Not in favor of full self driving

Let me explain my rationale for not being in favor of full self driving cars. To do so, I'll use a comparison to commercial airliner autopilot systems which, in some versions and at some airports can execute virtually a full flight on their own and which have been available for decades.

There are several differences between an airplane autopilot and a car FSD system. The two biggest ones are operator training and difficulty of implementation.

Commercial pilots are trained to know that putting the plane on autopilot isn't a reason to stop paying attention. Quite the opposite, actually. The purpose of the autopilot is to reduce pilot fatigue and workload so they can pay MORE attention to situational awareness - weather, communications, navigation, vehicle functions, and so forth. Regular people have been shown in cars with self-driving capabilities to use those capabilities to check their phones, play games, take naps or do other stupid things. Unless everyone getting an FSD car gets the same type of training that commercial pilots get, their lack of training and resulting lack of attention creates a dangerous situation where none needs exist.

Difficulty. Implementing FSD in a car is many times (perhaps many thousands of times) harder than implementing autopilot in an airplane. Airplane autopilots have no need to watch out for road construction, jay-walking pedestrians, icy roads (except on landing), fog, kids chasing balls across the street, animals in the road, the truck in front of you blowing a tire, and so on. They are also kept 1000 feet apart vertically and around 2 miles apart horizontally in terminal areas if they are on the same route. They follow pre-programmed routes or fly to way-points. The pilot is monitoring, as is ATC, and the pilot can take over in a moment if something off-nominal happens. It's just a way easier problem to solve.

You combine all the off-nominal situations that car drivers have to manage with the total lack of driver training on how to monitor a car on autopilot, and I think that's a lousy situation.

I'm all in favor of driving assist features of all sorts, but not ones that allow the car to operate without the driver paying attention, at least until drivers realize or are trained that they HAVE TO pay full attention even when the car is driving, just like pilots do when a plane is on autopilot. The disclaimers written into the instructions are not sufficient for average people. They just ignore them or don't read them in the first place.

 

I'm sure you're aware that autopilot as it exists now is a driver assist feature, not a true full self driving system.