Mobileye Says Tesla Was Dropped Because of Safety Concerns

An anonymous reader writes: On Wednesday, Mobileye revealed that it ended its relationship with Tesla because "it was pushing the envelope in terms of safety." Mobileye's CTO and co-founder Amnon Shashua told Reuters that the electric vehicle maker was using his company's machine vision sensor system in applications for which it had not been designed. "No matter how you spin it, (Autopilot) is not designed for that. It is a driver assistance system and not a driverless system," Shashua said. In a statement to Reuters, Tesla said that it has "continuously educated customers on the use of the features, reminding them that they're responsible to keep their hands on the wheel and remain alert and present when using Autopilot" and that the system has never been described as autonomous or self-driving. (This statement appears to be at odds with statements made by Musk at shareholder meetings.) It is also emerging that the crash which cost Joshua Brown his life in May of this year was unlikely to have been the first such fatal crash involving Tesla's Autopilot. In January of this year in China, a Tesla ploughed into the back of a stationary truck at speed, killing the driver.

Comments

Re:Well...

[jeremyp]

Nope.

That's not what "statistically significant" means. What it does mean is that the result is unlikely to happen by chance. If there have only ever been two fatalities while driving on autopilot, there really isn't enough data to be confident it's not a random cluster and so the number is not statistically significant.

Re:Unreasonable

[bobbied]

Exactly. If you call something autopilot, then people expect it to be an... autopilot.

The problem though is actual "autopilots" are in airplanes and they range in complexity and features.

Some are simple 2 axis affairs that can maintain heading and altitude, sort of, as long as your DG doesn't drift and the altimeter works. Some are fully automatic, land in a fog bank worthy of a mystery novel affairs that literally do everything but talk on the radios from departure to arrival with little more than a few button pushes. Most fall in between the extremes.

Using an autopilot in an airplane requires the pilots be fully aware of the automation's limitations and be monitoring the flight's progress. It's purpose is two fold, 1. to lower the pilot workload and increase safety at critical phases in flight, by automating the more mundane tasks like controlling altitude, heading and speed, and 2. Increase efficiency by keeping the aircraft operating in its most efficient way possible.

Tesla's "autopilot" is something totally different. It's not about efficiency, and it's not about safety, it's about convenience. Though they call it an autopilot, it's most certainly isn't one. It's built for a totally different reason.