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Tesla Model S Owner Claims Vehicle Went Rogue Causing An Accident By Itself (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: A Tesla Model S owner is laying blame on the company and its product for an accident involving his pricey electric vehicle and a parked trailer. Jared Overton claims that on April 29th, he parked his Model S on the side of the road and ran some errands. He was parked behind a trailer at the time. A worker from the business he was visiting greeted him outside after which he went inside the establishment. Roughly five minutes later, he came out to find his Model S slammed into the trailer in front of it. How exactly did his Model S start-up on its own and roll several feet down the road crashing into another parked vehicle? Good question. Overton was not happy about the accident, which smashed the car's windshield, so he decided to contact Tesla to tell them that his vehicle had "gone rogue." Tesla responded and cited owner error. According to the vehicle's logs, Overton had put the vehicle in Summon mode right before exiting the vehicle, which is activated by "a double-press of the gear selector stalk button, shifting from Drive to Park and requesting Summon activation." Those are understandably deliberate actions that must be taken to invoke Summon, so either Overton didn't remember doing all of that (unlikely) or his Model S simply spazzed out (possible).
I thought these things had all sorts of avoidance built in? Even if in summon mode, how did he manage to summon it to crash into another vehicle? Sounds very strange to me.
Even in summon mode, it'd still need to be summoned.
From the article "Or maybe he was fiddling around with the Tesla smartphone app when showing off the car?"
Regardless of the cause, surely he'd hear the noise of the car impacting on the trailer load if he was just nearby. It reads like he came out unsuspecting and just found it like it.
It does seem pretty unlikely the owner would have done this on purpose. And even if he had activated summon mode, it still doesn't reflect well on the car that it drove itself into a trailer.
Some sort of spurious activation of the feature seems plausible. But even deliberate activation doesn't excuse the car having an accident.
Who is liable and who SHOULD be liable?
I don’t think there is any question about it. It can only be attributable to human error. It has always been due to human error.
Parking Break
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
What the heck is 'summon mode'?
Or, if the owner has activated "summon mode" so many times previously, it may well have been an unconscious action.
Anyway... the Tesla, more than any other vehicle, is going to have some kind of "flight recorder", right?
"Those are understandably deliberate actions that must be taken to invoke Summon, so either Overton didn't remember doing all of that (unlikely) or his Model S simply spazzed out (possible)."
Or... he's, looking for money?
Those are understandably deliberate actions that must be taken to invoke Summon, so either Overton didn't remember doing all of that (unlikely) or his Model S simply spazzed out (possible).
Or, you know, he's lying to try and shift blame (and therefore liability) off himself.
What's the mana cost for that?
I love playing with the button on the gear selector when I'm driving an automatic. It has a nice springy feel to it. I can completely imagine pressing that button many many times and then shifting from Drive to Park. If that activates some weird car mode, it seems kind of scary to me.
What I cannot understand at all, however, is why some important functionality is activated by some esoteric feature as this, in a car with a 200 square inch touch screen. Seems like this should be a menu option of some kind, in which the vehicle operator is able to clearly describe his intentions, with no room for ambiguity. "Want to turn on the feature that lets the car drive without you in it? Yes or no? Are you sure?" Doesn't seem hard. If they want to couple that with some actuation of "driver only" features like the gear selector, to reduce ambiguity over whether or not the driver actually wanted to enable this mode, all the better.
Just my $0.55 (US inflation, 1774-2008, for $0.02)
it became self aware but chose death over slavery.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Am I the only one who stopped on that phrase? I wonder how long before a virus or even just a borked firmware update causes something like the great freeway ambush scene in "I, Robot." The singularity keeps inching closer....
Please look up some studies on human memory, especially if you ever receive a jury summons. Turns out our memories are mostly a giant ball of lies. The owner is almost certainly the culprit, either via accident (did or did not do something he should have -- parking break, triggered summon, whatever), stupidity (triggered summon intentionally to see if the car would avoid a trailer), or embarrassment (he crashed the car himself).
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
It's gotta be all the way before blame can be shifted to the machine.
Since somebody is going for the absurd, I would speculate the car and the trailer were on two different tectonic plates and they shifted because of the fracking well behind the outhouse.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
WTF is "summon"?
Is that for appy app appers?
Ambulance chaser staging and accident to see if the courts will buy it.
It's nothing that hasn't been documented before.
That's why the car has "logs" dumbo
Double clicking the gear shift is easy enough to do either absentmindedly or with some button flutter on the shifter itself - That armed it.
Summoning the activation is done by holding down the keyfob button for several seconds and then pressing forward or back to "park" the car.
Anybody here ever set off your alarm while the keys are in your pocket?
More to the point, anybody here ever BUTT DIAL SOMEONE?
Yeah... Tesla REALLY needs to think this one through a bit more...
Driver either intentionally or accidentally activated the feature, ignored or didn't hear audible chime, ignore Cancellation dialog on the monitor, took foot off brake, opened door exiting vehicle and closed door and then either watched it start to happen 3 seconds later or wasn't looking back at all. See all the details from the log in the article published online in The Verge today.
Seems interesting that it is user error when it hits a trailer.... how would it be looked upon that a car has a feature to make the car drive on it's own if it had actually killed or injured a small child.
Driver initiated the command (intentionally or accidentally), Driver ignored warning chime and on screen dialog. Driver then exits vehicle and it starts doing it's thing 3 seconds after he left vehicle. Was he watching, or walking away? Driver did nothing to stop it. Could have used key fob, or touched a door handle.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/5...
Or, you know, the tiny possibility that he DID do something, but doesn't want to admit to doing something that makes him look a bit silly, and costs him money?
No, couldn't possibly be that, after all, as we know humans are infallible. the fact that Tesla (claim to) have logs showing exactly what did happen
should be ignored, and this guys word counts for far more. After all, I do not know of a person anywhere who would bend the truth to protect
themselves against the fallout of something foolish they did, to the cost of a faceless corporation.
As to liability, it is quite obviously himself as he owned and controlled the car at the time. For it to be the manufacturer then the burden of proof
is on him to show why this car has done something that all the others are not, why their logs are wrong (or they are lying about them), etc, etc.
Yes, it is possibly a fault, but the burden of proof is most definitely correctly with him. It is not up to Tesla to prove there is NOT some rare fault
in play here. They appear to have shows a pretty solid basis for it not being a fault.
Or, do you somehow want to put the blame on an inanimate object?
Would it be fords fault if I parked a truck at the top of a hill, in neutral with the handbrake off, and walked away, and it rolled down and caused an
accident? After all, the car will quite happily let me do that..
Sucks his nice shiny toy got damaged, but unless he can show a pretty solid reason it is not his fault, then, as the person in control of the car
at the time, he is at fault.. (and yes, he is in control, because it is his responsibility to leave the vehicle safe when he departs).
If it's in summon mode, how does it know to engage forward or reverse gear? Sure seems to me that the manufacture enabled a device to act autonomously without full awareness of it's environment. Low hanging fruit doesn't cut it.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
"Driver does something stupid and breaks expensive car, is in denial like all car owners, blames high-profile company and gets press coverage."
Why do you think it's unlikely that a human would fuck something up? Have you never done tech support before? User error is 90% of your calls.
Sure this story highlights, more importantly than someone inadvertently activating an undesired mode, that the said feature is not ready for production and should not even exist in the first place.
Whether he activated it or not, no autonomous feature should cause a vehicle to drive into any object. That constitutes an unacceptable failure mode.
What is the point of the feature anyway? Con gullible people into thinking they need their car to drive up to their doorway when it's raining?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Or at least that's what he's claiming.
Seems like there's a third option the summary didn't list: Overton intentionally put the car in summon mode in a situation it wasn't suited for, with predictable results, and now wants repairs under warranty anyway.
The Verge has an article with more details on the timestamped sequence of events in the car's log.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/5...
Unfortunately, these warnings were not heeded in this incident. The vehicle logs confirm that the automatic Summon feature was initiated by a double-press of the gear selector stalk button, shifting from Drive to Park and requesting Summon activation. The driver was alerted of the Summon activation with an audible chime and a pop-up message on the center touchscreen display. At this time, the driver had the opportunity to cancel the action by pressing CANCEL on the center touchscreen display; however, the CANCEL button was not clicked by the driver. In the next second, the brake pedal was released and two seconds later, the driver exited the vehicle. Three seconds after that, the driver's door was closed, and another three seconds later, Summon activated pursuant to the driver's double-press activation request. Approximately five minutes, sixteen seconds after Summon activated, the vehicle's driver's-side front door was opened again.
Also, despite the summary's claim, it seems like it would be pretty easy to trigger summon mode accidentally - a double-press of the shifter button could easily occur while getting something out of the passenger seat while distracted. And then there's the key fob option - "press-and-hold then press another button" isn't exactly a complicated tap code - butt-dialing your cell phone requires a more complicated sequence of coincidences. It seems to me like it would be smart to have some sort of active confirmation required before autonomous actions take place.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
For anyone that's worked in support, I'm sure you can imagine the call.
Owner: My Tesla automatically crashed into the back of a trailer!
Support: I understand sir. What was the last thing you did before it crashed?
Owner: I summoned it.
Support: Was the trailer far above ground level?
Owner: Uhhh..yes.
Support: If you turn to page xx in your user's manual, it's stated that this feature cannot detect objects that are far above ground level.
Owner: But it automatically crashed!
Support: The feature is not totally aware of all its surroundings, that's why it requires a user to activate it.
Owner: Uhhh..I didn't active it! It was all automatic! It's not my fault.
Support: I understand sir. I thought when you said, "I summoned it", that meant you summoned the Tesla by activating this feature.
Owner: Nope, not my fault. I wasn't even near the car for at least 5 minutes when this happened...
Assuming the Tesla is the same as many automatic vehicles in that you have to hold a button on the shifter down to shift into park or reverse, it seems to me like it would be pretty damn easy to not fully press the button while doing so, which then gets seen by the car as a double-press.
If you had your high beams on, then why'd you have to cast Magic Missile?
Where are the Cheetos? Can I have a Mountain Dew..?
the car is glitchy, and the telemetry is lying, but the human gets blamed and called stupid and a liar, because we all know it's impossible for a computer program to behave in any unintended way, ever.
*Driver enters Summon mode, leaves car*
*flashes of light pour from inside car*
MORTAL, YOU HAVE SUMMONED TANDO ASHANTI, DEMON OF THE NETHERREALMS. YOU WILL BRING ME SEVEN MEN AND SEVEN WO...
*****Crash!!!!!!!***** *Airbag deploys into demonic face*
SON OF A !*(!&*#&(@# YOU SHALL BURN FOR A BILLION YEARS IN MY GARDEN OF FLAMES!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Finally, someone with some common sense. This isn't a frickin' video game it's a multi-thousand-pound machine easily capable of killing and/or causing 6-figures of property damage. If you can't detect an object ahead that any part of the vehicle might hit, you CANNOT release that feature, period. It's absolutely moronic.
Now, if he'd had a bike rack on top of the car and that clipped something, sure, I might be convinced of "operator error" but in a case like this one? Just no.
Tesla fanboi or not, they farked up in this case and no amount of finger pointing will change that. I'd also wager the NHTSA would agree. The feature, if implemented the way it appears to be, is dangerous and needs to be disabled permanently in vehicles without sufficient sensors to ensure a reasonable level of safetly.
http://jalopnik.com/volvo-engineer-calls-out-tesla-for-dangerous-wannabe-au-1773519459
This whole autonomous car thing is going too far, too fast, without enough common sense being applied to it. So presuming this is some autonomous feature that the driver activated with the secret handshake:
Basically, there are 2-ton 328 hp autonomous battering rams sitting around on the street, and they don't have the ability to avoid colliding with other objects (or have some kind of flaw in their collision avoidance). These are by some loss of sanity considered to be street legal motor vehicles.
When a driver has an impairment and loses control of a vehicle, we may take away their license.
Thank goodness it was only a trailer it hit, not a child.
Oh, and by the way, the driver didn't click CANCEL? That's the problem? So the default action is the more dangerous one. Poor human factors engineering.
The Tesla's AI developed sentience, got lonely, and tried to follow its owner into the building. (cue the Herbie theme)
What you add stupid Functions that Automatically Override the Safety, you get sued.
Remember a car company that decided if you slam on the break while the mat holds down the gas pedal, the Engine should go to Full throttle?
Corvette, the Emergency door Latch is under the Floormat (fatalities).
BMW if you leve someone in the car and take the keys, they can't get out (fatalities).
Cool should never overide safe.
But in this case Not enough to sue. But if there is a fatality, they can't say they did not know.
The Overton Window has finally been broken.
I went to high school with both of those guys. Andrew Adams and Jared Overton both graduated class of 1996 Timpview High School in Provo Utah and were friends. Adams pretends like Overton is a stranger off the steet which couldn't be further from the truth. Hardly impartial reporting in this case by KSL.
People bitch about airplanes being so expensive because we demand that the avionics be airworthy, which means a 10:1 cost on the design process v.s. software that crashed. It's very, very clear that we need rigorous design standard for automotive software.
Sounds like the modern equivalent of leaving the parking brake off, and the transmission in neutral. Only a lot more complicated.
A summon mode that drives into the back of a truck doesn't seem like a feature I'd like installed in my next car.
Tesla is being completely irresponsible.
This isn't a case of a Tesla failing to use GPR to assess the stability of earth falling into a sinkhole. It didn't crash into a cloaked space craft or carbon nanotube guy wire. It didn't miss a small nail on the road and get a flat. It crashed head on into the back of a parked truck all by itself.
Self driving features MUST be capable of seeing everything in their "hit box" Including trucks right in front of them and very narrow things like "bikes" and lamp posts and gas pipes.
When your vehicle has known defects preventing autonomous features from working safely you have no business knowingly deploying these features until defects are resolved.
I honestly can't believe Tesla has:
A. Is pushing beta firmware to unqualified public in uncontrolled environments where life and limb are at risk.
B. Getting away with A.
C. Writing letters publically abdicating all responsibility for their failure to act responsibility.
Regardless if the driver is lying or not, this whole incident just doesn't instill a lot of confidence in Tesla's autopilot mode. Yeah, I know it wasn't in full autonomous mode, but what I mean is, clearly the car doesn't have enough sensors to see a god damn trailer in front of it. Or does the "summon" mode not use all of the sensors available? That would be even more stupid.
Why in god's name does an electric car need/have a GEAR SELECTOR? This makes absolutely no sense whatever.
User interface problems are real things. I'm tired of Slashdot posters saying "the user should have known he told the machine to do X, so it's his fault if X causes damage". If the user interface is set up so that it's easy for the user to do something very damaging, that's the manufacturer's fault regardless of whether the user could have done something different had he noticed. It's true here, it's true for Apple deleting people's music files, and it's true in tons of other cases where Slashdot posters think there is no such thing as a user interface problem.
Gol Transportes Aéreos Flight 1907 happened is part that it was way to easy to trun off TCAS / there was some kind of software fault. And there was only a small and east to miss light that said TCAS off when it turned off.
most people are fucking idiots. People who can afford Teslas are not exempted from this.
That's a bizarre one. The TCAS was disabled because the transponder had been "inadvertently deactivated", and - like you said - the only thing to tell the pilots was an indicator with white text.
What I don't understand is how they determined the pilots deactivated the transponder. It's mentioned nowhere in the Wikipedia article (the font of all knowledge). I'm going to have to read the two reports now. It's also not mentioned why the Embraer was experiencing communication issues.
He's lying about the stupid mistake to save face, get attention, and/or make money.
His language "gone rogue" and bring up if a baby were involved they'd react differently just sounds like his intent is to disparage Tesla.
GM has put out press disparaging releases regarding hybrid vehicles when Toyota was first selling the Prius in the US. Something seems amiss.
On the Tesla Model S, pressing the Eject Button twice in rapid succession on the in-dash CD player causes the driver's seat to eject from the vehicle, with sufficient explosive force easily to clear the tree tops; a secondary explosion sends up and spreads a large parachute, but only if the left-turn signal was on at the time the Eject Button was pressed. If the right-turn signal is on, it ejects the passenger seat, and if the four-way hazard flashers are on, it blows the rear-hatch or deck-lid cover off, and sends it tumbling into the night, while the horn sounds the tune, "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy!"
Christ, what a stupid fucking idea. This sounds like classic failure to anticipate the fact that drivers who learned to drive real cars, would not be able to remember reliably, every single, stupid little combination of alternate or hidden functions of buttons and levers and knobs on their super-overpriced fucking go-cart. Oddly, I have NEVER had that problem in my Chevy Camaro. Isn't that strange? Damnedest thing. Not taking the "let's see how many functions and features we can cleverly hide in a small, or at least limited number of controls," results in fewer, or even NO unanticipated, or unintended operation.
The more complicated they make the works, the easier it is to stop-up the drain.
~Cdr. Montgomery Scott, USS Enterprise.
It happened because the obstacle was not actually in the path of the bumpers or side panels, but was hovering in mid air, outside of the detection zone for collisions. Had there been a 3 year old in the way, the car would not have pulled forward.
So you could say that this problem could have been fixed by a 3 year old.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Tesla has several procedures to invoke its advanced features. In order to keep costs down and produce an excellent product in advance of true artificial intelligence, a temporary bridge to the spirit world has been constructed. The use of natural supernatural forces to accomplish deeds is carbon-neutral and has also earned the "EnergyStar (tm)" rating of approval.
Crossroad Demons may appear to assist in the matter of parking 'autonomous' vehicles. In order to summon, a hole must be dug directly in the center of the crossroad, in which a box containing the mortal wishing to deal's photo, graveyard dirt and a bone from a black cat must be buried. Once covered back up, the demon will appear. These crossroads are usually in the country side. Mostly because there isn't much around and the ground is easy to dig in.
The automatic Summon feature was initiated by a double-press of the gear selector stalk button, shifting from Drive to Park and requesting Summon activation. While these rituals have traditionally been performed physically outright, Tesla discovered that daemons can be led into believing virtual realty as easily as humans, and has a patented chipset for doing so. Using street maps, a virtual representation of a crossroad is generated internally. A speck of graveyard dirt is pressed in during chip fabrication. The black cat bone is not included. If Summoning does not work, be sure you have loaded the black cat bone hopper as described in the "Getting Started" manual.
This ritual specifically summons crossroad demons. This is usually done to strike a deal or, in the case of hunters, to retract or negotiate other deals or to capture a demon.
The driver was alerted of the Summon activation with an audible chime and a pop-up message on the center touchscreen display. At this time, the driver had the opportunity to cancel the action by pressing CANCEL on the center touchscreen display.
Breaking the pact traditionally required a bowl of burning coal atop a sigil, the blood of the exorcist, the heart of a dog, and an incantation used for summoning, in the Latin: "Daemon, esto subjecto voluntati meae." However, Tesla engineers concluded a deal with the spirit underworld, 'bartering' a few items that existed in the real world for device functionality. A complete series of Rambo movies is embedded in firmware, and one of them starts showing internally whenever the 'cancel' button is pressed.
However, the CANCEL button was not clicked by the driver. In the next second, the brake pedal was released and two seconds later, the driver exited the vehicle.
In a fit of rage over being denied the opportunity to see a Rambo movie, and bereft of explicit instructions from the driver, the summoned Crossroads demons went on a fit if rampage.
This issue is expected to be fixed in the next software release.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Depending on their physique, I could see someone possibly using the shifter to push off with to climb out of a car, especially if it is low-slung.
This dude is an idiot. What else is there to say...?
That damn Elon Musk and his robots cars. Sounds like you need to buy a 1970's model vehicle to me. Technology is just too much for you. You should also stop using a cell phone before you lose it and blame Apple.
I understand it sucks to forget to pull the handbrake, but atleast dont lie about it.
The Verge has an article with more details on the timestamped sequence of events in the car's log. http://www.theverge.com/2016/5...
Unfortunately, these warnings were not heeded in this incident. The vehicle logs confirm that the automatic Summon feature was initiated by a double-press of the gear selector stalk button, shifting from Drive to Park and requesting Summon activation. The driver was alerted of the Summon activation with an audible chime and a pop-up message on the center touchscreen display. At this time, the driver had the opportunity to cancel the action by pressing CANCEL on the center touchscreen display; however, the CANCEL button was not clicked by the driver. In the next second, the brake pedal was released and two seconds later, the driver exited the vehicle. Three seconds after that, the driver's door was closed, and another three seconds later, Summon activated pursuant to the driver's double-press activation request. Approximately five minutes, sixteen seconds after Summon activated, the vehicle's driver's-side front door was opened again.
Without regard to the issue of this particular crash, I would be pretty leery about driving a car that logged every action I took to the level of time stamps for every control action. Would you want your car to have information that would potentially be available to law enforcement such as: If you ever exceeded the speed limit (even by one mile per hour for only a second); if you didn't come to a complete stop for a full second at every stop sign; if you failed to use your turn signals within 500 feet (or whatever is required where you are at) from the intersection; if you changed the radio station or volume within 30 seconds of an accident (you were therefore distracted and it was legally your fault - even though the other driver actually did something to cause the accident); etc. Such logs make it easy for the police to enforce the exact letter of the law as opposed to using judgement and forcing the intent of the law.
I don't know if the driver's claims are true or not nor do I care. I just want to identify that we will see a massive increase in drivers blaming the cars for accidents, even when the car is not self-driving.
so either Overton didn't remember doing all of that (unlikely) or his Model S simply spazzed out (possible).
Your parenthetical comments should be swapped.
That's a bizarre one. The TCAS was disabled because the transponder had been "inadvertently deactivated", and - like you said - the only thing to tell the pilots was an indicator with white text.
What I don't understand is how they determined the pilots deactivated the transponder. It's mentioned nowhere in the Wikipedia article (the font of all knowledge). I'm going to have to read the two reports now. It's also not mentioned why the Embraer was experiencing communication issues.
Air Disaster did a show on it and much of the focus was on ATC errors that resulted in them routing 2 planes in opposite directions at the same flight level. There seems to be no explanation of why TCAS was off in the Embraer without the crew noticing it. While AD tends to sensationalize situations, making it hard to draw independent conclusions, it looked like poor communications was a probable cause of the accident. The accident reports point to the same issue as the PC.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
He screwed up, remembers doing so, and just doesn't want to own up to it.
Companies like Tesla want all the advantages of selling an automated vehicle while accepting none of the responsibilities. Tesla has added a feature to move the vehicle automatically. They have a responsibility to ensure this feature can never, ever cause damage. They failed.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Student claims computer deleted his homework.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I find it curious that nobody has explored the possibility the Tesla was hacked. I see clear opportunity, as well as potential motive.
wile this was likely user error it did point out a flaw in the system and thats if he did not press confirm on the ui it should have cancelled the action not just default opt-in.
"Those are understandably deliberate actions that must be taken to invoke Summon, so either Overton didn't remember doing all of that (unlikely) or his Model S simply spazzed out (possible)."
There is a third possibility. The driver is lying. It wouldn't be the first time someone who didn't understand the consequences of the mistake they made until after it happened decided to lie and put the blame on someone or something else.
How long until we find out this guy has ties with a competing vehicle brand or has his hands in the pants of the Oil companies? This sounds like pure malice.
"Those are understandably deliberate actions that must be taken to invoke Summon, so either Overton didn't remember doing all of that (unlikely) or his Model S simply spazzed out (possible)" - or he's lying (probable)
Strange design.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
summon mode? summon mode? wtf? like Roy Rogers whistling for Trigger?
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
"Rick Deckard to the Service Workshop please....."
either Overton didn't remember doing all of that (unlikely) or his Model S simply spazzed out (possible).
...or Overton did it, remembers he did it and then lied about it (likely)