We
need to keep scrutinizing the technology—and whether drivers are
too easily lulled into trusting it more than they should.
Autopilot
might not be the selling point Tesla’s made it out to be.
Arnd
Wiegmann/Reuters
Friday
night’sadmission
by Teslathat its autopilot mode was
activated during a deadly crash by a Model X SUV earlier this
month is bad for Tesla, bad for the cause of self-driving cars,
and certainly bad for anyone who rides in semiautonomous or
autonomous vehicles or shares the road with them. On March 23, the
vehicle hit a barrier on Highway 101 near Mountain View,
California, thencaught
fire and was hit by two other vehicles. The driver died.In
an earlier statement about the incident, before Tesla had
been able to retrieve the SUV’s logs, the electric-vehicle company
was preemptively defensive of its technology, stressing that while
autopilot can’t prevent all accidents, it makes them “less likely
to occur.” The Friday-evening update offers a fuller, but by no
means complete, picture of what happened:
In
the moments before the collision, which occurred at 9:27 a.m. on
Friday, March 23rd,Autopilotwas
engaged with the adaptive cruise control follow-distance set to
minimum. The driver had received several visual and one audible
hands-on warning earlier in the drive and the driver’s hands
were not detected on the wheel for six seconds prior to the
collision. The driver had about five seconds and 150 meters of
unobstructed view of the concrete divider with the crushed crash
attenuator, but the vehicle logs show that no action was taken.
The
reason this crash was so severe is because the crash attenuator,
a highway safety barrier which is designed to reduce the impact
into a concrete lane divider, had been crushed in a prior
accident without being replaced. We have never seen this level
of damage to a Model X in any other crash.
According
to the Wall Street Journal, the National Transportation Safety
Board is investigating the incident. The
crash took place five days aftera
self-driving Uberbeing tested in Arizona
killed a pedestrian at night—leading Uber to suspend its tests of
the vehicles everywhere, and Arizona to suspend testing in the state
by Uber. The first fatality caused by a self-driving car, it has
inspired louder calls for the nascent technology to be strictly
regulated as companies race to perfect it. Tesla’sautopilotis
a less sophisticated technology than the fully autonomous systems
that Uber, Google sister company Waymo, and others are developing,
one that’s not meant to be used without an alert driver. But that
hasn’t stopped Tesla owners from occasionallybehaving
recklessly with the feature. That’s another key difference
between Tesla’s tech and Uber’s: Anyone who can afford to buy a
Tesla can use it. The
March 23 crash is the second known fatal incident involving Tesla’sautopilot,
following a 2016 collision between a Model S and a tractor-trailer
that killed the former’s driver. In that crash, as in the one last
week, the driver appears not to have had his hands on the wheel, and
the NTSB split blame for the fatality between shortcomings of
Tesla’s technology and the driver of the tractor-trailer. We
still don’t know all the details of the crash on Highway 101—like
what the driver was doing and whether theautopilotfailed
in any way—though it will certainly receive a great deal of scrutiny
at a time when many aspects of Tesla’s business are being prodded
for weaknesses. The company’s stock got pummeled all week as bad
news continued to pile up for the manufacturer. On Thursday it
recalled 123,000 Model S vehicles—almost half of the cars it’s ever
sold—over an issue with power-steering bolts that it will retrofit.
Perhaps most worryingly for the business, it is still struggling
with manufacturing delays for the Model 3, Tesla’s mass-market
electric car, whose production timeline has been consistently
overestimated by CEO Elon Musk. And there’s reason to believe thecompany
is running out of cash. All
of which might help explain whyTesla’s
latest updateon the March 23 crash, while
stressing regret for the lost life, contains more than a hint of
exasperation over yet another instance in which the company must
defend a technology that it believes, probably rightly, will improve
road safety once perfected:
In
the past, when we have brought up statistical safety points, we
have been criticized for doing so, implying that we lack empathy
for the tragedy that just occurred. Nothing could be further from
the truth. We care deeply for and feel indebted to those who chose
to put their trust in us. However, we must also care about people
now and in the future whose lives may be saved if they know that
Autopilot improves safety. None of this changes how devastating an
event like this is or how much we feel for our customer’s family
and friends. We are incredibly sorry for their loss.
But
it’s also possible to believe in the promise of self-driving cars
while worrying about the ways in which the technology is currently
being deployed—particularly the notion that a human driver and a
self-driving vehicle might compensate for each other’s shortcomings.
The latter is still inexperienced, while the former is too easily
lulled to inattention. And it’s becoming more apparent that the
combination of the two can sometimes be deadly.
