On Thanksgiving (Nov 24) an 8-car pileup occurred on the San Francisco to Oakland Bay Bridge. Nobody was seriously injured, but interest was raised because it was all started by a driver in a 2021 Tesla Model S. The driver, a 76 year-old San Francisco lawyer, told police he was using Tesla’s “Full Self Driving” mode and it malfunctioned, changing lanes and hitting the brakes hard in front of a line of cars. While the car would have actually been in “Autopilot” (a different system) this crash opens up some surprisingly interesting questions about how driver supervision of “pilot” style driver-assist systems should work, and who is at fault.
Tesla has two different systems which can take control of the car. The original one, “Autopilot,” is included with cars and drives highways while drivers keep their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road, ready to intervene if the system does anything wrong. This is known as advanced “driver assist” or ADAS. Owners can also buy an upgrade to this called “Navigate on Autopilot” which adds the ability to do automatic lane changes, among a few other features.
For even more money, some Tesla owners have pre-bought Tesla’s eventual “full self driving” system, a product which is not yet ready, though Tesla lets customers try out the early prototype in what they (very incorrectly) refer to as a “beta” test. While the system, when eventually delivered, promises right in the name to be an actual self-driving system, the prototype is not that, and needs very diligent monitoring with regular intervention by drivers. It works on city streets, and does not operate on highways. If you turn it on, and it enters a highway, it switches to the older Autopilot system automatically, which might have confused the driver in thinking that the FSD system was engaged, though the switch is quite obvious on the display screen.