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Driver Killed In a Tesla Crash Using Autopilot Ignored At Least 7 Safety Warnings (usatoday.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from USA Today: U.S. investigators said a driver who was killed while using Tesla's partially self-driving car ignored repeated warnings to put his hands on the wheel. In a 538-page report providing new details of the May 2016 crash that killed Ohio resident Joshua Brown in a highway crash in Florida, the National Transportation Safety Board described the scene of the grisly incident and the minutes leading up to it. The agency, which opened an investigation to explore the possibility that Tesla's Autopilot system was faulty, said it had drawn "no conclusions about how or why the crash occurred." The NTSB report appears to deliver no conflicting information. The agency said the driver was traveling at 74 miles per hour, above the 65 mph limit on the road, when he collided with the truck. The driver used the vehicle's self-driving system for 37.5 minutes of the 41 minutes of his trip, according to NTSB. During the time the self-driving system was activated, he had his hands on the wheel for a total of only about half a minute, investigators concluded. NTSB said the driver received seven visual warnings on the instrument panel, which blared "Hold Steering Wheel," followed by six audible warnings.
Of course he was going to ignore a warning that said, "Hold steering wheel."
Instead, the car should have said:
"What the hell are you doing with your hands off the wheel, you idiot???! Are you trying to crash? Do you want to die? Do you want to make your kids orphans?"
The warnings could get increasingly forceful as the car complains that its own safety is being jeopardized.
"I don't want to go to a body shop. They use hammers! Kill yourself if you want, but leave me out of it."
The accident was therefore Tesla's fault.
Because they trusted that the owner of an $80,000 car had at least some minimal intelligence and even if the driver had blind trust in the car, that when the car says "put your hands on the wheel and pay attention", that the driver would listen.
What if I go unconscious in my $80,000 car? Perhaps I have a heart attack, stroke, or simply had an unexplained fainting spell. So the car just beeps at me uselessly until it drives into something? Might as well use a traditional car, set it to cruise at 75 mph and take a nap because the end result will be the same.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
If you engage any sort of cruise control in the far left lane of a freeway, you probably intend to camp out in the lane and obstruct traffic so your car should detect this and helpfully explode.