EV Blog Admits: Tesla’s “Autopilot Will Probably Not Stop For Service Vehicles Parked In Lanes Of Traffic”

It look as though the EV community is finally starting to wake up to a fact that’s been obvious to the rest of us for quite a while now: Tesla vehicles on Autopilot don’t seem to recognize service vehicles parked in lanes of traffic.

Now we’re not automated driving engineers here at Zero Hedge, but we did see enough instances over the last couple of years (like this and this) of Teslas crashing into inanimate service vehicles on the road that we knew there was an issue.

Meanwhile, the tree-huggers over at blogs like Inside EVs were a little slower on the uptake. But that’s OK, because it looks as though they are finally starting to acknowledge the issue. 

They were prompted to make the admission after a 10 minute a video was published explaining why Tesla’s Autopilot crashed into stopped police cars on the highway.

The first minute of the video is nothing but police dashcam footage showing Teslas plowing into police cars on the side of the road and is disturbing to watch. 

Then, the maker of the video goes on to offer his take on what the problem is. 

“I have a lot of experience using Autopilot,” the author of the video says. “So, why did this accident happen?” he continues.

After first placing a majority of the blame on the drivers (a classic Tesla move), saying they “abuse autopilot”, he then still goes on to ask why Autopilot didn’t see the parked vehicles.

In answering his own question, he pulls out the Model 3 handbook and notes this part, that says that Autopilot “cannot detect all objects” and “especially in situations when you are driving over 50 mph”.

Even more specifically, it says that “Control cannot detect objects that are only partially in the driving lane…”

That’s comforting to know. 

“There is no such thing as a fully autonomous car yet,” he concludes. “At the end of the day we are still driving these cars.”

He also places some of the blame on the technology that Tesla uses, radar. “Radar has to ignore non-moving objects,” he says. 

The remaining videos over at Dirty Tesla on YouTube also highlight Tesla’s Autopilot at work, in various situations, to try and lay out clearly what the company should have already done already: explained clearly when Autopilot will work and when it won’t work.

Who knows – perhaps a couple of lives would have been saved at this point if they had done so?