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Dashcam video: my Tesla smacks armored truck while on Autopilot
- Thread starter Slymonkey
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- autopilot accident
No. The driver is always supposed to be in control. AP is driver assistance, not the driver.
The one area where I might not fault the driver is in auto-parallel parking where you need to come so close to another car to actually be able to park that a human would not be able to react quickly enough to prevent the accident. Of course because of that I never use the auto-park.
Sandollars
I bleed Cardinal
Autopilot is AWESOME! But I treat it like a tamed Lion; I may use and enjoy it but I am always on full alert when using it because it is not a house cat. Putting too much trust into a Beta product rarely has favorable end results.
Tam
Well-Known Member
My previous versions of AP2 couldn't handle a car cutting me off.
However, since 8.1 (2018.2), it has been very much improved such as an example below:
Although the radar had not registered the white Mercedes on the Instrument Clusters but it showed clearly that the car had applied brakes on its own (teal color icon means Autopilot and any manual actions of braking or steering would tun that icon off)
It has been very useful for me despite of its problems which are easily manually intervened each time.
I drive long distance a lot and I seldom have to manually intervene most of the time.
For example, I drove 200 miles and I only had to manually intervene twice on freeway (for failed auto lane change.)
Once I learned what works and what don't, it has been very relaxing from the start.
I always suspected BetaPilot would not work in rain/snow. Now I know. Thanks for posting this and confirming my suspicion. For all those believers out there, don't be the guinea pig.
You mean as clearly stated in the owners manual?
Super_Popular
Well-Known Member
Not going to harp on you but it's pretty obvious you were not paying attention. 100% your fault, not the fault of the car. HOWEVER...I do wish the sensors picked up cars moving into other lanes a little faster.
Graffi
Member
Owners Manual??? Is that something we are supposed to read and study??? I thought it was there for purely legal reasons, of if we could not figure it out ourselves....
Petra
Member
AP1/TACC is terrible at handling mreging traffic and people changing lanes in front of you. Always has been. That's why you shut it down and take full manual control in those situations.
Under no case is Autopilot “expected” to handle a situation unsupervised and take the blame. At least not under any released versions of Autopilot.
The only case I can imagine Autopilot sharing some blame is if it suddenly put in a control that destabilized your car. For example, suddenly jerking the wheel in a split second causing traction loss. To date this has not happened. I think if a human has more than 1-2 seconds to react to prevent a situation, it is difficult to successfully blame a L2 ADAS.
In your example, cars actually sometimes do move backwards despite applying the gas. Your engine could stall, your transmission could malfunction, or you could be applying insufficient torque for a hill. In all of those cases, the fault would still be on the driver.
So, no. Unless the system severely malfunctions in a way that makes it impossible for the human driver to do anything, it is virtually inconceivable to blame Autopilot. That would be a spectacular story when it happens, but so far, that’s not been any documented Autopilot accident.
This sort of happened to a fellow here a while ago. AP dove toward a barrier, and he corrected with the wheel, but the added torque required to overcome AP2 (it can be very high based on my experience), caused an oversteer condition after AP let go and he lost control of the car at highway speeds. He luckily did not wreck, but Tesla's answer was AP acted within design and the rest was driver error.
Scary Experience with AP2.0 Autosteer on the Highway
I have had a few scary disengagements myself with AP2, and took my car to the service center to see if they could lower the AP break away torque on the wheel. I was told I was using AP incorrectly, and that you are supposed to disengage with the stalk or brake not the wheel
what?? transmission and engine could fail and the driver is liable? Hmmm...
But I agree with everything else you said..
The line before is critical
Sure, if they burnt up the clutch using it to hold the car in place, or stalled it and rolled backward, those are legit on the driver. Even if the trans blew, no reason to roll backwards into someone else. (Though if it lost the pump while stopped, then rolled while moving their foot from brake to throttle, that can be forgiven
)You're absolutely right. I was not an attentive driver and was not watching the road, and hence the accident happened. I take full responsibility. No question about that. That doesn't change the fact that Autopilot is designed to detect a car moving into your lane and react accordingly, and it performed that task admirably well hundreds of times in the year and a half I've owned the car, and now a little rain blinded the radar so that it could no longer see other cars? That's just nonsense!
Medium. But if you watch the video with the audio on, you'll hear the collision warning go off about a blink before impact. I was fiddling with the GPS on my screen, and I recall hearing the beeping, slamming on the brake, but it was obviously too late to avoid hitting the truck.
Quite a bit, since my car hit his bumper at an angle. Here's a closeup. It's around $5k of damage, I believe. The shop replaced the hood, bumper, fender, and some stuff under the bumper.
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