A few days ago the news of a new accident of a Tesla car was known. The car, a Tesla X, collided with a barrier and the driver – an Apple employee – died shortly after the impact from his injuries, although he could be taken to hospital.
The vehicle had activated the autopilot , the company’s autopilot, and its driver was entertaining at that time playing a game on his mobile phone, as reported by the NTSB (US National Transportation Safety Board). The agency has warned that if the manufacturer does not implement changes in its system, more incidents of this type are expected.
This is not the first accident involving a Tesla . In the past, there have been accidents, some fatal, attributed to the driver’s inattention linked to an excess of confidence in the autopilot system.
” If Tesla does not incorporate safety measures that limit the use of the autopilot system for those conditions in which it was designed, and with the continued use of the system beyond its domain as an operational design, it is foreseeable that there will be the risk of future crashes “, the NTSB has pointed out in a report on the safety of these cars.
The agency makes some recommendations, such as improving collision avoidance systems to include common obstacles such as medians, evaluating the autopilot to determine if it can operate outside of its intended operational design, preventing automation compliance by drivers. and that all vehicles have a driver monitoring system.
Teslas are not autonomous cars
In the current state that the Tesla are in, they cannot be considered as fully autonomous cars, but as an intermediate step. The SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) has established a scale that goes from 0 to 5 to determine the autonomous driving capacity of a vehicle , being 0 for cars that do not have any automation and 5 for those that have full autonomy .
According to this ranking, the brand’s cars could be classified as 2. This ranking is for those vehicles in which the user can lift his hands from the wheel, but must remain alert.
And that is precisely what happens with the autopilot : although many drivers mistakenly believe that the autopilot has to do everything for them and they are completely unconcerned. Tesla explains it very well on its website: “The current features of the autopilot require active driver supervision and do not allow the car to be autonomous .”
It is true that the autopilot allows the car to turn, accelerate and brake automatically within the lane, to maintain a suitable safe distance, to suggest lane changes to optimize the journey and to steer the car towards road junctions and exits according to destiny. However, the brand makes it clear: the driver must be constantly attentive to what the system does and it is advisable to keep his hands on the wheel.
This message has also been reinforced by NHTSA (US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration). However, in the past this body has investigated more than a dozen accidents involving Tesla that were believed to be operating on automatic pilot.
