‘Self-driving’ in spotlight again as China sees first Tesla autopilot crash

Luo insists that Tesla’s sales staff led him to believe the vehicle was able to drive itself without inputs from a driver.

TESLA’s autopilot system helped save a man’s life after he took ill behind the wheel – by driving him to hospital. The automaker confirms crash happened in autopilot mode but says driver was responsible for maintaining control.

In the new case in China, Tesla said the Model S was “following closely behind the auto in front of it when the lead vehicle moved to the right to avoid hitting the parked auto”.

The automobile company said that the investigations are underway, but the preliminary data suggests that the driver’s hands were off the wheel during the accident.

The agency’s director, Mark Rosenfeld, said in July that self-driving cars hold great promise for safety improvements and that “no one incident will derail the Department of Transportation and NHTSA from its mission to improve safety on the roads by pursuing new life-saving technologies”.

“The impression they give everyone is that this is self-driving, this isn’t assisted driving”, he told Reuters.

That’s despite the vehicle asking the driver to keep their hands on the steering wheel after activating the feature and sporadically sending reminders when the feature is active.

Rising crashes caused by innovative technology has not only built pressure on auto industry regulators, executives, and experts to tighten rules on automated driving technology, but have also pushed them to fill the loopholes in the technology.

“They all described it as being able to drive itself”, said one Shanghai resident, who bought a Tesla Model S previous year.

The term “zidong jiashi” appears several times on Tesla’s Chinese portal, which is most literally translated to mean “self-driving”. It is also the term for airplane autopilot, which could be where the confusion comes from.

The spokeswoman added that Tesla makes clear that Autopilot requires the driver to remain engaged and does not describe it as an autonomous self-driving system.

Tesla, based in Palo Alto, noted that dashboard warnings instruct drivers to keep hands on the wheel even with Autopilot on. The pictures show damages to his blue Tesla Model S and a parked Volkswagen, while the dashboard camera video captures the lead up to the crash and the vehicle subsequently stopping.