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Dashcam Video Shows Tesla Steering Toward Lane Divider - Again (arstechnica.com)

AmiMoJo shares a report from Ars Technica: The afternoon commute of Reddit user Beastpilot takes him past a stretch of Seattle-area freeway with a carpool lane exit on the left. Last year, in early April, the Tesla driver noticed that Autopilot on his Model X would sometimes pull to the left as the car approached the lane divider -- seemingly treating the space between the diverging lanes as a lane of its own. This was particularly alarming, because just days earlier, Tesla owner Walter Huang had died in a fiery crash after Autopilot steered his Model X into a concrete lane divider in a very similar junction in Mountain View, California.

Beastpilot made several attempts to notify Tesla of the problem but says he never got a response. Weeks later, Tesla pushed out an update that seemed to fix the problem. Then in October, it happened again. Weeks later, the problem resolved itself. This week, he posted dashcam footage showing the same thing happening a third time -- this time with a recently acquired Model 3. "The behavior of the system changes dramatically between software updates," Beastpilot told Ars. "Human nature is, 'if something's worked 100 times before, it's gonna work the 101st time.'" That can lull people into a false sense of security, with potentially deadly consequences.

2 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. Re: Not driving towards "lane divider" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    Not quite. More like a train with lots of quiet cars, many extra seats and a be nice and mind your space rule.

  2. Re:Not driving towards "lane divider" by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1, Informative

    It's not clear if the car would have avoided the lane divider. It doesn't look like it but it's possible.

    Either way, this is a known weakness of the Tesla system. It doesn't prompt you to take over, and there have been multiple crashes.

    If I were writing that software then suddenly finding that the lane was very wide or a major correction was required would sound all kinds of warning bells.

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