The Tesla autopilot system is safer than the vast majority of human drivers. The truth turned left from the right lane in front of the Tesla and the accident was the fault of the truck driver, not the Tesla. Would the driver have been killed if he had been operating his own vehicle? Maybe/probably according to the facts presented in virtually every accident report I'v read. Second, the side panel of the truck was white and he turned into the sun creating a reflective situation that was not programed into sensors. Software engineers design based on situations likely to be encountered. The situation that caused this wreck was not one that, in over thirty two years as a professional driver, I've not only never seen, but never even heard of.

The room cause of this accident was the declining regulation of the trucking industry, the declining wages that go with it and and obvious lack of training of the truck driver.

Finally, I own Tesla stock and have been following the Trump administration' s handling of the entire industry of renewables. This report is but a series of policies coming from Washington designed to keep this nation from switching from fossil fuels to renewables. Check Teslas per mile accident rate with autopilot. A dollar to a donut says it's a fraction of the human rate.

Check Teslas per mile accident rate with autopilot. A dollar to a donut says it's a fraction of the human rate.

Not a good comparison considering how few Teslas there are on the road.

Software engineers design based on situations likely to be encountered.

Beta. There is a lot of sun. There are a lot white vehicles.

Tesla’s system was too slow to warn the driver to pay attention, unlike systems that Consumer Reports has tested from General Motors Co. and other companies, Friedman said. GM’s Super Cruise driver assist system operates only on divided highways with no median turn lanes, he said.

Consumer Reports.

Tesla does not market or promote their system as a replacement for human drivers. It is currently pushed as a backup for inattentive or incapacitated humans. If you can explain to me how this would have turned out better with a distracted human in control, I'll listen.

Yes, humans are using the system in a manner specifically in opposition to what the car company tells them to. I suspect that the majority of Knoxviews readers can be accused of the same thing WRT accelerators - not all the time but certainly some of the time.

You appear to have a bias against Tesla and the coming wave of autonomous vehicles. I agree that they will most likely not be perfect. However, they will be, and in many situations already are, better than human drivers. As a driver, as a motorcyclist, as a bicyclist, I can assure you in no uncertain terms that I would much rather take my chances with all the other vehicles on the road being operated by Tesla's current system than by humans with smartphones, stereo systems, dates, or children. I fully admit to having been less than perfect in my driving while screaming at the political news emanating from my own radio. Autopilot would have been a better driver right then.

I thought that's what we were discussing when I entered the fray.The whole and exact details of the most recent accident are sparse and inconclusive.

I thought, however, we were discussing to 2016 incident.

Their similarities speak for themselves.

I stand corrected.

I have no bias against Tesla and the coming wave of autonomous vehicles.

I have bias against companies putting out product that is not fully tested or is not fully explained, e.g. 737 Max.

Based on your description, it's too bad people are no longer expected to drive. Instead they get in a car and don't pay attention to the car and the surroundings. Alas. So many expectations have been lowered. Before they continue lowering expectations, they should come up with replacement tools that work.

I would like people to not just be users but also be interested in the tools they use. Not so much anymore, most people want to be users only.

I'm all for new technology that works. They need to stop doing iterative testing on public roads. Finalize the product a little better.

I follow this issue, for among other reasons, to figure out when my company is going to show all its drivers to the door. CNBC has several interesting reports. This stuff tends to transform into the industry rather quickly once it gets the green light. Under Obama, our company transformed a significant part of it's fleet to CNG and LNG fueled vehicles, and in the process, built a nationwide fueling system to handle this transformation. I look for that process to happen again with Hydrogen fuel cells and electric vehicles. The times, they are a changing.

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Tesla's EAP can be set up to 90MPH on interstates and 5 MPH above speed limit on secondary roads. If no speed limit is detected, max. for those is 45MPH.

When you hear about extremely high speed wrecks in Teslas, claims that it was on EAP are bogus.

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I'd just like a vehicle that could legally get me home after a night out on the town without having to worry about bringing home bedbugs from the Uber driver's cars. Those things are nasty.

CR finds Tesla's new automatic lane-changing feature is far less competent than a human driver.
...

David Friedman, vice president of advocacy at Consumer Reports, says that as it currently exists, the automatic lane-change function raises serious safety concerns.

“Tesla is showing what not to do on the path toward self-driving cars: release increasingly automated driving systems that aren’t vetted properly,” he says. “Before selling these systems, automakers should be required to give the public validated evidence of that system’s safety—backed by rigorous simulations, track testing, and the use of safety drivers in real-world conditions.”

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They weren't able to penetrate the autodriver though. Still, it's creepy. Especially for the trucking industry.

First of all, I would second Factchecker recommendation to give a Tesla a spin if you have the chance. It's an amazing vehicle by any metric I think of...it can outperform anything on the road, is tops in comfort, has an amazing sound system, is fun to drive, and is 100% electric. Once you have some personal experience with the car, it definitely changes your perception of a lot of the reports you read out there - especially the naysayers, many of whom also seem to have a clearly vested interest in opposing the kind of change that Tesla and Elon Musk represent. Remember Virginia Postrel's fascinating book back in the 1990s, "The Future and Its Enemies," by chance?
In light of Bizgrrl's original post, I did go back and read my manual about Autopilot. It's a fascinating feature with lots of potential...but there are explicit instructions not to take your eyes off the road or to rely on the car to brake itself. So, the error described in the incident in question was - as is typically the case in auto accidents - human error and negligence...the same kind that leads to the other 5,000,000 auto crashes, 40,000 deaths and millions of injuries each year.
I know that Elon Musk is a polarizing figure and I do understand the skepticism about self-driving cars - but the work that this man is doing - with electric cars, battery capacity, solar power, etc - offers a glimmer of hope for our future. And the future's coming, ready or not. I'm cheering him on.

Those of you genuinely interested in this issue might enjoy reading this blog post from Peter Diamandis. I would especially recommend the section on "How Autopilot Works" and then the next section on "Implications for AI & Robotics." Yes, Diamandis is an unabashed believer but still worth the read.

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Our Rav4 Hybrid Limited has radar cruise control, which is now a must-have feature on any new car I buy. The newest version has full stop and go speed control. Looking forward to that when I trade.

Ours also has "lane keep assist." This is a little gimmicky, but what it does is nudge you back into the lane if you stray outside the white lines. If you stray more than a few times in a few minutes it pops up a little coffee cup icon and says "time for a break?" I mostly keep it turned off, but the newest version has full automatic steering for highway driving. With radar cruise control, that's the next best thing to autopilot but you still control it. I'm looking forward to that, too.

Ours also has automatic emergency braking/collision avoidance, 360 degree proximity sensors with pedestrian and rear cross traffic sensors/alerts, 360 degree birds-eye view parking cameras, side mirror blind-spot sensor/alert and more. All these features are now must-haves for me.

So I'm coming around.

I like the new commercial even if it does co-opt Sound of Silence. I look forward to the new van, the Buzz. Electric that can go 260 miles!

Idiots abound

Tesla cannot gain the real world experience/data it needs if it disables the feature. OTOH, if it leaves it enabled humans will abuse it.

Heh. Jut these two incidents are different white Model 3s, Southern and Northern Cal. And there's another, a black one, featured in the news video.

Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk is "unhappy" with the progress of developing fully autonomous vehicles, and at least 11 members of the software team have left in the past few months...

Musk is also upset that some employees have said they can't meet the timelines Musk has set for the developing technology,

A former Tesla employee is being sued for downloading data related to the company's Autopilot feature and allegedly taking that data to a Chinese rival company.

Long before he left, Cao began uploading complete copies of Tesla's Autopilot-related source code to his personal iCloud account...

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LIDAR

The development discussed at the link could make a difference. LIDAR,like SONAR or RADAR, depends on a return signal. As such, it can't mistake a white truck for sky or any such thing. Elon Musk was reluctant to have them incorporated into the Tesla for reasons of cost, and I assume complexity, but it certainly has advantages. I would imagine that other manufacturers will be significantly less hesitant to incorporate the technology which will probably drive the cost down even further.

Obviously, the programming is a concern but were this incorporated into a Tesla-esque systems, it would likely mean a projected reduction in accident rate by a factor of ten at least and possibly a hundred or more.