Tesla with Autopilot hits cop car—driver admits he was watching a film

Law enforcement in North Carolina have submitted fees from a driver whose Tesla crashed into a police vehicle early Wednesday morning, Raleigh’s CBS 17 television studies. The driver admitted to officers that he had activated the Autopilot technologies on his Design S and was seeing a motion picture on his phone at the time of the crash.

“A Nash County deputy and a trooper with the Freeway Patrol had been on the facet of the road whilst responding to a previous crash when the Tesla slammed into the deputy’s cruiser,” CBS 17 reports. “The influence despatched the deputy’s cruiser into the trooper’s vehicle—which pushed the trooper and deputy to the floor.”

Luckily, no 1 was critically injured by the crash.

The driver was charged with a violation of the state’s “shift over” legislation and with owning a television in the vehicle.

It can be an significant reminder that no auto on the market place right now is entirely self-driving. Drivers will need to pay consideration to the street at all moments, no matter of what variety of car or truck they have or what form of driver-guidance technologies their automobile has.

Tesla could use better driver monitoring technological innovation

In the last year, there have been at least three comparable incidents involving Tesla autos crashing into police cars and trucks. This transpired in Arizona in July and in Connecticut and Massachusetts last December.

To be reasonable, this just isn’t just a Tesla trouble. Reports have located that driver-assistance systems like Autopilot—from Tesla and other automakers—are not excellent at halting for stationary motor vehicles. A examine earlier this thirty day period uncovered that driver support techniques from BMW, Kia, and Subaru unsuccessful to persistently quit for stationary cars on a test keep track of.

Nevertheless, Tesla plainly has room for enhancement. Of course, it would be excellent if Autopilot could basically detect stopped motor vehicles. But Tesla could also use better driver checking know-how.

Tesla motor vehicles use a steering wheel torque sensor to consider to detect irrespective of whether a driver is paying out focus. This kind of sensor is effortless to defeat. It’s also probable to maintain a hand on the wheel with out actually paying out consideration to the road.

Tesla could understand from Cadillac, whose Super Cruise engineering features an eye-monitoring digital camera that verifies that the driver is wanting at the road. An eye-tracking procedure like this would likely prevent incidents like Wednesday’s crash in North Carolina. If the driver experienced tried to view a movie though Autopilot was engaged, the technique would have detected that he was not seeing the highway, warned the driver, and finally deactivated by itself.