[msb-alumni] Driving a risky message? Tesla's cars will in August suddenly activate "full self-driving features,"
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2018 14:03:15 -0400
Blank . Drew Harwell.
Tesla's cars will in August suddenly activate "full self-driving features,"
chief executive Elon Musk tweeted Sunday, three days after federal
investigators
said a Tesla SUV driving semi-autonomously had accelerated over 70 mph and
smashed into a highway barrier.
Musk's promotion to his millions of followers - that the fantastic future of
self-driving cars might be only a few months away - appeared to give the
company
a leg up in the auto industry's most competitive technological race. Tesla's
stock price jumped Monday by more than 4.5 percent.
A Tesla spokesman on Monday said the cars would start offering only a limited
number of as-yet-undisclosed features, not full autonomy itself. But safety
experts worried the grand
promises of full self-driving capabilities could lull drivers into a false
sense
of security for technologies that are still largely unproven on the road.
Consumer groups argue Tesla's marketing - and even the name "Autopilot," which
calls to mind a free-flying jet - contributes to a dangerous misunderstanding
for drivers, suggesting they can take their hands off the steering wheel.
"Tesla
has a history of using consumers as guinea pigs," said David Friedman,
director of cars and product policy at Consumers Union, the advocacy arm of
Consumer Reports. Tesla's "misleading" marketing, he said, has had the dangerous
effect of "providing overconfidence and building you up to thinking it's safer
than it actually is. Musk tweeted that Tesla's Version 9, a software update
that will automatically install in Tesla cars, will "begin to enable full
self-driving features" and fix certain issues with Autopilot, the name for the
company's package of semi-driverless features such as advanced cruise control.
Autopilot resources, he said, have "rightly focused entirely on safety.
But consumer groups say Tesla's marketing often has skirted the lines between
encouraging responsible driving and suggesting the cars can drive themselves.
Directors of two consumer groups, the Center for Auto Safety and Consumer
Watchdog, wrote a letter last month urging the Federal Trade Commission to
investigate
Tesla for "deceptive and unfair practices" in their advertising of what
Autopilot can do. One driver, 38-year-old Walter Huang, was killed in March when
his Tesla Model X P100D sped up and then steered into a highway barrier while
driving on Autopilot, according to a National Transportation Safety Board
report released last week. Huang had set the car to drive at 75 mph, but his
hands were detected on the steering wheel just 34 seconds of the last minute
before impact. Tesla encourages drivers to pay attention while Autopilot is
engaged, and its cars include features that nudge drivers into taking over
if, for instance, they're not grabbing onto the steering wheel. But the company
also has heavily promoted its cars' supercharged ability to fend for itself:
The Tesla website promises "Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars," which it
says offers "a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver.
Tesla's cars are routinely featured in online videos showing drivers misusing
Autopilot while at high speed. One video recorded last week shows an official
Tesla vehicle speeding along a California freeway while its driver is facing
down, seemingly not paying attention or falling asleep. Tesla representatives
said they are investigating the incident. Missy Cummings, director of Duke
University's Humans and Autonomy Lab, said Musk's self-driving statement was
an "attempt to generate hype" and that his assertion of a focus on safety was
"laughable. "It took the Joshua Brown death to make them take driver monitoring
more seriously," Cummings said, referring to a fatal crash in Florida in 2016,
during which a Tesla driving on Autopilot slammed into a semitrailer truck.
"And, as pointed out by NTSB, it still failed to prevent [Huang's] death, and
indeed likely caused it. Buyers of Tesla's sedan or SUV, including the $140,000
Model X P100D, can pay an extra $5,000 for "Enhanced Autopilot," a package of
still-experimental features that the company says could include "on-ramp
to off-ramp" autonomous freeway driving. Drivers can prepay an additional
$3,000
on top of that for its "Full Self-Driving Capability" package. The company
advertises that "All you will need to do is get in and tell your car where to
go. But Tesla has shared little about how it has tested these features, Friedman
said, adding that the treating of self-driving capabilities as easy software
updates could have deadly results. "We can't treat cars like we do phones
or computers," he said. "There's so much more at stake when you've got two to
four tons of metal, glass and plastic hurtling down the road at 70 mph."
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