Tesla's 'Autopilot' Will Make Mistakes. Humans Will Overreact
That&#x27;s part of the problem.<p>Tesla has two basic problems with their &quot;autopilot&quot;.  One is hype, and one is bad technical design.<p>Tesla&#x27;s &quot;autopilot&quot; is just automatic lane keeping and automatic cruise control.  Mercedes and BMW have been shipping that for years. The other car companies have hardware to check if the driver&#x27;s hands are on the wheel.  Tesla not only didn&#x27;t do that, they hyped those basic functions as being an &quot;autopilot&quot;, as if they had something comparable to what Google has.  Tesla has significantly overhyped their technology, to a dangerous level.<p>Here&#x27;s another Tesla crash, from yesterday.[1]  This is a Tesla rear-ending the corner of a stalled van on a highway. This may be an &quot;automation in wrong mode&quot; error, and complicated excuses from Tesla will probably be forthcoming.  That&#x27;s not good enough.  Airline pilots get into &quot;wrong mode&quot; errors, and they get extensive training, including simulator time.  Drivers don&#x27;t get that.  This driver presumably thought the automation would do something sensible in that situation. It didn&#x27;t.<p>The other big Tesla problem is a pure technical design error - the bumper-mounted radar is blind at windshield height.  This is the immediate cause of the fatal accident involving under-running the semitrailer.  It&#x27;s also the cause of the parking accident with the truck with overhanging load sticking out the back.[2] Tesla&#x27;s implementation has deadly blind spots.  They need a radar at windshield-top height. It&#x27;s quite likely, now that the NHTSA is looking into this crash, that Tesla will have to do a recall and retrofit one.  (Along with hands-on-wheel sensors.)<p>Tesla was relying on stereo cameras too much.  Depth from stereo is always iffy; there needs to be some detail on the target to get range. You can&#x27;t range a uniform surface with stereo vision.  (Human flyers have the same problem flying over ice.) A big white truck under some lighting conditions has that property.  Cameras are useful, but backed only by today&#x27;s algorithms, not enough.  Teslas come with a sensor suite inadequate for the job.<p>From a software perspective, Tesla&#x27;s software seems to be overoptimistic that there&#x27;s no problem ahead. 3D vision systems know when they don&#x27;t have range info for a large area. Tesla&#x27;s software was willing to drive into that.  It didn&#x27;t note the absence of range info for the road surface; it may not even be profiling the road ahead.  (We all had to do that in the DARPA Grand Challenge because we were operating off-road. That&#x27;s a solved problem. Google does it with their roof-mounted LIDAR.)  Tesla owners have asked for &quot;pothole detection&quot; as a feature.  Lack of this may eventually take someone off a cliff.<p>The press is gradually picking up on this.  Until recently, Tesla&#x27;s autopilot was treated as a magic black box in the press.  Now some automotive writers are starting to ask the right questions.<p>This is not a setback for automatic driving. This is just a Tesla problem.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qQkx-4pFjus" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qQkx-4pFjus</a>
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