Tesla has had problems with the self-drive function of its cars over the past few weeks. Now boss Elon Musk also admits that the current version has problems. And that although the company wanted to drive fully autonomously by the end of the year.
It was a clear vision: fully automated driving was a “problem solved”, announced Elon Musk. In two years at the latest, cars would be on the road fully automatically and without driver intervention. That was in 2016. After all sorts of trouble with the autopilot, even the Tesla boss himself had to admit: It’s not really going well yet.
On Tuesday he spoke on Twitter about allegations about the current test version of Tesla’s autopilot, the company speaks of “Full Self Driving”, or FSD for short. “The FSD Beta 9.2 is really not that great,” wrote Musk, unusually self-critical. His team is on the matter. The tweet said it was to blame for the attempt to combine both motorways and urban roads with a single module.
Tesla in criticism
The beta had come under massive criticism in the past few weeks. And not only because Tesla had a software for autonomous driving tested directly by the customer in everyday traffic. The software reacted completely incorrectly again and again, for example trying to steer a driver into an excavation that was secured with traffic cones. The autopilot drives like a drunk, annoyed one tester.
One of the reasons for this could be that Tesla is still experimenting with how exactly the autopilot works. A clear contradiction to Musk’s statement about the solved problem. In addition to trying to combine city and motorway journeys, at the beginning of the year the group overturned the approach of detecting other vehicles and objects with a combination of cameras and radar. And now only uses cameras. This means that the group restricts itself even further compared to other manufacturers. In addition to cameras and radar, many now also rely on the lidar technology built into the iPhone, which enables distance measurement using laser beams.
Full-bodied announcements
How the changes affect Musk’s most full-bodied announcement to date is still unclear. He had announced that they wanted to achieve level 5 of autonomous driving by the end of the year. That would mean that the Tesla cars could react completely autonomously to all traffic situations without a driver or passengers. The US automotive authority DMV does not see this. “Tesla is currently at level 2,” says an internal memo from the agency. Tesla’s autopilot boss CJ Moore has already been confronted with the question. “In order to be raised to higher levels, the interventions by a driver would have to reduce to one intervention every one to two million miles driven,” said the authority.
However, Tesla is far from that. How far was shown by a recent investigation by the national road safety authority in the USA, the NHTSA. She wants to get to the bottom of the cause of a dangerous error in the autopilot: Again and again, automatically driving Teslas crashed into emergency vehicles parked on the side of the road. And the problem is increasing. Of the eleven cases registered since 2018, four fell between the end of February and the end of July this year.
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