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.
People on this site will shoehorn in a chance to hate on Tesla whenever they can. I got called a fanboy once for speculating why the cybertruck had such bad range. All I said was basically “I wonder if it’s a software bug,” and it was followed by 8 hours of being insulted by various people.
I’m not even sure how “I hate Tesla” translates into “this is definitely a thing people do and fuck you for suggesting this is done purely for attention and outrage!” But whatever. People can be wrong on the internet. Hell, maybe I’m even wrong. Wouldn’t be the first time. At the end of the day, the thread doesn’t matter at all. It will be forgotten about by everyone within the week.
I’m just vaguely curious whether these are the same folks who got suckered by tide pod challenges and other similar TikTok ridiculousness, or whether those people learned and this is a new batch of people jumping onto manufactured outrage. Welp… not going to get the answer today.