Walter Huang was killed when his Model X slammed into a safety barrier.
Tesla insists that Autopilot is safe and only fails when drivers are distracted.
That can mean one of 2 things:
-
Autopilot is safe and will drive you anywhere you want to go safely, unless you get distracted, then it goes into “unsafe” mode and attempts to kill the driver. I doubt this is what they are trying to say with that statement, so number 2 is the most likely.
-
Its double-speak of epic proportions because the statement itself is implying Autopilot isn’t safe since it requires an alert driver to be ready to correct it. Its either “safe” or it isn’t. If its not “safe” without intervention, then its not safe and to claim otherwise is fucking delusional. At least state the truth, the autopilot is prone to mistakes and requires a human to pay attention to ensure the vehicle is being driven safely. The autopilot is most definitely not “safe”.
I think what they mean is that it’s safe to recover into manual driving mode, as in it won’t get stuck in auto pilot mode if you need to take over.
Of course they shouldn’t have called it fucking auto pilot then. They want the marketing but not the responsibility. If it were called something like driver assist it would communicate what it’s supposed to do better.
Right. It’s advanced lane follow.
-
Aren’t you still supposed to keep your hands on the wheel while it’s driving?
This is the main problem with “auto-driving” features right now. They work well enough that the driver stops paying attention to the road, but not well enough to be 100% accident free. This allows the auto manufacturers to point to distracted drivers as the cause.
We probably need something like an insurance fund paid for by the makers of the technology to handle the claims that come in. It would force the manufacturers to be a lot more cautious of rolling out these features.
My car beeps if my hand isn’t on the wheel after like 5 seconds and threatens to shut off the feature if you don’t get your bloody hand back on.
I tried it once, the car started beeping, then louder, louder, much louder, then started quickly biting the brakes in short intervals. After that I decided that I should let the car know I’m still alive.
But it should then put on the blinkers and slowly come to a stop.
It’s not a Tesla though.
Yeah you can buy a device that bypasses this for $15 on alibaba.
Back in the day, a water bottle would defeat this. It’s not a solution that actually viably works right now.
Apparently the Tesla just smashes into a guard rail and kills you if you don’t put your hands back on the wheel.
Teslas do this as well but it often takes more than 5 seconds…
Do both hands have to be on or just one?
In its initial investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board found that a video game — “a world-building strategy game with multiplayer capability” — was the frontmost app on Huang’s phone at the time of the crash. But investigators could not determine whether he was actively playing it when his Model X slammed into the concrete divider.
However, historical cellphone logs from Huang’s phone found “a pattern of active game play” during morning commute hours in the days leading up to the crash and data transmission “consistent with online game activity” in the minutes leading up to the crash. Huang’s family claims he was letting games run passively on his phone to collect data.
Thankfully it didn’t kill anyone else. Hope it hurt like hell.
Bets on Raid Shadow Legends?
“What? It is self-driving! It drives itself straight into walls!”
