Tesla Smart Summon App May Not Be

. . . all that smart, that is.

 

Say you're a well-off single twenty-something guy with a brand-new Tesla and you read the following on your car's control screen:

 

"Buckle up for the ride of your life, except, surprise!  You're not in the car.  ASS (Actually Smart Summon) allows your vehicle to come to you, or head to a spot that you choose, all on its own.  It's like magic, but with more tech and less wand-waving."

 

What's not to like?  Imagine leaving a bar with your date and saying, "Watch this," and pressing the ASS button—on the phone, that is.  And your new Tesla just quietly leaves its space in the parking lot and pulls up next to you.  How cool is that?

 

And how likely are you to follow the fine print on the instruction screen to the letter, which reads in part "Keep an eye on your car and its surroundings at all times.  Stay vigilant, especially around the fast and the furious (people, bikes, and other cars)."  No, you're more likely to be lapping up the adulation from your date. 

 

So when the U. S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) received a complaint about a crash involving a Tesla under Actually Smart Summon control, it started looking around and found several other similar incidents in media reports, a total of twelve malfunctions that it is currently investigating.

 

Part of the problem is that the NHTSA has told Tesla to report directly to them any crashes on "publicly accessible roads" that involve autonomous operation of its vehicles.  The Summon software has an internal interlock that prevents it being used on public streets, and it's intended only for parking lots and driveways.  This leads to a debate about what "publicly accessible" means.  If you have a gate at the bottom of your driveway, it's not publicly accessible.  But what if there's no gate, or the gate is open?  I'd say most ungated parking lots for retail and commercial enterprises are publicly accessible.  It looks like Tesla hasn't been entirely forthcoming to the NHTSA, assuming in the first place that they knew about some of the incidents.  And considering how intimately the software of every Tesla is tied to corporate HQ, I suspect they had the data at their fingertips.

 

The Associated Press story about this latest kerfuffle between the NHTSA and Tesla reminds us that in the past, Elon Musk, Tesla's CEO, has complained that the regulatory agency is stifling progress in autonomous driving technology.  There is speculation that once the Trump administration is in charge of all executive-branch agencies such as the NHTSA, Musk, who donated heavily to Trump's campaign and was appointed to a government-improvement board, will pressure the NHTSA to lay off Tesla, in short. 

 

How much regulation is too much?  It depends on who you ask:  the companies that are regulated, or the people who benefit from regulations.

 

Just to pick a historical example, ask any member of the families of the so-called "radium girls" who spent eight hours a day in the 1920s painting radium dials on watches and clocks, came down with radiation poisoning, and died horrible deaths.  The use of radium was not regulated at all back then, and the radium girls paid the price. 

 

On the other hand, a classic case of "rent-seeking," which means a firm that uses government regulation to create a monopoly or other favorable business environment for itself, came about for most of the twentieth century in the U. S. when Ma Bell (American Telephone and Telegraph) regulated away virtually all other telecomm companies except for a few harmless local enterprises here and there.  In retrospect, this over-regulation stifled competition and slowed technological advance to a crawl until antitrust lawsuits broke up the monopoly and led to the explosion of telecomm services and smartphone apps that we (mostly) enjoy today. 

 

There are two extremes to think about.  The same AP article mentions that Tesla suffered its first decline in sales in a decade last year.  Could this be a sign that regulatory burdens are losing Tesla business?  I doubt it.  There are so many other factors involved—Chinese competition in electric vehicles, the continuing high prices of EVs compared to gasoline-powered cars, even political factors (I'm sure there are some people who will refuse to buy a Tesla simply because Musk hangs out with Trump)—that blaming a sales decline on regulatory pressure is implausible.

 

Musk has a well-earned reputation for playing fast and loose with bureaucracies and their spawn, namely regulations.  This attitude on the part of a radical innovator is understandable.  Technical innovation frequently gets ahead of the law, in that it creates situations that are unprecedented and nobody has had the time to figure out what laws to pass regarding them.  Musk seems to believe that it's easier to get forgiveness in retrospect than permission in advance, and there is some truth to that.

 

On the other hand, he also seems to think that telling people to be careful absolves him and his company of responsibility if a Tesla driver disobeys instructions.  Many crashes involving the "self-driving" features of Teslas have happened because, in direct contradiction to instructions telling drivers to keep their hands on the wheel and be prepared to take over if something unusual happens, the drivers have been doing things like watching videos on their phones. 

 

It's possible something similar is happening with the Summons features.  Besides the Actually Smart Summons, there is a Dumb Summons that lets you manually drive the car like a giant radio-controlled toy, and that obviously requires you to pay full attention to what you're doing and watch the four-camera display on your phone while you're doing it.  But the NHTSA is concerned about latency issues and how fast the car can go in this mode, as it looks like remote-control drivers may not have had enough time to avoid obstacles such as other parked cars and bollards (those traffic-preventing posts mounted in the ground).

 

My two cents on this is that the NHTSA is doing about right in not taking drastic action such as banning all Teslas from the road, but not ignoring new problems as they surface in complaints and media reports either.  The NHTSA will continue to spotlight problems with Teslas, and Musk will continue to gripe that they're overdoing it, and life will go on. 

 

And maybe the people making up acronyms at Tesla for the next new app will be a little more careful about what it spells.  I spent five minutes trying to think of how I could incorporate ASS in my headline, but finally took the high road and left it out.  Not everybody else will, though.

 

Sources:  An Associated Press article published on Jan. 7, 2025 entitled "US opens another Tesla probe, latest focused on tech that remotely returns car to driver," appeared at https://apnews.com/article/tesla-investigation-safety-autonomous-death-a158e4dee7b5e94b148ec3bb5c47233d.  I obtained the instruction quotes from a screenshot contained in a short video demonstrating the ASS app at https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RmVk-0LlDMI. 

Are We Ready for Mandatory Alcohol Detectors in Cars?

 

Drunk driving has been a problem ever since automobiles were invented.  The alertness needed to control a motor vehicle is incompatible with drinking more than a certain amount, and as a consequence of ignoring this fact, 13,400 people in the U. S. died in alcohol-related crashes, according to a recent AP news report.  That may be about to change, because in response to a law passed by Congress in 2021, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced on Dec. 12 that it is going to require all new passenger vehicles to have a device that will prevent drunk driving.

 

The NHTSA rule will not go into effect for a year or two, at least, because the agency's notice of proposed rule making first allows manufacturers to provide information about the state of the technology so as to have an orderly rollout and reasonable requirements once the rule is finalized.  But unless Congress changes its mind, sooner or later all new cars will have this feature—or bug, depending on your point of view.

 

So-called "ignition lockout" devices are not new.  A cursory search of the Internet turns up dozens of papers and project descriptions to implement versions of this technology.  It appears that some jurisdictions already require certain people convicted of drunk driving to install a lockout device on their car before they are permitted to drive again.  Some of these gizmos are pretty inconvenient—imagine having to blow into a tube every time you start your car.  But it's better than not being able to drive at all.

 

The AP article says that the new required device won't have a tube for drivers to blow into, and the average driver may not even be aware of its presence.  The optimum technology hasn't been decided on yet, but leading candidates include a sensor that would check the driver's breath from a distance (maybe mounted in the steering wheel?), or an optical spectrometer that would derive blood alcohol content from reflectance measurements on a finger. 

 

From a technical point of view, one can ask what the acceptable rate of false positives and false negatives are going to be.  For sober drivers and those who haven't consumed their legal limit, false positives will mean that your car won't start until the device decides that you're really sober.  Users of alcohol-based mouthwashes and breath-freshener sprays will have to avoid using them just before getting in the car in the morning.  This in itself is not a major problem, but other factors could cause false positives as well.  For the finger-spectrometer device, what if you happen to wear gloves?  Too bad, you'll have to take them off to drive. 

 

And then there's the question of setting a threshold.  As the instrument itself can be backed up by sophisticated statistical software, it may take other factors into account:  the weight of the driver (easily obtained from a strain gauge in the seat), the driver's motions as monitored by pedal and steering wheel activity, and history of alcohol use as detected by the system in the past.  But no system is going to be perfect.  We can expect some unanticipated problems when the systems are first deployed widely among drivers who don't drink, because there's nothing like the real world to come up with situations that even the most imaginative engineer can't predict.

 

Even worse will be the false negatives:  cases in which the driver is really drunk but the system doesn't detect it.  Habitual drunk drivers will have a strong motivation to defeat the system, and designers will have to take measures to ensure this doesn't happen.  "See that little hole in the steering wheel?  Plug it up with chewing gum and you can drive no matter how many you've had." Tricks like that will have to be prevented somehow.

 

Reducing the thousands of deaths annually due to drunk driving is worth something, certainly.  And adding one more required system to automobiles is not going to be noticed along with the many hardware and software enhancements—assisted driving chief among them—which are already being implemented voluntarily by carmakers. 

 

But an alcohol-detection system is different in kind from other systems, in that it monitors the driver's condition independent of how well he or she drives.  You can make the case that automatic braking systems step in and remove control from the driver when the system decides it's necessary, but that is determined by immediate road circumstances to avoid an imminent crash.  An alcohol-detection system uses a chemical sensor to conclude that the "meat system" called the driver is unsuitable for use, and simply shuts down the car until the driver sobers up. 

 

This may be the first step toward driver evaluation that is already implemented in some ways elsewhere.  "Dead man" lockout systems in certain types of industrial equipment require that a person always be touching the controls or holding a pedal down, and if the operator ceases to do so, the equipment automatically stops.  One can imagine alertness tests using subtle cues such as eye motion in response to instrument-panel changes, and if the car decides you're too sleepy to drive, it tells you to pull over or else.  Or else—what?  Stopping in the middle of traffic wouldn't be a good idea, but unless the car is semi-autonomous already, it's hard to think of what to do with a sleepy driver other than to tell him or her to get off the road, and hope that the driver obeys. 

 

Like it or not, all new cars will eventually have the alcohol-detection feature, which is already being required next year in some European Union countries.  And we will have to deal with the consequences, whatever they may be.  Reducing the number of drunk-driving crashes is a highly worthwhile goal, and if it means a few non-drinkers will be inconvenienced by false positives now and then, it's probably worth it. 

 

Sources:  The AP article "US agency takes first step toward requiring new vehicles to prevent drunk or impaired driving" was published at https://apnews.com/article/alcohol-breath-test-devices-required-new-vehicles-2a2e2862691ecea396df3ab66d4440c6.  I also referred to a website of the Chinese firm Winsen (which makes alcohol-vapor detectors) at https://www.winsen-sensor.com/knowledge/alcohol-detection-engine-lockin-to-prevent-drunk-driving.html. 

The Tesla Self-Driving-Software Recall

 

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. 

Federal Regulators Turn the Heat Up on Tesla

 

On Tuesday, Oct. 12, the U. S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) sent a letter to the automaker Tesla telling it to issue a recall notice if a software upgrade to its vehicles involves a safety issue.  This is the latest development in an escalating conflict between federal regulators and the electric-car maker, whose flamboyant CEO, Elon Musk, seems to enjoy twitting regulators of all kinds.  But beyond personalities, what we are seeing here is a conflict between a traditional legal system and a technology that has advanced beyond it.

 

The immediate issue that prompted the letter was an "over-the-air" software upgrade that Tesla made in late September.  The NHTSA had started investigating a number of crashes of Tesla vehicles into emergency vehicles that were parked and had their flashers operating.  The upgrade was intended to improve the ability of Tesla vehicles to avoid hitting emergency vehicles in low-light conditions. 

 

What annoyed the NHTSA was not that Tesla addressed the problem they were looking into, but the fact that they didn't issue a recall notice along with all the formalities and paperwork that are required along with it.

 

On the one hand, Tesla's position makes a certain amount of sense.  Back in the pre-software days when every automotive defect required a trip to the repair shop, the only way to get something fixed was to issue a recall to every traceable owner of every involved vehicle and try to get them all repaired within a reasonable time frame.  But now that software comprises a growing part of the overall system that we still call an automobile, upgrades can be done remotely and silently over the Internet without the owner even being aware of it.  So why go through all the hassle and bother of a recall when the thing can be done without anybody but the automaker knowing about it?

 

On the other hand, the NHTSA seems to think that such so-called "stealth recalls" can lead to problems.  How do car owners know the upgrade has really been done?  How will purchasers of used cars know they're getting a car with all pertinent upgrades?  What if an accident happens before the upgrade is done and there's no public record of whether the particular car involved was upgraded before the accident?  It's issues like these that are presumably behind the NHTSA's insistence that even over-the-air upgrades have to be accompanied by recall notices if they affect safety issues.

 

Of course, which upgrades affect safety is not always an easy matter to determine.  But the upgrade issued to improve the discrimination of emergency-vehicle lights certainly falls in that category.  This is not a trivial matter for Tesla, because if the NHTSA decides the firm has not complied with recall regulations by Nov. 1, they can fine the company $114 million.  Even to Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world, that is not chump change.  And there are the people called shareholders to consider.

 

Concerns like these are not confined to the NHTSA's dealings with Tesla, as cars from all makers are starting to resemble rolling software platforms rather than the all-mechanical vehicles of old.  The AP report describing the conflict attributes the agency's tougher stance to a general trend on the part of the Biden administration to clamp down on automated-vehicle safety issues, rather than tread lightly for fear of crippling the new technology in its cradle, so to speak. 

 

A dyed-in-the-wool libertarian might criticize the NHTSA for insisting on its bureaucratic rules being followed despite the fact that Tesla was doing the right thing, namely, fixing the emergency-vehicle-light problem that was attracting public attention.  But decades of experience with government regulation of auto safety includes numerous examples, ranging from introducing double-layer safety glass to defective-air-bag recalls, in which it is pretty clear that left to their own devices, the automakers would not have acted to protect the public from the hazards caused by their own products. 

 

The problem I see is not whether to regulate, but how to regulate in light of "over-the-air" recalls that do not require physical trips to a repair shop that are hard to document.  Clearly, the old-fashioned recall regulations need revisiting in the light of current technology, and it's always easier for a bureaucracy to use the regulations it has rather than to rethink them on the fly. 

 

But suppose there had been some kind of National Internet Security Administration in place at the dawn of the Internet, and in the 1990s they'd passed a regulation requiring all web-browser designing firms to write letters (not emails, but letters) to all users whenever an upgrade to their web browser was made that affected security.  That might have made a little sense back when web browsers were upgraded once a year, but anyone using Microsoft products knows upgrades are done almost daily, affecting all kinds of things, including security.  If such a regulation were still in place about notifying users, we'd all be buried in a blizzard of mail from software companies.  This would be a boon for the U. S. Postal Service, but not for anyone else.

 

So clearly, new technologies call for new regulatory processes.  One can imagine some kind of software certification for purchasers of used cars, verifying that the cars they buy have all the software upgrades made up to the date of purchase.  That would require cooperation among the automakers, used-car dealers, state and federal regulators, and customers, but these parties have worked together in the past, and it can happen again.  As for written notifications any time safety-related software is upgraded, it sounds to me a little like the NHTSA is hounding Tesla just for hounding's sake. 

 

In a related concern, there are genuine issues regarding how easy it is for drivers to fool Tesla's autopilot into thinking the driver is paying attention to the roadway when in fact the driver is playing a video game or even sitting in the back seat.  And Tesla needs to be taken to task for that issue.  But it's not good sense to punish a company for doing the right thing, which the NHTSA appears to have done in this case.

 

Sources:  Many news outlets published the Oct. 13 AP story by Tom Krisher which was entitled on the AP website "US regulators seek answers from Tesla over lack of recall," at https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-software-881ef270cbfdc6e4f62b88400588686f, to which I referred.

Federal Safety Agency Investigates Tesla Autopilot

 

In 2015, the upstart automaker Tesla introduced its Autopilot feature, an advanced artificial-intelligence-enabled system that takes over most of the routine operations that a human driver normally performs.  At the same time, Tesla warned Autopilot users that they should remain attentive with their hands on the wheel at all times, even when Autopilot is engaged.

 

This is a little bit like taking a hungry child into a candy store and telling them not to touch anything.  Most kids will obey, but it's hard on the kid and it can lead to embarrassing situations.

 

It's not surprising that, according to the U. S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), since 2016 ten people have died in eight crashes of Tesla vehicles in which the Autopilot feature was the cause of the crash.  Lately, there have been numerous crashes, one of them fatal, in which Teslas with Autopilot engaged have run into the rear of emergency vehicles with flashing lights. 

 

Finally, the NHTSA has had enough.  It has launched a formal investigation into how the Autopilot system works, how it is implemented, what its defects are, and what steps Tesla has taken to make sure that drivers are paying attention like they are supposed to when the Autopilot is driving the car.  There is abundant evidence that in many of the crashes, the driver was doing something other than watching the road:  watching a movie, playing a video game, or even sitting in a seat other than the driver's seat.  The Autopilot system is supposed to monitor hand pressure on the steering wheel, but according to some sources, this feature is very easy to defeat, and many people appear to have done so.  And most of them probably get away with it most of the time.  But not always.

 

In human-machine safety issues, there is a tradeoff between the two poles which represent extreme approaches to operating a device safely.  One pole relies totally on training the individual not to do dangerous things, or to do them in a safe way, if that makes sense.  Think of stunt drivers in the movie business:  they do things with cars that cars are not designed to do, but with careful planning and finely-honed skills, they manage to survive car flips, crashes, and other tricks that have probably passed into history now that CGI technology is so good that real stunt drivers are probably looking for work.  But the point is that this approach to safety concentrates on the knowledge and attention of the operator or driver, and basically tells him or her to drive safely.

 

The other pole of safety is building in foolproof safety features to the machine itself, so that even an ignorant five-year-old turned loose with the keys couldn't get hurt.  It's not possible to make a car at a reasonable price that is completely safe no matter what you do—at least not yet.  But many of the autonomous-vehicle-type features that are now showing up on many makes besides Tesla move in this direction:  lane-keeping features, automatic braking to avoid head-on collisions, and so on.  They make up for a driver's deficiencies, inattention, or errors.  But they are far from perfect yet, and so the attention and intelligence of the driver are still needed to fill in the gaps where systems like Tesla's Autopilot still can't figure out the situation, such as an emergency vehicle stopped in your lane.

 

I expect the NHTSA will encounter some headwinds in trying to figure out Tesla's Autopilot system.  Elon Musk has, shall we say, a rather cavalier attitude toward convention and traditional ways of doing things, and recently abolished Tesla's public-relations department.  Perhaps he thinks a few tweets from him do just as well, and in the absence of more formal ways of getting information from the company, he may be right.  But nobody can stop the NHTSA from renting or buying some Teslas and putting them through various scenarios and seeing what they do with and without human supervision.  Whatever is going on under the hood, the results will be clear to see.

 

But just testing the hardware and software is only part of the issue.  The poisonous mixture that the NHTSA is dealing with combines an Autopilot system that is very good—so good that people really can let it drive the car for many minutes at a time and get away with it—and drivers who either intentionally put too much trust in the Autopilot system, or simply get distracted and fail to do what they know they ought to be doing, which is looking at the road.  But nobody just accidentally starts watching a movie or playing a video game, and so we must conclude that in at least some of the cases where inattention and the Autopilot have caused crashes, people simply ignored the advice of Tesla to not let Autopilot drive the car by itself, and paid the penalty for their inattention.

 

Now in some countries and cultures (and political persuasions—notably extreme libertarianism), this would not be a concern of the government's.  If people want to do foolish things and ignore instructions, well, let them do it and suffer the consequences.  The problem with this attitude is that it ignores everybody else, particularly other people who might be harmed and killed in the same accident.

 

My point is simply that we in the U. S. have grown accustomed to holding automakers to safety standards that avoid preventable accidents, in the sense that preventable accidents follow a consistent pattern which reasonable interventions at not too much cost can prevent. 

 

We are in a curious transition phase in which systems like Autopilot are good enough to fool us that they can really drive our cars without us paying any attention, but not good enough to do it for real.  And until it is just as safe to play pinochle from the driver's seat as it is at home, we need some way to remind drivers that they can't ignore the road even if the car seems to be driving itself.

 

Sources:  I consulted an article in Consumer Reports at https://www.consumerreports.org/autonomous-driving/nhtsa-safety-defect-investigation-tesla-autopilot-crashes-a6996819019/ and an article in the Aug. 16 Austin American-Statesman online edition "Feds Open Investigation Into Tesla's Autopilot System.  The statistic on total fatalities and accidents due to Autopilot since 2016 was obtained from https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/infrastructure/561717-increasing-number-of-crashes-involving-teslas#:~:text=In%20total%2C%20at%20least%2010,each%20year%20in%20the%20U.S.

Are Self-Driving Cars More Dangerous?

Around midnight Sunday, Dec. 29, 2019, the driver of a Honda Civic headed northbound on Vermont Avenue in Gardena, California was making a left turn from Vermont onto Artesia Boulevard.  The traffic light at the intersection was red for westbound traffic on Artesia, and the intersection happened to be the western end of the Gardena Freeway, where it becomes a surface road.  At that moment, a Tesla Model S zoomed off the freeway westbound through the red light and crashed into the Honda, killing its two occupants.  The Tesla driver and his passenger were not seriously injured.  Early news reports failed to indicate whether the Tesla was on autopilot, but National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) officials are investigating the crash to determine whether the autopilot was engaged.

This latest fatality involving an autopilot-equipped Tesla inspired an Associated Press review of recent fatalities involving Tesla cars in which the autopilot was engaged.  The curious reader can view the website www.tesladeaths.com, where someone has attempted to compile a complete list of worldwide statistics for fatal crashes involving Tesla cars.  As of the end of 2019, the list totaled 110 deaths, of which only 4 are in the category of "verified Tesla autopilot death."  As well over 200,000 Teslas have been sold, these statistics are not particularly remarkable, except for the fact that Tesla purports to be the leading edge of the automotive future.  As such, it deserves closer scrutiny, and that is what it's getting.

The problem in answering the question of our headline is, "more dangerous than what?"  Not only is Tesla the world's best-selling plug-in passenger car, it offers what many regard as the most sophisticated commercially available autopilot system as well.  And in contrast to the more conservative approach many automakers have taken in adding self-driving features such as lane following and automatic braking, the Tesla driver can turn on autopilot and let go of the wheel.  Such behavior is not advised by Tesla, but since when have instruction manuals been 100% effective in keeping people from doing stupid things?

The Associated Press article quotes Jason Levine, head of the nonprofit Center for Auto Safety in Washington, as saying, “At some point, the question becomes: How much evidence is needed to determine that the way this technology is being used is unsafe?”  Levine criticized the NHTSA for dragging its feet instead of issuing regulations as to how Tesla's autopilot feature can be used.  Simply warning the driver that he or she should be alert at all times when the autopilot is working doesn't make it happen.  At least two fatal U. S. crashes (one in Florida and one in Ohio) happened when the autopilot's sensors became confused and failed to recognize a large truck blocking the roadway.  Presumably, if the drivers had been paying attention, they might have seen the truck and stopped.

Promoters of the autonomous-vehicle future face two distinct but interrelated obstacles that could delay or even prevent widespread adoption of self-driving cars.

The first obstacle is technology.  The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) has defined five levels of automated driving.  Level 0 is a 1955 Plymouth—completely manual operation—and Level 5 would be the equivalent of an electronic chauffeur—the passenger can watch TV, sleep, or do anything else you would do if you knew a trusted and competent human driver was in charge.  No automaker currently offers a Level 5 vehicle for sale, but Elon Musk is claiming that early this year, Tesla will start to sell fully self-driving cars, which sounds like Level 5 to me.  Of course, this may be nothing but vaporware.  But unless some pretty radical improvements are made in autopilot technology, it's inevitable that some fatal crashes will happen in which the autopilot was engaged.

And here's where we run into the second obstacle:  public perception, including the perception of government regulators, lawmakers, and their constituents.  I don't know about you, but I would feel a lot worse thinking about dying in a car wreck in which my car was driving itself, rather than dying in one where I was actively at the wheel.  True, I'd be just as dead in either case, but there's something about the hope that one can make a difference if one is trying to control the situation.  This is not a completely rational state of mind, but carmakers learned decades ago to appeal to the sub-rational "lizard brain" of the consumer.  Why else do pickup ads show their products bounding over rugged mountains and doing extreme feats that 99% of drivers will never have to do? 

The budding autonomous-car industry is still treading on very shaky ground, at least in the U. S., where the majority of fatal accidents involving Teslas have occurred.  As the statistics show, less than 10% of fatal crashes involving Teslas are associated with the use of the autopilot.  But statistics do not count for much in public perception, and Elon Musk's cowboy-style reputation lends credibility to the accusation that he and his company are playing games with the safety of their customers, and by implication, with the safety of anyone within collision range of a Tesla.

If properly designed and deployed, I concede that autonomous vehicles could lower the rate of traffic fatalities while lessening traffic congestion and doing other good things such as reducing carbon emissions as well.  But there is a world of challenges in that "if."  There may be unknown factors that no one will discover until there is a certain critical mass of autonomous vehicles on the road already.

In statistical mechanics involving solutions of, say, salt in water, you can apply simple rules to very dilute solutions, so dilute that each salt molecule or atom can be treated like it is the only one in the solution.  So far, autonomous vehicles are so rare that each one is surrounded by a sea of non-autonomous vehicles, and the software probably operates under that assumption.

But when you put enough salt in the water so that each salt atom gets within shouting distance of another salt atom, things get complicated.  New effects such as saturation and crystallization occur, and your analysis has to be more sophisticated in order to deal with these effects. 

If autonomous vehicles, especially those made by different manufacturers, ever become common enough so that one vehicle can "see" another one in a typical driving situation, it is very likely that novel and perhaps hazardous effects will occur that even the designers may not have anticipated.  But that will never happen if the public gets so fearful of accidents involving autopiloted cars that they are regulated out of existence.  I hope that doesn't happen either, but if Musk and Tesla get too careless, they might end up triggering just such a reaction.

Sources:  The Associated Press article I referred to appeared in many locations, among which was the San Jose Mercury-News website at https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/01/03/3-crashes-3-deaths-raise-questions-about-teslas-autopilot/.  I also referred to the same site for information on the Gardena crash at

 https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/01/02/fatal-tesla-crash-in-california-investigated-by-feds/.  The Tesla fatal-crash statistics website is www.tesladeaths.com, and I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Tesla, Inc.