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Tesla Driver Banned From Driving For 18 Months For Sitting in Passenger Seat (theguardian.com)
A 39-year-old motorist pointed his Tesla S60 down a highway at 40 mph -- while sitting in its passenger seat, leaning back with his hands behind his head. Another motorist spotted the empty driver's seat and filmed the car. Now (nearly a year later) the Tesla's owner "has been banned from driving for 18 months," the Guardian reports.
The driver, from Nottingham, pleaded guilty to one count of dangerous driving after admitting he switched seats when he turned on the car's autopilot mode, leaving the car's brakes and steering wheel unmanned. The driver admitted that the stunt in May last year had been silly, but insisted that he was simply "the unlucky one who got caught" trying out the "amazing" feature on the car.
As well as the 18-month driving ban he was ordered to carry out 100 hours of unpaid work. He was also put on a 10-day rehabilitation programme and will have to pay £1,800 in costs.
A police officer called the behavior "reckless," adding that autopilot controls like the ones on Teslas "are in no way a substitute for a competent motorist in the driving seat who can react appropriately to the road ahead."
As well as the 18-month driving ban he was ordered to carry out 100 hours of unpaid work. He was also put on a 10-day rehabilitation programme and will have to pay £1,800 in costs.
A police officer called the behavior "reckless," adding that autopilot controls like the ones on Teslas "are in no way a substitute for a competent motorist in the driving seat who can react appropriately to the road ahead."
You mean the cars don't go into pull-over-and-park-safely mode if the driver is missing or seems to be asleep or incapacitated?
That's dumb. Not as dumb as what this driver did, but dumb nonetheless.
Another ignorant asian , f* indian/paki in fact
This dude placed a lot of trust in autopilot when we have a few instances so far of autopilot fatally driving into fixed obstructions (highway exit divider, truck laying across the road, etc).
It's because idiots like him that we can't have nice things
This falls into the latter category. This particular idiot should be banned from driving for life.
A 39 year old Millennial.
Does the car get community service for allowing the driver to sit in the passenger seat?
Does that mean he can do what he did once again? If he was sitting in the passenger seat, he wasn't driving.
In this modern age of hold your hand safety features, why exactly doesn't this thing have a seat weight sensor? Or are they just in the passenger seats and the designers simply assumed their would be a driver? Even lawn mowers have them.
a 10 day rehabilitation programme
What is that? Hopefully it involves some pounding in the rear quarters
Those shiftless darkies are always sleeping, when they aren't dancing or stealing shit.
I kind of want to buy this guy a beer.
The driver is named as Bhavesh Patel. I've been to India and Nottingham (forget all that stuff about Robin Hood, it's now part of Gujurat) and I can guarantee you that the very worst AI driving software is infinitely safer than any person with even a trace of Indian DNA.
Here in England there are driving offences such as "Driving without due care and attention", "Dangerous driving", "Driving or attempting to drive while above the legal limit or unfit through drink" and so on. None of them is as heinous as "Driving like an Indian".
So give Bhavesh Patel a break, he was actually making our roads safer than if he had engaged his own laughably unsuitable brain matter and other genetic material for the task in hand. The man is a saint.
Most of the readers of this site understand how well, that is, not well, such a feature works in reality when it comes to dealing with the infinite complexities of driving. The average person though, after hearing "auto-pilot" and drinking the Kool-Aid of the media repeating how great autonomous vehicles are going to be (Slashdot is not an exception to this) will not think twice about putting human lives completely in such a feature's digital hands.
Maybe 'autopilot' should be called 'driver assistance' to avoid further confusion?
Requiem for the American Dream
How long before the autopilot will need to detect a driver, in the driving seat, before engaging?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Tesla royally fucked up by calling this autopilot. Its practically an invitation to the average schlub to do stupid things like this. They should have called it something less tempting, like "Safety Net" or "Save Your Ass" or "Augmented Driving" or even "When Your Kids are Fighting in the Backseat and You Are So Frazzled That You Turn Around and Yell at Them."
And to the pedants who want to argue that regular schlubs should know that "real" autopilot systems in airplanes don't actually do everything, spare us. Pedantry is just a form of masturbation so do it in private please.
Shouldn't they also prosecute the other 'motorist' who snitched on him, for filming with his phone while driving?
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
So the Sheriff of Nottingham caught him?
A police officer called the behavior "reckless," adding that autopilot controls like the ones on Teslas "are in no way a substitute for a competent motorist in the driving seat who can react appropriately to the road ahead."
Is he suggesting this guy was a competent motorist?, his actions alone prove he shouldn't be allowed to drive ever as he obviously has no understanding of what is required to be competent, maybe in this case the Tesla Autopilot "was" the safer option and at least it revealed what a fucking moron he is and that he shouldn't have a license.
The only thing sadder than the effort idiots go to is the companies which enable them: https://thetikit.com/
What do you have against natural selection in action? Trying to prevent improvement in the human gene pool? (Same issue with seat belt and motorcycle helmet laws.)
He showed his contempt for the court and other road users, by saying that he was the unlucky one who got caught.
Thank goodness that he was the lucky one who didn't cause a horrific accident.
In this modern age of hold your hand safety features, why exactly doesn't this thing have a seat weight sensor?
Because putting a sensor in for every idiotic thing idiots can do isn't exactly financially viable, and an idiot sensor doesn't exist.
Plus, all you'll do is breed a better idiot as a result.
No. We already have these sensors in passenger seats of every vehicle so that they can warn the passenger to buckle their seat belt. It's a commodity.
It is predictable that people would try to use their Tesla this way, and it could obviously cost lives, so they should be built to at least warn you against doing this until they are ready to be fully autonomous. He put the lives of everyone on the road at risk.
If there isn't a sensor, there should be one. If there is one and it's only designed to trigger on the seat belt and he had the seat belt plugged in, then he bypassed the security check.
Real lawyers write in C++
when your drunk... Its probably safer but still stupid to do.
[($)]
Stupid liberal cunts in the UK took away the death sentence.
Now we have brexit let's take back control and fry fuckers like this.
While I don't think autonomous vehicles are a good thing, and I wouldn't trust one enough to get in one (nor do I relish being anywhere near them as they share the road with me), I think it's also silly to accuse the "owner" (I'll explain the quotes below) of doing what such cars purport to deliver (which you describe as "drinking the Kool-Aid of the media") instead of challenging automakers and proponents to supply compelling reasons why anyone should bother with autonomous vehicles. If what we're told is true, it seems reasonable to do what this fellow did. The reaction against the lounging passenger seems to me indistinguishable from sycophantically siding with power. I recall there was a discussion about a proposed car that had no controls for the person in the driver seat. If this car is made and someone uses one and is found lounging or even drinking alcohol in the seat formerly known as the driver's seat, who's side will the power sycophants take then?
By the same token, amazon.com offers a way to deliver packages inside one's home or car. I'm sure there are people who think that this ostensible convenience completely outweighs letting unaccountable strangers into one's home or car. Again, here too I don't think such delivery is worth having and I think anyone who takes them up on it is being foolish. But by what right would I hold it against the customer when their house is robbed or their car gets altered, damaged, or stolen because they believed what was promised to them? At what point do we start defending what's in our interest: stop lying to us about the features and start offering services that respect our privacy, our property, and focus on improving the nature of the service by delivering goods on time and without mishandling the package.
Why the quotes around "owner" in this context? Self-driving cars are spybots riddled with proprietary software. For all we know, the car's controls can be taken over remotely by a number of different people in multiple organizations any time they want to; I imagine police love the promise of these vehicles because they could be made to ignore the driver's instructions and pull over whenever the police are nearby (should we think the police are fools to "drink the Kool-Aid" of this promise?). Therefore calling the person who pays for this tracker-on-wheels an "owner" of their vehicle seems to me an incredible claim.
Digital Citizen
Are these people so obsessed with this auto pilot feature they want everyone to know it? Does scream out âoelook at meâ! Make these type of people ride the bus and make us all safer.
I hope they also take his Tesla away from him; He clearly isn't responsible enough to own something as sophisticated as that.
He should be forced to re-take his test and drive an Aygo or an Up for 18 months.
...a competent motorist in the driving seat who can react appropriately to the road ahead.
Really? That's a requirement? Have you been out on the roads recently? Do you have an estimate for the percentage of cars on the road today that have this "feature"? I don't think it's as common as you might suspect, and hasn't been for... well, since the invention of the automobile.
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?