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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: 2) by HiThere on Sunday January 22 2017, @09:18PM
Sometimes writing down the passwords and sticking them to the monitor is the right approach. Depends on what you are guarding against. If you aren't guarding against local intrusion, but only against net based intrusion, then there's nothing wrong with that approach. Not all situations are the same. (OTOH, I'm not aware of any situation in which some "draconian password policies" are good, it's just that sometimes writing down the password is a reasonable thing to do.)
That said, for a mass-marketed vehicle, you need to presume that some fraction of the customers will act in ways that appear, to one who understands the system, really stupid. And you need to design with that in mind.
OTOH, this was a reasonable design bug in a complex system. It needs to be fixed, but the company shouldn't be considered culpable...this time. If they don't fix it, however...
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.