It’s good but…

[supergee]

Autopilot is not an autopilot.

Thanx to andrewducker

Comments

[weofodthignen]

Since I'm in the neighborhood, I've been reading with interest about what arrogant fools rich enough to buy Teslas do with them. One of the early-year crashes alluded to in the story is presumably this one, where the system was set to 75 mph(!) and appears to have been confused by a notoriously confusing highway fork; the driver, in his 30s, had brought his car for servicing several times with complaints about the navigation system that in retrospect suggest he expected it to navigate autonomously in such locations, which is pretty much confirmed by the fact he didn't take control; on the other hand what the testers said about the system being slow to disengage and not clearly signaling when it has done so is troubling with respect to that crash. He died; it took two Tesla engineers from one city over and two fire departments to finally extinguish the flaming battery pack. Conversely, in this very recent story from the actual headquarters city, we have a drunken fool in his 40s treating the car as a personal chauffeur, zooming along at 70 mph while he slept, and the local highway patrol showing admirable technical savvy and successfully stopping the car and getting him out to fail his sobriety test. Buried in the comments on that San Francisco Chronicle story is the true observation that the driver was perfectly sober and alert.

Fools will misuse their cars in any way they can come up with, and perhaps all the more so when they are relatively young and wealthy enough to have a sense of entitlement. But I suspect at least one of those guys would have wound up killing himself on the highway anyway, and the second guy—and possibly others who were on the highway that night—probably owes his life to the car's "autopilot" as well as the cops.