CEO Elon Musk says a new software update to its car’s autopilot system could have prevented a fatal accident that happened a year ago. The driver died after crashing into a tractor-trailer.
Advertisement
The company says it’s made more than 200 improvements to its software with this update, including a change that will lock inattentive drivers out of Autopilot mode if they don’t take the wheel when the auto issues an audible warning three times in an hour. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating the incident.
The NHTSA seems happy about the update according to Musk but he did not elaborate further regarding the pending investigation from the previous crash. Speaking in an online press conference to launch the software update he said: “It’s not going from bad to good, it’s going from good to great”. “I don’t think there would be a vehicle that is even within a multiple of the S and the X”, Musk said.
“I wish we could have done it earlier, but ideal is the enemy of good”, Musk said. The radar technology should decrease accident numbers, he noted.
The vehicle in the crash that killed Brown did not brake automatically because the system failed to distinguish a truck’s white trailer from the sky.
If three warnings are ignored in an hour, the new Autopilot system will switch off automatically until the Tesla is once again parked.
Tesla explained that “the net effect of this, combined with the fact that radar sees through most visual obscuration, is that the auto should nearly always hit the brakes correctly even if a UFO were to land on the freeway in zero visibility conditions”.
Radar was originally added to Tesla vehicles in 2014 to supplement the camera with extra data. And that radar will use more advanced signal processing to create a picture of the world.
Tesla has released a remote update that should cut Autopilot accidents “in half”, says Elon Musk.
“We really pushed hard on questioning all of those assumptions over the past few months”, he said. “Nobody else could solve this”. It slows the vehicles if they don’t respond. And these kinds of stops always have the potential to cause injury, making a false positive potentially risky.
Advertisement
Tesla Motors Inc. announced an upgrade Sunday for its Autopilot feature that could significantly improve the safety if its semi-autonomous driving system.
