REAL LIFE NEWS: SELF-DRIVING CAR CONFUSION LEADING TO DEATHS
by Hazed
Deaths on the road are being caused by confusion about just what ‘self-driving’ means.
There is a big difference between a true autonomous vehicle, which drives itself without human intervention, and a car that offers assistance to the driver with technologies such as Tesla’s Autopilot, or similar systems from Volvo, Mercedes-Benz, Cadillac and so on. With these systems the driver is expected to keep their hands on the wheel and pay attention, ready to assume control at any moment.
The US engineering organisation SAE International has categorised cars into six broad levels, depending on the degree of automation they contain.
Level zero means no automation at all, whereas Level 5 means the car can drive itself on all roads and in all conditions.
Most “driver assistance” systems available today are Level 2. That means the driver is supposed to keep hold of the wheel. But many people are confused about this – for example, recently a Tesla driver in the UK was prosecuted for climbing into the passenger seat of his car while it was driving through motorway traffic at 40mph. In other incidents the Tesla Autopilot was implicated in crashes, two of which were fatal.
While I was writing this story, news broke that a car with Tesla’s Autopilot switched on had ploughed into a stationary police car in Laguna Beach, California (see the second link below for the details).
Perhaps calling the system “Autopilot” is confusing people! “Calling this kind of technology Autopilot… that’s very misleading for consumers,” says Matthew Avery of Thatcham Research – a group that tests vehicles on behalf of the UK insurance industry. “They might think ‘I just need to push this button and I can let the car drive’.”
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44159581
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/30/tesla_car_in_autopilot_crashes_into_parked_police_vehicle/
