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.
They’re not true AR devices, they’re VR headsets masquerading as AR, you’re still just watching a video of the world around you. As good as the Vision Pro’s passthrough video, it’s still passthrough video and doesn’t have the same resolution as our eyes would have, plus it probably blocks out at least some of your peripheral vision. I do think having a HUD while driving would be nice, but it would need to be able to restrict any sort of extraneous content out (like youtube videos or whatever) and ONLY show information needed for driving (maybe have music/audio controls at most).
the only “HUD” I want while driving is one that dynamically dims LED headlights while leaving the rest of my view unaltered.
Speedo and tach projected in the bottom edge of the windscreen is really nice tho.