Transportation head says drivers must pay attention at all times after clips emerge of some using what looks like Apple’s Vision Pro
US transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg on Monday said human drivers must pay attention at all times after videos emerged of people wearing what appeared to be Apple’s recently released Vision Pro headset while driving Teslas.
Buttigieg responded on Twitter/X to a video that had more than 24m views of a Tesla driver who appeared to be gesturing with his hands to manipulate a virtual reality field.
Despite their names, Tesla’s assisted driving features – Autopilot, Enhanced Autopilot and Full Self-Driving – do not mean the vehicles are fully autonomous, Buttigieg said Monday on social media.
“Reminder – ALL advanced driver assistance systems available today require the human driver to be in control and fully engaged in the driving task at all times,” Buttigieg said.
I always wondered were there less accidents back then? Horses probably actively try not to run into things right? But they can also get scared and go crazy so who knows
Riding horses or in horse drawn carriages was banned in the city of Rome multiple times in antiquity, because of accidents involving two horses.
Cars will come to a stop, eventually, on their own.
Horses get spooked and run, causing a much bigger problem.
Mary Todd Lincoln once jumped from a carriage after her driver was thrown from the seat and the horse began to speed away. The resulting injury left her with migraines for the rest of her life.
I guess they are related no? Like it makes sense to have both.
The issue is seeing movement but you are not physically moving...although the car you are technically moving but... I guess confused the brain as the movement is not caused by you.
In my case I don't get sick on car ever... And in VR the same, the only exception is on VR I might lose a little bit the orientation and lose my equilibrium for sec but very very rarely and not enough to fall thankfully.
It's a mismatch between what the eyes see and the ears feel. In nature, this generally only happens when you've been poisoned (think drunk). The obvious solution to being poisoned is to empty the stomach, to limit how much more gets absorbed.
The effect is processed at a fairly high level, mentally. This means you can influence it. E.g. if you focus on the difference, in an accepting manner, and your subconscious will stop reacting to it as badly.
From what I've heard (back when I used Reddit) they aren't linked, there's apparently a bunch of people who have one but not the other.
Someone said that it's cause they're almost opposite effects- car sickness is when you feel movement but don't see it, whereas vr sickness is when you see movement but don't feel it- but I'd take this with a grain of salt since it's just some random person on Reddit guessing at the cause.
Personally my experience is mostly the same as yours, I don't get either.
A lot of the people that drive these things are acting like children in adult bodies. I have seen some wildly dumb shit happen. It's like the car company created by the Darwin Awards...
I literally once saw someone eating on a little folding table/desk of some sort in their Tesla (driver seat, of course) with the dash screen playing some sort of media.
Another time, the person was playing a handheld gaming console of some sort, in the driver seat.
An the automatic lane switching doesn't adjust for people speeding up in the passing lane well. I've seen a couple near accidents there.
People have always been idiots behind the wheel. I started driving before personal electronics and touchscreens were a thing. You still saw people bracing books or newspapers against the steering wheel with their thumbs so they could read as they drove down the highway. Now it’s watching movies, texting or other social media, video conversations, reading…
Just seems that there are way more people doing it. The social contract gets more broken every day.
“Reminder – ALL advanced driver assistance systems available today require the human driver to be in control and fully engaged in the driving task at all times,” Buttigieg said.
This is not entirely true anymore. If you're in a 2024 Mercedes EQS Sedan driving in Nevada (Edit: or California) at less than 40 mph, you are allowed to take your hands off the wheel and your eyes off the road.
No, Mercedes is the first one to market with a level 3 (fully self driving) system, which is available with their top of the line sedan.
They applied for certification and got it from the state of Nevada. (Edit: And California)
This is one of the things about assisted driving tech that's always confused me. It seems unlikely that we will have fully self-driving cars soon, but the illusion of being able to be absent while driving seems really dangerous. It doesn't seem like an improvement to me to remove the human element from most of the driving tasks while also requiring that human to spring into action seemingly at random.
Like don't get me wrong, people do dumb shit on the road with or without assistance, but having a system that requires human involvement at a zero-to-hero level seems like a bad system.
Then again, based on this actual content, maybe people just shouldn't be allowed to own vehicles full stop.
It seems unlikely that we will have fully self-driving cars soon
Maybe not from Tesla, but Mercedes already sells 2 cars which have limited Level 3 self driving functionality. Up to 50 mph you are legally allowed to divert your attention from the road and do something else, you just need to be ready to take back control within 10 seconds of the car telling you to do so. Mercedes is so confident in that system that they are taking legal liability for any crashes caused while the car is in self driving mode. And Mercedes is already planning to get the car certified for speeds up to 75mph soon, so it will be usable at regular highway speeds
You are of course correct but the problem is that Tesla are irresponsible, shocking I know.
All the other car companies are holding back their self-driving tech until it actually 100% works, but Tesla are like, nah we're going to use our customers as bata testers. So what if they die they've already bought the car.
Realization might only last for about a millisecond or two.
At some point, doctors are gonna tell a guy, "your face is already irreparably damaged by these AR devices in your sniff.. just as an experiment, why not improve the enhancements surgically?" And that's how cyberpunk 2077 gets on the rails.
After seeing some people having their face branded with their car logo from the wheel the the airbag fired... actually this might be better protection....
The complete disregard for road safety and personal well-being (not to mention the well-being of others) never ceases to amaze me.
I see several videos every day on social media of people taking videos while driving.
Saw another guy doing a (very unimportant) delivery with a trailer across state in a clapped-out old van on the 1 day of the year there was ice on the road, and predictably crashed badly.
And it looks fake, honestly. If you see videos of YouTube reviewers using the device, they do way less poking and tapping and like, weird throwing of the hands that the person in the OP video is doing.
Same with some of the other videos of people walking across streets and through traffic.
Well, the actual causes of pedestrian deaths (big dumb vehicles, infrastructure that more or less necessitates personal vehicle ownership) are the same things that the auto industry lobbies hard for.
It's Fred. Don't worry about him at all, he's really good on speed runs up and down the 5fwy. He always gets home with extra tokens and a good 5000 points.
They're not true AR devices, they're VR headsets masquerading as AR, you're still just watching a video of the world around you. As good as the Vision Pro's passthrough video, it's still passthrough video and doesn't have the same resolution as our eyes would have, plus it probably blocks out at least some of your peripheral vision. I do think having a HUD while driving would be nice, but it would need to be able to restrict any sort of extraneous content out (like youtube videos or whatever) and ONLY show information needed for driving (maybe have music/audio controls at most).
Oh, you "could." But I'll bet you these individuals aren't. These morons are looking at videos or scrolling the web or some other stupid attention diverting shit.
I'm not sure there even exists any kind of hypothetical "AR driving assistance" app for the Apple Vision. And there probably never will, for the obvious massive liability reasons.
The issue is the government's biggest concern isn't safety, it's being able to legislate those being unsafe. Which can actually be conflicting, because even if a VR headset showing directions on the road itself is less distracting than looking at a separate phone/GPS- a cop doesn't know if you're doing that, or if you have YouTube in the corner of your eye.
We embrance technology in stupid ways. It's a thing we always do, It's pretty hilarious aside from the death part.
When cars were invented, there were no traffic laws, people drove drunk and got in tumbling car wrecks, ran over people constantly. They were much faster than foot, carriage, etc.
When cell phones became affordable, people talked-and-drove so much and wrecks went up.
When texting became popular, people texted and drove and wrecks went up even more.
When smartphones became approachable to the masses, people drive around scrolling web sites rather than driving.
When social video media became popular and usable on mobile broadband, people drive around watching videos rather than driving.
Now VR headset, and on and on.
I see a couple takeaways here:
We really hate driving, like a lot, at the expense of our own safety. Why doesn't America especially embrace public transport. We have over a century of documented data indicating how much we all apparently hate driving so much we'll try to die instead of driving.
We humans are really stupid about risk assessment, but eventually society corrects the stupidity. Seems to be something we just keep doing ad infinitum and we're just cool losing a few people along the way until we correct. It's just odd.
I'm still paying attention to what's in front of me
Yeah, you're paying attention to the fast food you're too impatient to wait to eat safely. You're not properly paying attention to the road or all of the other people whose lives are now in danger because you're shoving a chalupa down your pie hole instead of safely operating the two ton missile you're supposed to be guiding down the highway. Your lane assist isn't magic, and when you inevitably fuck this up, I hope it's a single-vehicle accident and you spare other drivers the misfortune.
Jeez, It was a rental I had for a month about 2 years ago.
And for your information, it was a single chicken taco. There were no cars around. I'm not talking LA I5, this is in the middle of nowhere and I had to make an emergency drive up Eureka from Sacramento.
There's no way that isn't satire or similar commentary. Problem is I suspect way too many people are too dumb to get it. People who don't realize it's a faked scenario and are dumb enough to try it.
Edit: Jesus Christ it's fake. Have you downvoters even seen the video? Guy gets or of the car and is beep booping around? That motherfucker would be blind and couldn't walk around without falling. If he was in pass thru he'd be vommiting because there's no faster way to make yourself sick. The video isn't even possible without being staged.
The way people go on about critical thinking, I really expected you all to be a lot more savvy about things like this.
If he was in pass thru he'd be vommiting because there's no faster way to make yourself sick.
The issue I have with your comment is this. You're asserting that the experience you had with nausea and VR is the experience everyone has or will have with nausea and VR.
Some people can't read a book in the car without getting motion sickness. Some people can read hundreds. Some can read a few pages.
Some people can read a book but not play a video game. Some people have the opposite problem.
There's no way this was "fake" maybe staged, but this person was clearly in the driver's seat driving down a public 4-lane highway. Staged video or not, that's dangerous.
If you can find one person who has used pass-through while walking around for like 15 minutes and hasn't gotten sick, you've found one more person than me. I've never heard anyone mention pass-thru that didn't immediately follow up that it made them extremely sick.
I'm not a person prone to motion sickness. I'm on boats all the time. I drive hundreds of miles at a stretch without a problem. I started feeling queasy in pass-thru within about 5 minutes. But I stuck with it and within 20 minutes I was on the verge of vomiting. This is not a subtle thing or something that only affects those with a weak constitution.
So I don't know. Maybe there are folks out there who are completely unaffected by it.
Then there is the claim someone made that a user experience video showed that the headset just shut down at high speeds and couldn't even be used on a train. I can't verify that quickly with Google.
I'm not sure where your line is between "fake" and "staged" but if they are only putting the headset on for the purpose of the video and they don't actually drive around that way, I'm calling that fake. Because they aren't actually using the headset except to draw attention to the fact that they are wearing the headset. People aren't actually doing this. They created a fake controversy.
Check out Casey neistats video of the vision pro. He just walks around and rides his boosted board in nyc without getting sick. By his own words, the pass through seems to be so amazing and fast that he forgot it isn't reality.
Someone linked his video. It's pretty impressive, especially if unedited. Around 1:10 in the video I can see the low FPS and high latency which most folks say makes them sick when using VR, so that guy must have a hell of a stomach because I've got a pretty strong one and pass-through gave me intense nausea and headache in very short order and that has been the case for every single experience with pass-through I've read about before.
I don’t understand what you mean by “faked scenario”. This person is definitely driving and they definitely have the headset on. What do you mean is “faked” about this? Can you clarify?
I've clarified in other responses. "Faked" in that it was staged. The dude doesn't actually drive around wearing a VR headset except, you know, just long enough to film it to present the ridiculous idea that someone might do this. I don't have the time or energy to go in depth on every single response that says [DOUBT] but you can get a sense of my thought process and I guess either agree or not.
I want to say I'm surprised by how many downvotes you have. But then I remember what the average internet user is like, they love a common enemy and will ralley at any opportunity to follow the masses.
The new headsets show you the world around you and add an interface layer, like a HUD except the whole thing is on screen. You can walk around and still see in front of you, while your email interface floats off to the left. You interact with the interface through eye and hand motions.
I haven't used it, but that's what they claim it can do. It would not be impossible to do the things people are doing in the video.
Existing headsets also do this (not with integrated email but that's not the point). I know because trying it walking around my house made me the sickest I've ever been using VR. It shocks me the number of people who insist this is real and either haven't seen the video or haven't used VR.
This was staged. Will some idiots do it for real? Probably, if they can (sometime else said apple headsets shut down while in motion, so that would be another reason this was staged).
But the number of people downvoting me for saying the video everyone is talking about is faked honestly has me flummoxed. It's fucking obviously fake, just like the tide pod challenge.
If I understand those headsets correctly it shuts down if it detects movement. Either walking, driving etc. The review I was watching a dude couldn't use it in a subway. So there is no way this dude is using it while driving down the road. But still obstructs your vision too much.
I don't think that's the case. I've seen videos of them being used on the subway. I also know somebody that has one and it definitely doesn't mind if you walk around.
This is not entirely true. You can be moving but the headset needs tracking information to keep things stationary. There’s specifically a travel mode for the Vision Pro for using it on subways and planes and things. I’m assuming you’re talking about Casey’s video on the subway. He didn’t know about the travel mode.
At 1:10 in the video I can see some FPS and latency issues which is exactly what makes folks sick in the first place. Dude says he's had it for an hour at that point. I wonder how long he'd actually been wearing it. But absent any sort of evidence that this is a misrepresentation, I'll take it at face value.
If this guy actually used pass-thru for an hour straight without getting sick, he's certainly the first one I've seen. It's an impressive feat and kudos for finding it.
It could be fake, but it's just as, if not more likely real. The video is clearly a public road with other traffic around (waiting at the lights).
Also Tesla are having enough difficulty getting their autopilot features signed off, and Apple definitely wouldn't want to advertise their Vision as a tool you can use while driving.
I never said, or meant to say, the guy wasn't wearing an actual headset. I'm saying this was done to get attention and the guy isn't going around driving with a headset on when the camera isn't rolling. It's a fake controversy drummed up by an attention whore who clearly hit a nerve.