Hmmm… interesting!
Last year, it was revealed that there were more than 1,000 reported incidents of Nissan Rogues slamming on their brakes automatically when their forward collision technology interpreted snowbanks on the side of expressways (and other non-obstacles) as obstacles on the highway.
Nissan Rogue Automatic Braking Problems: 1,400 Complaints | CarComplaints.com
And these are serious bugs that need to be worked out…which I’m sure they will. This technology is changing extremely fast.
Hey, Buddy!
Nobody’s Driving Your Pizza Delivery Car! Get the kids off the street!
About a week ago, autonomous vehicles began operating on some Houston, Texas streets.
Pizza anyone?
I don’t eat restaurant food, on-site or carry-out and the only pizza I eat is my own specially made healthfully delicious stuff made with almond flour, and vegetarian ingredients. However, if I did order pizza for delivery, this would be nice!
Hold the Tip: Meet Domino’s Autonomous Pizza Delivery Robot (motortrend.com)
CSA
How many deaths/crashes from Domino’s back in the 80’s when they first started that guranteed in 20 minutes or it’s free?
Domino’s Fatalities Raise Safety Issue in Fast-Food Industry - CSMonitor.com
I think their new delivery system is a lot safer.
A quart barrel of beer might provide the weight needed to replace the driver.
I don’t know if Tesla vehicles have a weight sensor in the drivers seat but I have not worked on a vehicle that has one. The drivers seat has a position sensor that is used with the staged airbags, only the right front seat has a weight sensor as part of the occupant detection system.
The “Auto Pilot” system should use a drowsiness monitor (eye and face monitoring) to verify that a person is in the drivers seat and awake. This wouldn’t allow drivers to read books or spend time with a lap top computer so maybe this is why a proper monitor was not employed.
Abbott and Costello, Who is on first base, so who was driving, how could he, he’s playing baseball.
Some of them are probably going to do that in a future update, as they have driver-facing cameras. Of course, that also means they have driver facing cameras, and I really don’t need the Musk brigade to have the ability to catch me singing off key in the car. 
I think the bottom line is that the two guys in the car were idiots, but Tesla also bears responsibility for unleashing an early-Alpha of “full self driving” on the public, fully enabled but not fully functional. That’s the only car this could have happened in. If two morons get in the passenger seats of my car, it will just sit there, and that makes it pretty hard to crash.
I also saw a headline but didn’t have time to read the article that Musk is supposedly claiming that the auto-drive system was not being used in that car, which would make it a mystery as to how the car was tooling down the road with no driver and the autopilot disabled. Apparently there’s some magic/jedi mojo going on here because everything Musk says is accurate and honest. /s
As for the battery fires, yes, there’s a risk. But as @Triedaq pointed out, there’s a risk to having natural gas too. Every once in awhile you’ll see a house explosion on the news. That doesn’t mean the risk/reward calculation works out in favor of avoiding natural gas, and there are some definite advantages to using gas. The way pricing is structured where I live, I’d be spending a significantly higher sum to heat my house if I converted it to all electric. And gas stoves are just better at the job than electric ones.
LiIon fires are bad when they happen, but they’re pretty rare. Most of us are carrying a LiIon-powered computer around in our pockets every day and with the notable exception of the Samsung Note 7 which had a design flaw, vanishingly few of them catch fire.
They’re safe enough that you can even bring them on airplanes, and the aviation world is almost fanatical about banning things that might endanger the flight – my dad had a CO2 cartridge-powered tire inflator for his wheelchair and they made him toss the cartridges when he tried to get on the plane with it. So if they let cell phones on the plane, that’s an indicator that battery fires are incredibly rare events, and provided you don’t do something stupid like these morons did and crash your car, it’ll probably never catch fire.
Try a heat pump. And a hybrid water heater.
IIRC, the GM system currently used on the Cadillac does that, mostly to make sure the driver isn’t texting. Falling asleep is a good reason too.
That has been a standard feature on Subarus also, for a couple of years.
Consumer Reports was able to send their Model Y down the test track without a person in the driver’s seat;
Tesla Will Drive With No One in the Driver’s Seat - Consumer Reports
I have a Tesla mode Y. You can’t put it in drive if you’re not in the driver’s seat. If the seat belt is not fastened it won’t let you use cruise control much less autopilot. If you have autopilot on and unbuckle the seatbelt it alarms and turns off. When autopilot is on you have to actively move the steering wheel a bit a couple of times a minute to let the car know you’re paying attention.
I can’t say what caused the accident, but if autopilot was involved I can say they must have taken conscious and active measures to circumvent the built in safety precautions. Still, you can’t fix stupid…
The seatbelt thing is easy to defeat. And Tesla owners have been defeating the steering wheel check by hanging a bottle of water off it. The weight of the bottle provides enough resistance that the computer thinks someone is holding the wheel.
The worst part is that Tesla knows about this, because pictures of people doing it have been circulating the internet for a long time now. Where Tesla really deserves blame, however, is in selling this bill of goods to its customers while unleashing it on the rest of us. It’s not full self driving or autopilot. That much is obvious from the fact that it does check to see if someone has their hands on the wheel (flawed and useless though that check may be). “Full self driving” should not require driver intervention at all. Tesla’s system shouldn’t be sold as such until that is true.
Just put an IR sensor in dash pointing at driver. Let’s see tubers beat that.
Wait - so Tesla’s to blame because someone is reckless and irresponsible? That’s like blaming a table saw manufacturer because someone removed the blade guard and cut their hand off or blaming every other car maker because they don’t put limiters on cars to keep people from speeding.
Sorry, I don’t buy it. if someone deliberately ignores warnings and defeats the safety measures, then it’s on them, not on Tesla.
Yes, for the same reason that any product manufacturer is to blame when they release an unnecessarily dangerous product into the wild and accompany it with advertisements and boasting from their CEO that the product can be used in ways that it’s not supposed to be used.
Look, if this were a normal situation I’d mostly agree with you. For instance, I don’t necessarily think a gun manufacturer should be automatically liable if a kid finds his dad’s gun and shoots someone with it, because it’s the dad who was criminally negligent.
But if Glock were to run ads saying “hey kids, wanna have some real fun? Find your dad’s gun and point it at someone!” then yeah, they’d abso-damn-lutely be responsible.
That’s essentially what Tesla is doing. They’re putting out a system that is a driver assist mechanism which cannot operate the car autonomously in a safe manner, and saying “Hey, it’s full self driving. It’s autopilot.” I’ve actually had Tesla reps at car events tell me things like “oh yeah, I drove 200 miles here while I was reading a book, just used the autopilot!”
So the company is representing to its customers and potential customers that the autopilot is capable of more than it’s really capable of. The messaging from Tesla, generally only revealed in the manual after you buy, is at best “the irritating idiots from the government are making us tell you not to let the car drive unsupervised, wink wink, but dude, you totally could if the regulations weren’t in the way.”
That’s not only endangering the idiots who take Tesla’s fratbro marketing at its word, but it’s endangering everyone around those idiots when they’re doing stupid crap in their cars.
I wanted to add to the excellent reply from @shadowfax that for the table saw example, the stupid owner endangers himself, while with Tesla’s “autopilot” it makes way too easy to endanger innocent people around.
Not a good comparison . Many of the excellent wood worker shows have the table saw blade guard removed because of the operation being done can’t be done with the guard in place .
adding to that argument…
Ryobi table saw I have has multiple pages dealing with when and how to work the saw with removed guards and additional safety measures to be taken… not as generic “you have to be careful”, but giving actual advise on the spacers and tools to use to safeguard your hands
compare that to Tesla and their “wink-wink autopilot” - instead of stressing on the technology limits and precautions, it is totally opposite
take “driver assist” technology in so many new cars - for example my Honda dealer spend quite some time telling NOT to rely on it, but rather treating it as a second line of defense
The table saw example was simply an example of how injury could occur when one ignores or disables safeguards. If you are unable to see both the similarities and limitations of the example then I can’t help you.
Yes, Elon Musk was more cavalier about it several years ago, but please give an example within the last 3-5 years of Tesla encouraging reckless behavior; I have a feeling people are confusing what others say with what Tesla says.
From the Tesla manual:
WARNING: Navigate on Autopilot does not make driving autonomous. You must pay attention to the road, keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times, and remain aware of your navigation route.
From the ordering page on the web site:
The currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous.
This is in addition to the warnings in the car, on the screen, from the dealer as well as the safeguards.
(This wasn’t in small print, either, it’s the same font as everything else)
From the screen in the car when you activate Autopilot:
Warning keep your hands on the wheel at all times and remain aware of your navigation route
I astounds me how people will try to excuse a reckless idiot with no common sense.