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A Sleeping Driver's Tesla Led Police On A 7-Minute Chase (sfchronicle.com)
"When a pair of California Highway Patrol officers pulled alongside a car cruising down Highway 101 in Redwood City before dawn Friday, they reported a shocking sight: a man fast asleep behind the wheel," reports the San Francisco Chronicle:
The car was a Tesla, the man was a Los Altos planning commissioner, and the ensuing freeway stop turned into a complex, seven-minute operation in which the officers had to outsmart the vehicle's autopilot system because the driver was unresponsive, according to the CHP...
Officers observed Samek's gray Tesla Model S around 3:30 a.m. as it sped south at 70 mph on Highway 101 near Whipple Avenue, said Art Montiel, a CHP spokesman. When officers pulled up next to the car, they allegedly saw Samek asleep, but the car was moving straight, leading them to believe it was in autopilot mode. The officers slowed the car down after running a traffic break, with an officer behind Samek turning on emergency lights before driving across all lanes of the highway, in an S-shaped path, to slow traffic down behind the Tesla, Montiel said. He said another officer drove a patrol car directly in front of Samek before gradually slowing down, prompting the Tesla to slow down as well and eventually come to a stop in the middle of the highway, north of the Embarcadero exit in Palo Alto -- about 7 miles from where the stop was initiated.
Tesla declined to comment on the incident, but John Simpson, privacy/technology project director for Consumer Watchdog, calls this proof that Tesla has wrongly convinced drivers their cars' "autopilot" function really could perform fully autonomous driving...
"They've really unconscionably led people to believe, I think, that the car is far more capable of self-driving than actually is the case. That's a huge problem."
Officers observed Samek's gray Tesla Model S around 3:30 a.m. as it sped south at 70 mph on Highway 101 near Whipple Avenue, said Art Montiel, a CHP spokesman. When officers pulled up next to the car, they allegedly saw Samek asleep, but the car was moving straight, leading them to believe it was in autopilot mode. The officers slowed the car down after running a traffic break, with an officer behind Samek turning on emergency lights before driving across all lanes of the highway, in an S-shaped path, to slow traffic down behind the Tesla, Montiel said. He said another officer drove a patrol car directly in front of Samek before gradually slowing down, prompting the Tesla to slow down as well and eventually come to a stop in the middle of the highway, north of the Embarcadero exit in Palo Alto -- about 7 miles from where the stop was initiated.
Tesla declined to comment on the incident, but John Simpson, privacy/technology project director for Consumer Watchdog, calls this proof that Tesla has wrongly convinced drivers their cars' "autopilot" function really could perform fully autonomous driving...
"They've really unconscionably led people to believe, I think, that the car is far more capable of self-driving than actually is the case. That's a huge problem."
The California Highway Patrol on Friday pulled over a Tesla Model S that was traveling down the road—but whose driver appeared to be asleep at the wheel. The vehicle was traveling southbound on Highway 101 in Palo Alto.
Officers said that they were unable to get the man's attention.
"One of the officers basically ended up going in front of the vehicle and basically tried to slow it down," a California Highway Patrol spokesman told KCBS radio. The process took about seven minutes, and the car traveled for about seven miles before coming to a stop.
The driver was Alexander Samek, who serves on the Los Altos Planning Commission. He was arrested for driving under the influence.
So how was the vehicle able to travel for more than seven minutes with an apparently sleeping driver? The obvious theory is that the Model S had its Autopilot system turned on, but officials said on Friday that they hadn't confirmed that yet. It's quite possible that Autopilot saved Samek's life.
The situation is a bit of a puzzle because Autopilot is supposed to detect if a driver's hands are on the wheel and disengage if they're not. Tesla has steadily tightened up these rules, with recent revisions of the software warning drivers in as little as 30 seconds. So if the driver did fall asleep at the wheel the car should have started slowing down on its own within a few minutes.
In a similar case back in January, police encountered a man asleep behind the wheel of a Tesla car on the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. When police woke him up, he insisted that everything was fine because his vehicle was "on autopilot." Unfortunately for him, there's no autopilot exception to drunk-driving laws.
Top comment: onkeljonas
"It's entirely plausible that he was asleep with his hands on the wheel."
The Tesla pulled over on the roadway and Samek was taken to a Palo Alto gas station, ABC 7 reports. Samek was arrested on charges of driving under the influence after he failed a field sobriety test, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. https://www.sacbee.com/news/st...
Emergency services should have an override on automated vehicles, specifically for situations like this.
They've got one, the same one they use with human drivers. They used it. Problem solved.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's not quite there. It doesn't yet read stop lights. It'll stop if there's a car ahead of you, but not if there isn't one. It also doesn't know how to handle small traffic circles or 90 degree turns. Aka: it's not yet intended for city driving.
But it's pretty dang close to being a home-to-destination solution. Navigate-On-Autopilot was a big step in that direction.
Note that even when the car "can" do everything on its own, that doesn't mean it going to jump straight to Level 5 autonomy. For the foreseeable future, "human + vehicle" will continue to be safer than "vehicle alone".
You people make me envy the deaf and the blind!
Besides, the police DO have an override- they did exactly that. They boxed in the car and forced it to stop.
They didn't even have to box it in. They just put one car in front of it and slowed down to a halt. If you were driving the car, you would have just changed lanes, but this car was on autopilot and doesn't change lanes on its own.
The reason it took so long is that you can't just stop a car on the motorway, because of the huge risk that others drive into it. One driver had to slow down traffic behind the car to create a huge gap for safety, that's what took the time.
On a limited-access highway, "coming to a stop" is usually WORSE than "staying in the lane & maintaining a normal cruising speed". Autopilot lanekeeping & collision-avoidance is now better on average at avoiding accidents than most human drivers. It's UNUSUAL situations that create the danger.
A car staying in its lane & moving appropriately is the norm on a freeway. A car stopped on the shoulder creates an active road hazard for everyone else. Remember, his autonomous vehicle wasn't the only one on the road. It's not a safety improvement if your "safety feature" creates a situation that's MORE dangerous than letting the car just do what it does best -- follow the lane, avoid collisions, and behave in a predictable manner.
If you really need to punish drivers, add warning lights to visually communicate to other drivers that a car is operating without active human control. On a limited-access highway not under construction in good weather, inattentiveness with autopilot is a statistical non-issue... and in the real world, it's probably a net improvement over human drivers who are semi-distracted. On a non-freeway that has at-grade cross traffic, it's a genuine hazard. In bumper-to-bumper city-street gridlock, it's a non-issue (the car can stop within inches if necessary). On city streets at 30mph, it's likely to be dangerous.
The point is, there is no blanket "one size fits all" rule. Autonomous systems have known constraints. Stay within them, and you're fine. Deviate, and you create problems. Ignore the constraints entirely, and you're in uncharted territory risk-wise. Following lines & not colliding is easy. Finding a safe place to pull over is enormously harder.