A recent fatality involving a Tesla Model S using the car’s Autopilot feature has triggered a media outcry over the technology.
Kagan Pittman has a solid feature on the tragedy here on ENGINEERING.com, but in the mainstream, largely uniformed media you’d think that Elon Musk cut the brake lines personally.
“Tesla Autopilot Crash Should Slow Federal Regulators' Rush On Self-Driving Cars, Says Consumer Watchdog”, screamed the press release issued by the public advocacy group Consumer Watchdog. The Santa Monica California-based organization is calling for a slowdown in deployment of self- driving technology.
Quoting a blog about the accident posted on Tesla's website Consumer Watchdog said: "Neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied."
Carmen Balber, executive director with Consumer Watchdog then stated: "We hope this is a wake-up call to federal regulators that we still don't know enough about the safety of self-driving cars to be rushing them to the road. The Administration should slow its rush to write guidelines until the causes in this crash are clear, and the manufacturers provide public evidence that self-driving cars are safe. If a car can't tell the difference between a truck and the sky, the technology is in doubt."
Wow, where do we begin with this nonsense?
Firstly, Tesla has never built self-driving cars and has never claimed that the Autopilot feature can be used without driver supervision. It’s a driver aid, not a driver replacement and Tesla has gone to great lengths to inform their customers about this.
Secondly, the autopilot feature isn’t designed to prevent accidents, but reduce the likelihood of them.
The fact that the vision system couldn’t distinguish between a white trailer and a white sky isn’t news to anyone who’s driven into a rising or setting sun or encountered a darkly-clothed pedestrian when driving at night.
When true self-driving capability is offered on production cars it will use short wavelength RF systems ( i.e radar) and will have faster reaction times and better “vision” that the human eyeball, enhancing safety for all of us.
Adaptive cruise control and collision avoidance radar systems are on production cars today, so this doesn’t require a technological leap to achieve.
Thirdly, street testing of self driving technology so far has shown outstanding safety statistics, with over a million miles of driving for Google’s prototypes alone.
Every indication is that the safety benefits of self driving cars are so great that we should be on a global crash program to introduce the systems, not crush them under the weight of government regulation.
So what is Consumer Watchdog’s real agenda? It clearly can’t be safety. I suspect that it’s simply another Left Coast, anti-everything “.org” dedicated to total bureaucratic control over our lives.
Here’s an idea: if you don’t want or don’t trust a self driving car, don’t buy one!
If Consumer Watchdog thinks that any auto manufacturer can get away with deploying an unproven, unsafe technology in the land of the product liability lawsuit, they’re smoking something they shouldn’t be outside of Colorado.
When a self driving car does eventually crash, and like all technology it will eventually fail, I predict it will be at the corner of Hollywood and Vine and the first ambulance chasing shyster on the scene will be driving a Ferrari.
It’s possible that self driving cars may be born in California, so let’s hope they don’t die in childbirth as a result of Golden State “do-gooders.”