MplsP

I own a Tesla and have almost the latest ‘Full Self Driving’ firmware. (The latest has only been released to a few hundred people.)

First I’ll say that I’m not here to defend or make excuses Elon and I’m no Tesla fanboy. My Model Y has been a great car for the 3 years I’ve had it but it’s also got it’s flaws.

As far as self-driving goes, no one has solved it yet. Different companies are taking different approaches with varying degrees of success. Tesla is no exception. On the interstate, the basic autopilot that comes with all Teslas is nearly flawless. I use it to drive from Minneapolis to Grand Forks and the the only thing I need to do is tug the wheel once in a while to satisfy the nanny-nag. In terms of SAE autonomy levels it is technically level 2. Many people have guessed/speculated why Tesla hasn’t expanded it to Level 3 but my suspicion is it’s a combination of legal/regulatory/insurance issues and a desire to solve the full autonomy puzzle for all roads, not just interstates.

I’ve been using the FSD beta software for the last 3 years. In that time it has made huge advances but still makes some baffling moves. I use it on the majority of my drives around town. I know how it behaves and at this point it’s fairly predictable in how it will misbehave. In the end, it probably does about 90-95% of my driving for me disengaging and taking over for the rest. It’s good, and for me it makes driving more relaxing but it’s not good enough to be more than a supervised assist at this point. Whether it will in the future remains to be seen but beta is a very accurate categorization in its current state.

I clicked on the Gizmodo link in the story which says 

"When contacted by Gizmodo, Dante Lentini confirmed that the video was a “skit” that he made with friends and that he wasn’t arrested. 

He claims he only drove with the headset for 30-40 seconds while driving his Tesla."

Assuming he was anywhere other than an empty parking lot it's still incredibly stupid, but it puts the story in an entirely different light.

For reference for those who don't know, Tesla's have attention monitoring software that activates whenever Autopilot or Full Self Driving is engaged. The car requires someone to be sitting in the driver's seat and the seatbelt to be buckled. It also tracks gaze and torque on the steering wheel. The gaze tracking is done via a camera over the rearview mirror and is not as good as the iPhone's. When it can't be used (e.g. night time, sunglasses) the system resorts to checking torque on the steering wheel periodically. It can detect the difference between a weight and your hands and will disengage if you try to use a weight to trick it. If it doesn't detect some sort of driver input it will nag you with an alert. The time between these nags can vary between 10 and 90+ seconds depending on the driving conditions (heavy city traffic with construction vs cruising straight on an uncontested interstate.) If the system sees you using your cell phone it will immediately disengage and disable itself for the rest of your drive.

13485 said:

I'm not in favor of data harvesting by government agencies or commercial entities, but if the information they are referencing is already out there (commercially available), whether damaging or innocuous, those horses have been loose for many decades and aren't going back into the barn.

How the information may have been initially collected, or why one may have provided it to be used commercially (informed consent?) is more deserving of investigation.

Agreed - if the information is commercially available as stated then how can it be classified as spying or illegal. One may take issue with the fact that the information is commercially available but that’s a separate question/issue.

So if apple can sell the watches without the feature, just how are they suffering 'irreparable' harm? Sounds more like a lawyer whining that they might not make as much money if they're not allowed to sell a device that infringes.

tht said:

MplsP said:

I’m curious how Apple could claim irreparable harm when it sells other watches without the technology. 

It's lawyer-speak and irreparable harm means something different in court than it does to laypersons.

I guess fundamentally, you can interpret it to mean that Apple is losing sales, revenue and income as they can't sell any Watch Series 9 and Ultras during the holiday shopping season. That's tens to hundreds of millions of dollars that can't be recovered because Apple can't go back in time to get those sales back. The gov't doesn't have to make an import ban decision now and can wait until decisions are final.

The same argument could be made for any patent enforcement, though so if ‘lost sales’ is the argument it essentially becomes meaningless.