Tesla’s self-driving technology is slammed as ‘flawed’ by experts after car owners’ videos showed vehicles steering into oncoming truck, failing to stop for pedestrians and hitting roadside obstacles
- In footage recorded earlier this month by YouTube user AI Addict, a Tesla Model 3 with Full Self-Driving can be seen smashing into a bike lane bollard in San Jose
- During the same drive, the feature attempts to drive down some light-rail tracks, mistaking it for a road
- Another video posted by the YouTuber in December shows it failing to stop for a pedestrian in a crosswalk
- In yet another jarring clip, a Tesla vehicle using the technology fails to detect on oncoming truck as it prepares to make a turn, forcing the driver to intervene
- The footage highlights some of the flaws with the still largely untested software, according to experts
Tesla’s beta stage Full Self-Driving software does not appear to be ready for the mass market after users posted multiple videos in recent months showing harrowing near-misses.
In footage recorded earlier this month by YouTube user AI Addict, a Tesla Model 3 sporting the technology – which is still being tested but is available to selected Tesla owners in its incomplete ‘beta’ stage – can be seen smashing into a bike lane bollard at 11 mph on streets of San Jose. During the same drive, the feature attempts to drive down some light-rail tracks, mistaking it for a road.
AI Addict also posted a video in December of his car failing to stop for a pedestrian in a crosswalk.
Meanwhile, YouTuber Dirty Tesla shared a terrifying clip in November of his Full Self-Driving software preparing to cross traffic into a left turn – ignoring a fast oncoming truck. The driver was forced to intervene, grabbing the wheel to avoid collision.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk claimed only last month that the FSD Beta system had never had an accident, but the new footage offers proof that this is no longer the case.
The jarring videos highlight some of the flaws with the still largely untested software, which uses a combination of cameras and ultrasonic sensors to stitch together a view of the world so cars can drive autonomously, experts say, highlighting the unpolished feature’s failure to detect common road obstacles and pedestrians.
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In footage recorded earlier this month by YouTube user AI Addict, a Tesla Model 3 sporting Full-Self Driving- which is still being tested but is available to selected Tesla owners in its incomplete ‘beta’ stage – can be seen smashing into a bike lane bollard at 11 mph in San Jose
‘The video [footage] shows different scenarios where the automated driving system was not able to detect and/or cope with relevant features of its Operational Design Domain,’ Nicola Croce told The Washington Post Thursday, referring to the conditions under which the Full Self-Driving system is expected to safely operate.
Croce currently works as a technical program manager at Deepen AI, a company that helps carmakers employ driver-assistance and autonomous-driving technologies in their vehicles. Tesla is not one of its clients.
The slip-ups, Croce told the paper, reveal an inherent weakness in the software that resulted in it not meeting basic safety requirements it was designed to adhere to – a sentiment that was echoed by other autonomous-driving experts who viewed the videos.
Speaking on the clip of the car crashing into the bike lane divider in San Jose, Brad Templeton, a seasoned self-driving-car developer who worked on Google’s self-driving car, said the cause of the collision was due to the software being incomplete.
‘The bollard issue is both mapping and perception,’ Templeton told The Post. ‘As permanent bollards rather than temporary cones, they should be on a map,’
That way, he said, ‘the car would know that nobody ever drives through these.’
‘As to why the perception missed them until too late, this is an issue with computer vision. Perhaps it never got trained on these unusually shaped and [colored] bollards,’ he added.
As for the near-miss with the pedestrian, who in the clip was standing just off the sidewalk at the start of a crosswalk when the car fails to stop to the driver’s horror, experts blamed the lapse on the technology’s failure to recognize pedestrian walk signs, or foresee the fact that a stopped pedestrian might venture off a sidewalk.
‘It’s unclear whether the car reacted or not to [the pedestrian’s] presence, but clearly the driver is shaken,’ said Andrew Maynard, a professor at Arizona State University. Maynard serves as the director of its Risk Innovation Lab, where he works on technologies similar to Full Self-Driving.
Hod Finkelstein, chief research and development officer for AEye, a company that sells light detection and ranging (lidar) technology to carmakers seeking to implement smart cameras into their vehicles, theorized that the incident occurred because cameras alone are insufficient when it comes to detecting pedestrian intent.
Finkelstein says this is because cameras are not capable of measuring the distance of distant objects, and can be blinded by glares originating from headlights or the sun.
The jarring videos highlight some of the flaws with the still largely untested software, experts say, highlighting the unpolished feature’s failure to detect road obstacles and pedestrians
A Tesla Inc Model 3 electric vehicle, like the one seen in one of the videos, is seen here displayed inside a showroom in Tokyo, Japan
Elon Musk in August admitted that Tesla’s new self-driving software is ‘not great’ but the firm is trying to fix it
Tesla boss Musk famously sought to use only cameras and ditch sensors in his vehicles’ less sophisticated Autopilot feature, which was panned by experts after at least 10 were killed in eight accidents in which Tesla’s Autopilot was engaged since its release in 2016, reports from the National Highway Traffic Safety Agency reveal.
Last week, Tesla had to recall nearly 54,000 vehicles equipped with its ‘Full Self-Driving’ software, after it allowed vehicles to run through stop signs at low speeds, without coming to a complete halt.
The company also had to recall over 800,000 vehicles because seat belt reminder chimes may not sound when the vehicles are started and the driver isn’t buckled up.
All were to be fixed with online software updates, where possible.
Safety advocates and automated vehicle experts say Tesla is pushing the boundaries of safety to see what it can get away with, but now NHTSA is pushing back.
In November, NHTSA said it was looking into a complaint from a California Tesla driver that the ‘Full Self-Driving’ software caused a crash.
The driver complained to the agency that a Model Y went into the wrong lane and was hit by another vehicle.
The SUV gave the driver an alert halfway through the turn, and the driver tried to turn the wheel to avoid other traffic, according to the complaint. But the car took control and ‘forced itself into the incorrect lane,’ the driver reported.
NHTSA also is investigating why Teslas using the company’s less-sophisticated ‘Autopilot’ partially automated driver-assist system have repeatedly crashed into emergency vehicles parked on roadways.
The agency opened the investigation in August 2021, citing 12 crashes in which Teslas on Autopilot hit parked police and fire vehicles. In the crashes under investigation, at least 17 people were hurt and one was killed.
Last week Tesla said in its earnings release that ‘Full Self-Driving’ software is now being tested by owners in nearly 60,000 vehicles in the US. It was only about 2,000 in the third quarter. The software, which costs $12,000, will accelerate Tesla’s profitability, the company said.
Tuesday’s recall is the 15th done by Tesla since January 2021, according to NHTSA records, with almost all of the more than one million vehicles sold in the US requiring an update due to a recall.
CALIFORNIA SUES TESLA FOR RACIAL DISCRIMINATION OF BLACK WORKERS AFTER EVIDENCE OF ‘SEGREGATION’
By Kate Dennett For Mailonline and Afp
Tesla has been hit by a racial discrimination complaint from a California agency after it found evidence of ‘segregation and hostile work environment’ at the electric car maker’s Francisco factory.
Black workers at Tesla’s Fremont factory were regularly subjected to deeply offensive racial slurs and jokes by co-workers and managers, according to the complaint, which was filed in a California court late on Wednesday.
Kevin Kish, the director of the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH), said the agency had received hundreds of complaints from workers at the plant.
Wednesday’s filing claimed one worker heard ‘racial slurs as often as 50-100 times a day’, while there was allegedly racist graffiti found, which included Nazi swastikas and reference to the Ku Klux Klan.
The DFEH ‘found evidence that Tesla’s Fremont factory is a racially segregated workplace where Black workers are subjected to racial slurs and discriminated against in job assignments, discipline, pay, and promotion’, Kish said in a statement reported by the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg.
‘The facts on this case speak for themselves,’ he added.
Ahead of the filing Tesla released a statement on Wednesday saying it ‘opposes all forms of discrimination and harassment’ and that it is committed to providing ‘a workplace that is safe, respectful, fair and inclusive’.
Black workers at Tesla’s Fremont factory (pictured) were regularly subjected to deeply offensive racial slurs and jokes by co-workers and managers, according to a complaint
But according to the DFEH, workers at the factory would be ‘taunted by racial slurs and then baited into verbal and physical confrontations’ by non-black workers and would subsequently face disciplinary action.
The complaint also claimed non-black workers would regularly call areas where many black or African-American workers were stationed with racist historical names, including ‘the plantation’.
Black slaves were frequently set to work on agricultural plantations in North America before the mid-19th century producing crops including sugar and cotton.
Non-black workers were given frequently given preferential treatment at the plant, including being handed easier jobs and given greater leniency in disciplinary proceedings compared to their Black colleagues, according to the filing.
One worker ‘heard these racial slurs as often as 50-100 times a day’ and workers with racially incendiary tattoos of the Confederate flag would make them visible to intimidate Black employees, the DFEH said.
Racist graffiti allegedly seen in the factory toilet included Nazi swastikas, ‘KKK’ in reference to the white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan, and ‘go back to Africa’.
Wednesday’s filing claimed one worker heard ‘racial slurs as often as 50-100 times a day’, while there was allegedly racist graffiti found at the factory (file photo)
Racist language directed at Black workers included ‘porch monkey’ and jokes saying they were ‘out of the hood’ and ‘from the ghetto’, according to the filing.
‘The stress from the severe and pervasive racial harassment, the risk of a physical altercation and escalation with harassers, the blatant discrimination, the disproportionately severe discipline, and the futility of complaining, made the working conditions so intolerable that they resigned,’ the complaint said.
The company, owned by billionaire Elon Musk, has been hit with several lawsuits alleging discrimination at the California factory in recent months.
However, many don’t reach the courts because Tesla requires its full-time employees to agree to private arbitration of employment-related disputes.
In a blog post before the filing, Tesla called the suit misguided and said the DFEH ‘has never once raised any concern’ about its workplace practices following a three-year investigation.
‘Tesla has always taken disciplinary action and terminated employees for professional misconduct, including those who utter racial slurs or harass others in various ways,’ the company said in its statement on Wednesday.
Tesla’s post said the lawsuit appears to focus on accusations by production associates at the factory, who said misconduct took place between 2015 and 2019.
The post also said it will ask the court to ‘pause the case and take other steps to ensure that facts and evidence will be heard’.
‘Attacking a company like Tesla that has done so much good for California should not be the overriding aim of a state agency with prosecutorial authority,’ the blog said.
It comes just over a week after former Tesla contractor Kaylen Barker, who is black and a lesbian, filed a lawsuit alleging that the company ignored her complaints about shocking discrimination and abuse while she worked at an assembly plant in Lathrop, California.
The company, owned by billionaire Elon Musk (pictured), has been hit with several lawsuits alleging discrimination at the California factory in recent months
‘I feel like I have been tortured and sent back in time before African Americans had civil rights,’ Barker said in a statement, adding that ‘being a black worker at a Tesla’s renowned California factory, is to be forced to step back in time and suffer painful abuses reminiscent of the Jim Crow Era.’
Barker, 25, said she was ‘violated physically, mentally and emotionally’ while working for Tesla because she’s ‘an African American lesbian.’
The suit, filed on February 1 in California Superior Court in Alameda County, alleges that a white coworker struck Barker with a hot grinding tool while calling her the N-word, ‘stupid,’ ‘dumb’ and ‘a b***c.’
Although the white coworker was fired after then incident, Barker alleges that the person was ‘shockingly rehired’ about two weeks later.
Tesla, which has abolished its press relations department and refuses to speak to the media, did not immediately respond to an inquiry from DailyMail.com on Tuesday morning.
Last October, a California jury awarded former Tesla contractor Owen Diaz (pictured) $137 million verdict after he sued alleging racial harassment at the Fremont factory
In December, six women sued Tesla, alleging a culture of sexual harassment at the Fremont plant and other facilities.
The suit came after a California jury ruled in October that Tesla should pay a Black ex-employee $137million in damages for turning a blind eye to racism the man encountered at the Fremont plant.
The contract worker, Owen Diaz, said he faced ‘daily racist epithets’, including the ‘N-word,’ at the plant in 2015 and 2016 before quitting.
Diaz said employees drew swastikas and left racist graffiti and drawings around the plant and that supervisors failed to stop the abuse.
Tesla is appealing that verdict and has denied any knowledge of racist conduct that Diaz said took place at the plant, which has about 10,000 workers.
Last year, Musk feuded with authorities over the re-opening of the factory amid coronavirus restrictions and threatened to move his headquarters out of the state.
Subsequently, Musk told investors in October that the leading electric vehicle maker is relocating its headquarters to Texas, where it is building a plant.
Accounts of systemic racial discrimination in US workplaces have become more common after Black Lives Matter protests hit full swing in 2020.
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