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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.
Why would the car continue to operate for 37.5 minutes of the trip if the driver didn't have his hands on the steering wheel? If that's a requirement, why didn't the car just pull over and shut off? It seems like Tesla failed to implement some common sense safety protocols here.
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.
Yet this driver has demonstrated that people are about as dumb as you think they can be, so now they've implemented a 3 strikes policy that disabled autopilot after 3 reminders.
There are various assumptions to make before pulling over the side of the road which may or may not be safer than simply having the car continue. You have to make sure there is an unobstructed emergency strip and you're not just careening the vehicle down a cliff. If your car makes the decision to go on a shoulder and something happens (or the shoulder doesn't exist), at that point the liability shifts because you've gone from passive "cruise control with intelligent lane following" to active intervention in a situation.
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The driver was watching a Harry Potter movie when he crashed, according to earlier published reports.
Turns out that was just rumor. The investigation concluded there was no movie being watched.
...what's your point?
All of the above are stupid.
If you are too tired to drive safely, you should not be driving, with or without fucking "autopilot".
How come when people insist that driving is hard and that autonomous driving is not around the corner, people say "driving isn't that hard". Yet when people are surprised that Autopilot can't simply pull over, people say "oh but that is really hard". So which is it? Sorry, for a car that is supposed to be ready for autonomous driving, this is pig shit. Parking may be hard, but it is nowhere near all the other situations it needs to deal with in traffic.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.