Dangly weight tied to steering wheel to fool autopilot that you're paying attention?

Its on Amazon, scroll down to "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought"

Amazon.com: Zone Tech Car Ipad Laptop/Eating Steering Wheel Desk: Automotive

 

Seriously? The reason it has you put your hands on the wheel is because it doesn't know where to steer. If you hang something on the wheel, you'll just cause the car to leave the road and crash.

It doesn't nag you for nagging's sake. It needs to know where to steer the car.

 

Sometimes I amazed by the ingenious stupidity of people.

 

I think someone following this suggestion could truly be called "dead weight."

 

Why don't you give it a try and let us know how it works out when you get out of the hospital.

Larry

 

Have you seen any of the hundreds of media reports, videos, or other threads on this forum? They all clearly show that there is no nag, and the only time you need to grab the wheel in the Model S is when you're about to die if you do nothing.

 

Some of the public videos do show the nag quite frequently when hands are removed. I suspect the press vehicles had the nag disabled.

 

I'm sure the coke-can trick from mercedes would work, as would a dangly weight, HOWEVER, this is an incredibly bad idea! In other vehicles the nag is simply a timer, so overriding it will be safe most of the time, in the Tesla the nag is when the autopilot doesn't know what to do on it's own... that's the last place I'd want to be overriding the safety feature!

 

Aside from what's been mentioned, if the weight is tied to the "3 o'clock position", wouldn't it cause the steering to pull to the right when you take your hand off it? Serious question as I've not tried out AP yet (or received my Tesla, heh).

 

It seems like there have been reports both ways, though?

 

I just drove for over three hours (ok, the car just drove for over three hours) and it asked me to put my hands on the wheel three times total.

There is no nag.

 

The great thing about auto steer is it doesn't nag or require you to put your hands on the wheel actually like other brands. It only does when it can't figure out where to go, doesn't have enough data, or you actually do need to steer.

In using it today, it has a pretty solid feel when in control and if you want to use the wheel to force it off you have to apply a decent amount of force - especially if it starts to veer dangerously or something. Overall works great without any nags when in normal operation though so no weights/trickery needed unless justified it seems.

My other take is that it is freeway ready, useful when following another car and with lane info, but not quite solid for city driving roads for sure yet. I think we are a ways off from that in years...

 

Maybe that's it. Maybe I have turned "nag" off. Dang. Is it a feature or a defect?

No, really. You don't have to hold the wheel, or touch it. If your hands are in your lap, and it asks for assistance (It is called Pilot Assistance after all) you probably need to help it out, but otherwise, you don't need to fondle the wheel.

I drove 60 miles today on PA. Much of it was hands off. I never felt it was nagging.

 

People like you are my job security, so go right ahead and tie something to the wheel.

I've used AP several times today and there is no nag. It makes you grab the wheel when it doesn't know what it's doing. And in my experience so far, when it tells you to take the wheel, you're going to want to take the wheel! If the road is well marked (or even sometimes when it's not), it does an excellent job driving along on its own. There is absolutely no timed nag, or anything of the sort.

 

There is most definitely nag. Not quite sure what triggers it... my guess at this point from what I have seen is a large curve that the car has to navigate (even though it has no trouble doing so) will prompt it to nag me to touch the wheel. If I refuse, I get I think it is 2 more chances/nags... about 30 seconds apart. After that, the TACC will stop functioning (the icon still shows it enabled), the car will beep constantly, and a message will say something similar to "take control to resume speed". I drove a good 2 minutes in this state. The beeping is quite annoying. The car kept steering, but I had to modulate the accelerator as I would without TACC. After ~2 minutes, when i got tired of the beeping (and it may have been less than 2 minutes, but it felt like a long while), I gave the steering wheel some pressure/torque, and everything was nice and happy again. This same situation happened twice on large curved sections of highway, with a car in front of me. I do not think it was because the car was having difficulty, rather I think it is a programming decision that on certain size bends, the driver is then asked to respond. For what reason, I'm not sure (given that I could then drive 20 minutes without a nag, so it isn't to keep my attention).

Also, while i get the car wanting to in some fashion get the drivers attention, I am surprised that using the accelerator pedal and adjusting cruise speed via the stalk doesn't signal to the car "ok, driver isn't dead, carry on". I'm sure this will all be tweaked over time.

 

You know what, I stopped wishing for more job security years ago, now I wish for more sleep in the hall... (or AP on my ambulance... that would be awesome!)

 

It's pretty clear to me after having driven quite a bit today that the request to hold the steering wheel pops up when the car doesn't have 100% confidence in the upcoming road. Many times it doesn't actually need your help. I'm pretty sure that this is all about confidence. If Elon was being honest about machine learning being used here (expert assisted machine learning to be exact), the confidence will grow over time and the request to hold the steering wheel will appear less often. It may even be a way of helping checking to see that you're there so it can then determine that what it does is actually correct (i.e. if you're paying attention and it does something wrong you'll counter its actions). But if you're not paying attention and it does something wrong then it may not know. Say nobody is next to you and it veers into another lane. No accident happens. So how can Tesla learn from that behavior. I think the nag is less about nagging us and more about validating the learning it's doing.

 

There is no nagging just for the sake of it. When confidence interval drops, it asks for human input. It's really that simple. You can see the confidence interval represented by the blue lines on the lane markings (the blue lines extend farther with higher confidence).

I'm not sure why you think a weight attached to the steering wheel will be as good as a human giving input on where to steer the car. Maybe you should try flying a plane with autopilot where there is no nagging at all. Would you attach a weight to the yoke and hope it's all good?

- K

 

If you look at the video I made earlier today, you'll see I wasn't nagged for a ~25 minute interstate stretch (~30 miles). On the return trip I was nagged once, touched the wheel for 3 seconds, and all was well.

And this is a public release, not a press vehicle.

Edit: Oh, and the weight is a suicidal idea.