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Did a Russian Robotics Company Fake This Tesla-Robot Crash? (wired.com)
Last Saturday a firm which rents promotional robots claimed that one of their robots broke free from a line of robots, only to be hit by a self-driving Tesla.
Though video of the incident has now been viewed over 1.2 million times, Wired followed up on the company's claim that "Nevada police" were investigating the incident. Or weren't. Aden Ocampo Gomez, a public information officer with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, said he couldn't find any record of such an incident. And anyway, he says, "We don't report to that kind of incident on private property."
Wired also challenged Promobot's claim that their robot was hit by "a self-driving Tesla car": Teslas don't have a "full self-driving" mode. Autopilot, the automaker's semiautonomous system, is made for highways, not the sort of private road shown in a video of the alleged crash published by the robotics company. Promobot seems to start falling over just a moment before the car gets to it. And that video appears to show a rope snaking away from the incident -- the sort that could be used, say, to pull down a robot that hadn't been hit by a car at all.
When Wired contacted the company for a comment, they didn't respond.
The company's press release also claims that after the collision "most likely there is no way to restore" their robot -- and yet the Daily Dot reports Promobot "does not intend to pursue reparations".
Though video of the incident has now been viewed over 1.2 million times, Wired followed up on the company's claim that "Nevada police" were investigating the incident. Or weren't. Aden Ocampo Gomez, a public information officer with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, said he couldn't find any record of such an incident. And anyway, he says, "We don't report to that kind of incident on private property."
Wired also challenged Promobot's claim that their robot was hit by "a self-driving Tesla car": Teslas don't have a "full self-driving" mode. Autopilot, the automaker's semiautonomous system, is made for highways, not the sort of private road shown in a video of the alleged crash published by the robotics company. Promobot seems to start falling over just a moment before the car gets to it. And that video appears to show a rope snaking away from the incident -- the sort that could be used, say, to pull down a robot that hadn't been hit by a car at all.
When Wired contacted the company for a comment, they didn't respond.
The company's press release also claims that after the collision "most likely there is no way to restore" their robot -- and yet the Daily Dot reports Promobot "does not intend to pursue reparations".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... So they did the same PR stunt 3 years ago in Russia, and now blame a Tesla for "Killing A Robot" in Nevada. LMAO. What a crappy company this must be...
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
It's not a terminology problem. It's a complete lack of understanding of what a Tesla can and can't do.
Yes, Tesla Autopilot can be used on city streets. But what you see here is not a street. It is a parking lot driveway. It is absolutely impossible to engage Autopilot on a road that looks like this. Autopilot requires a road to have lines (solid or dotted) on both sides of the lane, though occasionally you can get away with a sufficiently high-contrast curb.
On a road with no lines, you cannot engage any autonomy other than basic traffic-aware cruise control (with no automatic steering whatsoever). If somehow you managed to trick Autopilot into driving on this road anyway, it would have treated the driveway as a single (unusually wide) lane, so the car would have gone right down the middle of the driveway, not down one side.
So basically, unless they're claiming that Tesla brought a car with alpha firmware and ran it on a public street as a publicity stunt (which would probably be illegal unless they somehow received special approval to beta test their tech somewhere other than California), you can safely assume that a human was driving.
Also, from some angles, you can clearly see the rope.
The question is not whether this is fake; it clearly is. The question is why the heck the press were so gullible that they believed something that literally ANY Tesla driver could have told them was fake within the first three seconds without even having to slow down playback.
This is fake news.
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