My intention was in no way to underplay or diminish the achievement of Auto Pilot but to simply make the point that: In this video, of this event Auto Pilot adds nothing. In this case the driver was "alert and competent". This video does NOT showcase or demonstrate Auto Pilot preventing an accident, reacting faster or better than a human.
That is my point. People seem to be extolling how Auto Pilot saved that day in this video. It didn't.
How do you know? Driver could have been looking back at his kids for all we know when the car beeped and he then paid attention.
And yes, I would say that the autopilot reacted faster than a competent human driver not expecting a crash while watching a 30 second clip. Probably by time measured in seconds.
I do agree safe following distance made the auto-breaking pretty irrelevant in this specific case as there was plenty of time for a human to react. But it's still impressive to see things working, and a bit of positive public PR hype over this tech can't be an entirely bad thing.
I agree that some of the headline around this video are a bit overstated, but it is nevertheless a deserving credit to Tesla's autopilot system for handling the incident so well. I also agree that an "alert and competent" human driver would handle the situation the same way, but I don't think it's safe to assume that all or even most drivers are usually "alert and competent".
Imagine if you could be confident that the cars sharing the road with you were all "alert and competent" at all times because they were using a solid autopilot system.
My intention was in no way to underplay or diminish the achievement of Auto Pilot but to simply make the point that: In this video, of this event Auto Pilot adds nothing. In this case the driver was "alert and competent". This video does NOT showcase or demonstrate Auto Pilot preventing an accident, reacting faster or better than a human.
That is my point. People seem to be extolling how Auto Pilot saved that day in this video. It didn't.