Quote:
Originally Posted by zer0cool
It appears based on the comments from the article that the man first turned on autopilot on the highway, then decided to change lanes. If you put enough torque on the wheel to change lanes, AP is automatically turned off (since it assume you want to manually take over, it's really well implemented), so he basically hit the car in the other lane while changing lanes... he suffered minor injuries and no one on the bus was injured...
According to the article:
A Tesla spokesperson however said in a statement that "we have spoken to our customer, who confirmed that Autopilot was functioning properly and that his use of Autopilot was unrelated to the accident."
This is not really related to AP... just someone who changed lanes and hit another car.
However Model S warns you when you veer into another lane and there's a car there or right behind you. There's a red warning with vibrating steering wheel. It's an assistance feature meant to reduce accident magnitude. I wonder if the feature kicked off, maybe that's why it wasn't that serious? I mean usually the driver could avoid the accident given such warning, maybe the driver ignored or the warning didn't go off. Regardless, the driver should have checked... but really there shouldn't be much of a blind spot when it's a bus on the other lane... So probably just distracted driver.
|
Yeah, distracted doing something else, because he thought the Auto Pilot was driving the car...
If you don't want to drive, then take a plane, bus, taxi, subway, or hire a driver.
__________________
A manual transmission can be set to "comfort", "sport", and "track" modes simply by the technique and speed at which you shift it; it doesn't need "modes", modes are for manumatics that try to behave like a real 3-pedal manual transmission. If you can money-shift it, it's a manual transmission. "Yeah, but NO ONE puts an automatic trans shift knob on a manual transmission."