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Tesla Model S Software Updates Lets Car Park Itself With No One Inside It (bgr.com)
An anonymous reader writes with a link to this article at Boy Genius Report about a software upgrade now hitting Tesla owners, which begins: Tesla earlier today began pushing out version 7.1 of its software to Model S and Model X owners and, suffice it to say, it's a doozy of a software update. While we'll get to the full changelog shortly, we first wanted to highlight a feature called Summon which enables users to park their cars without having to be inside it. Conversely, it also lets Tesla owners summon their cars that already happen to be parked.
The programmer in me says that you can't design infrastructure and situations for people's level of ability to deal with the unexpected, and then rely on strictly less able primitive AI in the same situations on the same infrastructure.
I always visualise a busy car park with two self-driving cars both stopped with noses together, trying to get into the same parking space and unable to safely proceed, and traffic backed up out onto the main road trying to get in.
Would that be the exact case that trips them up? Maybe not.
Maybe it's the guy with a short trailer sticking into the otherwise eligible car space.
Maybe it's unusually narrow and some idiot (or self driving car, same thing really) who can't read arrows on the car park concrete has gone down the wrong way and someone has to reverse through mixed car park traffic or nearly scrape other cars to resolve the situation.
The point is, there will be some case it just can't handle without human supervision, resulting in it stopping in the middle of a place other people need to drive.
Also, remember that even if you think of these situations, it is extraordinarily difficult to be sure that it won't be thrown off by variations of these situations that human brains lump together but it can't.
The trend with autonomous vehicles is the manufacturer is culpable for anything that happens when the vehicle is in autopilot mode. The question in my mind is: does this mean the vehicle will auto-switch back to manual control when collisions are imminent? They shouldn't, but does a manufacturer have the balls to try to get away with such a stunt?
A lesser version of this is refusing to switch to automatic when conditions are unfavorable, or a drunk driver trying to switch to autopilot right before crashing in to a playground, etc.