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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The driver of this Model S was found to have only had his hands on the wheel for 51 seconds of the last 13 minutes 48 seconds of his trip.
One of the more highly publicized Tesla crashes in recent memory involved a man in Los Angeles plowing his Tesla Model S into the back of a fire truck. The car wasn't going all that fast and thankfully nobody was hurt, but it was a fairly gnarly crash nonetheless.
Part of the government's investigation into the crash involved finding out whether or not Tesla's Autopilot system had been engaged at the time of the collision and if so, determining whether or not the driver was paying attention to what was going on around them.
Well, it's been a while, but the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has released part of the findings of its inquiry according to a Tweet published by the agency on Tuesday and hey, guess what? The driver of the vehicle was found only to have had his hands on the wheel as prescribed by Tesla (and good sense) for 51 seconds of the final 13 minutes and 48 seconds of the drive. Even worse, his hands weren't on the wheel at all for the last 3 minutes and 41 seconds before the crash.
When questioned by the NTSB as to what he was doing at the time of the crash, the driver stated, "I was having a coffee and a bagel. And all I remember, that truck, and then I just saw the boom in my face and that was it."
Clearly, there was a breakdown in the system here, and while Autopilot isn't a perfect system and while we've criticized its name as being somewhat misleading, the fault here doesn't seem to lie solely with Tesla.
The moral of the story here is that the advanced driver assistance systems, like Autopilot, that are found in many of the vehicles being sold today are not a form of self-driving. There is no "self-driving" car on sale today, and it's the responsibility of the driver to pay attention to the world around them as they drive.
Tesla didn't immediately respond to Roadshow's request for comment.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @08:05PM
> "driving" a Harley on the interstate with their arms crossed
It wasn't me...but if you were in western PA in the early 1980s it could have been me. I was a test rider for one of the tire companies, who were trying to get some tire business from Harley-Davidson. One problem was steering shake on longitudinal rain grooves, which were cut into a stretch of rural interstate that we used for testing. The test was to get lined up in the lane, check for nearby traffic (usually none), then lock the throttle and ride no hands for several miles to the next exit. The motorcycle had a data recorder for speed, steering angle and several other channels (have forgotten details). The data was analyzed later (no laptops back then) and was combined with my subjective comments into the final report. There was huge variation between the different experimental tires I rode, some barely noticed the grooves, others latched on to the grooves and shook the bike continually--but it always went straight in the macro sense, never had to grab the bars to keep in my lane.
It turned out to be more comfortable to ride from the passenger's seat, so I would move back after locking the throttle, small amounts of body lean would nudge it to stay in lane... That Harley was so stable that what might have looked crazy from the outside was trivial as the rider/driver.
At the same time, I was just as "hyper aware" as when riding any motorcycle, watching for nearby animals, debris on the road, etc--and also watching the steering shake so I could give a good subjective report on each tire.