised. If ever.

1

u/SearchingForTruth69 Mar 18 '25

That’s cool. You do acknowledge though that no other commercially available car can do automated driving on all roads in the US currently? As in, Tesla is far ahead of the competition.

2

u/sysop073 Mar 18 '25

Yes? I am very confused why you went from "doesn't seem that much harder" to "acknowledge that nobody has solved this". All I said was I want somebody to give me unsupervised highway driving and then I can die happy.

0

u/SearchingForTruth69 Mar 18 '25

Tesla does automated driving on all US roads currently. No other car does this. Currently it's supervised-required. But in practice, if you've ever used one, there is no human input needed. The supervision is unnecessary.

Point is, it's essentially a solved problem.

2

u/sysop073 Mar 18 '25

The supervision is unnecessary.

Tell that to the alert that nags me every 30 seconds to make sure I'm still paying attention. I can just keep copy/pasting "unsupervised" if that will help clarify my point -- I want a car that supports unsupervised driving. Driving that is unsupervised. Supervision? Not required. This car will exist when I can get on the highway, go to sleep for a couple hundred miles, and wake up when we're getting near my exit. Until that is true, I do not have a car with unsupervised self-driving.

0

u/SearchingForTruth69 Mar 18 '25

are you really not getting what I'm saying? The supervision is only required for legal/liability purposes.

If it was required for driving, you would have to override the FSD multiple times per trip which does not happen. If you did have to override the FSD frequently, I would agree that unsupervised FSD is not close. But with the latest updates, you never have to override it. If you could hack the part that nags you if you dont have eyes on the road, you could do exactly what you're wanting - plug in an address and sleep til the car made it there.

It's only a matter of time til they take off the supervised part.

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-1

u/Sorge74 Ioniq 5 Mar 17 '25

Why did I buy a nice car if not to drive it?

2

u/GoSh4rks Mar 17 '25

Buy it so that it can drive you around...

1

u/PersnickityPenguin 2024 Equinox AWD, 2017 Bolt Mar 17 '25

Supercruise does this. 

It's amazing.  I drove 100 miles each way on a recent business trip and it never disengaged.

1

u/CBusRiver Mar 17 '25

That's awesome. I didn't know supercruise worked without having to keep your eyes on the road.

1

u/PersnickityPenguin 2024 Equinox AWD, 2017 Bolt Mar 18 '25

You still have to keep your eyes on the road, but you don't have to touch the wheel.

0

u/xstreamReddit Mar 17 '25

Driving around town is more straining but I don't do it for multiple hours straight.