The first Tesla Autopilot-related crash fatality reportedly occured in China in January, five months before the widely covered incident in the United States in May. The incident was under investigation earlier this year, and the family of the Tesla driver are said to have sued ‘Tesla China’ in July, for Autopilot failing to prevent the accident.
A 23-year-old man was driving his father’s Tesla Model S on a highway when the car struck a roadsweeper truck at highway speed, killing the driver. According to a report by Chinese news portal 163.com, the police found no sign that the vehicle applied the brakes before the collision, claiming that Autopilot was engaged at the time of the incident.
“We were saddened to learn of the death of our customer’s son. We take any incident with our vehicles very seriously and immediately reached out to our customer when we learned of the crash,” said Tesla in a statement provided to electric vehicle site Electrek.
“Because of the damage caused by the collision, the car was physically incapable of transmitting log data to our servers and we therefore have no way of knowing whether or not Autopilot was engaged at the time of the crash. We have tried repeatedly to work with our customer to investigate the cause of the crash, but he has not provided us with any additional information that would allow us to do so.”
The Tesla owner’s manual reportedly has a warning for the particular situations. “Warning: Traffic-Aware Cruise Control can not detect all objects and may not brake/decelerate for stationary vehicles, especially in situations when you are driving over 80 km/h and a vehicle you are following moves out of your driving path and a stationary vehicle or object, bicycle, or pedestrian is in front of you instead.
“Always pay attention to the road ahead and stay prepared to take immediate corrective action. Depending on Traffic-Aware Cruise Control to avoid a collision can result in serious injury or death. In addition, Traffic-Aware Cruise Control may react to vehicles or objects that either do not exist or are not in the lane of travel, causing Model S to slow down unnecessarily or inappropriately.”
Tesla has just released an update for the Autopilot package which sees radar systems take the lead for autonomous driving, over the camera systems which previously were the vehicles’ primary guides; CEO Elon Musk says the company believes it would have saved the driver in the May incident.
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This verifies why most automakers use RADAR or LIDAR instead of camera based active cruise control systems. It is much safer detecting the actual presence of a physical obstruction than a picture of it. Tesla will still most probably get away with this because it states that the system is still in Beta test phase and users use this function at their own risk
What rubbish autopilot. God give you eyes and hands for what? Use them! No need for all these junk.
Soon you will ask automotic arm to lancap you also.
Tesla: “Why don’t you use the door?”
A380 got autopilot also..then the pilot useless la?
What “if” the driver didn’t actually turn on the system & thought it was on !!
Stupid Tesla. Don’t sell the equipment if it fails. Ppls life are at risks.
Honda Lane Watch System is better.
Honda sell you takata airbag
Scary…
Tesla will be working fine in malaysia if only appointed SPAD to monitor them !
car response to various road & traffic conditions shall be within mili-second. It is scary that people dare to leave all these on computer processor to handle for them.
No matter how powerful the processor is, soon or later, it will encounter the delay in response or electronic glitch.
Scary
They should market it as co-pilot driving instead to make people more aware. You know lah when some people use this technology they will show off how great their car is or simply become too lazy, putting themselves in harm’s way
Why depend on autopilot when even game AI NPC noob like shit?
So pipu can respawn again after death? Oh wai….
4 vi this is is not grab car, vi call this seKRAP kar. Just sell to eat to kelling botol. V must create malaika humanoid clone to drive tesla outopilot vehicle we need bio brain human sense not ecu edu or edo, that why if you drive dont drink.i not understand, are u understand?
Maybe I’m just being paranoid but the auto-pilot thing is still too far from being a reliable reality. There’s just too many question marks. When there is software and hardware being used, there will surely be problems like malfunction, bugs, software being hacked, and poor quality hardware that would deteriorate over time etc. What seems like a cool idea now, would be another matter when lives are lost.
once dead………surely autopilot to heaven….