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.
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.