Christine is of course the car that kills in John Carpenter's movie based on the Stephen King novelTesla's automobile is also a killer:Yes, I'm being provocative intentionally. I really would like readers to consider the myriad of problems that have shown themselves to us at this present time as humans over rely/depend and become addicted to unnecessary/ detrimental technologyFollowing up on: Tesla’s Driverless Car Kills Zombie “Driver” & Google's Self Driving “Sticky Technology”Globe and Mail
The details of the accident are likely to add fuel to the debate over whether self-driving cars are ready for the real world. Autopilot didn’t notice the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake wasn’t applied.
-Would Auto pilot be able to differentiate between falling snow and a white vehicle?-Can it differentiate between pedestrians dressed in white under the same conditions? -Did the Tesla AutoPilot apply the brake after the car hit either of the two fences or the pole? - Did the car's auto pilot hit the brakes at any point in time? - Or was the vehicle so damaged from the multiple hits that it simply could not continue driving?-I'm not even going to touch the hacking aspects of this very preventable tragedy! The driver would have been beheaded in this preventable accident, had he been in control of his vehicle. The Tesla vehicle drove right under a transport truck and continued on through two fences, hitting a pole, then coming to a stop.
If the autopilot system didn’t recognize the tractor trailer, then Tesla will have to recall the cars to fix the flaw, said Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, an advocacy group in Washington. Mr. Ditlow said that Tesla’s autopilot system needs to be able to recognize all possible road conditions.
- "Tesla’s autopilot system needs to be able to recognize all possible road conditions"Is that even possible?
“That’s a clear-cut defect and there should be a recall,” Mr. Ditlow said in a phone interview. “When you put autopilot in a vehicle, you’re telling people to trust the system even if there is lawyerly warning to keep your hands on the wheel.”Tesla said in the post on Thursday that it requires specific knowledge from the vehicle owner that autopilot “is new technology and still in public beta phase” before it will enable the system. No other auto maker sells unproven technology to customers, said Eric Noble, president of CarLab Inc., a consulting firm in Orange, Calif.
Mobileye NV, a supplier of cameras and technology to Tesla for the Model S, said its system is designed to brake automatically to avoid rear-end collisions but won’t be able to brake for laterally crossing vehicles until 2018.
Important- The supplier of cameras and tech to Tesla said the system is NOT designed for this situation- (Designed to avoid a read end collision- a car directly in front of you and most often stopped) Which tells you it cannot detect moving cars or pedestrians.Thank god there were no pedestrians and this car didn't have that god awful google sticky technology!!
“What we know is that the vehicle was on a divided highway with autopilot engaged when a tractor trailer drove across the highway perpendicular to the Model S,” Tesla said in the post. “Neither autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied. The high ride height of the trailer combined with its positioning across the road and the extremely rare circumstances of the impact caused the Model S to pass under the trailer, with the bottom of the trailer impacting the windshield of the Model S.”
Ah, hello. It is not an extremely rare circumstance to have a tractor trailer on a highway!!!Pretty sure Tesla co is simply going to blame the driver. No doubt the driver signed some 'lawerly waiver' and Tesla will wash their hands of this whole episode. The regulators will assist Tesla in this 'sweeping under the carpet' so they can push assist in pushing the centralized control agenda via theirTechnocracyTechnocracy : the government or control of society or industry by an elite of technical experts and their creepy tyrannical technology.