Dude Tests Tesla’s Autopilot Braking on His Wife

Posting under the moniker KriszXstream, the video is a test of Tesla’s Autopilot braking using a moving object: his own wife. In other words, this dude asked his wife to cross the street and even to stand in the middle of the lane as he drove directly towards her.

While he never goes faster than 38 kph (24 mph) and the wife seems OK with being turned into a test subject, you can imagine the uproar the video is causing, especially after it was picked up by several media outlets. Consequently, the comments section was flooded with all kinds of remarks, many of them of the inflammatory kind.

As a response, the man driving the Tesla is setting the record straight: while this might seem like a foolish test, it was done in a safe environment, he promises. The idea was to see how responsive Autopilot was and under what conditions.

“I had my foot on the brake and I was ‘speeding’ with 30km/h (18mph) Now that's what you call speeding??? a bicycle goes faster than that,” the driver says. “She was not in front of the car by the time I got there, and it was also not too close. It could look that way from my camera point of view, but it was not. The road was also closed for traffic which made this test even safer...”

To those saying he should try and stand in front of a moving car while his wife was at the wheel, the driver says that he would. He wanted to be the test subject but his wife wasn’t as accustomed to the Tesla as he was, so that’s how they agreed which part they should play.

As for the results of the tests: Autopilot didn’t “see” the wife when she was walking slowly across the road or when she ran, but it did pick her up and braked when she stood in the middle of the road, and even next to the car.