this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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Yeah, there are some major differences in the vehicles, but both disengage when there's anything out of the ordinary going on. Maybe people base their understanding of autopilots on the movie "Airplane!" where that inflatable puppet groped the Stewardess afterwards.
True, good point. As far as I know, it does turn itself off if it detects something it can't handle, though. The problem with cross traffic is that it obviously can't detect it, otherwise turning itself off would already be a way of handling it.
Proximity detection is far easier up in the air, especially if you're not bound by the weird requirement to only use visible spectrum cameras.
(To make things clear, I'm just defending the engineers there who had to work within these constraints. All of this is a pure management failure.)
At least for the base autopilot (AP), the only system I've experience with, this is not true. My car doesn't know it's on a road with cross traffic. It only knows it's on a road that it can see lane lines to differentiate lanes. It doesn't even know which direction they are supposed to travel. If I cross the center line, I could activate AP and it would keep me centered in the lane with oncoming traffic. This was all thoroughly explained to me when I bought it. I had no misconceptions about it's capability.
It really feels like the people who are so opposed to it are working off some major disinformation which only muddied the conversation when they state things that are plainly wrong or misuse terms.
I'm sorry, what? If you set an airplane to maintain altitude and heading with autopilot, it will 100% fly you into the side of a mountain if there's one in front of you.