Slashdot Mirror
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.
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)
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 should never be possible for a car to automatically crash into a large stationary object
tesla fucked up
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).
"Driver does something stupid and breaks expensive car, is in denial like all car owners, blames high-profile company and gets press coverage."
So if that is the case then it is pretty close to what Tesla says the Summon system won't detect.
Yup. I noted that.
Tesla says the car won't see things that are hanging from a roof and this setup is pretty close to that.
You are thinking like an engineer / software programmer and you are considering the problem with respect to your knowledge of where the sensors are and how they work.
A normal human being is not going to equate "a parked trailer on the ground" as being the same problem space as "things hanging from a roof".
So what should be the outcome then? If I sell you ammo that is perfect for hunting deer and then you shoot a person do you get to argue that "but you told me it was good at deer not people" as a way out?
Tesla's documentation is pretty clear. They even have videos showing how the system works AND they specify that you have to keep the vehicle under your immediate supervision while using summon mode (not to mention what ever by laws there are in your location). The guy fucked up, and I feel sorry for him for scratching his car. But we can't be passing liability to Tesla because the guy has no critical reasoning skills.
If I sell you ammo that is perfect for hunting deer and then you shoot a person do you get to argue that "but you told me it was good at deer not people" as a way out?
That analogy really doesn't fit at all.
If I sold you an automatic sentry gun (a la aliens) and claimed it would shoot anything that moved but that it wouldn't shoot people. And then it riddled a man in a wheelchair because... i dunno... wheels aren't people?
So what should be the outcome then
That was precisely the question I asked in my OP.
Whether the guy or Tesla or his insurance company pick up the repair on this car is almost beside the point.
The bigger question is whether this feature is ready for the public. IF it can't detect an honest to goodness parked vehicle in front of it, then its not ready for the public; even if that vehicle is a bit unusual -- its not THAT unusual.
And a disclaimer that it detects "most vehicles and works as expected except when it doesn't" doesn't absolve Tesla of responsibility. It didn't hit something hanging from a ceiling. It hit a parked vehicle in front of it.
And if the feature can be activated remotely, then Tesla should expect customers to operate it remotely; the car is driving itself; and Tesla should be on the hook for the accident... in my opinion.
But we can't be passing liability to Tesla because the guy has no critical reasoning skills.
I don't dispute the guy was a bonehead.
Tesla sold a car self-driving/self-parking car function that couldn't detect a vehicle in front of it in broad daylight to the public world of boneheads. I'd say Tesla lacked some critical reasoning skills too.
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
Blowing mod points here, but this is where Tesla fscked up... by defaulting the selection to time out to accept it... the dialogue message should have been 'Press to Accept'... and cancelling if it times out...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Who designed the UI to have accept as default on time out? At least they should have the equivalent of putting set -o noclobber in .bashrc
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact