<story><title>Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash</title><url>http://abc7news.com/automotive/exclusive-tesla-issues-strongest-statement-yet-blaming-driver-for-deadly-crash/3325908/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>patcheudor</author><text>&amp;gt;t&amp;#x27;s a tool to help attentive drivers avoid accidents that might have otherwise occurred.&lt;p&gt;This needs far more discussion.  I just don&amp;#x27;t buy it.  I don&amp;#x27;t believe that you can have a car engaged in auto-drive mode and remain attentive.  I think our psychology won&amp;#x27;t allow it.  When driving, I find that I must be engaged and on long trips I don&amp;#x27;t even enable cruise control because taking the accelerator input away from me is enough to cause my mind to wander.  If I&amp;#x27;m not in control of the accelerator and steering while simultaneously focused on threats including friendly officers attempting to remind me of the speed limit I space out fairly quickly.  In observing how others drive, I don&amp;#x27;t think I&amp;#x27;m alone.  It&amp;#x27;s part of our nature.  So then, how is it that you can have a car driving for you while simultaneously being attentive? I believe they are so mutually exclusive as to make it ridiculous to claim that such a thing is possible.</text></item><item><author>tc</author><text>Tesla probably shouldn&amp;#x27;t be saying anything about this at all, even just to avoid giving it more news cycles.  But if they were going to say something, here&amp;#x27;s what they should have said the first time.&lt;p&gt;----&lt;p&gt;We take great care in building our cars to save lives.  Forty thousands Americans die on the roads each year.  That&amp;#x27;s a statistic.  But even a single death of a Tesla driver or passenger is a tragedy.  This has affected everyone on our team deeply, and our hearts go out to the family and friends of Walter Huang.&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;ve recovered data that indicates Autopilot was engaged at the time of the accident.  The vehicle drove straight into the barrier.  In the five seconds leading up to the crash, neither Autopilot nor the driver took any evasive action.&lt;p&gt;Our engineers are investigating why the car failed to detect or avoid the obstacle.  Any lessons we can take from this tragedy will be deployed across our entire fleet of vehicles.  Saving other lives is the best we can hope to take away from an event like this.&lt;p&gt;In that same spirit, we would like to remind all Tesla drivers that Autopilot is not a fully-autonomous driving system.  It&amp;#x27;s a tool to help attentive drivers avoid accidents that might have otherwise occurred.  Just as with autopilots in aviation, while the tool does reduce workload, it&amp;#x27;s critical to always stay attentive.  The car cannot drive itself.  It can help, but you have to do your job.&lt;p&gt;We do realize, however, that a system like Autopilot can lure people into a false sense of security.  That&amp;#x27;s one reason we are hard at work on the problem of fully autonomous driving.  It will take a few years, but we look forward to some day making accidents like this a part of history.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hyperbole</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t buy this either nor should we it&amp;#x27;s not how the feature is marketed.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The system is designed to be able to conduct short and long distance trips with no action required by the person in the driver’s seat.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The result of this statement and the functionality that matches it is it creates a re-enforced false sense of security.&lt;p&gt;Does it matter whether the driver of the model X whose auto pilot drove straight into a center divider had his hands on the wheel if the outcome of applying autopilot is drivers focus less on the road? What is the point of two drivers one machine one human? You cannot compare car auto pilot to airplane they&amp;#x27;re not even in the same league. How often does a center divider just pop up at 20k ft?&lt;p&gt;Usually machinery either augments human capabilities by enhancing them, or entirely replaces them.  This union caused by both driver and car piloting the vehicle has no point especially when it&amp;#x27;s imperfect.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not opposed to Tesla&amp;#x27;s sale of such functionality, sell whatever you want, but I am opposed to the marketing material selling this in a way that contradicts the legal language required to protect Tesla...&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s risks in everything you do, but don&amp;#x27;t market a car as having the hardware to do 2x your customers driving capability and then have your legal material say: * btw don&amp;#x27;t take your hands off the steering wheel... especially when there&amp;#x27;s a several minute video showing exactly that.&lt;p&gt;Tesla customers must have the ability to make informed choices in the risks they take.</text></comment>
<story><title>Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash</title><url>http://abc7news.com/automotive/exclusive-tesla-issues-strongest-statement-yet-blaming-driver-for-deadly-crash/3325908/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>patcheudor</author><text>&amp;gt;t&amp;#x27;s a tool to help attentive drivers avoid accidents that might have otherwise occurred.&lt;p&gt;This needs far more discussion.  I just don&amp;#x27;t buy it.  I don&amp;#x27;t believe that you can have a car engaged in auto-drive mode and remain attentive.  I think our psychology won&amp;#x27;t allow it.  When driving, I find that I must be engaged and on long trips I don&amp;#x27;t even enable cruise control because taking the accelerator input away from me is enough to cause my mind to wander.  If I&amp;#x27;m not in control of the accelerator and steering while simultaneously focused on threats including friendly officers attempting to remind me of the speed limit I space out fairly quickly.  In observing how others drive, I don&amp;#x27;t think I&amp;#x27;m alone.  It&amp;#x27;s part of our nature.  So then, how is it that you can have a car driving for you while simultaneously being attentive? I believe they are so mutually exclusive as to make it ridiculous to claim that such a thing is possible.</text></item><item><author>tc</author><text>Tesla probably shouldn&amp;#x27;t be saying anything about this at all, even just to avoid giving it more news cycles.  But if they were going to say something, here&amp;#x27;s what they should have said the first time.&lt;p&gt;----&lt;p&gt;We take great care in building our cars to save lives.  Forty thousands Americans die on the roads each year.  That&amp;#x27;s a statistic.  But even a single death of a Tesla driver or passenger is a tragedy.  This has affected everyone on our team deeply, and our hearts go out to the family and friends of Walter Huang.&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;ve recovered data that indicates Autopilot was engaged at the time of the accident.  The vehicle drove straight into the barrier.  In the five seconds leading up to the crash, neither Autopilot nor the driver took any evasive action.&lt;p&gt;Our engineers are investigating why the car failed to detect or avoid the obstacle.  Any lessons we can take from this tragedy will be deployed across our entire fleet of vehicles.  Saving other lives is the best we can hope to take away from an event like this.&lt;p&gt;In that same spirit, we would like to remind all Tesla drivers that Autopilot is not a fully-autonomous driving system.  It&amp;#x27;s a tool to help attentive drivers avoid accidents that might have otherwise occurred.  Just as with autopilots in aviation, while the tool does reduce workload, it&amp;#x27;s critical to always stay attentive.  The car cannot drive itself.  It can help, but you have to do your job.&lt;p&gt;We do realize, however, that a system like Autopilot can lure people into a false sense of security.  That&amp;#x27;s one reason we are hard at work on the problem of fully autonomous driving.  It will take a few years, but we look forward to some day making accidents like this a part of history.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fapjacks</author><text>I have to preface my post to say that I think developing self-driving automobiles is so important that it&amp;#x27;s worth the implied cost of potentially tens of thousands of lives in order to perfect the technology, because that&amp;#x27;s what people do; make sacrifices to improve the world we live in so that future generations don&amp;#x27;t have to know the same problem. But I think you&amp;#x27;re right. I think the &amp;quot;best&amp;quot; way to move forward until we have perfected the technology is not something that drives for you, but something that will completely take over the millisecond the car detects that something terrible is about to happen. People will be engaged because they &lt;i&gt;have&lt;/i&gt; to be engaged, to drive the car. The machine can still gather all the data and ship it off to HQ to improve itself (and compare its own decisions to those of the human driver, which IMO is infinitely more valuable). But if there&amp;#x27;s one thing the average person is terrible at, it&amp;#x27;s reacting quickly to terrible situations. You&amp;#x27;re absolutely right that people can&amp;#x27;t be trusted to remain actively engaged when something else is doing the driving. Great example with the cruise control, too.</text></comment>