Tesla says new Autopilot would likely have prevented fatality

The updated system now will temporarily prevent drivers from using the system if they do not respond to audible warnings to take back control of the vehicle.

“I think it will make the Model S and X by far the safest vehicle on the road”, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in a call with reporters Sunday.

Musk initially promised “major improvements” to the software about two weeks ago and promised to provide details about the upgrade in a blog post on August 31.

This update, for instance, comes after the death of Joshua Brown, a Florida man who died after his Tesla, operating in Autopilot mode, crashed into a truck.

Tesla is releasing an update to its autopilot software in the coming weeks that it said would have prevented a fatal accident in May.

“I do want to emphasize this does not mean ideal safety”, he said, though he did note that he hopes this will cut the accident rate roughly in half. “Perfect safety is really an impossible goal”. It’s really about improving the probability of safety. “There won’t ever be zero fatalities, there won’t ever be zero injuries”.

According to Tesla, one of the biggest challenges was the need to eliminate false positives.

At the time, radar “was only meant to be a supplementary sensor to the primary camera and image processing system”, Tesla said today. If you are going faster than 45mph, you’ll get an alert every minute if there’s nothing in front or you or three minutes if you’re following a auto since Autopilot is more accurate when you have a vehicle ahead. So with the update, drivers who receive an audible alarm for not having their hands on the wheel more than three times in an hour will have to park and restart the vehicle in order to re-enable semi-autonomous functions.

Technically, you are still supposed to keep your hands on the wheel when Autopilot is engaged, as the system is not completely autonomous.

Autopilot 8.0 will also have improved visual alerts, including a flashing light that borders the instrument panel.

Musk said that the new system should detect “any thing that’s metallic, anything that’s large and dense”, and then brake the vehicle, “as long as it’s not large and fluffy”.

Advanced Autopilot users, rather than new users, were most likely to ignore warnings to put their hands back on the wheel, Musk said.

On Sept. 1, SpaceX, where Musk serves as CEO, sustained what he later called “the most hard and complex failure” in the commercial space company’s history when a Falcon 9 rocket exploded on its launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

But after getting upgraded components from Tesla’s suppliers, they found they could combine that with their real-time fleet learning system and nearly entirely eliminate false positives.

“I wish we could have done it earlier”, he said on Sunday.