Innovators tend to disrupt established procedures and shake things up generally. No matter how good a new idea is, there are usually lots of people who will be inconvenienced or worse if the innovation takes hold and spreads, and the innovator has to push hard just to get a hearing.
The way Tesla under Elon Musk has introduced semi-autonomous cars is a great example of this principle. Readers of this blog are familiar with numerous cases in which Tesla drivers have been injured or killed under circumstances that point to careless use of the car's self-driving feature. But until now, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has not taken definite far-reaching actions against the firm.
That changed this week when Tesla, under pressure from the NHTSA, issued a voluntary recall of some 360,000 of its cars that have the so-called "Full Self-Driving" mode installed. This option, which according to one report costs $15,000, reportedly does all the work necessary to move the car safely: steering, acceleration, and braking, under the control of cameras and artificial-intelligence (AI) systems. An Associated Press article quotes Raj Rajkumar, a computer-science professor at Carnegie-Mellon, as saying Teslas don't use radar or laser systems in addition to cameras, and thus can miss important environmental clues that such systems provide.
In its recall, the NHTSA refers to Tesla's self-driving system as a Level 2 SAE type. Some years back the Society of Automotive Engineers established a five-level ranking system for autonomous-car features. Warning-only features make a car Level 0, as the driver is still doing all the actual work. Level 2 can control braking, acceleration, and steering, but the driver "must constantly supervise these support features; you must steer, brake or accelerate as needed to maintain safety."
Technically, the software being recalled is a beta version, meaning that the user in some sense agrees to be a guinea pig and try out something that may still have bugs in it. The bugs cited by the NHTSA in its recall notice include things like ignoring speed zones, rolling through stop signs without stopping, and going straight in a turn-only lane. These things sound like typical careless-driver problems, but as Rajkumar points out, upgrading the software to solve these issues may not be a simple or quick fix.
The recall itself is peculiar, in that no hardware has to be idled or replaced. Tesla will simply issue an over-the-air upgrade at no cost to the car owners. Musk tweeted that calling such an upgrade a recall was "anachronistic and just flat wrong!" He has a point, in that over-the-air software upgrades are a routine part of doing business, but are usually not mandated or pressured into execution by a federal agency.
This recall is not the only concern that the NHTSA has with self-driving Teslas. The agency is investigating numerous incidents that pose serious safety concerns, such as the tendency of some autonomous-mode Teslas to crash into emergency vehicles—some 14 such crashes have been recorded, as well as the deaths of 19 people in accidents where self-driving features may have been involved.
Musk claims that the safety record of self-driving Teslas is better than old-fashioned hand-driven cars, but detailed statistics to back up his claim are lacking. The autonomous-car project has always suffered from a chicken-and-egg problem. To develop good self-driving systems, you need to get extensive testing in all sorts of real-world situations, but fielding a system that isn't yet perfected—whatever that might mean—entails some level of risk for both the people riding in the autonomous vehicles and for everybody else around them too.
Here in Central Texas, as I drive around the stretch of I-35 between Austin and San Antonio, sightings of Teslas have gone from remarkably rare—maybe one every few weeks—to almost routine, as a couple of them are now usually parked in the same lot I use at work. I have not yet seen one rolling down the road while the driver was reading a book or kissing his girlfriend, but I'm sure that happens. The one Tesla driver I've spoken to about the autonomous system—our piano tuner, of all people—says he only uses it on I-35 and takes over once he gets off the freeway. So for every careless driver who ignores the instructions to "constantly supervise" the self-driving mode, there are many responsible Tesla owners who learn the limitations of the system and act accordingly.
As a federal agency, the NHTSA seems to have its act together a lot better than, say, the FBI. It largely stays out of politics and sticks to its mandate to safeguard the nation's highways. The Tesla recall could have been much more drastic, as the NHTSA has the power to order carmakers to tell car owners to stop using the vehicle in question until the recall is installed. That would have been an unnecessary move. While nineteen fatalities possibly involving a new technology are of course tragic, that number pales in comparison to the estimated 42,915 people who died in traffic accidents in 2021, which was a 16-year high.
Ideally, autonomous cars will contribute to a decline in traffic casualties, not an increase. Overall, the NHTSA seems to be doing its job as watchdog, not cutting off a given manufacturer at the knees, so to speak, but not ignoring problems either. The recall mechanism indicates to me that the NHTSA thinks Tesla may be going a bit too fast and careless in their beta-testing of so-called Full Self-Driving systems, and Musk knows he is playing a game that could cripple his car business if he and his engineers are not careful. But being too careful in an innovative industry leaves you in the lurch, so it will be interesting to see how, and whether, the industry as a whole approaches the prize of truly autonomous Level 5 driving, in which the driver neither knows nor cares what is going on around him. But we are by no means there yet.
Sources: The AP article "Tesla Recalls 'Full Self-Driving' To Fix Unsafe Actions" appeared on the AP website on Feb. 16, 2023 at https://apnews.com/article/tesla-recalls-full-self-driving-cars-875b54d4b71e97d43a17e968d7b856ae. The NHTSA recall notice can be found at https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2023/RCLRPT-23V085-3451.PDF. The SAE autonomous driving levels are listed at https://www.sae.org/blog/sae-j3016-update. The statistic on 2021 U. S. driving fatalities was from https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/17/us-traffic-deaths-hit-16-year-high-in-2021-dot-says.html.
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