this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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So I need to understand the autopilot of a plane first before I buy a car?
I would be mislead then, as I have no idea how such autopilots work. I also suspect that those two systems don't really work the same. One flies, the other drives. One has traffic lights, the other doesn't. One is operated by well paid professionals, the other, well, by me. Call me simple, but there seem to be some major differences.
I would have though people would read autopilot and think automatic. At least that's what I do. I guess pilot is closely associated with planes but it certainly isn't what I think of.
This is a pretty absurd argument. You could apply this to literally any facet of driving.
"I have to learn what each color of a traffic light means before driving?"
"I have to learn what white and yellow paint means and dashes versus lines? This is too confusing"
God help you when you get to 4-way stops and roundabouts.
Not absurd, but reality. We do that in driving school.
I don't know where you are from and which teaching laws apply, of course, but I definitely learned all those lessons you mentioned.
That's precisely my argument and why "learning my new car's features is too confusing" is an absurd argument.
Yeah, there are some major differences in the vehicles, but both disengage when there's anything out of the ordinary going on. Maybe people base their understanding of autopilots on the movie "Airplane!" where that inflatable puppet groped the Stewardess afterwards.
True, good point. As far as I know, it does turn itself off if it detects something it can't handle, though. The problem with cross traffic is that it obviously can't detect it, otherwise turning itself off would already be a way of handling it.
Proximity detection is far easier up in the air, especially if you're not bound by the weird requirement to only use visible spectrum cameras.
(To make things clear, I'm just defending the engineers there who had to work within these constraints. All of this is a pure management failure.)
At least for the base autopilot (AP), the only system I've experience with, this is not true. My car doesn't know it's on a road with cross traffic. It only knows it's on a road that it can see lane lines to differentiate lanes. It doesn't even know which direction they are supposed to travel. If I cross the center line, I could activate AP and it would keep me centered in the lane with oncoming traffic. This was all thoroughly explained to me when I bought it. I had no misconceptions about it's capability.
It really feels like the people who are so opposed to it are working off some major disinformation which only muddied the conversation when they state things that are plainly wrong or misuse terms.
I'm sorry, what? If you set an airplane to maintain altitude and heading with autopilot, it will 100% fly you into the side of a mountain if there's one in front of you.