From many years, big names in the world of technology have been claiming that self-driving cars will soon reduce road accidents and deaths. One of the biggest Businessman Elon Musk, whose company Tesla has been promising to bring fully automatic cars for the last decade. But a tragic incident near Phoenix, Arizona in 2023 has raised questions about this confidence.
Bloomberg recently released footage of the accident, in which a self-driving Tesla Model Y is seen crushing a 71-year-old woman at high speed. The woman was helping in traffic control after an earlier accident on the highway. The car first tried to turn left when a man signaled it to stop, but the speed od the car did not reduce and car turned right and hit the woman.
Despite this, there was a driver in the car, who could have taken control at any time, but it is not clear yet how responsible the driver’s role was in this accident.
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The most surprising thing is that Tesla reported this fatal accident to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) after seven months, whereas according to the rules such a report should be made immediately.
This accident gives rise to a new federal investigation on Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ software. Even though the name is ‘Full Self-Driving’, the technology still depends on human monitoring and many accidents have happened due to this system before.
Tesla has opted to use only cameras instead of LiDAR sensors, which may prove to be weaker in terms of safety compared to other companies like Tesla’s rival Waymo. By 2024, 467 accidents have been reported due to sensor-related flaws. To overcome this problem, the company is working on a ‘sensor cleaning system’, which is not considered a permanent solution to the problem.
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Now Tesla’s driverless robot taxi service is going to be launched in Austin, Texas, and the testing of Model Y is already going on here. But the company’s internal documents themselves indicate that this could be a big risk.
In a conversation with Bloomberg, lawyer and transport engineer Bryant Walker Smith said, “Tesla is claiming that they will soon be able to do ‘true autonomous driving’, but all the evidence shows that they are not yet able to do so safely. And for this every person on the road will be a kind of test subject.”
So the question arises whether this bold step of Tesla will become a new example of safety for the future or a big threat?
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Source: Yahoo.com
