Tesla Defends Autopilot Again After A Fatal Model X Crash
Elon Musk has defended Tesla’s publication of investigation data following a fatal crash that happened while a Model X was driving on Autopilot.
Despite the whole world knowing that Autopilot is not a foolproof self-driving system and was never designed to be, Apple engineer Wei Huang reportedly refused to grab the wheel even after his car had issued several ‘take control’ warnings.
The accident occurred on 23 March, when the Model X struck a California Route 101 concrete lane divider head-on between a slip road and the main carriageway, causing massive damage to the car and fatal injuries to Mr Huang.
According to details released by Tesla, Mr Huang had received several warnings to retake control of the car, a process one fellow Tesla owner has suggested could have been caused by bright sunlight and ‘cut lines’ on the road that could have been mistaken for lane markings, confusing the car and triggering it to call upon the human driver.
After harvesting the car’s data, Tesla issued a blog post saying that the driver had “about five seconds and 150 metres of unobstructed view of the concrete divider.” The crash, which utterly destroyed the front of the car, was made much worse because the crash attenuator, a sort of crumple zone for the concrete, had been crushed in a previous accident and not replaced.
Tesla’s statement explained what the official investigation into the crash had found, clearly protecting its interests in terms of stressing that, while its level two autonomous systems are far from perfect, they were not directly at fault. The National Transportation Safety Board – an advisory body – had voiced its displeasure at Tesla’s release of the details.
Now Elon Musk has responded with a tweet putting the body in its place, pretty much asking the NTSB to stop butting into the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s business regarding autonomous driving.
The bottom line seems to be that it doesn’t matter what kind of autonomous car you’re driving. You, the human driver, need to stay alert and ready to take control at all times.
Comments
No matter how hard you try Elon, you just can’t fix stupid. What that says about the accident I really don’t know.
At the start of the video there is a nice clean g35
Maybe Tesla should test the buyers intelligence before they could buy them. The car had warned him to take the wheel but he refused. It’s like someone told you don’t poke the bee’s nest but you keep poking it anyway. Sorry i have no empathy for stupidness.
so true
Yeah!! The smartest idea ever!!! Why didn’t Tesla and Mr.Musk put it effort make it first ?
This is exactly why I think that autonomous cars are a bad idea. Not because of the car manufacturers or the technology behind everything, but because people will stop paying attention altogether. That’s not what the road is for. Traffic isn’t designed to follow certain patterns. It goes its own way and therefore nothing and nobody can avoid accidents, but if this driver hadn’t simply refused to do anything nothing would have happened.
I know that Tesla hasn’t designed the car for the driver to not pay attention, but even cars that are designed that way like the Renault from that CT video can only work with the data it collects. It can’t think of its own like a human.
Autopilot has no future.
It does, but tesla doesn’t have autopilot
As long as only the driver paid, I guess it could’ve been worse. Did he deserve to die? Probably not, but stupidly got the best of him. Let this be a lesson learned to all of us.
Lots of people on here bashing Tesla for making the technology available for use and saying drivers won’t want to pay attention. I’m sure there was a time when people thought the same about cruise control. It too is a flawed system by those standards because it will crash into the car infront at full speed if you don’t slow it down.
But tesla didn’t give us new technology, they just gave us a glorified lane assist
And this is why tesla should not call a glorified cruise control a autopilot, because people are easy to fool
They should ban the autopilot