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Tesla knew Autopilot caused death, but didn't fix it
(www.theregister.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Everybody who has a bit of an idea what an autopilot in a plane actually does is not mislead. Do people really think that commercial airline pilots just hit the “autopilot” button in their cockpit after disengaging the boarding ramp and then lean back until the boarding ramp at the destination is attached?
So I need to understand the autopilot of a plane first before I buy a car?
I would be mislead then, as I have no idea how such autopilots work. I also suspect that those two systems don't really work the same. One flies, the other drives. One has traffic lights, the other doesn't. One is operated by well paid professionals, the other, well, by me. Call me simple, but there seem to be some major differences.
Yeah, there are some major differences in the vehicles, but both disengage when there's anything out of the ordinary going on. Maybe people base their understanding of autopilots on the movie "Airplane!" where that inflatable puppet groped the Stewardess afterwards.
True, good point. As far as I know, it does turn itself off if it detects something it can't handle, though. The problem with cross traffic is that it obviously can't detect it, otherwise turning itself off would already be a way of handling it.
Proximity detection is far easier up in the air, especially if you're not bound by the weird requirement to only use visible spectrum cameras.
(To make things clear, I'm just defending the engineers there who had to work within these constraints. All of this is a pure management failure.)
I'm sorry, what? If you set an airplane to maintain altitude and heading with autopilot, it will 100% fly you into the side of a mountain if there's one in front of you.