Fatal Tesla Crash Into Home Raises More Questions

  

Around 8 P. M. Friday June 19, 76-year-old Martha Avila was standing in the playroom at the front of her daughter's house in Katy, Texas.  Her daughter, son-in-law, and their children were also in the house or in the back yard.  Suddenly a Tesla Model 3 occupied by 44-year-old Michael Butler crashed into the house after reaching a speed exceeding 70 MPH on the short residential street.  The car pinned Avila, who was extracted from the crash by EMS personnel but later died at a local hospital.  Within a few days, Avila's family had filed a lawsuit against Tesla and Butler, and last Wednesday the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) announced it was opening an investigation into the accident.

 

Something obviously went wrong if a car failed to negotiate a right turn of a residential street and instead hopped the curb and plowed into a house.  According to those investigating the crash, Butler, who was also injured, claims that the vehicle was in self-driving mode at the time of the accident. 

 

Elon Musk, Tesla's CEO, has issued a statement on social media saying that the crash "made no sense" as the self-driving mode usually maintains a low speed in residential areas.  Another Tesla official stated that according to vehicle data, "the driver pressed the accelerator to 100% and reached a speed of 73 MPH before the crash." 

 

Clearly, investigators have a job on their hands to figure out exactly what happened.  Rose Hollow Lane, the street on which the Tesla accelerated, is only about 1000 feet long before it makes a right turn going east and becomes another street at the corner where the crash occurred.  Teslas are notorious for their ability to accelerate rapidly, however, so it's possible that the car was traveling at a lower speed at first and then responded to its accelerator, which might have been pressed in error. 

 

In fairness to Tesla, there are plenty of examples of non-self-driving cars crashing into structures and killing people as well.  Tesla releases quarterly statistics on its vehicles that are operating in full self-driving mode, and claims that the number of accidents per million miles is lower than the average for the entire U. S. fleet.  Critics say that this isn't an entirely fair comparison because the Tesla fleet is newer and has more advanced safety features than the average car on the road.

 

All the statistics in the world won't bring back Martha Avila, however, and that is why the family is suing Tesla and the driver of the car. 

 

According to information on Reddit, the driver of a Tesla in full self-driving mode can override the system by pressing on the accelerator.  If that's what happened in the accident, the responsibility cannot be laid exclusively to Tesla, which is why the driver is also being sued as well. 

 

If we allow imagination to roam, perhaps the following scenario occurred.  As the driver went down Rose Hollow Lane, perhaps a squirrel or other small creature darted out in front of the car.  Intending to hit the brake, Butler instead pressed the accelerator pedal.  The resulting goose of energy could have sent the car off the road into the house where Avila died. 

 

Again, we will have to wait for the outcome of the NTSB investigation to find definitive answers to the questions raised by this tragedy.  If the cause turns out to be largely human error which could have happened with a non-self-driving vehicle, then there is nothing out of the ordinary about it except that the vehicle happened to be a Tesla.  If on the other hand, there was something about the self-driving mode that contributed directly to the crash, investigators will want to know what it was, and possibly issue directives to fix the problem.

 

Other self-driving vehicles such as Waymo rely on multiple types of sensors, while Teslas have so far relied exclusively on vehicle cameras, possibly for reasons of cost.  Whether such a compromise will be viable going forward may depend on how frequently crashes occur which could have been avoided through the use of a wider variety of sensors.

 

The course of autonomous driving in the U. S. has not followed the forecasts of its initial optimistic promoters.  The SAE five-level autonomous-driving scale which ranges from Level 1 (e. g. cruise control) to Level 5 (fully self-driving in all conditions everywhere) shows that there are only a few places in the world where Level-4 cars such as Waymos operate specific routes in favorable conditions.  As we noted in this space a few weeks ago, Waymo temporarily suspended operations in San Antonio and other locations where its vehicles ran into trouble with flooded streets.  So for most people, self-driving cars are not something they encounter voluntarily, unless they take a Waymo taxi where they are available, or take a ride with a Tesla owner who wants to show it off.

 

It looks like the ideal Level-5 self-driving car is still in the future.  And even if it arrives, it may remain in a niche market favored by the handicapped, the elderly, and other people who simply can't drive at all without it, or have to hire a cab.  For the rest of us, the price we'd have to pay for even a Level-4 self-driving car is way more than what it is worth to us not to have to bother turning the wheel and operating the pedals when we're in the car.  And that may remain the case for the indefinite future.

 

As for Tesla, which still promotes its "Full Self-Driving" mode of operation in what seems to be a misleading way, the requirement for the driver both to let the computer drive the car and still remain ready to take over if something goes wrong means that the driver's attention is theoretically required all the time, but practically almost none of the time.  I don't know about you, but I would find it very hard to just sit behind the wheel and pay attention to the road just as much as if I were driving, only not drive.  It may be a situation like this which led to the accident that killed Martha Avila.

 

Time will tell, and if the NTSB investigation report reveals anything new, we hope to bring it to you in this space.  But not right away.

 

Sources:  I referred to reports at https://abcnews.com/US/tesla-allegedly-autopilot-mode-crashes-texas-house-woman/story?id=134062374, https://www.fox26houston.com/news/tesla-sued-after-katy-crash-leaves-76-year-old-woman-dead, https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/tesla-crash-katy-texas-ntsb/285-42522116-a98b-4e89-8bae-7db39b5d642d, and a reference to a Forbes report (unfortunately behind a paywall) at https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2025/11/14/tesla-finally-releases-fsd-crash-data-that-appears-more-honest/. 

Uber Backup Driver in Self-Driving Car Fatality Pleads Guilty

 

When Elaine Herzberg started to cross a dark street in Tempe, Arizona on Mar. 18, 2018 with her bicycle, she didn't see the Volvo approaching.  Unfortunately for her, it wasn't an ordinary Volvo.  It was an experimental self-driving vehicle operated by Uber, and behind the wheel was Rafaela Vasquez, whose job was to monitor the car's performance and intervene before anything serious went wrong.  The Volvo was equipped with factory-installed safety features such as automatic braking, but Uber had disabled those features because they interfered with Uber's own self-driving system.  It was Vasquez's job to stop the car if it was about to run over something—or somebody.

 

Video footage recorded at the time showed that Vasquez was looking at something in her lap instead of watching where the car was going.  Prosecuting attorneys said it was a TV show she was streaming on her phone.  Her defense attorney claimed it was a messaging program on a work cellphone.  Whichever it was, it distracted Vasquez enough so that by the time she noticed Herzberg only a few feet ahead of the car, it was too late to do anything.  Herzberg died in the accident and Vasquez was charged with negligent homicide.  Last Friday, she pled guilty to a lesser charge and was sentenced to three years of supervised probation.

 

Most sources agree that this was the first fatal collision involving a fully autonomous car.  As such, it presented something of a puzzle to the prosecutors.  Clearly, Vasquez was not just an ordinary driver—her role was to monitor the car's performance and intervene only when it looked like it was getting into trouble.  Numerous other parties were involved as well:  Volvo itself, whose automatic braking features were disabled; Uber engineers who developed the self-driving features being tested; and Uber supervisors who issued orders and instructions to Vasquez. 

 

More than five years have passed since the accident, and the charge Vasquez pled guilty to is not the one she was originally charged with.  In a plea deal, she agreed to plead guilty to an "undesignated felony," which apparently can be converted into a misdemeanor if she successfully completes three years of supervised probation.  Vasquez is a convicted felon, having served prison time for attempted armed robbery, so she is no newcomer to the criminal justice system.  While Uber deserves credit for employing ex-convicts, their judgment may have erred in this case.

 

When I blogged on this accident back in 2018, the autonomous-vehicle landscape was very different.  Self-driving cars were a novelty and found mostly in experimental trials in a few cities.  Since that time, things have progressed in that field, but probably not as fast as its promoters wished.  Tesla, which has probably fielded the largest number of partially self-driving cars of any U. S. manufacturer, is currently under scrutiny by the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration for accidents involving its so-called Autopilot feature, which drives the car without direct human-driver intervention but should not be used without constant monitoring for bad behavior.  I can testify that these days, I see at least one Tesla almost any time I'm out on the road for any length of time, and maybe several.  As Autopilot is an expensive option for an already costly car, I don't know how many drivers have it or use it, but so far I haven't seen a Tesla tooling down the expressway with nobody at the wheel—yet.

 

Simply because the current driving environment is so complex, the ultimate vision of so-called Level 5 autonomous vehicles, which could drive anywhere a human could without any human intervention at all, may not ever come to pass.  Fully autonomous vehicles can work in highly restricted and controlled environments such as open-pit mines, but the average city street is full of so many surprises and hard-to-determine obstacles that current technology cannot be trusted to navigate it without human help. 

 

If we are to realize the dream of totally autonomous cars, we might have to accept some geographic restrictions that will not be popular.  For example, if certain streets or blocks were designated for autonomous vehicles only, and no-jaywalking laws were strictly enforced, the environment could be modified enough so that fully-autonomous Level 5 cars would work with reasonable safety.  But that would require a coordination among local, state, and national governments, besides car manufacturers, that is so far lacking, and may never be achieved.

 

A few people have always enjoyed the equivalent of fully-autonomous cars:  those who can afford to hire a chauffeur.  The fact that some rich folks are driven around by hired drivers has had negligible impact on the transportation system so far, and if such an experience never makes it to prime time via the development of Level 5 autonomous vehicles, it will not signal the failure of transportation technology in general.  The only people who would really benefit in a major way from Level 5 vehicles are those who cannot drive:  the handicapped and disabled, the elderly, and children.  I am told that children used to ride the New York subway system unsupervised all the time, and some may still do so.  But we have a long way to go before anyone would trust their five-year-old to get in an autonomous vehicle for a ride to day care.

 

That dark night in Tempe, Rafaela Vasquez unwillingly made history through her negligence in trusting too much to the self-driving capabilities of the experimental Uber-modified vehicle she was hired to supervise.  The same mistake is being made by people who don't follow instructions to keep their hands on the wheel of an Autopilot-equipped Tesla, and the unfortunate thing is that they often get away with it.  But sometimes they don't, and that's what the NHTSA is looking into.  Uber was not charged in the Tempe accident, probably because there was evidence that they had told Vasquez to be vigilant and she clearly failed to do so.  But it's human nature to assume that if you can get away with something for a long time, you'll be able to get away with it indefinitely.  And the temptation to do that with advanced self-driving features is too great for some people, who should be held responsible, along with their car's manufacturer, when something goes wrong.

 

Sources:  The AP report on the Vasquez trial can be found at https://apnews.com/article/autonomous-vehicle-death-uber-charge-backup-driver-1c711426a9cf020d3662c47c0dd64e35.  I also referred to a CNBC report at https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/06/nhtsa-presses-tesla-for-more-records-in-autopilot-safety-probe.html.  I blogged on the Tempe accident here and here.

Is the Bloom Off the Self-Driving Rose?

 

Pardon the mixed metaphor—roses don't drive—but I couldn't think of another way to summarize the current prospects for truly autonomous vehicles.  For several years now, we have been promised that self-driving cars are just around the corner.  In particular, Tesla has marketed an expensive option for their electric vehicles called "Full Self-Driving Capability."  But as the NHTSA is asking Tesla for ever more detailed information about how it has deployed and modified its autonomous-driving software since 2014, it's beginning to look like the promised future of leaving all the driving to robot chauffeurs while we nap or play cards in the back seat is nothing more than hype.

 

What is reality right now regarding self-driving cars?  The Society of Automotive Engineers has established six levels of autonomy, ranging from 0 (what a Model T had, requiring you to do everything yourself) up to Level 5.  A Level 5 car could drive you anywhere that is physically accessible by a car without your having to lift a finger. 

 

The most advanced self-driving systems currently on the market are Level 3.  A Level 3 system such as that in the Honda Legend, which was introduced only in Japan in limited quantities, really does drive the car without human intervention, but reserves the right to ask the human to take over if things get too hairy.  "Hairy" in this case can mean something as mild as a rainy day, which sets up weird reflections on streets and can confuse even deep-learning AI systems. 

 

Tesla's much-publicized "Full Self-Driving Mode" is only a Level 2 system, because the occupant is supposed to be prepared to start steering at any time.  People routinely violate this rule, however, which is how several accidents involving supposedly self-driving Teslas have happened.

 

Computer scientist and engineer Anthony Levandowsky ought to know the self-driving score if anybody does, as he got into the business way back in 2003 when he teamed with some fellow U. C. Berkeley engineers to enter a self-driving motorcycle in DARPA's 2004 Grand Challenge.  He went on to work for Google, left Google for Uber amid lawsuits charging theft of intellectual property, was convicted of same, and pardoned by President Trump on Trump's last day in office.

 

If anybody has an insider's perspective on self-driving vehicles, Levandowsky does.  What is he up to now?  He runs a company that converts giant open-pit quarry trucks to be autonomous vehicles.  And in an interview with Bloomberg News, he says that the kind of highly restricted environment in which such trucks operate may be the best that truly autonomous driving can do for the foreseeable future.

 

While there have been numerous technical advances in sensors, computing power, and AI in the two decades or so that Levandowsky has been in the business, self-driving cars are up against a truly astounding opponent:  the average driver.  As the Bloomberg article points out, suppose you see a couple of pigeons on the road ahead.  As an experienced human, you know that pigeons almost always fly away before your car lands on top of them.  And even if you are contending with a particularly dopey or hung-over pigeon whose situational awareness isn't up to snuff, running over a pigeon is not going to ruin your car.  So it's no big deal to see some pigeons in your path if you're driving.

 

But to an autonomous vehicle system that may never have encountered these particular pigeons on this particular stretch of road under these particular lighting and weather circumstances, it's a totally novel experience.  And most prudent programmers will insert a default "brake when in doubt" operation when the system encounters something that might be dangerous.  So what may well happen is that the car suddenly brakes, and the driver following you may not notice in time, leading to a rear-end collision or even a pileup on a busy freeway—all because of a pigeon.

 

Multiply this scenario by the thousands of other ones that come up all the time, and you begin to understand why self-driving taxis are found only in highly restricted areas of certain cities, and why so many of the demonstrations of self-driving cars take place in California, Arizona, and other places where clear skies can be counted on.  Levandowsky takes the position that every so-called self-driving car out there is really just a pilot project, and Tesla even makes this condition explicit, calling their system a "beta version," meaning it's still under development. 

 

So when, if ever, are we going to get to have our little cocktail among friends in the back seat, heedless of the weather or the traffic?  I can picture only two situations in which even some people can get to experience this in what remains of my lifetime.

 

One is if cities establish self-driving-only zones in which only self-driving cars with similar operating systems are allowed.  This type of operation will never be a mass-market phenomenon, but it essentially transfers Levandowsky's self-driving quarry trucks to dense downtown areas, where the environment can be controlled, perhaps with strictly-enforced rules on pedestrians.

 

The other would extend this principle to an entire region or country.  Maybe we should start with Lichtenstein.  Only self-driving cars would be allowed on the roads.  This will probably never fly in the U. S., but it might take place in some dictatorial environment such as China or North Korea—assuming North Koreans ever get rich enough to buy their own cars.  And even then, the rest of the environment is still going to cause lots of problems—pigeons can't read highway laws, and they're going to land on the road anyway. 

 

It's kind of a shame, really.  Part of me was looking forward to handing the whole responsibility of driving over to some system that had proven itself at least as trustworthy as your average taxi driver.  (Not the taxi driver I wound up with in Amherst, Massachusetts once, who had been out "fishing" with a six-pack and hit a curb, blew out a tire, stopped at a gas station, got the tire fixed, and still got us to our flight to China somehow.)  But now it looks like that's going to go the way of other Jetson-inspired dreams, like personal flying saucers.  Of course, if they do get batteries good enough to operate self-flying one-person drones, we could rewrite the FAA rules a lot more easily than redoing all the traffic laws.  But you'd still have to deal with those pesky pigeons.

 

Sources:  The Bloomberg News article "Even After $100 Billion, Self-Driving Cars Are Going Nowhere" appeared on Oct. 5, 2022 at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-10-06/even-after-100-billion-self-driving-cars-are-going-nowhere.  I also referred to the J. D. Power website for the SAE's six levels of autonomous-vehicle operation at https://www.jdpower.com/cars/shopping-guides/levels-of-autonomous-driving-explained

and https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/tesla-autopilot-driver-assist-system-nhtsa-seeks-details-recent-changes/, as well as the Wikipedia article on Anthony Levandowsky.

Self-Driving Car Kills Pedestrian

Mill Avenue near Curry Road in Tempe, Arizona is a wide four-lane surface road with few streetlights. Around 10:30 PM on the night of Sunday, March 18, it was quite dark where Elaine Hertzberg, 49, chose to walk her bicycle across the road in the middle of a block, instead of crossing at a designated crosswalk.  From a dashcam video of the accident that happened a few seconds later, it does not appear that her bicycle had any lights or reflectors on it, and she wasn't looking in the direction of oncoming traffic as she slowly rolled her bike across.

Meanwhile, in a self-driving car operated by the ride service Uber, Rafael (or Rafaela—sources differ) Vasquez, 44, was behind the wheel.  But as well-functioning self-driving vehicles tend to do, the car had driven itself so well without difficulties in the past that Vasquez had gotten used to doing things other than keeping her eyes on the road all the time.  A video of the car interior taken simultaneously with the dashcam video shows Vasquez glancing up occasionally, but most of the time she has her eyes on something in her lap—possibly a cellphone. 

Hertzberg and her bicycle were well into the car's lane before they showed up in the headlights.  But the bicyclist was moving too slowly—or the car was going too fast—for her to get out of the way before it hit her.  She died at a local hospital a short time later, becoming the first pedestrian to die in an accident involving an autonomous vehicle.

In the week just ended, several experts have criticized Uber for fielding a self-driving system that could have failed so easily.  Uber's autonomous vehicles are equipped with radars and lidars (essentially, radars using light), and should have detected Hertzberg or her bicycle before she came into view in the car's headlights.  But the video reveals no sign such as swerving or braking that the system had any sign that she was there.  And Vasquez happened to glance up only a second or two before the collision, so she was unable to do anything until it was too late.

This death both draws attention to possible defects in Uber's self-driving cars, and also calls into question the usefulness of backup drivers in such vehicles.

Most self-driving cars today are in a kind of gray area, neither completely independent of human assistance but not needing it most of the time.  In the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's five-level classification of self-driving cars, the highest level out there according to one expert is Level 3, which says that the automated driving system (ADS) performs all driving tasks under "some circumstances," but the human driver must be prepared to take over at the request of the ADS.  I don't know about you, but I would have a lot of trouble sitting in the driver's seat and waiting for a call that might not come for hours or days.  Boredom sets in, and it's no wonder Vasquez was looking at her cellphone when she should have been watching the road.  So as long as humans are designed to be in the loop of controlling the car, the humans will have an opportunity to drop the ball, and last Sunday, that's what happened.

On the other hand, it would be hard for designers to make the leap straight from Level 0 (totally human-driven cars) to Level 5 (humans are passengers only, and the car does all the driving all the time) without months and years of real-life testing, as well as computer simulations.  And so you get into a chicken-and-egg situation:  how do you design a Level-5-competence car without testing it in real traffic, but if it's not Level 5 yet, how do you test it without a human driver to help out?  The answer is, you don't, so we have Level 2 and Level 3 cars out there with people behind the wheel, but inevitably, some of the drivers start treating the car like it was a Level 5, and you get accidents. 

This mishap will be thoroughly investigated, so it is too soon to draw any definite conclusions about the cause.  It may turn out that some of the vital systems in the Uber car were temporarily out of commission, or that the pedestrian's bicycle confused the sensors somehow, or that some other explanation is the case that we can't even imagine now.  Uber has commendably suspended all operations of their self-driving cars.  But once the cause or causes are found, the state of self-driving-car engineering can move forward with added understanding, which is how engineering usually works—learning from failures sometimes more than from successes.

It's usually dangerous to commit a known wrong in the present on the chance that it will lead to something better that might result from it in the future.  That's how we got Communism's mass slaughters in the name of the glorious egalitarian future that never came.  But there is no indication that Uber has been so negligent as to allow this accident to happen on purpose.  The first fatality involving steam locomotives didn't stop the progress of railroads, and this first fatality involving a pedestrian and a self-driving car will not stop the development of Level 5 cars, which promise eventually to reduce the already declining number of automotive deaths in both the U. S. and abroad.   It's likely that if we could give every person convicted of DWI a self-driving car right now, the net auto fatality rate might plunge significantly.  I'm not recommending that, but if we don't have the gumption to stop drunks from driving, we should take the keys out of their hands and give them to robots as soon as the market and the technology are ready. 

I'm sure that Elaine Hertzberg had no desire to become posthumously famous by being the first pedestrian to die from being hit by a self-driving car.  But now that it's happened, it's the job of engineers to make sure that more lives are saved than lost by the advancement of self-driving car technology.

Sources:  A story on this accident by Associated Press writers Tom Krisher and Jacques Billeaud was picked up by numerous outlets such as the Phoenix ABC-TV station at https://www.abc15.com/news/region-southeast-valley/tempe/experts-uber-suvs-autonomous-system-should-have-seen-woman-in-tempe.  I also referred to articles in the Washington Post at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2018/03/24/waymo-ceo-on-fatal-autonomous-uber-crash-our-car-would-have-been-able-to-handle-it/?utm_term=.a25e8b99ab08 and Forbes at https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltaylor/2018/03/22/fatal-uber-crash-inevitable-says-bmws-top-engineer/#7f99b0f45568.  The dashcam and interior camera videos leading up to the moment before the crash can be viewed at https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/03/video-uber-driver-looks-down-for-seconds-before-fatal-crash/.

Will Tesla's Electric Semis Take Over?

Elon Musk's latest product unveiling, held last week in Hawthorne, California, was done in the accepted fashion of introducing a new product these days, which is for the CEO to stand alone on a stage, backed by giant screens and, if possible, a piece of the subject hardware too.  Musk claimed that the new electric truck he plans to start building in a year or so will travel 500 miles on a single charge.  Critics cited in the New York Times article about the announcement say the more likely distance is 300 to 450 miles, which is a big constraint for commercial truckers, who can currently cover a lot more than that distance without refueling.  And Musk's figure assumes there are rapid-charging stations everywhere they are needed, which is currently not the case.

The new truck will also feature the same semi-autonomous driving technology that other Tesla vehicles have, which would be a big asset for truckers.  But you can have autonomous driving technology on a conventional diesel-powered truck, and in fact some other companies are already doing experiments along those lines.  It may turn out that the self-driving features make more sense to the trucking industry than the electric-power feature, an ironic twist that would not be unprecedented in the introduction of new technologies.

When personal computers were introduced, marketers desperate to include women in the potential customer base tried to sell the machines as a replacement for the kitchen card file of recipes.  Replacing a $5 card file with a $2000 computer never caught on, but a little afterthought feature called a modem turned out to be the genesis of the Internet, and the rest is history, so to speak.

Robotics expert Rodney Brooks, writing in IEEE Spectrum, thinks that convoys of autonomous-driving trucks may be one of the first widespread uses of self-driving technology.  It's a logical extension of the two-trailer articulated trucks you see fairly often on many highways, and forming a closely-spaced convoy of identical autonomous vehicles is one thing that the technology has demonstrably done well.  Brooks also thinks that once the freeway part of the trip is over, cities will insist on putting drivers in every truck before they are allowed off the freeway.  If that's the case, then right away, the main appeal of autonomous truck convoys to trucking companies—the ability to fire needless drivers—goes away.  So even that possibility is fraught with problems. 

Right now, buying an all-electric car or truck is a triumph of faith over reason.  The faith is a conviction that going electric is the wave of the future and, for many, a moral obligation in the face of rising carbon-dioxide levels and climate change.  The trouble for makers of all-electric vehicles is that, so far, only the faithful with a lot of money can afford to live out their convictions by buying an all-electric car. 

The conventional automakers are selling to people whose reason for buying a car is more or less the same as it's always been:  the need to get from A to B reliably and with a minimum of expense for the amount of comfort and convenience provided.  For many of these people, hybrid vehicles combine the best of both worlds.  They have better fuel economy than gasoline or diesel cars, and don't cost all that much more.  And the payback time, in terms of saving enough fuel money to pay for the premium in price, is often reasonable too, just a few years or less depending on how much you drive.

Most commercial truck owner-operators and the companies they work for are intensely practical.  They can't afford to make political statements with the kind of truck they drive, and what they're looking for is reliable, efficient, low-cost transportation systems.  If there is any economic benefit to be derived from converting a truck fleet to Tesla all-electric models, some corporation will figure it out–maybe one that runs well-defined routes between locations that have already got charging stations.  But beyond such special cases, Musk may have an uphill battle in trying to sell all-electric technology to a market segment where politics and faith is outweighed by bottom-line considerations.

After all, given the rise of autonomous vehicles, the long-term prospects for employment as a truck driver are not great, depending on how things play out.  If the convoy idea catches on, the job might actually get better for a while if you are lucky enough to be one of the drivers riding along in the convoy, ready to take over once the freeway ride is over and each truck has to be independently piloted through a city or town. 

But the current tendency of most automation is to eliminate jobs, not make them easier.  And without strong unions or other countervailing political forces, the profession of truck driver (and if you think it's not a profession, try it yourself some time) may be entering a long-term decline, closing off yet another avenue of employment for those without a college degree.

And as for the all-electric feature of the new Tesla truck, well, it's still true that even if we all started driving Teslas tomorrow, the big-picture carbon emissions caused by the resulting increased electric load on a power grid that still uses a lot of fossil fuels, plus the multiple inefficiences of generating electricity, transmitting it over lossy lines, charging a battery, and discharging it into an electric motor, mean that the nation's carbon footprint would probably get bigger, not smaller.  So it really boils down to faith, or even esthetics. 

I think most of the people who drive all-electric vehicles simply do it because they think it is cool.  And that is fine for those who can afford to be cool in that way.  But as for any larger good consequence of the move to all-electric vehicles, it remains to be seen whether the rest of the power infrastructure will catch up to the point that the fossil-fuel-free vision of the future will come to pass.

At any rate, it will be easier to pass than a row of five autonomously-driven trucks in a row on the freeway.

Sources:  The New York Times website carried the article "Tesla Unveils an Electric Rival To Semi Trucks" on Nov. 16, 2017 at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/16/business/tesla-electric-truck.html.  Rodney Brooks' article "The Self-Driving Car's People Problem" appeared in the August 2017 issue of IEEE Spectrum on pp. 34-37 and 50-51. 

Self-Driving Car Fatality No. 1: Joshua Brown Makes History

On May 7 of this year, Joshua Brown, owner of a wireless-network technology company and Tesla car enthusiast, was riding in his Tesla Model S on a divided highway in Florida.  Mr. Brown loved his car and posted numerous YouTube videos that showed him using the autopilot function in the "look, Ma, no hands!" mode.  By all accounts, Brown was a generous, enthusiastic risk-taker (his specialty when he was in the military was disarming weapons, according to a New York Times report), and hands-free driving went against the explicit instructions Tesla provides for the autopilot feature.  But Tesla owners do it all the time, apparently, and until May 7, Mr. Brown had gotten away with it.

Then a tractor-trailer rig made a left turn in front of Mr. Brown's Tesla.  According to a statement by Tesla, the high ground clearance of the trailer and its light color, resulting in low visual contrast against the sky, failed to trigger the car's brakes.  The Tesla ran underneath the trailer, fatally injuring Mr. Brown.  A neighbor quoted Mr. Brown afterwards as saying in another context a few weeks before the accident, "For something to catch Elon Musk’s eye, I can die and go to heaven now."  No one knows how serious Mr. Brown was when he said that.  But he will go down in history as the first person in the U. S., and perhaps in the world, to die in a car that was operating in its self-driving mode.

Will this tragedy spell doom for self-driving cars?  Almost certainly not.  The first recorded steam-locomotive railway fatality was that of the English politician William Huskisson, who attended the opening ceremonies of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway on Sept. 15, 1830, which featured inventor George Stephenson's locomotive the Rocket.  Wanting to shake the hand of his former political enemy the Duke of Wellington, Huskisson walked over to the Duke's railway carriage, then saw that the Rocket was bearing down on him on a parallel track.  He panicked, tried to climb onto the carriage, and fell back onto the track, where the locomotive ran over his leg and caused injuries that were ultimately fatal.  Passengers had been warned to stay inside the train, but many paid no attention. 

If Huskisson's death had been mysterious and incomprehensible, it might have led to a wider fear of railways in general.  But everyone who learned of it took away the useful lesson that hanging around in front of oncoming steam locomotives wasn't a good idea, and railways became an essential feature of modern life.  Nevertheless, every accident can teach engineers and the rest of us useful lessons in how to prevent the next one, and the same is true in Mr. Brown's sad case.

It's not clear how long the Version 7.0 of the Model S software featuring the autopilot function has been available, but it's probably been out for at least a year.  Multiply that time by the number of Model S owners and how far they drive, and you have a track record that shows if anything much is wrong with the software, it's not very wrong.  Model S owners aren't dying like flies in autopilot accidents.  Still, telling drivers how great a self-driving feature is, and then expecting them to pay constant attention as though the car were a driver's ed student and you were the instructor, is sending a mixed message.

Tesla's own posting about the accident cites statistics that show if anything, Model S cars have a lower accident rate than average, and that may be true.  But as Tesla's public profile rises, the firm has some delicate maneuvering ahead of it to avoid becoming a target for lawyers who will want to portray Tesla in court as heedless of driver safety.

We've known since the earliest days of automobiles that they are dangerous in careless hands and require constant vigilance on the part of the operator.  Plenty of people ignore that fact and pay for it with injuries or their lives, and take the lives of others as well.  But everybody, whether safe or careless, still admits it's a good idea to pay attention while you're driving.

Now, however, something fundamentally new has been added.  When a car has a self-driving feature that nevertheless requires you to be ready to take command at a moment's notice, the driver is torn between letting the machine take over and keeping a constant lookout for trouble.  You can't both be constantly vigilant and also watch a Harry Potter movie, as Mr. Brown may have been doing at the time of the accident.  In most of us, especially guys, attention is a focused thing that has to be directed at one primary target at a time.   Even if I had a self-driving car (which I don't), and after driving it for a while and learning what it typically can and can't do, I wouldn't feel very comfortable just sitting there and waiting for something awful to happen, and then having to spring into action once I decided that the car wasn't doing the right thing.  That's a big change of operating modes to ask a person to do, especially if you've been lulled into a total trust of the software by many miles of watching it perform well.  Who wouldn't be tempted to watch a movie, or read the paper, or even sleep?

I'm afraid we've got some institutionalized hypocrisy here that most auto companies are fortunately free of.  But Tesla is a different kind of beast, founded at a time when anybody who ever installs software is either forced to lie, or actually has to read dozens of pages of legal gobbledegook before clicking the "I Agree" button.  The impression I have of the arrangement between Tesla and Model S owners is that Tesla pretends that  they have to keep their hands on the wheel, and the owners pretend that they're following instructions.  And the pretense has made the lawyers happy, I suppose—until now.

Now that the much-anticipated First Fatality has happened, things could go in any of several directions.  The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, which is investigating the accident, could come out with a bunch of heavy-handed federal regulations that could squash or set back autonomous vehicles in the U. S. for many years.  Joshua Brown's relatives could mount a lawsuit that could cripple Tesla.  Or (and this is the one I'm hoping for), Tesla's engineers can learn what went wrong in Mr. Brown's case, fix it, and deliver clearer, more practical instructions to drivers, including some human-factors engineering that seems to be missing, about how to use the self-driving feature, so that the remaining Tesla drivers can lessen their chances of becoming Fatality No. 2.

Sources:  Many news outlets carried reports of Mr. Brown's death.  Tesla's own posting concerning the incident appeared June 30 at https://www.teslamotors.com/blog/tragic-loss.  I referred to reports on Fortune's online version at http://fortune.com/2016/07/02/fatal-tesla-crash-blind-spot/, the New York Times report on Mr. Brown's background at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/02/business/joshua-brown-technology-enthusiast-tested-the-limits-of-his-tesla.html, the Tesla press kit on its autopilot at https://www.teslamotors.com/presskit/autopilot, and the Wikipedia article on William Hoskisson.  Thanks to my wife for notifying me about the incident.

California Puts the Brakes on Autonomous Vehicles

The California Department of Motor Vehicles (CDMV) has issued proposed regulations for self-driving cars (also known as autonomous vehicles, or AVs), and what they are planning wasn't all good news, at least to hopeful AV developers such as Google.  Last Wednesday, the CDMV released a draft version of rules that would apply to AVs used not for experiments and tests (these have been allowed for some time already), but by paying customers.  They are pretty restrictive.

For one thing, the CDMV doesn't want anybody selling AVs yet—only leasing.  For another thing, a specially licensed person has to be in the vehicle whenever it's operating, and able to take over manual control at any time.  These restrictions rule out some of the most commercially promising potential applications for AVs, namely, driverless delivery vehicles.  In its defense, the CDMV says that more testing is needed before such vehicles can be let loose on California freeways.  And having driven on California freeways myself, I have to say they may have a point.

You can't blame the CDMV for being cautious.  So far, the testing Google and automakers such as Mercedes and Tesla Motors have done has not turned up any show-stopper problems with autonomous vehicle systems.  But effects that don't show up in small-scale tests can raise their ugly heads later.  I'm not a traffic engineer, but there may be new types of problems that don't arise until the percentage of AVs on the road rises above a certain threshold.  Despite all the manufacturers' efforts, AVs will act differently than human-driven cars, and depending on the programming, sensor layout, and other factors, there may be some unknown interactions, perhaps between cars of different makes, that will lead to weird and possibly hazardous problems that nobody could have suspected in advance.  We simply don't know.  So going slow in the largest automotive market of any state is perhaps a good thing.

On the other hand, history shows that government restrictions on new technology can quickly become absurd and even obstruct progress.  Historians of the automobile are familiar with the "red flag laws" that the English Parliament enacted in the latter part of the 1800s.  A typical law of this type required any "powered locomotive" on a public road to be accompanied by a person walking at least sixty yards (55 m) ahead of the vehicle, holding a red flag to be used as a signal to the operator to halt, and also to warn passersby of the machine's approach.  Despite rumors that these laws were passed specifically to slow down the spread of self-powered passenger vehicles, they were actually aimed at steam tractors, which were mobile steam engines used to operate agricultural machinery.  Steam tractors were developed as early as the 1860s, and the larger ones could do considerable damage to the roads of the day and frighten horses, so the regulations were appropriate at the time they were first passed.

However, when the newer, smaller passenger automobiles of the 1890s came along, the 4-miles-per-hour speed limits and other restrictions that were appropriate for steam tractors made little sense for autos, and it took some time for popular demand and pressure from automakers to change the red-flag laws.  Something similar happened in a few U. S. states, but by 1900 most red-flag laws had been repealed or transformed into regulations more suitable for internal-combustion cars.

There are a couple of lessons here for what could happen next with regard to AV regulations.

First, we should expect some overreacting on the part of government regulators.  No regulator I know of ever got fired for being too vigilant.  Unfortunately, very few regulators get fired for not being vigilant enough, either, but the tendency of a bureaucracy whose mission is to regulate an industry, is to do more than necessary rather than less, up to the limit of the resources the regulator has at hand.  Some commentators have said that what's bad for California is going to be good for Texas, which has taken a much more laissez-faire attitude toward AV experiments by Google and others.  So we can thank what remnants of federalism remain in the U. S. for the fact that if one state passes excessively restrictive laws on an activity, companies can simply pull up stakes and go to a more friendly state.

The second lesson is more subtle, but has deeper and broader implications.  It has to do with the gradual but pervasive spread of what is called "administrative law."  To explain this problem, we need another historical detour.

Those familiar with the U. S. Constitution know that the powers of the federal government were purposely divided into three parts:  the legislative branch for making the laws on behalf of the people it represents, the executive branch for enforcing the laws, and the judicial branch for judging whether citizens have violated the laws.  This was done in reaction to the so-called "prerogative" that the English kings of the 1600s and earlier liked to exercise.  In those bad old days, a king could haul off and make a law (legislative power), have his royal officers drag a subject in off the street (executive power), and pass judgment on whether the guy had broken the King's law (judicial power).  Combining these distinct powers in one person was a great way to encourage despotism and tyranny.  The authors of the U. S. Constitution had enough of that, thank you, so they strictly divided the operations of government into three distinct branches corresponding to the three basic functions of government, and made sure that new laws could be originated only by representatives elected by the people.

But over the last century or so, the dam holding back government by prerogative has sprung lots of leaks in the form of administrative laws.  Nobody elects anyone who serves in the California Department of Motor Vehicles.  It's just a bunch of bureaucrats who can make up regulations (legislate), pronounce penalties for violation of those regulations (execute), and in some cases even decide on whether a party is guilty or innocent of violating the regulations (judge).  Yes, the California Senate, a representative body, asked the CDMV to do this, but in turning over the power to make laws to the CDMV, the Senate abdicated its legislative function and handed it over to a non-representative body.

This is an oversimplified version of a huge and pervasive issue, but once you understand the nature of the problem, you can see versions of it everywhere, especially in the alphabet soup of federal agencies:  OSHA, FDA, FCC, etc.  At least in the case of the red-flag laws, it was Parliament itself which passed the laws, and which modified them in response to public demand when the time came.  But if the voters of California don't like what the CDMV does, they don't have a lot of options.

Perhaps the streets of Austin will see lots of consumer-owned AVs before you can find any in Los Angeles.  That's fine with me, as long as they drive at least as well as the average Texas driver.  And that shouldn't be too hard.

Sources:  I learned about the proposed CDMV regulations from an article by Kevin Williamson "The Long Road to Self-Driving Cars" in National Review at http://www.nationalreview.com/article/428715/california-self-driving-car-regulations.  I also referred to an article in Fortune's online edition at http://fortune.com/2015/12/16/google-california-rules-self-driving-cars/ and Wired at http://www.wired.com/2015/12/californias-new-self-driving-car-rules-are-great-for-texas/.  A summary of the proposed CDMV regulations can be found at https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/dbcf0f21-4085-47a1-889f-3b8a64eaa1ff/AVRegulationsSummary.pdf?MOD=AJPERES.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article "Locomotive Acts."  I am currently reading law scholar Philip Hamburger's lengthy tome Is Administrative Law Unlawful? (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2014), which contains hundreds of arguments against administrative law.

Self-Driving Cars: More Bumps in the Road

In what is probably the most detailed reporting on Google's self-driving cars to appear so far, New Yorker staff writer Burkhard Bilger shows just how far the technology has advanced since the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) held its first Grand Challenge race of autonomous vehicles in the Mojave Desert in 2004.  Nobody came even close to finishing that first race, but only a year later the lessons learned from the inaugural debacles paid off when five vehicles completed the 132-mile course.  Today, Google's fleet of self-driving cars regularly plies roads in California, where the legislature recently passed new licensing laws making it legal to ride in such a vehicle without actually driving it.  But as Bilger briefly points out, a lot remains to be done before you can reasonably expect to own (or at least ride in) a self-driving car yourself.  And in my opinion, technology is not the main stumbling block.

A couple of years ago, I wrote in this blog that I perceived at least two problems which stood in the way of self-driving cars:  unexplored technical problems that might arise if lots of them were on the road all at once, and the reluctance of drivers to hand over the wheel to a robot.  I now think that the first issue has probably been overcome (or easily can be if it arises), and the second issue will take care of itself as the technology becomes more available and peer pressure or necessity (would you rather be told you're too old to drive, or buy a car that can drive itself?) convinces reluctant drivers to hand over the keys to Cyborg. 

But Bilger touches on what I now believe is the single most important obstacle that might slow the spread of autonomous vehicles, at least in the U. S.:  the conservatism of U. S. automotive engineers. 

Bilger spoke with representatives of several car companies:  GM, Ford, Nissan, Toyota, Mercedes, and Volvo, among others.  Ford and GM continue to make incremental "driver-assist" options available, but don't seem enthusiastic about self-driving cars at all. Nissan is the only firm that has made a definite commitment to market a self-driving car, with a target date of 2020.  Mercedes is worried about what the currently-required laser dome on the roof will do to styling, and Volvo is concentrating on safety more than autonomy:  their goal is to make fatal crashes in a Volvo essentially impossible.  But whether a robot or a human drives the car is not their primary concern.  Toyota is still recovering from the controversial accusations that their cars were prone to sudden acceleration, and has paid out millions in legal costs as a result.  That firm is probably not eager to market a product that a few accidents could transform into another huge legal liability.

Here is what I think will happen.  In highly congested non-U. S. cities—Tokyo, Amsterdam, Berlin—auto makers will first market self-driving cars to people for whom car ownership is very expensive in terms of parking and driving aggravation.  Bilger makes the somewhat curious claim that once cars can drive themselves, most people will not feel the need to own one.  I for one fail to see the connection, except in circumstances where it is a positive pain to own a car, such as living in Manhattan. 

Google admits it's not planning to go into the car business.  But if it thinks Ford or GM is going to buy turnkey controls sold by Google and install them in their own products, they have not given sufficient consideration to the power of N. I. H.:  Not Invented Here.  Not only will the U. S. auto engineers be reluctant to hand over critical responsibilities for their products to a bunch of California geeks; the Detroit crowd recognizes that the whole idea of car ownership is tied intimately to the fact that you drive the thing, you don't just ride in it.

Most U. S. automakers sell cars by playing on the emotions of potential car owners.  The idea is "you are what you drive."  Drive a Dodge Ram?  You're a rough, tough guy who can climb mountains while carrying a ton of rocks—in your pickup.  And so on.  The psychological distance between the driver's seat and the passenger seat (even if you're still sitting behind the wheel) is vast.  A car that drives itself isn't a car anymore, it's a one-person bus.  And public transportation in this country is about as sexy as a roomful of old men playing dominoes. 

To sell self-driving cars, the U. S. auto companies would have to retool their whole way of thinking about how cars are sold.  Of course, if buying a car becomes a thing that only really rich people can afford to do (like keeping a chauffeur), and most cars become part of some public transportation network, the marketing job for the auto industry becomes much easier.  They will have to sell only to a few large municipal purchasing agents rather than to millions of individual car owners.  But except in a few quasi-European cities on the U. S. coasts, I simply can't picture this happening to any large extent.  People love their cars too much to let go of them, even if they no longer drive them. 

Perhaps we will go through another U. S. automaker shakeout, like the one that happened in the early 1980s as foreign automotive producers out-manufactured U. S. firms and took over huge tracts of market share.  If lots of people like the idea of not having to drive, but still want to own a car, Nissan will find out when they offer a truly self-driving vehicle.  Legislatures in states where the demand is high will take care of the licensing problem, and if U. S. carmakers ignore or downplay the self-driving car trend after foreign makes start selling, it's their funeral, along with the funerals of those people who die as a result of human-driver error—deaths that Google engineers claim can be reduced drastically once we switch to self-driving vehicles.  And that's another factor that may push U. S. auto manufacturers unwillingly into the self-driving-car business:  insurance companies.  If a large enough database of statistics shows that self-driving cars are, say, four times as safe on average as human-driven ones, insurance rates on the self-driving models will plummet, and people will have to pay more for the privilege of driving rather than letting the computer steer. 

Sooner or later, the sight of driverless cars will no longer attract the attention it does today.  But a lot of things will have to change first, and among the most important are attitudes of engineers, legislatures, and drivers themselves.

Sources:  Burkhard Bilger's article "Auto Correct" appeared on pp. 96-109 of the Nov. 25, 2013 issue of The New Yorker.  I addressed the issue of autonomous vehicles in my blog in this space on August 11, 2011.