Tesla’s ADAS system, AutoPilot has been polarising because of the way it has been pitched. Elon Musk has often called a fully self-driving system, but in reality, it has often been detailed as a level 2 ADAS system. Now there is an ongoing investigation by the US NHTSA which is looking into an accident that caused the death of two motorcyclists in August. The accident involved a Tesla which was on AutoPilot. In October 2022, NHTSA revealed that there were overall three fatalities caused by AutoPilot.
This incident happened in Boca Raton, Florida in August where a Tesla Model 3 driven by a local resident rear-ended a Kawasaki Vulcan S. The passenger, Ingrid Noon, was thrown backwards from her motorcycle by the force of the impact and struck the windshield of the Tesla. She eventually died of the injuries.
The Palm Beach Sheriff’s office noted that the driver was using the AutoPilot feature and was driving impaired at the time of the crash. This means this is the third fatality in just two months that has involved AutoPilot.
While Tesla notes driver supervision is always needed for AutoPilot, but the language that is used results in users often being lax. While this happens, Tesla for the last two years has been working on a new version of AutoPilot which has been dubbed the Full Self Driving Beta by Elon Musk.
“The car will be able to take you from your home to your work, your friend's house, the grocery store without you touching the wheel,” he has described the software as. Tesla’s reluctance to depend on machine learning algorithms but not use things like LiDAR and radars also complicates matters.
