Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A Tesla on autopilot crashed into the roof of an overturned truck in Taiwan on Monday, prompting concern about Tesla autopilot’s ability to recognise visually confusing obstacles.
Watch an oblivious Tesla Model 3 smash into an overturned truck on a highway ‘while under Autopilot’
Driver braked but it was too late
TUE 2 JUN 2020 // 01:07 UTC
Video A Tesla Model 3 plowed straight into the roof of an overturned truck lying across a highway in Taiwan, sparking fears the driver trusted the car’s Autopilot a little too much.
The smash occurred on Monday at 0640 local time (2240 UTC) and the drivers of both vehicles were unharmed according to Taiwan’s Liberty Times. You can see the accident for yourself below:
The prang reminds us of a previous case where a 40-year-old man was beheaded after his Tesla Model S, while in Autopilot mode, hit a white 18-wheeler tractor trailer in 2016.
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Read more: https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/02/tesla_car_crash/
To the credit of Tesla’s safety technology the driver survived a high speed collision with a truck.
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Here, it looks like this Tesla has really poor brakes.
Consumerreport:
“The Tesla’s stopping distance of 152 feet from 60 mph was far worse than any contemporary car we’ve tested and about 7 feet longer than the stopping distance of a Ford F-150 full-sized pickup.”
152 feet are some 46 meters!
Facepalm.
Tesla has simply no brakes.
My MB stops after 35 m at that speed.
Well, my MB did authomatic emergency brake several times on autobahn already and saved at least the car, if not my life.
It’s not the brakes, it’s the weight. Those batteries are heavy.
MArkW
Not that heavy.
The heaviest Tesla 3 (3500 to 4100 pounds) is only 9% heavier than the heaviest BMW series 3 (3500 to 3770 pounds).
This just proves yet again that we are a long long way from self driving cars.
IMHO we will never have truly autonomous passenger vehicles. The whole technology is one class action lawsuit away from extinction.
Seems to me that Tesla is dead on center into that truck! Maybe they should send this technology to the military for shooting down incoming missiles?
Anyone taking bets that the proposed solution will be to ban white trucks?
I have a 2018 Ford Edge, 60-0 in 39 meters.
I trust the autonomous cruise control to a point, only had to ‘take over’ once.
This is my first car with all the new safety gizmos…like it so far.
CLOUD!
For some reason Teslas like to confuse trucks and clouds.
The truck rolled because some idiot packed the Tesla nose-down on top of the truck.
The idiot who loaded the truck that way should be sacked.
One of my concerns on driverless cars is about courtesy. How on earth do you incorporate that into the software, particularly as it depends so much on visual communication between drivers usually by eye and signal means, subject to interpretation?. There are endless examples of this courtesy enabling flow in heavy traffic situations, that we have all experienced; so I don’t need to give examples. I do wonder though how two such cars would react when they meet head on on a single track road, apart from stopping and digitally glaring at each other.
Autonomous driving systems need to be trained to ‘see’ road to use, and obstacles to avoid. They aren’t too good at independent thought, because they are not actually thinking! That said, I have been driving quite a long time, and I have never seen a truck overturned on a highway in that way. The auto-driver may well have interpreted the roof as a tunnel – it did hit it almost dead center (same way a smart bomb hits a target dead center. If not now, then very soon the self driving car will be safer than human driven, and then we will have to fight for the right to drive.
If not now, then very soon the self driving car will be safer than human driven
Not for a long time, as long as the roads are filled with chaotic human drivers. AI is a long ways from being able to handle “unexpected” things at any moment (Exhibit A – an overturned truck) whereas humans do a better (not perfect, but still considerably better) job of reacting to the unexpected things (be it the stupidity of their fellow drivers or a natural phenomena such as extremely bad weather that can block, obscure, interfere with or just generally foul up autonomous vehicles sensors). Self driving cars are great in “perfect” orderly conditions that pretty much only exist on a test track, not so great in the chaotic conditions of the real world. No amount of wishful thinking changes that reality.
The new Shelby GT500 will do 0-100 – 0 in 10.8 seconds and in a touch over 800′
Mine isn’t quite that fast but I can’t understand distracted driving in a Tesla
Does the Tesla come with FREE crash reporting and Emergency Services Notification?