Elon Musk: Autopilot Feature Was Disabled In Pennsylvania Crash (latimes.com)

An anonymous reader writes: In response to the third reported Autopilot crash, which was the first of three where there were no fatalities, Tesla CEO Elon Musk says that the Model X's Autopilot feature was turned off. He tweeted Thursday afternoon that the onboard vehicle logs show that the semi-autonomous driving feature was turned off in the crash. "Moreover, crash would not have occurred if it was on," he added. The driver of the Model X told police he was using the Autopilot feature, according to the Detroit Free Press. The vehicle flipped over after hitting a freeway guardrail. U.S. auto-safety regulators have been investigating a prior crash that occurred while Tesla's Autopilot mode was activated. Late Thursday afternoon and into early Friday, Musk made some comments on the improvements made to its radar technology used to achieve full driving autonomy. "Working on using existing Tesla radar by itself (decoupled from camera) w temporal smoothing to create a coarse point cloud, like lidar," he tweeted. "Good thing about radar is that, unlike lidar (which is visible wavelength), it can see through rain, snow, fog and dust." Musk has rejected Lidar technology in the past, saying it's unnecessary to achieve full driving autonomy. Consumer Reports is calling on Tesla to "disable hands-free operation until its system can be made safer."

Comments

Re:Hands-free?

[robbak]

If it does not detect your hand on the wheel for a certain number of seconds, it alerts to tell you to return your hands to the wheel, and, if you don't, then it slows the car down to a gentle stop.

Re:Maybe the driver believed it was enabled?

[WalksOnDirt]

The Tesla logs were reported as saying:

Prior to the collision, Autosteer was in use periodically throughout the approximately 50-minute trip.

The most recent such use ended when, approximately 40 seconds prior to the collision, the vehicle did not detect the driverâ(TM)s hands on the wheel and began a rapidly escalating set of visual and audible alerts to ensure the driver took proper control.

When the driver failed to respond to 15 seconds of visual warnings and audible tones, Autosteer began a graceful abort procedure in which the music is muted, the vehicle begins to slow and the driver is instructed both visually and audibly to place their hands on the wheel.

Approximately 11 seconds prior to the collision, the driver responded and regained control by holding the steering wheel, applying leftward torque to turn it, and pressing the accelerator pedal to 42%. Over 10 seconds and approximately 300m later and while under manual steering control, the driver drifted out of the lane, collided with a barrier, overcorrected, crossed both lanes of the highway, struck a median barrier, and rolled the vehicle.

Now, you can believe this or not, but it doesn't match up with your hypothesis.