‘It Happened So Fast’: Inside a Fatal Tesla Autopilot Accident

I ask because the article mentions a flashing red light, which is common at rural intersections, and having a light flash is a proven way to grab a humans attention because we’re sensitive to the slightest change in brightness: think of a lost hiker flashing a mirror at a rescue plane overhead.

Without being sensitive to the blinking lights designed for humans, the car sees a floating red orb in one frame, and nothing in the next.

This quote from the Reuters article from yesterday makes me believe something about the tech stack makes it difficult to detect patterns of flashing light:

> In February 2020, Tesla's director of autonomous driving technology, Andrej Karpathy, identified a challenge for its Autopilot system: how to recognize when a parked police car's emergency flashing lights are turned on. "This is an example of a new task we would like to know about," Karpathy said at a conference.

What a fucking idiot. Handsfree exists for that same use case without holding the phone.

Also where was the "Driver Monitoring System" that was supposed to monitor the driver's attention and their eyes on the road whist operating the vehicle with autopilot on?

I think lots of drivers have become too complacent and relying too heavily on the autopilot system and are still not paying attention when using it.

Maybe if Tesla had put in place a system that properly monitors the eyes of the driver perhaps, the car would slow down by itself and pull over, instead of running past a red traffic light and killing a person.