Tesla Cars Can Drive With Nobody in the Driver's Seat
DannyB writes:
Consumer Reports shows Tesla Autopilot works with no one in the driver's seat
Consumer Reports argues Tesla needs a better driver-monitoring system.
Last Saturday, two men died when a Tesla Model S crashed into a tree in a residential neighborhood. Authorities said they found no one in the driver's seat-one man was in the front passenger seat, while the other was in the back. That led to speculation that the car might have been under the control of Tesla's Autopilot driver-assistance system at the time of the crash.
[....] Consumer Reports decided to test this latter claim by seeing if it could get Autopilot to activate without anyone in the driver's seat.
It turned out not to be very difficult.
Sitting in the driver's seat, Consumer Reports' Jake Fisher enabled Autopilot and then used the speed dial on the steering wheel to bring the car to a stop. He then placed a weighted chain on the steering wheel (to simulate pressure from a driver's hands) and hopped into the passenger seat. From there, he could reach over and increase the speed using the speed dial.Autopilot won't function unless the driver's seatbelt is buckled, but it was also easy to defeat this check by threading the seatbelt behind the driver.
"In our evaluation, the system not only failed to make sure the driver was paying attention, but it also couldn't tell if there was a driver there at all," Fisher wrote in a post on the Consumer Reports website.
Tesla cars can drive with nobody in the driver's seat, Consumer Reports engineers find
Consumer Reports said it tricked Tesla's system by putting a weighted chain on the wheel and keeping the seat belt buckled on the driver's seat.
The test follows a fatal 2019 Model S crash in Spring, Texas, on Saturday that elicited two federal investigations by the National Transportation Safety Board and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Police said, after a preliminary investigation, that they believe nobody was in the driver's seat of the Tesla at the time of the crash.
Comprehensive investigations have not been completed, and authorities have not said whether Autopilot or Tesla's premium automated driving system, marketed as Full Self-Driving, or FSD, were in use at the time of the collision. Tesla cautions in its owners' manual that Autopilot and FSD require active supervision.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Monday said in a tweet: "Data logs recovered so far show Autopilot was not enabled & this car did not purchase FSD. Moreover, standard Autopilot would require lane lines to turn on, which this street did not have."
Following Musk's tweet, Texas police planned to serve search warrants on Tesla in order to secure data from the crash, Reuters reported.
Would a test for driver sobriety also double as a test for driver actually present?
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