Man Says Tesla Autopilot Saved His Life By Driving Him To the Hospital (cnbc.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Last month a man sent an email to Elon Musk explaining how his Tesla Model S with Autopilot activated may have saved a pedestrian's life. Now, it appears Autopilot may have saved the life of a Tesla Model X driver. CNBC reports: "A Missouri man says his Tesla helped saved his life by driving him to the hospital during a life-threatening emergency. Joshua Neally is a lawyer and Tesla owner from Springfield, Missouri, who often uses the semi-autonomous driving system called Autopilot on his Tesla Model X. The system has come under fire after it was involved in a fatal Florida crash in May, but Neally told online magazine Slate that Autopilot drove him 20 miles down a freeway to a hospital, while Neally suffered a potentially fatal blood vessel blockage in his lung, known as a pulmonary embolism. The hospital was right off the freeway exit, and Neally was able to steer the car the last few meters and check himself into the emergency room, the report said."

Comments

call an ambulance

[YesIAmAScript]

Don't risk wrecking or running over people on your way to the hospital. Call an ambulance. Even if it is expensive, if you can afford a $100K car you can afford to call an ambulance.

Re:call an ambulance

[Swave An deBwoner]

You may have missed the point.

This is not about expectations of firefighters working for free, nor about cops.

In most civilized locales, firefighters (and cops) are paid through public funds obtained via taxes.

In rural Tennessee, it appears that the fire department is paid via individual homeowner "subscriptions", literally. If you don't subscribe then they will let your home and your pets (maybe your kids too, I don't know) burn. In fact it's not the firefighters who decided that, it was the pea-brained politicians and --, probably by the power of suggestion -- their constituents, who decided that. "No more taxes", yeah!

Corrected headline:

[Anonymous Coward]

Man puts other drivers at risk by keeping driving after being severely impaired with the help of a half-baked autonomous driving system.

Re:Not to diminish the usefulness of the feature

[gweilo8888]

This. Instead of hyping Tesla, this idiot should have called for an ambulance. What happens if he passes out on the way to the hospital, and then his "autopilot" decides it can't quite tell what it's doing and reverts control the unconscious driver? An accident, that's what.

Tesla owners really are a special kind of stupid to rely on autopilot like they do.

I hope his license is permanently revoked.

[Anonymous Coward]

So he knew he was in need of urgent medical attention and he knew his driving was severly impaired, but instead of getting off the road and calling an ambulance, he continued to drive, relying on a system not at all designed for such circumstances?

I have some sympathy for people who assume Auto Pilot will not have glaring blind spots due to trivial engineering shortcomings, but anyone who thinks it means you can drive while unconscious/dead is not fit to be on the road. Thank goodness he did not cause an accident on this busy freeway resulting in the injury/death of dozens of people.

This is the archetypal selfish cunt, who may have made a lucky call on this occasion, but certianly did not make the right one.

Terms of Use Violation

[Anonymous Coward]

But "everyone knows" you're not supposed to do this, right? Tesla tells you not to do this; you agree not to do this. If the article had been "man dies by using autopilot instead of calling ambulance" that's what a lot of people would be saying, right?

I'm not saying that the feature should be disabled or making any claim as to whether or not it's a net benefit. But if you're going to take credit for these situations where the autopilot worked when the driver was clearly not in any condition to drive, then you should take responsibility for its failures instead of deflecting fault because the driver was "distracted" or "inattentive".