If Tesla Expects The Public To Adopt Autonomous Vehicles, It Needs A Sensory Upgrade

The lack of reinforcements as well as the fact that the Tesla has a blind spot in said vulnerable area goes to show that the car is designed well for autonomous driving during certain specific parameters. This works for a Beta version of Autopilot that is supposed to only be operated when the driver has their full attention on the road, but will not do for fully autonomous versions of the software that allow drivers to be distracted on the highway or city streets. Furthermore, Tesla supplier Mobileye, which sells the EV company sensors for use on its Autopilot enabled cars, has spoken out to confirm that the sensors are not designed to spot a laterally crossing vehicle that comes into the Tesla's line of trajectory.

Lateral Turn Across path functionality should debut on these sensors beginning in 2018 with Euro NCAP requiring them by 2020, but as of now there is a lack of such sensors. In the Florida crash, Tesla blames the camera for not being able to read the tractor's white trailer against the unusually bright sky. The stereoscopic sensors would have been useless as well given that their placement low to the ground only contributes to the blind spot above and even if they could see it, their short 16-foot range would have detected the truck far too late to stop in time. What this points to more than anything is a hardware problem. Tesla has arguably proven itself as capable of making autonomous software that works well, especially since it's continually updated.

The problem is that if Tesla expects to be able to simply update its existing fleet with full autonomy, it will be making a mistake. In order to get autonomous vehicles to gain public acceptance and go mainstream, they need to eliminate as many holes as possible, especially blind spots that a driver who is alert would easily spot. That's why Tesla needs to either add more sensors or upgrade the existing hardware to make it capable of seeing the entire car's surroundings, not just the ones that are most likely to be hit. It doesn't matter how unlikely the accident is, the point of an autonomous vehicle is to have it be safer than a human driver. Statistically, Autopilot already is safer than human drivers having gone 130 million miles before its first fatality.

This means that an Autopilot will enable an additional 36 million miles of death-free driving over a human pilot, a start, but far from what the end goal should be. To double or quadruple the safety factor, or even eliminate deaths entirely, Tesla needs to look into improving its eyes on the road. By 2017, Tesla expects to roll out its most important car yet, the $35,000 Model 3 sedan. With nearly a half million preorders for the Autopilot-enabled Model 3, this means that it will be one of the first vehicles to introduce autonomous driving to the masses, and Tesla needs to be sure to have all of the kinks worked out by then. Of course, putting everything on hold to redesign the sensors would cause massive delays, but unlike Falcon Wing doors, that's a delay we can all stand.