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.

  • IronpigsWizard@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It was amazing what I saw people doing when commuting in L.A. traffic. Yes, it was very slow. You still could hit the person in front of you!

  • Mahonia@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • RubberElectrons@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • geekworking@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I am more concerned about the innocent people who will pay for the assholes “bad idea” will their lives.

  • werefreeatlast@lemmy.worldBanned
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    1 year ago

    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.

    I wish my Toyota gave me points for driving it!

  • fne8w2ah@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Between this and the crApple VR thingy on the NYC subway, this makes me wonder for the fate of humanity.

  • Copythis@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I mean, I’d use partial self driving on I5 to eat my taco bell, but I’m still paying attention to what’s in front of me!