If a driver ignores warnings to take the wheel, he or she will need to park and restart to use Autopilot again.
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Mobileye’s statement escalates a public spat with Tesla and will nearly certainly draw the interest of two federal agencies investigation the death of a driver while using Autopilot in a May crash in Florida.
In a tweet on Friday, Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, said the automaker planned to roll out the update on 21 September.
When reached for comment about the January crash, Tesla said that it was unable to access the car’s logs and therefore can’t determine if Autopilot was engaged at the time of the crash.
Earlier this week, Amnon Shashua, the chairman and CTO of the Israeli company Mobileye, said Mobileye severed ties with Tesla earlier thjs year because Tesla was “pushing the envelope in terms of safety”, according to a Reuters report.
Tesla’s shares have fallen 16.5 percent this year, as the safety of the company’s Autopilot feature has been questioned following crashes.
Mobileye previously had said its system was never created to spot cross traffic, but it didn’t know if Tesla had modified the system.
Tesla Motors is suing an oil company executive said to have impersonated its CEO Elon Musk in order to obtain financial information on the company.
Musk told reporters on a conference call that the new version of Autopilot would “very likely” have prevented the death of Joshua Brown, an OH man who died when his Tesla Model S drove into a tractor-trailer truck that was crossing a highway in Florida.
Later in the year, Tesla deployed the system, which can maintain a set speed, keep the auto within its lane and brake automatically.
Tesla said the email received by Mr Wheeler was signed “em”.
The crash and resulting video is reminiscent of a previous incident, also from China, where a Model S in Autopilot mode crashed into a vehicle that was parked on the shoulder of a highway.
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Mobileye said it made “substantial efforts” to take more control of the Tesla project, but the two companies could not reach agreement. The Silicon Valley electric luxury vehicle maker did not have an immediate reply after Mobileye’s statement was filed on Friday.
