[ad_1]
Consumer Reports released a video revealing how a vehicle driver got a Tesla to drive on autopilot without a person in the driver’s seat taking over if something went wrong.
The protest aired just days after two friends died in a fire crash in Texas in a 2019 Tesla Model S that officials said did not have a driver – something Tesla CEO Elon Musk said. , denied.
Rigging the car to run on its own seems relatively easy (watch the video above). A small weight was attached to the steering wheel to mimic the touch of a driver’s hand, but the person in the car actually didn’t touch anything and sat in the front passenger seat. The car drove down the road and did not issue any warning that no one was in control.
Tesla’s Autopilot website warns that its cars are not “self-driving.” The autopilot is “intended for use with a fully attentive driver, who has their hands on the wheel and is ready to take over at any time,” the website says.
The site, however, gives mixed messages. In a video shown on the Autopilot site, a car is driving around town while the driver is doing nothing and has his hands on his knees. A message at the beginning of the video states that “the person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons.” He does nothing. The car drives itself.
Musk largely ignored concerns about the autopilot function and insisted that it makes cars safer by helping drivers. Drivers are known to fall asleep at the wheel, read or write while driving, or simply stop paying attention to the road when using the feature.
Friends from Texas, aged 59 and 69, were killed on Saturday night when the Tesla missed a curve and crashed into a tree, causing a fire explosion in a residential area in suburban Houston. Their wives overheard them discussing testing the car’s autopilot function when they left, law enforcement officials said. There was no one in the driver’s seat when firefighters put out the fire in the car, according to Constable Mark Herman of District 4 in Harris County. A man was seated in the front passenger seat; the other was in the backseat, according to Herman.
It took four hours and 32,000 gallons of water to put out the fire because the car’s lithium battery cells kept reigniting.
After Tesla’s shares fell 3.4% on Monday after the crash was widely reported, Musk denied the car was driverless. He insisted in a tweet that “the data logs recovered so far” showed that the autopilot was “not activatedIn the crash. He also said the owner had not purchased an “FSD” – a complete autonomous driving package.
Herman told Reuters that Musk’s tweet on Monday was the first that officials had heard from Tesla. He said authorities would serve search warrants on the company to obtain all the data it had recovered from the vehicle.
“If he’s tweeting that, if he’s ever recovered the data, he hasn’t told us,” Herman said. “We will look forward to this data.”
Tesla officials apologized on Thursday – but not for the Texas crash. Tesla has pledged to cooperate fully with an investigation into a February multi-car crash in China. One of the drivers in the crash had climbed on top of a Tesla at a motor show in a protest accusing the brakes of his Tesla of being responsible for the crash.
“We will work with regulators to conduct a full and full investigation, and accept the supervision of the company with sincerity and openness,” the company said on Chinese microblogging site Weibo, Vice reported.
Tesla offered a “deep apology” for not fixing the problem, pledged to win back consumer support “with sincere sincerity” and pledged to cover all the costs of a third-party review of the vehicle. protester.
The Communist Party’s powerful anti-corruption watchdog criticized Tesla as “spoiled and arrogant,” and warned him against “making money from the Chinese people by taking the lives of the Chinese,” Vice reported. .
Calling all HuffPost superfans!
Sign up to become a founding member and help shape the next chapter of HuffPost
[ad_2]
Source link