Sorry, nope. If your car crashes after you press that button and take your hands off the wheel, Tesla will point to the line in their terms of service which says, "keep hands on the wheel, driver must pay attention at all times."
Tesla (and Elon Musk in particular) are of course happy to encourage the misconception that they already sell a self-driving car.
Most people think of "self-driving" as allowing them not to pay attention to what the car is doing. Autopilot is emphatically not that, even in the limited highway settings where you can actually use it.
That you can get from any number of other makes, except that they do not slam you into firetrucks, and don't call it self-driving when it obviously isn't.
Please don't get into old habits of breaking the guidelines. It's absolutely not OK to address other community members like this and we ban accounts that keep on.
It's got extremely limited assist features that still required a human to be legally licensed and competent to drive, hands on wheels, not drunk or on disqualifying drugs, etc. That is not at all self-driving. You can keep on repeating yourself, and attempting to wordsmith this as if it is self-driving - it's not a convincing argument.
> It's got extremely limited assist features that still required a human to be legally licensed and competent to drive, hands on wheels, not drunk or on disqualifying drugs, etc.
Irrelevant. Most people would still say that this falls under the category of self driving for most situations.
For the vast majority of people in the world, it solves most of their MVP usecases.
It does not work for everything and that's fine. What matters is that it works for most situations.
Since it works for most situations, most people would be happy to call that self driving.
Or in other words, it is a self driving car that is only allowed to be used when you have a license and are not drunk.
Yes, that is a limitation, but it is a small limitation and still mostly fulfills most people's definition of self driving.
>Most people would still say that this falls under the category of self driving for most situations.
Saying things doesn't make it true. You can provide a citation for a study that tells us what most people want and need when it comes to either autonomous driving or self-driving. I don't know a single person who considers these very narrow feature sets with many caveats to even approximate either what they want or need.
>For the vast majority of people in the world, it solves most of their MVP usecases.
This cannot be a true statement. A top requirement would be "keeping me safer than driving myself" and in numerous instances we find that's simply not true even when people are paying attention.
>Since it works for most situations, most people would be happy to call that self driving.
Most people routinely drive on surface streets with traffic lights, pedestrians and cyclists. It absolutely does not navigate that environment by itself.
> top requirement would be "keeping me safer than driving myself"
No, the usecase is "able to take my hands of the wheel and not pay attention". Regardless of what the Tesla term of service says about hands on the wheel or whatever, I am sure that many of their owners do this already.
Even IF this is more dangerous, there are still lots of people who would be happy to make this tradeoff.
We trade off our safety for convenience all the time. This technology does that and it does so right now.
Can I get in the car, set destination, then sit in the back and watch a movie with my feet up? Can I call my car to me when I'm in LA and the car in NYC?[1]
If not, it's not self driving as generally understood, it's just driver or lane assist. A perception intentionally created by Tesla promoting their driver assist as giving a car that could effectively wander off on its own. Maybe take a part-time job as autonomous taxi. Long having offered full self driving in the paid options list.
That's such b.s. Tesla explicitly says you can't take your hand off the wheel. So what are you even talking about?
"I'm going to drive to the store" means a complete sequence of events, start>unpark>integrate merge with traffic on route>follow route>navigate parking lot>park.
Nothing other than a human does that today. That is what is meant by either "self-driving car" or "fully autonomous". All exceptions to what a human can do is just making excuses, and it's b.s. Driving is a broad term that encompasses all responsibilities for getting from A to B.
Does a Tesla lane change automatically to follow a route? Does it enter turn lanes and turn onto new streets? Does it turn into parking lots? Nope. Human prompted lane changing, and staying in a lane, is not "driving", it's a vertical feature that partially offloads some task from a human.
What if I were to tell you that you can buy a self driving car right now, and that there are 100s of thousands them in consumer hands, right now?
Tesla sells them. And they aren't that expensive.
If you can press a button, and take your hands off the wheel, that is a self driving car. And you can buy them today.