Slashdot Mirror
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.
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 .