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.

Comments

Re:Simple question

[Jhon]

How do they know he was watching it? It might have been PLAYING... but how do they know he wasn't asleep?

Re:Simple question

[Jhon]

"Driving while tired is also a decision. If you make that decision, you are also dumb."

Tired or exhausted? Tired with autopilot might end up being as bad as driving while exhausted to the point of falling asleep behind the wheel without autopilot.

Re:Simple question

[Anonymous Coward]

If that's a requirement, why didn't the car just pull over and shut off?

Because the car isn't smart enough to do that. It can keep you between the lines on the road; it can't take you out of the lanes and park you up. That's actually a harder thing to do.

Isn't this the car that can park itself and then come fetch you when prompted remotely. Oh! Yes, it is! (Note: article predates this accident)

Re:Simple question

[Mr D from 63]

For the first few days people will be extremely cautious letting the autopilot do anything.

For the first few weeks they'll give it more leeway, but be very attuned to any warnings it gives.

After a few months, if they haven't had any real scares, they'll assume the auto-pilot knows what it's doing and generally ignore warnings.

Some people will be more cautious, but as a software developer this is exactly what I expect to happen with a significant portion of people. Everyone knows the right thing to do, we should backup our data rigorously, always use good unique password, follow the proper procedures, etc. But that's not how people work. If it's not part of a routine, and it's not given an immediate payoff, then people won't do it.

Give people a car that can self-drive in some situations and they will inevitably let it self-drive in every situation they can.

Its human nature. Bad driving habits reinforced over time. A certain percentage of people will grow unsafely confident and increase their risk. Just like texting while driving .

Too soon

[duke_cheetah2003]

I think this AI assisted driving should be taken out of the cars. This technology is not ready for the real world. It's just too tempting to turn this gadget on and doze off or some other totally stupid behavior, thinking the car can deal with driving on it's own.

Having this incomplete technology in service could hamper efforts to convince government entities that self-driving cars can and will be safe, when an immature technology is turning out to be not so safe. And trust me, regulators are looking at this and saying to themselves, "If this can happen, this technology is not safe."

Trust me, I want a self-driving car like yesterday, but the technology needs to mature more, more testing, in more situations needs to be done before this is ready for the end-user who's going to take a nap while his/her car drives itself.

Tesla is definitely at fault

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

It is basic safety design. Implemented even in steam engines. Trains are a good analog of autopilot because the locomotive drivers don't have to steer. They only control the speed manually. The biggest safety issue in locomotives is boredom. Eyes glaze over looking at the endless track, they ignore signals, their reaction time becomes very slow. Deadman's Treadle was introduced to make sure the loco drivers tread it once in so many minutes, else the train stops. In modern diesels they constantly issue alert and if the driver does not react it stops the train. Japan's bullet trains have their own methods to keep driver alertness. They always point to whatever they should be looking at, and look at it and say it aloud.

Given the history of how to handle inattentive drivers on machines that require very infrequent action, they should have designed the auto pilot with random reaction testing alerts and challenges.