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).

Comments

Summon into back of trailer mode?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Summon into back of trailer mode?

[quenda]

I thought these things had all sorts of avoidance built in?

It has conventional parking sensors, but thats not good enough.
This incident shows a clear design fault:
- normal parking sensors are low down, because their job is to detect things he driver cannot see.
- this Tesla ran into a high trailer with its windscreen.

CLEARLY- any sort of autonomous driving like this needs a camera or other sensors for the full front of the car, not just ones designed to supplement human vision.
Surely its not that hard?

Not so ridiculous

[jimmyswimmy]

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.

Re:Not so ridiculous

[shess]

I changed my mind after reading the article, it's not a UI issue, the car gave the user a warning on the screen, and the user had a chance to cancel. Quote:

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.

Yeah, this guy screwed it up (although it's kind of surprising how much information Tesla collects).

So his car was damaged by auto opt-in?

Dear submitter,

[Rhys]

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).

Probable

[thesupraman]

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).

Re:Options 3 and 4

[advocate_one]

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.

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...