Smart summon requires someone to hold the button down as they use it. Did they not pay attention or did this fail to stop the car after they let go etc.
Why didn’t the car react to the aircraft? Did it not detect it, or did it fail to judge it’s location?
Did the car bit notice the collision, or is that ignored by this feature?
Because these smart vehicles are dumb as fuck when you put them anywhere other than on a well maintained, sunny, first world country highway. Not so long ago teslas braked on the highway when going under signs because they thought the shadow was an obstacle. A few of them crashed in overturned trucks because they though their roof was the sky/a cloud, one even missed a damn firetruck and smacked into it at full speed
When you have thousands of cars out there your one in a billion edge case will happen, this is the perfect example. A ten years old would have braked, the tesla didn't
There are a fair share of adults that do not understand height while driving either. Look no further than the 12'4" (previously 11'8") bridge on YouTube.
According to https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/is_is/GUID-6B9A1AE...
> Smart Summon may not stop for all objects (especially very low objects such as some curbs, or very high objects such as a shelf) and may not react to all traffic.
The tail of the plane was quite high, so smart summon probably wasn't trained to recognize it.
I am puzzled at how a system with such basic bugs is rolled out to production. Even obstacle detection hasn’t been solved yet. Yes it might be hard but an 8 year old in a GoKart would do better than this.
But maybe that's a feature that'll come with their Level 4 autonomous software that'll come out very soon now /s
0: https://old.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/u95dqt/someone_just...
There is also (and has always been) a shit ton of warnings you have to ignore to use the feature. [1]
Here's a particularly applicable warning from the manual.
> Smart Summon may not stop for all objects (especially very low objects such as some curbs, or very high objects such as a shelf) and may not react to all traffic. Smart Summon does not recognize the direction of traffic, does not navigate around empty parking spaces, and may not anticipate crossing traffic.
I know a lot of people like to dig at tesla, but they really aggressively warn drivers when it comes to using the driver automation.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/is_is/GUID-6B9A1AE...
Guns, knives, wood chippers, chainsaws etc.
Summon/Smart summon can be used safely if you monitor the car.
Tesla tells you that if you don't watch the car, you can cause an accident.
After all, we can't make any of those things 100% safe so they are obviously completely broken.
Tesla's smart summon operates at under 5mph. It's not perfect, but it's also not fast. If you are using it in a situation where you can't see the car then yes, you are at fault for using a tool in an unsafe manner.
Can it be improved and made safer? Certainly. Should it? Yes. Does it need to be completely shut off until it is? No. It can be safely operated by responsible car owners. Until we start having major issues with smart summon damage I see no reason to kill it. A rich person ramming a private plane is not a "major issue" any more than a nascar wreck is a "major issue" for automobiles in general.
Tesla's summon thing is unsafe because they can't be assed to take the time to implement it well and QA it appropriately. Summon isn't intrinsicly unsafe, they just have a half-assed implementation of it. Like many other of their features, they're too interested in pretending it works better than it does, and just throwing a warning in some doc somewhere as cover.
Also really all of them are dangerous to the Tesla owner/operator, where an argument could be made that they're accepting the risk, but _also_ to the general public.
The general public should not be the victims of Tesla's shitty, unprepared beta test(s), especially not just to satisfy Musk's impatience.
Very sorry to hear that, that's horrible.
> They are more dangerous than Tesla summon both in deaths per year and deaths per mile
I don't think deaths per year is that compelling as a metric for this. Teslas are becoming more common, so it's going to get worse.
Deaths per mile, where are you getting data for that? I mistrust anything from Tesla, they have a history of coloring the truth, at best.
Anyway though, I fundamentally disagree with this entire thought process of "X is worse, therefore we can't fix Y". Let's just fix them all!
This is a design flaw in Teslas [0]. The radar it uses has trouble seeing large stationary or slow-moving objects. Tesla refuses to use state of the art safety technology while developing these autonomous cars ostensibly in the name of safety. Not one, but two people have lost their lives because a Tesla failed to see a tractor trailer and collided with it [1]. I would have thought after the first time that happened it would be the last, but no. Tesla didn't have to change a thing about their design, and they are still allowed to beta test these things among the unwitting general public. Most everybody hasn't agreed to be part of Tesla's beta program, and yet we're subject to these machines with flawed sensor systems that Tesla just refuses to update to a safer technology. Why? People have died because of this, they're causing damage all over the place, and all they want is to put more out there as fast as possible. Why haven't they fixed the flaw that killed a man in 2016, and then killed a man the same way in 2019. How many bodies and how much damage exactly is enough before Elon Musk is forced to fix this thing? It's absolutely ludicrous these cars are allowed on public roads.
[0]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/why-teslas-keep-st...
[1]: https://electrek.co/2019/03/01/tesla-driver-crash-truck-trai...