Tesla confirms “Autopilot” crash in Montana
With three accidents on &quot;autopilot&quot; in a short period, the defects in Tesla&#x27;s design are becoming clear.<p>1. Tesla&#x27;s &quot;hands on wheel&quot; enforcement is much weaker than their competitors.  BMW, Volvo, and Mercedes have similar systems, but after a few seconds of hands-off-wheel, the vehicle will start to slow.  Tesla allows minutes of hands-off time; one customer reports driving 50 miles without touching the wheel. Tesla is operating in what I&#x27;ve called the &quot;deadly valley&quot; - enough automation that the driver can zone out, but not enough to stay out of trouble.<p>The fundamental assumption that the driver can take over in an emergency may be bogus.  Google&#x27;s head of automatic driving recently announced that they tested with 140 drivers and rejected semi-automatic driving as unsafe. It takes seconds, not milliseconds, for the driver to recover situational awareness and take over.<p>2. Tesla&#x27;s sensor suite is inadequate.  They have one radar, at bumper height, one camera at windshield-top height, and some sonar sensors useful only during parking.  Google&#x27;s latest self-driving car has five 3D LIDAR scanners, plus radars and cameras. Volvo has multiple radars, one at windshield height, plus vision.  A high-mounted radar would have prevented the collision with the semitrailer, and also would have prevented the parking accident where a Tesla in auto park hit beams projecting beyond the back of a truck.<p>Tesla is getting depth from motion vision, which is cheap but flaky.  It cannot range a uniform surface.<p>3. Tesla&#x27;s autopilot behavior after a crash is terrible.  It doesn&#x27;t stop.  In the semitrailer crash, the vehicle continued under power for several hundred feet after sheering off the top of the Tesla driving under the semitrailer.  Only when it hit a telephone pole did the car stop.<p>The Pennsylvania Turnpike crash is disturbing, because it&#x27;s the case the &quot;autopilot&quot; is supposed to handle - divided limited-access highway under good conditions.  The vehicle hit a guard rail on the side of the road.  That may have been an system failure. Too soon to tell.<p>The NTSB, the air crash investigation people, have a team investigating Tesla. They&#x27;re not an enforcement agency; they do intensive technical analysis. Tesla&#x27;s design decisions are about to go under the microscope used on air crashes.<p>Tesla&#x27;s spin control is backfiring.  They tried to blame the driver. They&#x27;re being sued by the family of the dead driver, and being investigated by the NHTSA (the recall people), and the NTSB.  In comparison, when a Google self-driving car bumped a bus at 2mph, Google admitted fault, took the blame, and Urmson gave a talk at SXSW showing the data from the sensors and discussing how the self-driving car misjudged the likely behavior of the bus.