Photo: YouTube screenshot
Tesla is upset about all the coverage the Autopilot crashes get, and feels the media isn't paying enough attention to those cases when the system actually does what it's supposed to and prevents an incident.
In case the sarcasm in the previous paragraph wasn't obvious enough, Elon Musk is acting as if he only now starts to understand what constitutes a press subject and what isn't newsworthy. If Elon Musk had the choice between reading about a baker making bread or one whose oven blew up because of weird ingredient mix, which one do you think he'd go for?
Even so, we did occasionally oblige and talked about the few cases that made it onto the Internet in which the Autopilot worked its wonders and prevented the EV it was installed in from ending up in the crusher. However, things didn't exactly go as planned, since we concluded that, in each case, an experienced driver paying attention to the road would have made equally good or even better decisions.
The latest instance to surface involves the Model X owner that goes by the name Wineborg on the Tesla Motors Club forum. In a post he wrote yesterday, he claims that the Autopilot saved his car from rear-ending a Jeep Grand Cherokee.
The two vehicles were cruising down the I-78 with a Toyota preceding them with speeds of up to 65-70 mph. "All of a sudden, my MX braked very hard with some rapid beeping sounds, and the Jeep Grand Cherokee in front of me swing to the grass median," he remembers. " My MX stopped less than 2 car length away from a Toyota in front and the Cherokee definitely would have hit the Toyota if it didn't go to the median."
The point Wineborg is trying to make is nothing short of an advertisement for the V8.0 of the Autopilot (which is probably why Musk retweeted his post). He even goes as far as saying he might have crashed had he not installed the update a few days before: "Not sure what can happen if I was still on V7.1. Thanks Elon !!!"
He says that the new version of Autopilot managed to read the rapid deceleration of the car in front of the Jeep using its radar sensors, reacting before the SUV did and thus braking in time to prevent the crash. That sounds like quite a feat on the part of the vehicle, right? It does, but it's another sentence of his that continues to raise some doubts over the effect of using the Autopilot: "All these went so fast and I didn't have time to process what exactly happened until all came to stops."
Wineborg is convinced he would have hit the Toyota that popped up in front of him almost standing still after the Grand Cherokee bailed out on the median. Well, that's all down to the driver. If he had kept a wide enough gap from the Jeep, he would have had sufficient time to either brake, or follow the SUV on the grass. Besides, it's really hard to evaluate how you would have fared through a situation had you been in control if you weren't actually connected to what was going on to begin with, as Wineborg's sentence above would suggest. Maybe there were signs of what was going to happen that you didn't pick up because you relied on the Autopilot. You can never know.
The good news here is that as long as it's not a stationary vehicle, the system works. The bad news is that it is absolutely impossible not to doze off, even if just a little, once the Autopilot is engaged. Which is why so many people insist on waiting for fully-autonomous cars.
Even so, we did occasionally oblige and talked about the few cases that made it onto the Internet in which the Autopilot worked its wonders and prevented the EV it was installed in from ending up in the crusher. However, things didn't exactly go as planned, since we concluded that, in each case, an experienced driver paying attention to the road would have made equally good or even better decisions.
The latest instance to surface involves the Model X owner that goes by the name Wineborg on the Tesla Motors Club forum. In a post he wrote yesterday, he claims that the Autopilot saved his car from rear-ending a Jeep Grand Cherokee.
The two vehicles were cruising down the I-78 with a Toyota preceding them with speeds of up to 65-70 mph. "All of a sudden, my MX braked very hard with some rapid beeping sounds, and the Jeep Grand Cherokee in front of me swing to the grass median," he remembers. " My MX stopped less than 2 car length away from a Toyota in front and the Cherokee definitely would have hit the Toyota if it didn't go to the median."
The point Wineborg is trying to make is nothing short of an advertisement for the V8.0 of the Autopilot (which is probably why Musk retweeted his post). He even goes as far as saying he might have crashed had he not installed the update a few days before: "Not sure what can happen if I was still on V7.1. Thanks Elon !!!"
He says that the new version of Autopilot managed to read the rapid deceleration of the car in front of the Jeep using its radar sensors, reacting before the SUV did and thus braking in time to prevent the crash. That sounds like quite a feat on the part of the vehicle, right? It does, but it's another sentence of his that continues to raise some doubts over the effect of using the Autopilot: "All these went so fast and I didn't have time to process what exactly happened until all came to stops."
Wineborg is convinced he would have hit the Toyota that popped up in front of him almost standing still after the Grand Cherokee bailed out on the median. Well, that's all down to the driver. If he had kept a wide enough gap from the Jeep, he would have had sufficient time to either brake, or follow the SUV on the grass. Besides, it's really hard to evaluate how you would have fared through a situation had you been in control if you weren't actually connected to what was going on to begin with, as Wineborg's sentence above would suggest. Maybe there were signs of what was going to happen that you didn't pick up because you relied on the Autopilot. You can never know.
The good news here is that as long as it's not a stationary vehicle, the system works. The bad news is that it is absolutely impossible not to doze off, even if just a little, once the Autopilot is engaged. Which is why so many people insist on waiting for fully-autonomous cars.
Google News