Elon Musk Says Tesla New Autopilot Features Would Have Prevented Recent Death (fortune.com)

An anonymous reader writes:Tesla Motors Chief Executive Elon Musk said on Sunday the automaker was updating its semi-autonomous driving system Autopilot with new limits on hands-off driving and other improvements that likely would have prevented a fatality in May. Musk said the update, which will be available within a week or two through an "over-the-air" software update, would rely foremost on radar to give Tesla's electric luxury cars a better sense of what is around them and when to brake. New restrictions of Autopilot 8.0 are a nod to widespread concerns that the system lulled users into a false sense of security through its "hands-off" driving capability. The updated system now will temporarily prevent drivers from using the system if they do not respond to audible warnings to take back control of the car. Musk said it was "very likely" the improved Autopilot would have prevented the death of Brown, whose car sped into the trailer of a truck crossing a highway, but he cautioned that the update "doesn't mean perfect safety."

Comments

Re:So what was the prior feature?

[Junta]

This is less like something like adding airbags and more like when airbags explode with shrapnel.

The former is an improvement that's seen as natural evolution of things. The second is a safety problem where a functionality is likely to do more harm than good and comes with liability issues.

Here, Tesla may be found to have been irresponsible by calling the feature 'autopilot' with a bunch of connotations in the minds of the users causing them to watch DVDs instead of driving. Additionally, 'beta testing' highly dangerous functionality is not something car companies generally get to do. When it comes to anything resembling autonomous vehicle operation, you can point at *any* other company and how extremely careful and conservative they are being. Even with similar 'lane assist' technologies that are in production vehicles, they *already* were being far more strict about monitoring driver attention than Tesla was.

So here we have Tesla being more aggressive about how 'automatic' things are, taking less measures for safety than the rest of the market offering equivalent feature today, and not being as conservative as the efforts that are what Tesla purports this technology to be.

I know there is a desire to bow down and really kiss up to Tesla, but they need to be held to the same standards as their competitors. They are not holy saviors of our society. They aren't even the only electric car company. They are certainly not the most accessible/affordable things. They have done nothing to earn having a blind eye turned to their mistakes.