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dhamtoday at 12:59 PM7 repliesview on HN

Here we go again. Autopilot != FSD. Autopilot is not "autonomous" driving. It's lane keep with adaptive cruise control. The same system that Honda, Toyota, etc have. Yes the naming is wrong, the marketing is bad, but I don't see it as much worse as Toyota safety sense. If you use it to be "safe" you're going swerve off the highway into a ditch. I used super cruise from GM in my friends suv. As soon as lane markers go away on a bridge, I almost hit the railing.

I'll get downvoted but just giving you the facts. I'm glad the Autopilot name has been retired. Such a bad name, but maybe a good name because autopilot in planes can't see and avoid obstacles either.


Replies

idoptoday at 1:44 PM

Elon himself uses both terms interchangeably[1], and the two reportedly use the same stack, so why shouldn't we conflate the terms?

[1] https://electrek.co/2026/03/18/tesla-cybertruck-fsd-crash-vi...

ori_btoday at 1:03 PM

Can you explain why that makes it ok to cover up accidents and lie about the recordings of the event being corrupted?

dv_dttoday at 1:03 PM

The news isn't necessarily of the effectiveness of the particular tech stack, but the integrity, or lack thereof of the manufacturer in reporting incidents. If that is in question, assessing the effectiveness of any of Tesla's tech stacks fsd or autonomy, or taxis for driving is in doubt.

Glemllksdftoday at 1:02 PM

I don't get it?

If autopilot was missleading, full self driving is too?

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estimator7292today at 1:06 PM

How about the fact that Tesla is killing people and covering it up?

Would you go to a driver's funeral and tell their family that um, ackshully it's sparkling autopilot?

What do you think you're adding to the conversation? You're trying to distract from the fact that real, actual people have been actually killed by this.

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buellerbuellertoday at 1:02 PM

Here we go again; Musk fanboy to the rescue!

trymastoday at 1:14 PM

IMHO you're shifting goal posts (and I am not downvoting).

Tesla (or probably mostly Elon) was not selling "adaptive cruise control". It's selling "Autopilot" for $8k (now with a subscription AFAIK), with a pinky promise that "soon" or "next year" or "after two weeks" (jk) you essentially will set a destination, go to sleep and wake up at destination[1].

It's same as saying that "LLM != AI" and arguing that "ChatGPT is not AI - it's a glorified statistics model that is good at creating human sounding texts". Yeah - you and I understand this - but the average guy most likely does not and will get burned by this, because dozen tech-bros are burning billions of dollars and try to convince everyone that it's a panacea to every problem you can think of.

[1] It's a slight exageration, though I won't spend time digging for quotes but my main point is that's what Tesla are selling to an average guy and not nerds who can distinguish on what's possible, what's working and what level of driving assist there are.

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