Does anyone know the total fatality record for Teslas? They keep saying it’s the first fatal crash of a Tesla in self-driving mode. That sort of implies there were fatalities in Teslas with the driver at the wheel. I remember a while back, Elon Musk said nobody had ever died in a Tesla, then there was a guy who was killed when he crashed a stolen Tesla while in a high speed police pursuit. Musk said that one didn’t count against the Tesla’s perfect safety record. I would tend to agree with him, the thief was willing to risk his life to get away from the police. Stealing a Tesla is a stupid idea, they’d be able to track it remotely. But it would be a great getaway car if it had the Ludicrous Speed option. In any case, the thief was stupid and got himself killed.
I just don’t want Tesla to fuck up my self-driving car future by allowing public perception to equate their technology with that of, say Google’s. I’ve read and agree that Tesla’s Autopilot is more like a super advanced cruise control, while Google’s solution hopefully will be more like the future cars seen in Minority Report and iRobot. I’ll wait for the latter before getting creamed by a truck in a Tesla.
They have not claimed it is more than that, and that it is a good feature. The article says this is the first fatality in 130 million miles of these being driven. That’s a damn good record. And the only reason this guy got “creamed” is because he was not paying attention to the road in complete contradiction to what Tesla says to do.
As to google, there is no way their system will be completely foolproof. As noted here, the bright sky and the white truck were similar appearance, so the contrast was not picked up by the system. Google ain’t perfect, and I don’t see any system that would be perfect and pick up all scenarios. Not possible.
I don’t care what the system is, I want a person monitoring the vehicle, be it me or another driver. Trains have tracks, planes have autopilot. But both still have real people monitoring things. These types of features are designed to make operation easier, not to close your eyes and say “it’s cool, the machine has it”. This is not an automatic thermostat where the only consequence of malfunction is that your AC goes on at the wrong temperature.
So, his “need for speed” just could not be satisfied in a way that did not put the rest of us at such great risk? How about this headline " Ignorant jackass who thinks he owns the highway takes himself out; the rest of us breath a sigh of relief"
This is ridiculous . The truck driver is just trying to cover his as. The trick driver is at fault for turning in front of incoming traffic. How would he even know if auto pilot was engaged? And why would it make a difference if it was? He still failed to yield to oncoming traffic. People die from this all the time, no auto pilot required.
The truck driver was at fault, end of story.
Unless you are privy to information that is not contained in the article, there is simply no way to assert your theory conclusively. It is quite possible that when the trucker began to make his turn, there was no oncoming traffic visible to him, or that any traffic was what would normally be considered a reasonably safe distance. Perhaps traffic suddenly backed up and prevented him from completing the turn. I’m not saying this is what happened, either, just pointing out that there are plausible alternate explanations to the one you seem to be so sure of.
Sure, all those things are possible. But the burden of proof should be on the truck driver, not the dead guy and his auto pilot. The article clearly stated that the truck turned left in front of the tesla. Sure, a human would slam on the brakes to avoid the truck. But if there was not enough time to stop, it would still be the trucks fault, not the car that was unable to stop. Unless there is proof of excessive speed or other absolving factors, of course.
Frank Baressi, 62, the driver of the truck and owner of Okemah Express LLC, said the Tesla driver was “playing Harry Potter on the TV screen” at the time of the crash and driving so quickly that “he went so fast through my trailer I didn’t see him.”
The movie “was still playing when he died,” Baressi told The Associated Press in an interview from his home in Palm Harbor, Florida, saying the careening car “snapped a telephone pole a quarter mile down the road.” He acknowledged he didn’t see the movie, only heard it.
Other articles I’ve seen have arranged these sentences in a more honest way, with the last coming first. The truck driver got out of his truck, went over to the car (some ways down the road) and heard the sounds of what he said was Harry Potter. He didn’t see the movie playing and didn’t see it on the car’s video screen.