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Tesla drivers run Autopilot where it’s not intended — with deadly consequences
(www.washingtonpost.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2023
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A Tesla driving on Autopilot crashed through a T intersection at about 70 mph and flung the young couple into the air, killing Benavides Leon and gravely injuring Angulo. In police body-camera footage obtained by The Washington Post, the shaken driver says he was “driving on cruise” and took his eyes off the road when he dropped his phone.
But the 2019 crash reveals a problem deeper than driver inattention. It occurred on a rural road where Tesla’s Autopilot technology was not designed to be used. Dash-cam footage captured by the Tesla and obtained exclusively by The Post shows the car blowing through a stop sign, a blinking light and five yellow signs warning that the road ends and drivers must turn left or right.
It's insane that people are blaming this on Autopilot when there is a driver sitting behind the wheel who also missed a stop sign, blinking light, and five yellow warning signs while driving at 70MPH. You could physically do this with any other car that has cruise control and nobody would be blaming the car.
I haven't seen anyone blaming the autopilot for situations like this
Your above comment was blaming it. Why even bring Autopilot up otherwise?
The above comment, which was a summary of the article, doesn't blame autopilot. It brings up autopilot as being used by an inattentive driver outside autopilot's intended use conditions. Acting like autopilot, it's marketing, and it's general population perception is an innocent bystander in this situation is, however, disingenuous. You don't give a car to someone and say "it has airbags, it's safe" and trust that they'll actually be ok on the road with no further info, right? So why would you think releasing untested software in a product with overhyped marketing using unfamiliar terms^1 would just be ok?
I'll blame the auto pilot. It's good enough to train people to not pay attention, but not good enough to be fully driverless. So the users are being trained to fully trust something they can't fully trust.
If you were trying to teach a new driver how to drive, you wouldn't do 99.9% of the driving for them, and then randomly throw them into the driver's seat when there's an emergency. That's not how you would get a good driver, that's how you would get a bunch of accidents. We know that at the human level. If you want to train a driver, you let them practice on the easy stuff, you keep them engaged, you keep them thinking about it.
The Tesla semi-automated self-driving, is the reverse, all the easy stuff the computer does, the rare emergency difficult stuff the human has to do. But they get no practice. It's like the gold standard of how to create accidents