Thanks to NTSB reports, we get to look inside what happens in some Tesla Autopilot crashes, and learn what's going wrong. In the report on a crash earlier this year, we see that Tesla still struggles with stalled vehicles ahead of it on the road that are suddenly revealed, and even speeds up.
NTSB report on a January 2019 Model S Autopilot crashWe pick on Tesla because Autopilot is out there driving far more miles than other systems, and it's an incomplete driver assist system being monitored by ordinary drivers, so it's going to have a lot more crashes.
The Tesla Autopilot and its driver did not react until about 0.5 seconds before the crash. Or rather, it initially reacted in the worst way, by speeding up. Fortunately, it was going only 20mph in the traffic jam, and only got up to 30mph before hitting the truck. Cameras see, and computer vision tries to recognize things like a truck. They also have an easier time if those things are moving. They do that by learning from huge numbers of tagged pictures of cars and trucks. It may be a problem that most of those pictures do not have a fire truck parked at an angle. It may have had some trouble identifying it that day.
As such, when the lead car veered off, the Tesla decided that now the lane in front of it was suddenly wide open. It calculated there was nobody in front for 120 meters and it should immediately speed up. Tesla does not have a system to detect hands on the wheel. Instead, it detects the application of modest steering force on the wheel. You can, and many drivers do, keep their hands on the wheel without applying steering force. They may only briefly apply some force every so often to keep Tesla's system happy and avoid the warnings. This is not at all out of the ordinary.
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