Tesla claims Autopilot is currently stopping about 40 crashes per day just by correcting drivers pressing the fallacious pedal, something that has led Tesla to be accused of sudden acceleration previously.
Over time, Tesla vehicles have often been accused of accelerating on their very own, leading to crashes.
These events are called “sudden unintended acceleration,” which could be as a result of a defect or a driver’s mistake, as a rule from pressing the fallacious pedal.
We reported that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said that it’s looking into claims that Tesla vehicles have a defect resulting in “sudden unintended acceleration” after receiving a petition citing 127 claimed incidents.
As we stated on the time, several claims of sudden unintended acceleration involving Tesla vehicles have been made public over time. Probably the most publicized one involved a South Korean celebrity claiming his Model X accelerated by itself into his garage.
We have now also seen loads of Tesla vehicles slamming into buildings – most frequently in a parking situation – like pictured above.
Nevertheless, in every case, Tesla claimed that the automotive’s log showed that it was a user mistake as a result of pedal misapplication, meaning that the driving force pressed on the accelerator as an alternative of the brakes.
In a single case, Electrek was capable of have Tesla’s log verified by a 3rd party, and it supported the automaker’s claims that it showed the driving force pressed on the accelerator.
Last yr, NHTSA released findings from its investigation and determined that the incidents of sudden acceleration involving Tesla vehicles where drivers said that the vehicles were “accelerating by themselves” were as a result of user errors.
Following the NHTSA investigation, Tesla issued a statement claiming that there are not any defects in its vehicles leading to unintended acceleration, and that the petition with NHTSA was began by a TSLA short seller.
On the time, Tesla noted that it was using Autopilot to try to stop those fallacious pedal mistakes leading to accidents:
Unique to Tesla, we also use the Autopilot sensor suite to assist distinguish potential pedal misapplications and cut torque to mitigate or prevent accidents after we’re confident the driving force’s input was unintentional.
The automaker is using its advanced driver assist (ADAS) technology to attempt to detect that although the driving force is pressing on the accelerator, they’re likely doing it unintentionally and applying the brakes as an alternative.
It’s a difficult technology to implement because you generally don’t wish to override driver input with ADAS technology.
But Tesla claims to have impressive success with it as Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s head of Autopilot software, recently revealing that “Autopilot prevents ~40 crashes per day where human drivers mistakenly press the accelerator at 100% as an alternative of the brakes.”
He even shared an example:
That is a very good example of Tesla all the time getting blamed when there’s an accident where Autopilot is involved, however the automaker doesn’t get credit for all of the crashes that it has avoided.
The comment and the instance come from a chat that Elluswamy gave for the CVPR 2022 Workshop on Autonomous Driving in June, but it surely was just released on Youtube last week.
The talk goes into detail about Tesla Autopilot’s use of occupancy networks. It’s actually more of an inside baseball talk, but it could be interesting to some: