Tesla has been under fire since Joshua Brown, a former Navy SEAL, was killed when his all-electric Tesla Model S sedan drove under a semi trailer that was crossing a Florida highway.
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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has been investigating Tesla’s Autopilot system since June because of the fatal accident.
As of this year, it’s swimming in more than $3 billion-worth of debt, and still has plenty of competition from companies like Sunrun and Vivint Solar.
Attorneys for the family of Brown, who lived in OH, couldn’t be reached for comment.
The CCTV report on Wednesday raises the question whether the China crash was the first fatal accident involving Autopilot. Tesla had to clarify about the language problem on its website as people perceived its autopilot feature as self-driving.
“I am highly confident this will be a substantial improvement”, Musk told reporters.
Musk said that it was “very likely” that the new version of Autopilot would have prevented the death of Tesla owner Joshua Brown, but that the update “doesn’t mean ideal safety”.
The feature also includes cameras and sensors. Even the tragic death occurring while Autopilot was active in May would have likely been prevented if the driver was prepared to manually take control of the vehicle.
In the case of Tesla models, the autopilot cars are not fully autonomous in the same way as self-driving cars, such as Google’s test vehicles.
Tesla will release an update for its Model S as Elon Musk wants to further enhance the safety of the self-driving auto.
“Tesla is actually using its customers as trainers”, Smith said via email.
Palo Alto-based Tesla has always maintained that the technology is not foolproof and requires the driver to be prepared to take over at any time. “They get very comfortable with it and they repeatedly ignore the warnings”. It was found out that the updates will affect all of the Tesla vehicles that were built from October 2014 to the present.
Regardless, continual improvements in safety are essential if driverless cars are ever to be commonplace on the roads, so Tesla’s move is a step in the right direction. In case the driver ignores the warnings repeatedly, the vehicle will have to be stopped and parked before the autonomous functions can be activated again. He estimates that this is going to make Tesla vehicles three times safer than any other vehicle on the road, which is a huge claim to make. Although Tesla denied most of the claims made, many auto experts believe that the company’s update plans were probably caused by these issues.
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Tesla said then that the May 7 incident was “the first known fatality in just over 130 million miles where Autopilot was activated”. “It’s quite unequivocal that Autopilot improves safety”, he said.
