Cruise Control on Steriods

Tesla’s autonomous vehicle control system warned Joshua Brown 7 times to take over control of the car before his fatal crash last year. Photo: NTSB/Florida Highway Patrol

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Believe it or not, I’ve never seen the Harry Potter movies. But they must be pretty good, considering that Joshua Brown, the victim of last year’s famed “Tesla Crash” was allegedly watching one of the films right up to the point when his car rear-ended a tractor trailer last year, killing him.

As you’ve surely heard by now, new details about that crash have emerged, including the well-publicized fact that Tesla’s autonomous system warned Brown seven different times that he needed to assume control of the car, and that he manually bumped his speed up just two minutes before the crash occurred.

I’m not familiar with the Tesla autonomous driving system, although I have spent a limited amount of time behind the wheel of Freightliner’s Inspiration truck while it was in self-driving mode. And I can attest that programming the truck to slow down and eventually pull off the road in the event road conditions aren’t absolutely perfect for autonomous vehicle control is one of the system’s core attributes. In fact, the Daimler Highway Pilot system is so safety-conscious, it will pull the truck off the highway if any number of critical information inputs aren’t being met; anything from faded lane markings to a spotty GPS signal is enough to make Highway Pilot punt and hand control back over to one of us human beings or simply pull off the road if – I dunno – the wizard is about to zap a dragon with his magic wand, or something.

If you’re lucky as a writer, you might get to invent a bunch of new words (like that show-off, Shakespeare) or, more likely …Read the rest of this story

Source:: http://www.truckinginfo.com/blog/truck-tech/story/2017/06/cruise-control-on-steriods.aspx