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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."
You are a perfect illustration of the problem Tesla faces. You think you know what an airplane's autopilot does, based solely on the name, but you have no real clue.
Some, not all, modern autopilots in airplanes can land an airplane provided the the airport is a Cat IIIb or Cat IIIc; i.e.: they require a fair bit of active infrastructure on the airport. In other situations, or with the rest of the installed autopilots in the world, they will only assist the pilot in keeping the planes attitude and heading.
Yet whenever an airplane - be it a small private plane or a passenger jet - crashes when on autopilot, no one is suggesting the pilot is free of blame...
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Meanwhile, over a thousand people per day are dying in traffic accidents worldwide. SDCs likely could prevent most of those. You want that progress held up because, what, 3 people have died in a year? Get some sense of perspective.
"Buy our new car with DrivesItself* technology"
And then in small-print:
*car does not actually drive itself.
See the problem? Just change the fecking name.
And promotional material is skimmed by the very first owner only. You can put all the crap you like in there, it's still misleading to name it Autopilot.
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.
It's like saying you don't need a childproof medicine lid as long as you have the warning **Keep out of reach of children**.
I have no children, no children ever come into my home, but I do have rheumatism and childproof lids are also arth1proof. When the local pharmacy no longer provided easy-open lids, I switched pharmacies.
I shouldn't have to pay a price in pain because other people can't keep meds and spawn apart.
Options are good. Individual responsibility too.
The tricky problem about this technology is that it is aimed at taking the burden away from what is required to be able to take over. At least, most people perceive it that way at first. Proper training is required and you know what? In the end, it requires more concentration to watch on standby ready to take over than manually driving the car yourself.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.