Tesla said it didn't have key data in a fatal crash, then a hacker found it

>> not sure if you are saying otherwise but for those who might get confused this crash was with “Autopilot” not FSD

And the distinction is what?

I'm not serious of course. There are huge swaths of the public whose eyes would glaze over if you tried to explain it, and that's my point.

i think the public can generally grasp the difference between lane assist and a waymo/AV but the naming is bad agreed

Tesla's official, wildly misleading position is that FSD is a driver assist system that should be treated no different than autopilot, not an autonomous system like Waymo. They've stated it in court, in regulatory filings, and if you open the owner's manual you'll find a bolded statement that FSD doesn't make the vehicle autonomous.

Everything else that you might be reasonably misled by? Puffery and the official position is that you really should have known better.

I've seen videos of people literally using the Tesla mobile app to 'call' their FSD-enabled car to them. Given that that they coded this functionality and expose it in their app, I really don't see how Tesla can be let off by making the statement that you must officially be in front of the wheel all of the time.

Summon is a separate feature from FSD.

Part of the issue is that there are no regulatory guidelines for what's appropriate, and regulators have not stepped in to ensure things are as safe and free of misuse as reasonably possible. Industry standards/norms exist, but they have no legal weight and Tesla ignores them to push the line in ways that I'm personally not thrilled with.

fair enough, was just trying to clarify the situation in the article. Tesla’s branding is ridiculous and extremely misleading.

> Given that that they coded this functionality and expose it in their app, I really don't see how Tesla can be let off by making the statement that you must officially be in front of the wheel all of the time.

Just to be clear, Tesla says that the person doing the summoning should be able to see the car at all times and be able to force a stop if necessary when using Summon. At least this was the case the last time I used it.

I’m not necessarily giving a pass to Tesla here, but it doesn’t seem reasonable to throw all the blame on a manufacturer when a user doesn’t follow directions and misuses a function.

A debate could be had about whether functions should be allowed if a certain (high?) percentage of users will abuse it, but that’s a tricky discussion imho.

Almost all of the public examples I’ve seen of Autopilot or Summon being unsafe were when people were misusing it.

There are definitely examples when these functions don’t work (there’s one spot near me when my car makes the wrong choice consistently), but it’s trivial to correct if one is paying attention like you’re supposed to.