A Tesla on Autopilot Crashed Into a Parked Police Car (fortune.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Fortune: A Tesla vehicle in Autopilot mode collided with a parked police cruiser in California, authorities said. The Tesla sedan was driving outbound when it struck a parked Laguna Beach police car, the Laguna Beach police department said Tuesday. According to police, the driver in the Tesla sustained minor injuries. The police cruiser was empty of officers at the time of the crash. Laguna Polic1e Sgt. Jim Cota told the Los Angeles Times the police car "is totaled."
The police sergeant also told the Times that it was the same area where a Tesla crashed into a semi-truck last year, adding "Why do these vehicles keep doing that? We're just lucky that people aren't getting injured."

"Tesla has always been clear that Autopilot doesn't make the car impervious to all accidents," Tesla responded in a statement, "and before a driver can use Autopilot, they must accept a dialogue box which states that 'Autopilot is designed for use on highways that have a center divider and clear lane markings.'"

Record producer Zedd also responded to the news by sharing on Twitter what he calls "the other side": I once fell asleep driving home late at night on the highway (w/ autopilot on) and got woken up by it beeping + turning off music to wake me up. Would have prob been dead without it... I didn't touch the steering wheel for a couple minutes and then it turned off the music and started beeping. Elon Musk responded to the tweet, "Glad you're ok!"

Comments

I am sure this is all Elon Musk's fault of course

[AlanObject]

An airplane's autopilot can crash the plane. Either by flying into the side of a mountain, running out of fuel, running into another plane, or into weather conditions the plane can't handle. All possible and even likely if the human pilot does not take responsibility.

And the collection of devices is still called "Autopilot" and have been for more than a half century. Nobody claims that the respective manufacturers have oversold their product and/or delivered defective product.

I mention this because I pointed out this obvious fact when this story popped up on a popular liberal political blog. I was roundly denounced as I was "blaming the victim." Then referred to breitbart.com where apparently that is considered acceptable. Stupid me for expecting better.

So I guess the noisy media circus that goes on any time Tesla is mentioned isn't going to abate anytime soon.

Maybe the GPS and map could work together

[clovis]

"Autopilot is designed for use on highways that have a center divider and clear lane markings."

The GPS knows where the car is, and just about every mapping software knows what kind of road you're on.
So how hard would it be to have the Tesla's computer not even turn on the autopilot if they're not on a road with center divider and clear lane markings? Or better yet, the autopilot only runs on roads that have been certified "not screwed up".

In this case he was on Laguna Canyon Road, which has a median in some places and a middle "suicide lane" in others, and varies from one to two lanes from place to place.

Re:Maybe the GPS and map could work together

[Anonymous Coward]

GPS is very unreliable. Sometime you can't get signal from all the satellites you need to get an accurate in precise location. I wouldn't trust my life to them. Even when you get enough signal i have seen them be drastically wrong.I have had 3 gps sitting right next to one another and give me coordinates that are 100 meters away from each other even when they say they receiving enough signal to be accurate to within 3 feet.

Re: "center divider and lane markings"

[reanjr]

As the summary points out, there are likely people being saved by autopilot like Zedd, but they don't make the news.

Simple solution

[quonset]

Since Musk can send an OtA update to adjust brake usage, he can send a command to disable auto pilot on all Teslas in the wild.

With that problem taken care of, he and his engineers can spend their time working on reworking and/or improving their "auto pilot" so it doesn't run into parked vehicles. Or anything else.

Re:Fords have killed tens of people today...

[Rei]

Teslas have driven over 7,2 billion miles. Given how by far most of that has been accumulated since the addition of AP hardware (in October 2016 they were only at 3,5B), and from the Q1 conference call we know that over 1/3 of Tesla miles are on AP, we can extrapolate to maybe around 2 billion miles (give or take large margins of error, and yes, that's the best we can do for now until the first AP statistics report comes out). At the normal US vehicle fatality rate of 1 per 86 million miles driven, 23 people should have died on AP (were Teslas only of average-safety, which they're not).

Adjust up or down by your personal assumptions. We should have actual data to work with in a month or two.