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Tesla Owner In China Blames Autopilot For Crash (usatoday.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from USA Today: The owner of a Tesla Motors Model S sedan in China reportedly said his vehicle crashed into a car on the side of the road while the vehicle's Autopilot system was engaged, but the automaker said the driver was using the system improperly. Luo Zhen, 33, of Beijing told Reuters that his vehicle collided with a parked car on the left side of a highway, damaging both vehicles but injuring no one. He criticized Tesla sales people for allegedly describing the vehicle as "self-driving." "The impression they give everyone is that this is self-driving, this isn't assisted driving," he told Reuters. In the new case in China, Tesla said the Model S was "following closely behind the car in front of it when the lead car moved to the right to avoid hitting the parked car." "The driver of the Tesla, whose hands were not detected on the steering wheel, did not steer to avoid the parked car and instead scraped against its side," Tesla said Wednesday in a statement. "As clearly communicated to the driver in the vehicle, Autosteer is an assist feature that requires the driver to keep his hands on the steering wheel at all times, to always maintain control and responsibility for the vehicle, and to be prepared to take over at any time."
The sensor does stop the car after a couple of minutes of not touching the wheel or responding to prompts.
I don't think forcing the user to keep their hands on the wheel at all times will help much. Take a look at this video of a guy sleeping with autopilot on, presumably with one hand on the wheel so that it thinks he is paying attention.
The real issue here is that if the car does 99.9% of the work for hours on end you can't really expect human beings to remain attentive and ready to take over in a fraction of a second. Tesla have found the danger zone of inattentiveness between a high level of automation and full autonomy.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
An autopilot landing is actually more work and is more stressful than a normal, manual landing. There's a checklist of things to verify before you can even start the approach, and we have to be extremely attentive to any errors the autopilot could make. We regularly practice these approaches in the simulator: ground equipment failures, autopilot failures, instrument failures, engine failures, you name it. Some of these are quite subtle, like the one that crashed a Turkish Airlines flight in Amsterdam in 2009. The radio altimeter malfunctioned, so the autopilot thought it was close to the ground and pulled the throttles back to idle. In reality, the plane was still 500 ft above the ground and stalled.
Interestingly, the accident was classified as "pilot error" because the pilots should have intervened when the speed dropped below approach speed.