1958 Imperial: What It's Like to Drive an Auto-Pilot Car
A fascinating account of a feature we&#x27;d now recognize as &#x27;cruise control&#x27;. Despite the technical details being different than modern systems, many of its behaviors are familiar -- like the surreal rollercoaster-tow hillclimbing -- while some have been rectified in more modern systems, like better engine braking to regain the target speed.<p>I believe the UX of vanilla cruise control is a good fit for what it does: it&#x27;s a fire-and-forget, opt-in mode that&#x27;s disengaged with a tap of the brake or its own button. It&#x27;s simple to reason about: do I want the car to gun it at a constant 70 mph, or no? You can run a quick mental judgement call and decide whether to engage it or leave it off.<p>This is completely unlike any other &#x27;assist&#x27; feature that came later: ABS, automatic emergency braking, and especially adaptive cruise control. And, in my opinion [1] this vast difference between adaptive and classic cruise control is a safety risk -- features that override driver behavior in case of a condition the car identifies need to have no false negatives, need to be on by default and opt-out instead of opt-in, and need to not be disengaged by trivial inputs like lightly tapping the brakes.<p>In Tesla&#x27;s particular case, the opt-in UX was even worse, because its automatic emergency braking wouldn&#x27;t engage if autopilot was off [3] -- a decision contrary to sane user expectation, and completely unlike cars of other premium automakers. And the fact that their emergency braking still can&#x27;t detect all stationary hazards in a travel lane is tragic.<p>I&#x27;m not convinced that classic cruise control is a good case study (or anecdote) to compare emerging driver assist, autodriving, and safety features with. It simply has the exact opposite semantics than every other feature that we have since put in our cars.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16772748#16774258" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16772748#16774258</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12097671#12097911" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12097671#12097911</a> [3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12011584" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12011584</a>