Autopilot Tesla steered again into a stationary object – the pilot pursues

Earlier this month, Shawn Hudson 's Tesla Model S crashed into a speeding car as it was moving at a speed of about 80 miles to the airport. hour on a Florida highway. Tesla's autopilot technology was already in use and Hudson has now started a lawsuit against Tesla in state courts.

"Thanks to an omnipresent national marketing campaign and a deliberately manipulative sales pitch, Tesla has misled consumers" into believing that Autpilot could "carry passengers at highway speeds with minimal control and oversight. ", says the lawsuit.

Hudson had two hours to get to work at a car dealership. He says he heard about Tesla's autopilot technology last year and consulted with a Tesla dealer to find out more.

"Tesla's sales representative assured Hudson that all he had to do as a driver of the vehicle, was to occasionally place his hand on the steering wheel and that the vehicle" would do all the rest, "says the lawsuit.

But this description of the Tesla autopilot system is not true. Although the system can handle a variety of driving conditions, it is not designed to stop on parked cars or other stationary objects while driving at high speed. This year, at least two other Tesla drivers crashed into parked vehicles while their cars were in autopilot mode (one of them sued Tesla last month). Californian Walter Huang, another Tesla customer, was killed at top speed when his Tesla vehicle hit a concrete lane divider.

Tesla did not respond to our request for comment, but the company's response to other news outlets covering the story was consistent with Tesla's past positions. Tesla argues that the pilots are ultimately responsible for monitoring the performance of the autopilot and that any accident occurring while the autopilot is activated is ultimately the driver's fault, not the Tesla software.

Why cars continue to crush on stationary objects

The Hudson accident occurred on Friday, October 12th. He was heading south at about 150 km / h on State Road 91. According to Hudson, he was "relaxing on his way" when "suddenly and without any warning" the car crashed on a Ford Fiesta left in the traffic lane.

"If it had been anything more substantial than a Ford Fiesta, it would not be there," said Hudson's Lawyer, Mike Morgan, at a press conference announcing the lawsuit. .

"Hudson has become the guinea pig for Tesla to experiment with his fully autonomous vehicle," Morgan said.

According to Morgan, the Model S manual states that "it can be used at more than 50 miles at the time, but if it is engaged at more than 50 miles, it is It's hard to find stationary objects and stopped cars, which is a big problem for me, which means you're not selling anything. "

Not unique to Tesla

To be fair to Tesla, this problem is not unique to society. Most emergency braking systems currently available on the market do not stop for objects still at the speed of a highway. These systems are not sophisticated enough to distinguish a stationary object on the road from the one located next to or above the road. So, to make the problem easier to manage, cars can simply ignore stationary objects, assuming the driver directs them.

Most of the time, it works pretty well. The traffic lane on the highway is supposed to contain only moving cars. If a driver uses adaptive cruise control to maintain speed with a car in advance, it works very well. But it can fail catastrophically in rare circumstances when a stationary object is found directly on the road or when the car's track control system becomes confused as to the location of the track and directs the car to a motionless object next to the road. This latter scenario apparently corresponds to what happened at the time of Walter Huang's death: the car confused with the location of the traffic lanes, directed the vehicle in a "lane" which was not actually a traffic lane and ended directly in a lane separator. .

However, while many car manufacturers have driver assistance technology with this type of limitation, Tesla is touting the capabilities of its system more aggressively than many of its competitors. The Tesla Autopilot page has a big banner at the top that says "Complete equipment of self-driving on all cars" at the top. It also features a video of a vehicle navigating in an urban environment with the driver's hands on his lap all the time.

Savvy observers know that the video is two years old and represents a research prototype, not the shipping capabilities of Tesla vehicles. But there is no disclaimer in the video or in the text that surrounds it. Hudson says that Tesla's marketing materials have led him to believe that his vehicles can behave on the highway with minimal human intervention.

In the past, Tesla insisted that, despite recent accidents, drivers are much safer with the autopilot activated than without the autopilot. But when we examined these claims in May, we found that they were not resistant to examination. We simply do not have enough data to know if using the autopilot saves lives on the internet. And we certainly know that in some cases the autopilot has made mistakes that a driver would probably not be able to commit.