Chitchat Auto Drive car's first fatality - will you trust car to drive on its own?

http://m.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/u.s.-opens-investigation-into-fatal-crash-in-tesla-411762


(Reuters) - The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said on Thursday it is opening a preliminary investigation into 25,000 Tesla Motors (O:TSLA) Model S cars after a driver of one of the vehicles was killed using the Autopilot mode.
The agency said the crash came in a 2015 Model S operating with automated driving systems engaged, and "calls for an examination of the design and performance of any driving aids in use at the time of the crash." The investigation is the first step before the agency could seek to order a recall if it finds the vehicles were unsafe.
NHTSA said in a statement the driver of the 2015 Model S was killed while operating in Autopilot mode in a crash on May 7 in Williston, Florida. NHTSA said preliminary reports indicate the vehicle crash occurred when a tractor-trailer made a left turn in front of the Tesla at an intersection.
Tesla said in a blog post that this is the first known fatality in just over 130 million miles where Autopilot was activated.
Tesla said "neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied."
The company said "the high ride height of the trailer combined with its positioning across the road and the extremely rare circumstances of the impact caused the Model S to pass under the trailer, with the bottom of the trailer impacting the windshield of the Model S."
Tesla said that "Autopilot is getting better all the time, but it is not perfect and still requires the driver to remain alert. Nonetheless, when used in conjunction with driver oversight, the data is unequivocal that Autopilot reduces driver workload and results in a statistically significant improvement in safety when compared to purely manual driving."

Its like people trusting their lives to HDB Lifts or MRT escalators..

The same analogy can reapplied here to a political party of the brand 'pxp', that the 70% have trusted it to 'drive on autopilot'; like the TESLA car...it could not differentiate the lightening, when the truck suddenly appear....the same will be for the 'pxp' who had been on 'autopilot'....we will all, dies like the , 'test car driver'..when some suddenly unexpected economic or natural disaster event suddenly appear...for the 'autopilot' cannot differentiate.... sounds technically impressive.....

let me ask u this question:
do you trust Indian drivers or Tesla auto car?

if Tesla car is risk free, all motor insurance companies will go bankrupt

gingerlyn said:

let me ask u this question:
do you trust Indian drivers or Tesla auto car?

if Tesla car is risk free, all motor insurance companies will go bankrupt

Click to expand...

Dun be silly. No claim insurance is good for insurers. No claim also must pay premium. Can drive without insurance?

90 years ago do u dare to fly a plane?this is the pioneer generation of a new technology,we are the early adopters just like the first people who began using the first altair 8800 computers.50 years later autopilot will be standard across the world,it is inevitable.

Planes can catch fire easily, we still fly? Boh Pian lah!

If I owned an expensive car I would want to drive it instead of letting a computer do it.

Man who died in fatal crash with Model S on Autopilot was allegedly watching a movie
By Zach Epstein on Jul 1, 2016

Telsa’s much-lauded Autopilot feature on the Model S and Model X managed to log a combined 130 million miles without a single crash involving a fatality. That phenomenal streak came to an end last month, however, when Tesla acknowledged that the Autopilot feature was engaged on a Model S when it struck a tractor-trailer while traveling at high speeds. The driver of the Model S was killed in the horrific crash, and Telsa is now cooperating with an investigation being conducted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).


As impressive as Tesla’s Autopilot feature is, drivers are always advised to keep their attention on the road even while autonomous features are enabled. But according the driver of the truck that was struck by the Model S, the driver was actually watching a movie while Autopilot was engaged.

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62-year-old Frank Baressi was driving the tractor-trailer with which the Model S in question collided. The Model S was traveling down a highway with Autopilot engaged when Baressi’s truck pulled across the roadway from a perpendicular street to make a turn in the opposite direction. Neither the Tesla driver nor Autopilot detected the truck, and the Model S drove underneath the trailer while colliding at windshield height.

Here’s a diagram of the incident that was created by Electrek:

tesla-truck-accident

In an interview with The Associated Press, Baressi has made a curious but serious accusation. According to his claim, the driver of the Model S was watching a movie on the car’s display when the accident occurred.

Frank Baressi, 62, the driver of the truck and owner of Okemah Express LLC, said the Tesla driver was “playing Harry Potter on the TV screen” at the time of the crash and driving so quickly that “he went so fast through my trailer I didn’t see him.”

“It was still playing when he died and snapped a telephone pole a quarter mile down the road,” Baressi told The Associated Press in an interview from his home in Palm Harbor, Florida. He acknowledged he couldn’t see the movie, only heard it.
There is no mention of a movie playing on the Tesla’s screen in the police report. Video playback is also disabled automatically when the car is in gear, so the car’s owner would have had to modify the software in some way in order to have been watching a movie while driving. There are no reports at this point suggesting that was the case.

The victim in the crash was former Navy SEAL Joshua D. Brown of Canton, Ohio. Brown was an avid Tesla enthusiast who had previously credited the Autopilot in his Model S with avoiding a collision with a truck.

Science is great isn't it?

We should continue to sacrifice our lives to scientific causes so that fewer people will die in future.

So who is the next volunteer?

The sense of freedom one gets from driving is only achieved when doing so on scenic country roads with almost no other traffic. City driving will never be able to give you that feeling, in fact you have to tolerate all the bad habits of other human drivers.

Ideally, in the future, all city driving will be done by computer as a matter of law. Computers on all city cars will be designed to communicate with each other and there will be a master driving computer for the entire city. Tampering with the car to disable the computer function will be a serious crime. Chaffeurs, bus and taxi drivers, will be re-trained to do other jobs or starve. Waiters, chefs, maids, security guards, etc will be replaced by robots.