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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).
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?
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.
Summon mode is a desperately over hyped concept of having the car crawl forward or backwards at ridiculously low speed, in a straight line while the owner holds down a button on the key fob.
It is, like every other part of Tesala's "autonomous car technology" about as far from being actually autonomous as it can get without getting them sued for false advertising.
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.
This is not a new phenomenon; the aviation industry has wrestled with this quite some time with automation in flight controls. Systems can silently shift from one mode to the other or get activated without the pilot realizing it has transitioned, resulting in unexpected actions and or unplanned contact with the ground. Absent a way to clearly let the operator know what mode the system is in results in confusion because the system doesn't responds as the operator expects leading to adverse outcomes.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
How this works is that you press the park button twice to activate autopark (aka summon). This brings up on the center display an overhead representation of the car with arrows front and back that you can press to move the car forward or backward. The flaw is that forward is the default. You don't have to press it. The default should be "do nothing", making the driver confirm intent to autopark.
The first time I saw this, I knew it would be trouble.
The trailer bed was up high with significant overhang of the rear axle
Actually... that's not the rear of the trailer. When I saw the still frame in the linked article I couldn't help but wonder where the underride guard (aka Mansfield bar) was, as they're extremely common these days. After watching the video I realized why - that was just the trailer (well, technically two in tandem) without the tractor out front. The Tesla crashed into the front of the trailer, not the back. When they slide the camera in under the trailer you can clearly see the nose plate and kingpin for a fifth-wheel setup. That's why there's no underride guard or anything low enough that the Tesla would see as an obstacle.
Then I thought maybe the trailer was parked backwards, but it's clearly on the right hand side of the road, with a vehicle parked behind it in the same orientation.
So now my question is - why did this goofball park his car on the wrong side of the road?
play some pinball and you will see all of what you listed happen.
Here's a better question: why does a summon mode, which somehow involves the car moving, use the 'park' selection on the shifter? That's just begging for mistakes like this. All he had to do was double tap the button while parking?
Design flaw.
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.