Part 7 transcript is out
Transcript: Elon Musk’s press conference about Tesla Autopilot under v8.0 update [Part 7]
More info on the warnings:
Joe White – Reuters
Good thanks. I’m sorry I have to retrace steps for my question and see if I can clarify this with you. If I am in a Model X, how many minutes or seconds may I take my hands off the wheel and how many times an hour may I do that? I mean how long are now going to let me take my hands off the wheel versus the previous generation of the system?
Elon Musk – Tesla CEO
It actually depends on fast you are going. If you are going in very slow stop-and-go traffic – I believe the threshold is about 8 miles an hour – you can actually take your hands off the steering wheel for indefinite period of times. This is at times where you are basically at walking speed on average on the freeway. there’s no limit on that and I don’t think there should be. That’s also the regulatory limit for automatic parallel parking.
And this is a complicated answer. It’s not as simple as “2 minutes” or something like that. If you are below 45 mph, in theory, the longest you could go is about 5 minutes, but there are actually hands on wheels requirement positions that detects lateral acceleration above a certain threshold. So you would have to be a very straight road – below 45 mph to last 5 minutes.
And then if you are above 45 mph – and again this is a complicated answer and I don’t know how much of this you can put in an article [laughing] – it’s one minute if you don’t have a car to follow. It’s 3 minutes if you do have a car to follow because the accuracy is greater if your follow than if you don’t.
I think that the thing that will probably be most effective is the limit for expert users, which is where we tend to see actually the biggest issue. It’s not with the new users. The new users of Autopilot are incredibly attentive. They pay attention very closely. Intermediate users, same thing. It’s actually the people who know it best, ironically, where we see some of the biggest challenges.
The limitation of only 3 audible warnings per hour [laughing] which is a fair number of warnings, but we see people engaging in reflex actions where they will hear a warning every 3 minutes and they will just touch the steering wheel but not actually pay attention to the road.
I think that will be most effective in addressing the instinctive “I want the beep to go away” and touch the steering wheel, it will only allow people to do that 3 times in an hour.
We are also going to provide a visual indicator where the perimeter of the instrument panel lights up with an increasing pulse rate before giving you the audible warning. So that the visual warning is a reminder to pay attention to the road before you get the audible warning. I beta tested – true beta test, alpha test really – the software personally. I feel strongly in using myself and make sure it’s good before anyone else uses it. I used it on an alpha basis to confirm and it’s good.
I really feel like we’ve struck a great balance between both improving the safety and the usefulness – and the comfort level of the system, and it’s very difficult to do both.
Obviously, you could hamstring the whole system and therefore reduce the action on Autopilot, and it becomes useless and painful to use. Or you can loosen all those limits and have more accidents. So it’s a very difficult thing to both improve the safety and improve the utility of the system which I think we have achieved.