Tesla Autopilot prevents about 40 accidents per day that could have been caused by sudden unintended acceleration (SUA). This news comes from Tesla’s Director of Autopilot Programs, Ashok Elluswamy, who Share this news during his workshop at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference in New Orleans earlier this summer. He later posted the workshop on YouTube and shared it on Twitter.
These predictions have already been used to prevent many collisions. For example, Autopilot prevents about 40 accidents/day where drivers accidentally depress the accelerator pedal 100% instead of the brakes. In the video, the autopilot brakes automatically, saving this guy’s legs (7/12) pic.twitter.com/XtMssPT9cM
– Aelluswamy August 21 2022
In the video, Ashok explains how the autopilot is able to avoid collisions and highlights some of the safety features that the autopilot has.
“Here, I am showing a particular situation of humans failing where they accidentally depress the accelerator pedal instead of the brake pedal. For example, these people depress the accelerator thinking they are depressing the brake pedal. But the car realizes it is doing so and heads toward a collision and automatically cuts off acceleration and depresses on the brakes to prevent humans from colliding.”
Ashok explained that this particular driver would have launched his car into a river had they not been rescued by autopilot. He shared another video where the person was trying to stand up but they hit the accelerator pedal instead of the brake. Tesla Autopilot prevented them from crashing into the storefront and pedestrians that were inside.
Although autopilot saves many humans, Ashok emphasized that more collisions remain to be prevented. Participate in cases where drivers misplace the pedals and will be rescued by autopilot. In one of the videos, the driver’s decision to switch gears and reverse at full speed caused them to crash into the garage.
“Although this is very sad, I’m glad no one was hurt in this accident, it just doesn’t make sense for us to collide when we have a great system that can detect public obstacles,” he said.
Ashok also pointed out the three things a self-driving car should be useful: safe, comfortable and reasonably fast. You can watch the full workshop in the video below.
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