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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."
Now, although disabling automatic systems on manual input has been the standard for as long as automatic systems have been available, I am beginning to wonder if it really is the right decision here. People seem to be turning it off without realising that they have done it.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
The Tesla logging system is not under investigation for being unreliable.
Whether a hardware system is on or not is entirely different from any data that may be generated by it. There's a number of events required to enable autopilot, and all are logged.
Hourglass says she knows a kid in Iowa who grows up to be president.
This kind of thing - at the very least the finger pointing surrounding it - is why until now nobody put "beta" heavy machinery in the hands of the general public.
The general public should never be assumed to use things as designed - not all product liability lawsuits are as frivolous as they are sometimes portrayed.
I would probably find Tesla negligent just on the grounds that they are assuming people won't abuse (or even simply misuse!) the feature. Waivers notwithstanding - it would be interesting to see those in court, because I guarantee just about everyone who signed one would have to say "I just signed it to get the shiny, I don't know what it said" if they were being honest. This means there is no evidence of expectation in the general public that these things are "beta".
Put another way: you can call something "beta" all you want in theory, but if you're selling it to the general public, it ain't in practice.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
For fatal accidents, the per-mile rate is lower with Autopilot enabled.
But perhaps that doesn't tell the true story. Autopilot cannot be used in many situations, what if those situations are more dangerous? In other words, if the Autopilot can only be enabled on roads that are generally safer, then pure per-mile statistics are misleading.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
In response to the third reported Autopilot crash, which was the first of three where there were no fatalities
The first crash in Florida was the guy who got killed going under the truck while watching his DVD. .
The second crash was a gallery owner in Detroit and he and his passenger survived without any injuries
The third crash - the one apparently without autopilot - hit a guard rail in Montana. "The two occupants walked away without major injuries."
I don't know why this "fatalities in two crashes" myth is so pernicious. It was also falsely claimed in this Slashdot story on the third crash last Monday. But all of the linked articles are absolutely clear that there's been only one fatality, so it's not like the various submitters are just getting bad information from the media. Instead, the Subbys appear to be making up the second fatality out of nothing.
A more skeptical person than me would wonder if someone shorted TSLA.