Auto-driving personalities

Tesla continues to perplex by positioning automation and safety as trade-offs rather than complements.

Last year my wife and I bought a Toyota Camry.  We had purchased another Camry just a few years earlier, but technology has leaped forward in the interim.  The cruise control feature is more advanced than on previous vehicles we've owned: if it decides our pre-set speed is accelerating us too quickly toward the vehicle in front of us, it automatically slows us down.  And if I start to drift into another lane - something that happens to me fairly frequently during highway driving, as I tend to give trucks a wide berth when passing them - the car beeps a lane-detection warning to me.  

If I was Perfectly Rational Man, I'd be grateful for these enhanced safety features.  But this post is about driving, and driving is a distressingly rational-free endeavor.  To be candid, I find both safety features more than a bit annoying, and if I wasn't so lazy I'd pull out the owner's manual and figure out how to disable them.

Tesla, the flagship corporate child of Elon Musk, now famously the second richest man in the world, presents a fuller and more compelling vision of driving automation: Musk has publicly referred to it as "full self driving".  This suggests to people like us, who take words at their commonly-agreed-upon meanings, that Teslas which are equipped with its Autopilot feature are able to drive themselves.  Several leading automotive and technology companies have been working on self-driving vehicles for years; but even these gargantuan corporate outfits, which employ some of the best engineering brains on the planet, haven't yet quite succeeded in offering a car with a true self-driving capability as an available feature to the general public.  Driving is thought to be sufficiently simple that we let even the dumbest 16-year-olds do it by themselves, but programming cars arrayed with chips, software, cameras, radar and so on to simulate human perception and decision-making turns out to be surprisingly complicated.   

But Musk is not one to let pesky facts stand in the way of a great story.  Like a lot of uber-successful entrepreneurial types, he is one part idiosyncratic visionary and one part (or more) huckster.  Not to put too fine a point on it: you can't always believe what he says (or tweets), as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) forcefully concluded a few years ago.  

Musk seemingly has been overhyping Tesla's self-driving capabilities for years.  A lengthy New York Times article chronicled his exaggerations:

For years, Mr. Musk has said Tesla cars were on the verge of complete autonomy. “The basic news is that all Tesla vehicles leaving the factory have all the hardware necessary for Level 5 autonomy,” he declared in 2016. The statement surprised and concerned some working on the project, since the Society of Automotive Engineers defines Level 5 as full driving automation.

More recently, he has said that new software — currently part of a beta test by a limited number of Tesla owners who have bought the F.S.D. package — will allow cars to drive themselves on city streets as well as highways. But as with Autopilot, Tesla documentation says drivers must keep their hands on the wheel, ready to take control of the car at any time.

This overselling hasn't been harmless: one Tesla customer died tragically because the feature set failed at the wrong time:

By the end of 2015, Mr. Musk was publicly saying that Teslas would drive themselves within about two years. “I think we have all the pieces, and it’s just about refining those pieces, putting them in place, and making sure they work across a huge number of environments — and then we’re done,” he told Fortune magazine.

Other companies like Google, Toyota and Nissan exploring autonomous driving were not nearly as optimistic in their public statements.

In May 2016, about six months after Mr. Musk’s remarks appeared in Fortune, a Model S owner, Joshua Brown, was killed in Florida when Autopilot failed to recognize a tractor-trailer crossing in front of him. His car had radar and a camera.

Mr. Musk held a short meeting with the Autopilot team and briefly addressed the accident. He did not delve into the details of what went wrong but told the team that the company must work to ensure that its cars did not hit anything, according to two people who were part of the meeting.

Tesla later said that during the crash, Autopilot’s camera could not distinguish between the white truck and the bright sky. Tesla has never publicly explained why the radar did not prevent the accident. Radar technology, like cameras and lidar, is not flawless. But most in the industry believe that this means you need as many types of sensors as possible.

Less than a month after the crash, Mr. Musk said at an event hosted by Recode, a tech publication, that autonomous driving was “basically a solved problem” and that Teslas could already drive more safely than humans. He made no mention of the accident in which Mr. Brown was killed, though Tesla said in a blog post a few weeks later — headlined “A Tragic Loss” — that it had immediately reported the episode to federal regulators.

Tesla came under fire again recently when it came to light that drivers were permitted to play video games on the car's digital screen while the car is in motion.  

Musk's and Tesla's history with the self-driving feature may serve as background for this announcement which landed in my inbox yesterday, courtesy of Axios:

Tesla's latest assisted-driving software lets car owners decide how aggressively they want their car to behave in traffic — even to the point of bending rules.

What's happening: The latest release of Tesla's "Full Self-Driving" (FSD) beta software lets owners choose among three driving profiles — Chill, Average or Assertive — that dictate how the car will behave in different scenarios, The Verge reports.

Why it matters: Assertive Teslas are programmed to allow rolling stops, follow other cars more closely and swap lanes more frequently — behaviors that tend to be more dangerous no matter who's driving.

• The vehicle will also "not exit passing lanes" — meaning it'll just cruise in the left lane even though that's prohibited on most highways.

Critics say it's another example of Tesla's "irresponsible" approach to automated driving.

• The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating a series of crashes involving Tesla's Autopilot feature.
• In December, Tesla agreed to modify its cars' software to prevent drivers from playing video games on the dashboard screen while the vehicle is in motion, after a New York Times report prompted a federal safety investigation.
• Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.

The Axios headline seems to capture the essence of the story: "Your Tesla could drive like a jerk"

People's personalities reveal themselves behind the wheel (and probably also online!) in surprising ways.  In my work life, people over the years have told me that I come across as preternaturally calm. The only way I can explain that is that I think I'm the only person in the office who doesn't drink coffee.   But regardless of how impassive I may appear on the outside, inside my brain I'm always a churning, heaving volcano of emotions.  When I'm behind the wheel, I tend to be a bit on the "Type A" personality side.  I don't think I'm a jerk (but then, does anyone think that of himself?) but I am, let us say, a confident driver, and with a greater risk tolerance than my wife, who has prayed countless Hail Mary's from the passenger seat.  Over the years I think I've mellowed as a driver; on the whole, better to arrive a few minutes later in one piece.  

I suppose one can err by driving so slowly and cautiously that s/he becomes a menace to others on the roads.  But my supposition is that more collisions are caused by reckless behavior.  I don't think Tesla should offer an Assertive setting.  It seems to me that, if all cars could drive no more assertively than Average, we'll all be safer, and quite possibly we'll all arrive at our destinations sooner.