I am one of the biggest Tesla fans out there. I fucking love the company. But Autopilot in its current form is nothing short of dangerous.
I took a test drive in a Model S a couple months ago and enabled Autopilot at the Tesla rep's encouragement while on a straight stretch of route 90 near Boston. We were going 70mph, a safe speed.
The car came to a point where the highway curved, and a slight deceleration is required to navigate the curve correctly.
Little did I know, Autopilot stays at the speed you set and does not alter it as the environment requires, short of not hitting the car in front of you. So of course it tried to take the curve at 70mph and swung out of the lane almost instantly, prompting immediate corrective action from me to avoid a serious accident.
I couldn't believe the Tesla rep hadn't made this clear. I was required to have my hands on the wheel, but the position of my hands doesn't ensure that I'm mentally ready for egregious errors on the car's part and prepared to correct them at a split second's notice at all times.
Operational question mark aside, as an investor I was also astonished that the software was still in such a rudimentary state that it didn't know to slow down on curves. I found this troubling. It was scarcely more advanced than cruise control, to be honest.
It's the one place where I think Elon is really gambling with people's lives as well as his company's credibility, the former being an infinitely worse transgression than the latter.
I do agree with his goal. And maybe its worth some percentage of Tesla buyer's lives? Let's not talk too much about this, okay?
This almost killed a tester from the German federal motor vehicle approval agency. Their overall report is devastating, and shows the Tesla autopilot is little more than a glorified cruise control, marketed in a very deceptive way.
This can lead to major issues, as mentioned.
Otherwise autopilot wouldn't work at all on highways.
https://github.com/andrew-ayers/udacity-sdc/blob/master/Term...
Then again, it does have a failure mode where occasionally, for some reason, it will direct the car to change lanes into the path of a much faster moving vehicle in the lane being changed to. Most of this is because it only runs the behavior planner every second or so in the simulation, and probably does get everything perfectly correct in the prediction part (I honestly am not sure where the problem lies, though).
That means if you're on the Autobahn, at say 130km/h in the right lane, and a Porsche is coming from behind at 300km/h, the Tesla will not be able to see it, and consider the lane free.
This is what you get when the speed limit actually is "unlimited".
Tesla uses a combination of the visual lanes, cars in front, and an accelerometer, to determine the curve and how much it needs to slow down.
Other than a freak situation last year (not on a curve, it was the hill crest with the white truck crossing the highway), every SINGLE accident has been shown to be the drivers fault with autopilot disengaged. Not a single accident of what you described has happened.
But it is not 100% false that the Tesla I test drove functioned this way. It is, in fact, 100% true. This happened last month.
Can you provide a map link to the stretch of road where this happened?
It's route 90 between Allston and Back Bay. It looks like a pretty gentle curve so looking at the map certainly makes my description of events seem questionable, but I can only tell you that it occurred as I described.
I understand your skepticism.
Normally I'd call the issue "the driver", but since the car was automated, it was an input failure, not a curve that couldn't be negotiated at that speed.