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Last Thursday the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration delivered the results of its investigation of the 2016 crash of Joshua Brown while he was driving a Tesla with Autopilot software.
"A safety-related defect trend has not been identified at this time and further examination of this issue does not appear to be warranted," NHTSA's investigators found. In other words: Tesla didn't cause Brown's death.
The verdict should relieve not just the electric car builder, but the industry at large. Semi-autonomous and driver assistance technologies are more than a fresh source of revenue for automakers. They're the most promising way to cut into the more than 30,000 traffic deaths on US roads every year. Today's systems aren't perfect. They demand human oversight and can't handle everything the real world throws at them. But they're already saving lives.
NHTSA's goal wasn't to find the exact cause of the crash (that's up to the National Transportation Safety Board, which is running its own inquiry), but to root out any problems or defects with Tesla's Autopilot hardware and software.
The content of the investigation report is available from the NHTSA web site.
[Editor's note: Recently the link to the report has been returning an error occasionally. As an alternative, the Google webcache of the page is available as is a copy of the report at archive.org .]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Arik on Sunday January 22 2017, @05:21PM
A human cannot stay alert and ready to take over at a moments notice like that. It's not psychologically possible. If he's in control he'll focus on the road, if he's not he'll find something else to focus on instead, whether internal or external, and he will not be in a position to take back over when the computer suddenly dumps the controls on him.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Informative) by gringer on Sunday January 22 2017, @05:51PM
This is not "a moment's notice", this is seven seconds, or about 200m of travel at the fastest legal road speed.
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday January 22 2017, @09:25PM
It may be longer than a moment's notice, but it's too short a period of time to switch your attention to the road/environs and be ready to take control. Not even if you were thinking of something else, even if your hands were on the wheel the entire time, and you were nominally looking at the road. Imagine, e.g., you were in the process of analyzing how large a hash table the program you were working on should use, and under what conditions it should be flushed to disk...now you've got 7 seconds...
Taking control in 7 seconds is unreasonable. 20 seconds would be more reasonable, but even that would fail in tricky situations, but if a decision/reaction within 7 seconds is needed, it's better that the auto-pilot act on it's best guess.
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(Score: 3, Touché) by Thexalon on Monday January 23 2017, @10:43PM
He will? I see all kinds of drivers of ordinary non-automated cars every day that definitely are not focused on the road.
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