Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier
Here is my armchair diagnosis: right before the car veers towards the barrier it drives through a stretch of road where the only visible lane marker is on the left.  Then the right lane marker comes into view at about the point where the lane starts to widen out for the lane split.  The lines that will become the right and left lane markers of the split left and right lanes respectively are right next to the van in front of the Tesla, and at this point resemble the diamond lane markers in the middle of the split lanes.  My guess is that the autopilot mistook these lines for the diamond lane marker and steered towards them thinking it was centering itself in the lane.<p>If this theory turns out to be correct then Tesla is in deep trouble because this would be a very elementary mistake.  The system should have known that the lanes split at this point, noticed that the distance between what it thought was the diamond lane marker and the right lane line (which was clearly visible) was wrong, and at least sounded an alarm, if not actively braked until it had a better solution.<p>This is actually the most serious aspect of all of these crashes: the system does not seem to be aware when it is getting things wrong.  I dubbed this property &quot;cognizant failure&quot; in my 1991 Ph.D. thesis on autonomous driving, but no one seems to have adopted it.  It&#x27;s not possible to engineer an autonomous system that never fails, but it <i>is</i> possible to engineer one in such a way that it never fails to detect that it has failed.  Tesla seems to have done neither.