Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and how the tech are you today? I'm introducing a new kind of tech stuff episode. Now. Listeners who have been with me for a long long time might remember the old uh listener mail episodes where I would say listener mail in an extremely obnoxious way and we would have a terrible sound effect play afterward, and we had equal amounts of mail about listener mail, with about half saying I hate it, I hate how you do it. Stop doing it. I still want the listener mail episodes, but stop introducing it the way you introduce it, and the other half said, I think it's hilarious. Keep doing it. And eventually I just stopped because you know, I was alienating like half the audience. But now we have a new type of tech stuff episode, which means we have a new opportunity to have a way to introduce these types of episodes, and I'm calling this type of episode a tech Stuff talk back. Now, for those of you who have not heard, if you use the I Heart Radio app, which is a free app. You can download tier Phone and use that to access the tech Stuff podcast. You'll see there's a little microphone icon. It's both on the main tex Stuff page and it's also on every single episode that's in the app. If you click on that icon, then you can leave a thirty second voice message to us, and Tori and I are the only two people who can listen to those messages. So you can leave a message to the show in general, or you can go into a specific episode and leave an episode specific message. On the back end, we can see what episode you you clicked on and all that, so it makes it really easy to figure out who is talking about what. So listener Greg sent me a couple of messages, including one that was just really friendly saying thank you for the show. Thank you, Greg, that was really thoughtful of you. And he used the talk back feature on the I Heart Radio app. So first off, shout out to you Greg for being the first person to use that feature to contact me. I am not counting the test message I sent to myself. Also, while technically using talk back gives me the right to use the audio that is recorded, So, in other words, if you leave a message technically because of the agreements, the user agreements. I can use that audio, However, uh, that's not my style. I am not sure if Greg is cool would be using his audio. So I'm just gonna summarize what he asked. And now, if folks in the future use the talkback feature and you want me to include that audio in an episode like you would like it if I had that play and then answer your question, just let me know and you can say it's cool to use this in your episode or something along those lines. Now, Greg's talk back came in before I set those expectations, so I'm just going to assume by default he would prefer I not include it. And that is because I much prefer opt in systems where you choose to be part of it, rather than opt out systems where you expressly have to say, hey, don't use this um So I would rather err on the side of opting in. Anyway. Greg has been listening to tech stuff since twenty six and he had a couple of requests. For one, he wanted to know if I had any direct personal experience with writing around in Tesla vehicles, particularly with the full self driving system turned on. And I can answer that one right away. I do not have that experience. I have a neighbor, my next door neighbor, who has a Tesla. I mean, he lives literally right next to me. But we are not in the hey can I hop in your car phase of our relationship. We're more in the hey, I accidentally got your mail again phase in our relationship. So I have not asked him to give me a ride in his Tesla. I think that that would probably come across as very odd to him. But Greg also wanted to know if full self driving is what Tesla says it is. Now that question is actually more complicated than what it seems on the surface. So on the face of it, you've got the term full self driving. Now, to me, that implies that the vehicle does all of the driving by itself. That's to me what full self driving seems to imply. So if you told me that this is a full self driving car, I would assume that you were talking about at least a level three autonomous vehicle. Now, as a reminder, there are six levels to autonomous driving, as agreed upon by the Society of Automotive Engineers, Levels zero through to cover driver assist features, and they all require that a human behind the wheel continues to monitor the driving environment at all times. That is where Tesla's full self driving mode actually falls. It falls in level two under some situations and level one under other situations. A level three autonomous vehicle would do all the monitoring of its environment by itself. Human override would still be possible in a level three autonomous vehicle, and in fact it might be required for edge cases that pop up during driving or certain conditions. So this means that a level three at ponomous vehicle would still need controls like you would still need to have a steering wheel and an accelerator and a break that a human could operate. If you did not have those controls, that car would need to be level four or higher like level four level five autonomous. So in addition, a level three autonomous vehicle would have conditional autonomy, so that means it only operates an autonomous mode if all those conditions are met. So that might include things like weather conditions. If whether it is particularly nasty like storming or something where you have heavy heavy rains, or maybe a very dense fog, that might be a condition where the car will not operate an autonomous mode. Uh that might also have a geo fencing feature, meaning that you have to operate within a certain radius, and if you get outside of that radius of operation, the car will not work in autonomous mode and you have to drive it manually. So level three autonomy is conditional autonomy. Tesla full self driving mode does not get to level three yet. I think Tesla refers to its mode as full self driving because it handles two separate driving functions at the same time under certain conditions. That is, it handles both the acceleration and breaking of the vehicle, as well as the steering of the vehicle. A level one autonomous vehicle only handles one driving operation at a time. It can handle acceleration, slash breaking or steering, but not both. So a car that has lane correction, for example, will guide a vehicle that's drifting out of a lane of traffic to go back into the lane of traffic. That's one job it's steering. Or a car that has adaptive cruise control will change the speed of the vehicle's travel based upon the speed of traffic around it. So if the car in front of you slows down, your car's adaptive cruise control will slow your car down to automatically. Full self driving takes on both of those functions, at least in highway operation, and I'm guessing that's why Tesla called it full self driving, because it controls both the acceleration and deceleration as well as the steering. You as a driver don't have to do anything when in full self driving mode other than maintain supervision of the vehicle and be ready to intervene at any given moment, so this is still a very highly conditional mode. Full self driving mode is meant for highway use. You can activate it when you're taking an on ramp to a highway and the full self driving system uh this this part of full self drivings in beta testing, by the way, But the full self driving system can then navigate your car through highway traffic, including lane changes to go to the appropriate exit, and it can even navigate through interchanges, so you can go from one highway to a different highway and continue on to your you know, exit, the the appropriate exit for wherever you're going. At that point. You would then resume manual steering of the vehicle. There are also some non highway modes that you can use in full self driving there's an auto park feature, which means you can, you know, have your car park itself. It will guide the Tesla to parallel park itself or to park in a perpendicular space automatically. And there's kind of the reverse of that. There's the Summon feature, which, as you might imagine, summons your Tesla so that your car moves to where you are, kind of like an automated valet. And there's a mode that will automatically identify traffic lights and stop signs, which will guide your car to stop appropriately on city streets. So that would allow for acceleration deceleration on city streets, but not steering. So as of right now, auto steer on city streets is not an option. It is listed as coming up like an up humming option, but it's not there yet. So on city streets, full self driving really reverts down to a level one autonomous mode of operation because it handles acceleration and deceleration but not the steering, and in all modes, Tesla drivers are expected to supervise the operation of the vehicle at all times. All right, when we come back after this quick break, I'll wrap up with Greg's question here. So before the break, we were talking about how Tesla drivers have to maintain supervision of their vehicle even in full self driving mode, which keeps full self driving at level to autonomous operation at least in highway mode. On city street mode, you're still at level one, and Tesla for it, for the record, they are up from about this. So my beef with Tesla is that the names that it gives of these features, like autopilot, which is the more basic set of driver assist features, and full self driving, those names, at least to me on the surface, create a bit of misdirection. Uh, if you read up on it, If you actually go to Tesla site and you read up on autopilot and full self driving, you would quickly understand the limitations of those systems and the expectations Tesla has for its drivers, and you can probably suss out why Tesla chose those names in the first place. But I say, on the surface level, those terms are misleading at best. I think they said particular expectations that aren't realistic, and I think those unrealistic expectations have factored into some truly tragic accidents. So is Tesla responsible for those high profile accidents that we have seen, some of which lead to fatalities. That to me is a very difficult question to answer. So, on the one hand, the company communicates to drivers the requirement of actively supervising the vehicle, not relying on it as a self driving solution. They even go so far as to outright say it is not an autonomous vehicle. On the other hand, the marketing of these features to me, suggests that the vehicle is capable of handling everything by itself. Full self driving seems to indicate that the car will do everything for you. I don't think that Tesla should be totally off the hook here. I do think that Tesla drivers bear most of the responsibility for accidents. I do not want to give the implication that I think Tesla is fully responsible for any accident of a Tesla vehicle that was operating in full self driving mode. I don't think that's true. I think that the drivers bear most of that responsibility, largely because Tesla does communicate what the limitations of those modes are two drivers before they can activate them. Whether of the drivers read it or not is another question. It can be like one of those end user license agreements that everybody with a few exceptions just skips over so that they can click the eye accept at the end of it and move on with their lives. Um only a few people ever bother reading those and I worry that Tesla drivers can sometimes be the same way with the warnings and limitations of things like autopilot and full self driving. So it's hard for me to remove all accountability from the company itself. I do think Tesla bears at least some responsibility, perhaps for poor communication of what these these modes do, simply because the names are so evocative of things that that the modes just can't can't do. Anyway, as to whether full self driving does what Tesla says it can do, I think yeah it does. If you actually read what Tesla says the mode does. Uh, you have to take that time to do it. And if you don't do it and you just rely on the feeling you get from the name itself, you are going to walk away with the wrong impression. But at the heart of the matter, Tesla does pretty much. You know, let's spell out what the mode can and cannot do. So would I be comfortable writing with someone who activated Tesla's full self driving mode. Let's say I get in my next door neighbors Tesla. He takes me out on the highway and turns on full self driving. Well, if I had previously ridden with the guy and I knew that he was a really good driver, and that he was paying attention and that he's a responsible driver, then I probably feel comfortable because I know that he would be continuously monitoring the situation and ready to step in should anything unexpected happen. However, if the driver was someone that I felt was, you know, vaguely irresponsible and was clearly leaving everything up to the ca are, I absolutely would not feel comfortable at all, and I would be questioning every decision I had made in my life that led me to sit in that vehicle. I would be terrified. So I think the last several years have shown us that Tesla's particular approach to self driving technology has a really long way to go. It is tragic that in the process of learning about those gaps and capability, people have lost their lives and accidents. That is truly terrible. Obviously, it would be a lot better if any company would discover limitations like that through controlled tests that didn't endanger human lives or the lives of you know, other people who are on the road and aren't even involved in the vehicle itself. You could make the argument that the way Tesla has rolled out the features has inspired unrealistic expectations and has created situations where people have uh abused the technology. Now that's how I feel, but I also acknowledge that other folks might strongly disagree with me and say that the drivers should shoulder full responsibility for their actions. I don't quite feel that way, because I feel like if someone is selling you something and they call it one thing, and it's only by reading the fine print that you realize it's not it's not exactly what they're calling it, some of that responsibility has to follow fall on the vendor for a kind of misrepresenting the product. That's just how I feel though. That's my own opinion. But thanks to Greg again for his request. He also sent a follow up request asking me to do a full episode treatment for on Kio. I talked about how the company that created the on Chio brand has gone out of business. The brand itself lives on so A few people on Twitter have similarly asked me to do a full episode on Kio. So I'm going to be tackling that very soon. Keep an ear out for it, and if you would like to leave me a message, that would become a future tech Stuff talk back episode. Like I said, just go download the I Heart Radio app on your smartphone, navigate to tech Stuff. You'll see that there's that little microphone icon both on the main page and within each episode. You click on that, you record your thirty second message. Remember, let me know if you want that to audio to actually play within an episode, and then I will take care of it from there. It's a great little feature and I'm really enjoying how it's working out so far, and I'm looking forward to hearing from more of you in the future. And otherwise, if you just want to get in touch with me on Twitter, you can still totally do that to The handle for the show is tech Stuff H. S W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tex Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and how the tech are you today? I'm introducing a new kind of tech stuff episode. Now. Listeners who have been with me for a long long time might remember the old uh listener mail episodes where I would say listener mail in an extremely obnoxious way and we would have a terrible sound effect play afterward, and we had equal amounts of mail about listener mail, with about half saying I hate it, I hate how you do it. Stop doing it. I still want the listener mail episodes, but stop introducing it the way you introduce it, and the other half said, I think it's hilarious. Keep doing it. And eventually I just stopped because you know, I was alienating like half the audience. But now we have a new type of tech stuff episode, which means we have a new opportunity to have a way to introduce these types of episodes, and I'm calling this type of episode a tech Stuff talk back. Now, for those of you who have not heard, if you use the I Heart Radio app, which is a free app. You can download tier Phone and use that to access the tech Stuff podcast. You'll see there's a little microphone icon. It's both on the main tex Stuff page and it's also on every single episode that's in the app. If you click on that icon, then you can leave a thirty second voice message to us, and Tori and I are the only two people who can listen to those messages. So you can leave a message to the show in general, or you can go into a specific episode and leave an episode specific message. On the back end, we can see what episode you you clicked on and all that, so it makes it really easy to figure out who is talking about what. So listener Greg sent me a couple of messages, including one that was just really friendly saying thank you for the show. Thank you, Greg, that was really thoughtful of you. And he used the talk back feature on the I Heart Radio app. So first off, shout out to you Greg for being the first person to use that feature to contact me. I am not counting the test message I sent to myself. Also, while technically using talk back gives me the right to use the audio that is recorded, So, in other words, if you leave a message technically because of the agreements, the user agreements. I can use that audio, However, uh, that's not my style. I am not sure if Greg is cool would be using his audio. So I'm just gonna summarize what he asked. And now, if folks in the future use the talkback feature and you want me to include that audio in an episode like you would like it if I had that play and then answer your question, just let me know and you can say it's cool to use this in your episode or something along those lines. Now, Greg's talk back came in before I set those expectations, so I'm just going to assume by default he would prefer I not include it. And that is because I much prefer opt in systems where you choose to be part of it, rather than opt out systems where you expressly have to say, hey, don't use this um So I would rather err on the side of opting in. Anyway. Greg has been listening to tech stuff since twenty six and he had a couple of requests. For one, he wanted to know if I had any direct personal experience with writing around in Tesla vehicles, particularly with the full self driving system turned on. And I can answer that one right away. I do not have that experience. I have a neighbor, my next door neighbor, who has a Tesla. I mean, he lives literally right next to me. But we are not in the hey can I hop in your car phase of our relationship. We're more in the hey, I accidentally got your mail again phase in our relationship. So I have not asked him to give me a ride in his Tesla. I think that that would probably come across as very odd to him. But Greg also wanted to know if full self driving is what Tesla says it is. Now that question is actually more complicated than what it seems on the surface. So on the face of it, you've got the term full self driving. Now, to me, that implies that the vehicle does all of the driving by itself. That's to me what full self driving seems to imply. So if you told me that this is a full self driving car, I would assume that you were talking about at least a level three autonomous vehicle. Now, as a reminder, there are six levels to autonomous driving, as agreed upon by the Society of Automotive Engineers, Levels zero through to cover driver assist features, and they all require that a human behind the wheel continues to monitor the driving environment at all times. That is where Tesla's full self driving mode actually falls. It falls in level two under some situations and level one under other situations. A level three autonomous vehicle would do all the monitoring of its environment by itself. Human override would still be possible in a level three autonomous vehicle, and in fact it might be required for edge cases that pop up during driving or certain conditions. So this means that a level three at ponomous vehicle would still need controls like you would still need to have a steering wheel and an accelerator and a break that a human could operate. If you did not have those controls, that car would need to be level four or higher like level four level five autonomous. So in addition, a level three autonomous vehicle would have conditional autonomy, so that means it only operates an autonomous mode if all those conditions are met. So that might include things like weather conditions. If whether it is particularly nasty like storming or something where you have heavy heavy rains, or maybe a very dense fog, that might be a condition where the car will not operate an autonomous mode. Uh that might also have a geo fencing feature, meaning that you have to operate within a certain radius, and if you get outside of that radius of operation, the car will not work in autonomous mode and you have to drive it manually. So level three autonomy is conditional autonomy. Tesla full self driving mode does not get to level three yet. I think Tesla refers to its mode as full self driving because it handles two separate driving functions at the same time under certain conditions. That is, it handles both the acceleration and breaking of the vehicle, as well as the steering of the vehicle. A level one autonomous vehicle only handles one driving operation at a time. It can handle acceleration, slash breaking or steering, but not both. So a car that has lane correction, for example, will guide a vehicle that's drifting out of a lane of traffic to go back into the lane of traffic. That's one job it's steering. Or a car that has adaptive cruise control will change the speed of the vehicle's travel based upon the speed of traffic around it. So if the car in front of you slows down, your car's adaptive cruise control will slow your car down to automatically. Full self driving takes on both of those functions, at least in highway operation, and I'm guessing that's why Tesla called it full self driving, because it controls both the acceleration and deceleration as well as the steering. You as a driver don't have to do anything when in full self driving mode other than maintain supervision of the vehicle and be ready to intervene at any given moment, so this is still a very highly conditional mode. Full self driving mode is meant for highway use. You can activate it when you're taking an on ramp to a highway and the full self driving system uh this this part of full self drivings in beta testing, by the way, But the full self driving system can then navigate your car through highway traffic, including lane changes to go to the appropriate exit, and it can even navigate through interchanges, so you can go from one highway to a different highway and continue on to your you know, exit, the the appropriate exit for wherever you're going. At that point. You would then resume manual steering of the vehicle. There are also some non highway modes that you can use in full self driving there's an auto park feature, which means you can, you know, have your car park itself. It will guide the Tesla to parallel park itself or to park in a perpendicular space automatically. And there's kind of the reverse of that. There's the Summon feature, which, as you might imagine, summons your Tesla so that your car moves to where you are, kind of like an automated valet. And there's a mode that will automatically identify traffic lights and stop signs, which will guide your car to stop appropriately on city streets. So that would allow for acceleration deceleration on city streets, but not steering. So as of right now, auto steer on city streets is not an option. It is listed as coming up like an up humming option, but it's not there yet. So on city streets, full self driving really reverts down to a level one autonomous mode of operation because it handles acceleration and deceleration but not the steering, and in all modes, Tesla drivers are expected to supervise the operation of the vehicle at all times. All right, when we come back after this quick break, I'll wrap up with Greg's question here. So before the break, we were talking about how Tesla drivers have to maintain supervision of their vehicle even in full self driving mode, which keeps full self driving at level to autonomous operation at least in highway mode. On city street mode, you're still at level one, and Tesla for it, for the record, they are up from about this. So my beef with Tesla is that the names that it gives of these features, like autopilot, which is the more basic set of driver assist features, and full self driving, those names, at least to me on the surface, create a bit of misdirection. Uh, if you read up on it, If you actually go to Tesla site and you read up on autopilot and full self driving, you would quickly understand the limitations of those systems and the expectations Tesla has for its drivers, and you can probably suss out why Tesla chose those names in the first place. But I say, on the surface level, those terms are misleading at best. I think they said particular expectations that aren't realistic, and I think those unrealistic expectations have factored into some truly tragic accidents. So is Tesla responsible for those high profile accidents that we have seen, some of which lead to fatalities. That to me is a very difficult question to answer. So, on the one hand, the company communicates to drivers the requirement of actively supervising the vehicle, not relying on it as a self driving solution. They even go so far as to outright say it is not an autonomous vehicle. On the other hand, the marketing of these features to me, suggests that the vehicle is capable of handling everything by itself. Full self driving seems to indicate that the car will do everything for you. I don't think that Tesla should be totally off the hook here. I do think that Tesla drivers bear most of the responsibility for accidents. I do not want to give the implication that I think Tesla is fully responsible for any accident of a Tesla vehicle that was operating in full self driving mode. I don't think that's true. I think that the drivers bear most of that responsibility, largely because Tesla does communicate what the limitations of those modes are two drivers before they can activate them. Whether of the drivers read it or not is another question. It can be like one of those end user license agreements that everybody with a few exceptions just skips over so that they can click the eye accept at the end of it and move on with their lives. Um only a few people ever bother reading those and I worry that Tesla drivers can sometimes be the same way with the warnings and limitations of things like autopilot and full self driving. So it's hard for me to remove all accountability from the company itself. I do think Tesla bears at least some responsibility, perhaps for poor communication of what these these modes do, simply because the names are so evocative of things that that the modes just can't can't do. Anyway, as to whether full self driving does what Tesla says it can do, I think yeah it does. If you actually read what Tesla says the mode does. Uh, you have to take that time to do it. And if you don't do it and you just rely on the feeling you get from the name itself, you are going to walk away with the wrong impression. But at the heart of the matter, Tesla does pretty much. You know, let's spell out what the mode can and cannot do. So would I be comfortable writing with someone who activated Tesla's full self driving mode. Let's say I get in my next door neighbors Tesla. He takes me out on the highway and turns on full self driving. Well, if I had previously ridden with the guy and I knew that he was a really good driver, and that he was paying attention and that he's a responsible driver, then I probably feel comfortable because I know that he would be continuously monitoring the situation and ready to step in should anything unexpected happen. However, if the driver was someone that I felt was, you know, vaguely irresponsible and was clearly leaving everything up to the ca are, I absolutely would not feel comfortable at all, and I would be questioning every decision I had made in my life that led me to sit in that vehicle. I would be terrified. So I think the last several years have shown us that Tesla's particular approach to self driving technology has a really long way to go. It is tragic that in the process of learning about those gaps and capability, people have lost their lives and accidents. That is truly terrible. Obviously, it would be a lot better if any company would discover limitations like that through controlled tests that didn't endanger human lives or the lives of you know, other people who are on the road and aren't even involved in the vehicle itself. You could make the argument that the way Tesla has rolled out the features has inspired unrealistic expectations and has created situations where people have uh abused the technology. Now that's how I feel, but I also acknowledge that other folks might strongly disagree with me and say that the drivers should shoulder full responsibility for their actions. I don't quite feel that way, because I feel like if someone is selling you something and they call it one thing, and it's only by reading the fine print that you realize it's not it's not exactly what they're calling it, some of that responsibility has to follow fall on the vendor for a kind of misrepresenting the product. That's just how I feel though. That's my own opinion. But thanks to Greg again for his request. He also sent a follow up request asking me to do a full episode treatment for on Kio. I talked about how the company that created the on Chio brand has gone out of business. The brand itself lives on so A few people on Twitter have similarly asked me to do a full episode on Kio. So I'm going to be tackling that very soon. Keep an ear out for it, and if you would like to leave me a message, that would become a future tech Stuff talk back episode. Like I said, just go download the I Heart Radio app on your smartphone, navigate to tech Stuff. You'll see that there's that little microphone icon both on the main page and within each episode. You click on that, you record your thirty second message. Remember, let me know if you want that to audio to actually play within an episode, and then I will take care of it from there. It's a great little feature and I'm really enjoying how it's working out so far, and I'm looking forward to hearing from more of you in the future. And otherwise, if you just want to get in touch with me on Twitter, you can still totally do that to The handle for the show is tech Stuff H. S W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tex Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H