A 56-year-old Snohomish man had set his Tesla Model S on Autopilot and was looking at his cellphone on Friday when he struck and killed a motorcyclist in front of him in Monroe, court records show.
A Washington State Patrol trooper arrested the Tesla driver at the crash site on Highway 522 at Fales Road shortly before 4 p.m. on suspicion of vehicular manslaughter, according to a probable cause affidavit.
The motorcyclist, Jeffrey Nissen, 28, of Stanwood, died at the scene, records show.
The Tesla driver told a state trooper he was driving home from having lunch in Bothell and was looking at his phone when he heard a bang and felt his car lurch forward, accelerate and hit the motorcyclist, according to the affidavit.
The man told the trooper his Tesla got stuck on top of the motorcyclist and couldn’t be moved in time to save him, the affidavit states.
The trooper cited the driver’s “inattention to driving, while on autopilot mode, and the distraction of the cell phone while moving forward,” and trusting “the machine to drive for him” as probable cause for a charge of vehicular manslaughter, according to the affidavit.
The man was booked into the Snohomish County Jail and was released Sunday after posting bond on his $100,000 bail, jail records show.
What’s the actual point of “autopilot” if you have to pay full attention and be ready to take control at a moments notice?
Sounds like… driving. 🤔
It’s poorly named. A more accurate, less marketing influenced name would be “Adaptive Cruise Control with Lane Assist” for the basic “Autopilot”.
I think it’s more fair to say it is maliciously named. It’s false advertising and leading to issues exactly like the one mentioned in this post.
But Elmo would never do such a thing /s
ambitiously named.
Which my parents’ Lexus had like 7 years ago.
There’s a pretty important distinction here: people using autopilot and full self driving interchangeably when they are very different things. It’s important to know which.
If you try using adaptive cruise control and lane assist functions as a method to keep your hands off the wheel you’re going to be in for a bad time.
I’m sure it’s not all cars, but all the ones i’ve been in over the past 10 years generally only jerk you back to the middle of the lane. They don’t adapt well if you’re cut off suddenly at high speeds either.
I find it much smoother and more consistent than my Subaru was, but clearly NOT ready for hands free. If it’s only “autopilot”, it really is just a nicer adaptive cruise control with lane keeping.
Modern cruise control makes it much less taxing to drive. You can focus only the necessities while leaving things like lane centering and maintaining a proper distance up to the ecu.
Tesla fsd is really just advanced cruise control. The problem is you can’t program out the idiots, and Tesla’s fsd should be considered advanced cruise control and not imply that the operator doesn’t need to pay attention.
But if it’s marketed to change lanes, adjust speed, avoid obstacles, stop, signal, and everything else a driver does… then it’s being marketed as far more than “advanced cruise control”, is it not?
Quite literally their website says: “Tesla cars come standard with advanced hardware capable of providing Autopilot features, and full self-driving capabilities.”
“The system is designed to be able to conduct short and long distance trips with no action required by the person in the driver’s seat.”
“When you arrive at your destination, simply step out at the entrance and your car will enter park seek mode, automatically search for a spot and park itself. A tap on your phone summons it back to you.”
They are telling you the car will drive without someone even being in it!
Why are they even allowed to get away with this kind of marketing? Getting people killed along the way.
*May run over a Grandma just trying to walk into Trader Joe’s.
“You must agree to the TOS before driving this vehicle.”
I agree that’s is marketed as fully autonomous and it shouldn’t be. I think the states dmv should have stepped in and not allowed a vehicle to be registered as anything but having cruise control unless they OK’d it because there are idiots behind the wheel that are simply ignorant of the fact that they are moving multiple tons of mass at speeds that are faster than they can react.
I think y’all are focusing on the wrong feature in this case. Regardless of the limitations of automated driving, or whether it was human or computer doing the driving, obstacle avoidance is meant to prevent hitting things
I agree. You should see the tests of these cars slamming into pedestrians. Why they are allowed to be on public roads is beyond me.
Fsd? You mean the service tesla itself named “Full self driving?”
Sure seems like the company is very intentionally misleading its customers, no matter how many disclaimers they have added over the years as more and more people get killed by their cars.
Your point will have more merit when Tesla drops that dangerously misleading name. Until then, they are partially culpable.
I agree. The state should stop allowing new teslas to be registered on their roads until that moniker is corrected. They should prevent advanced cruise control systems from being misleadingly labeled.
I agree there should be a law against it and sanctions, but Tesla is also capable of making these changes.
The fact they won’t tell you everything you need to know about how Tesla sees itself and its customers.
At the risk of giving you more ammo, there are two different levels
But also, there’s a more general question here. Regardless who is in control of the car or who should be, obstacle avoidance should have helped avoid running over a motorcyclist. We don’t know the scenario but if I’m approaching a motorcycle and the car gets worried, it sets off an alert. If I don’t fix it asap, the car hits the brakes that’s what should have happened.
What was this scenario?
It’s named after airplanes, airplane autopilot doesn’t do everything and you need to be ready to take control at a moments notice.
What’s the point of cruise control if you still have to pay attention? What’s the point of adding adaptive cruise control and lane assist if you still have to pay attention?
They’re all things that help alleviate some of the monotonous things one has to do while driving. Self driving also had the benefit of, in the future, completely relieving human drivers.
In fairness, cruise control is designed for maintaining a speed when you are just going straight for a long time, in a situation where other vehicles are going the same speed (i.e. on a highway). Cruise control isn’t designed to navigate around pedestrians, turn lanes, approach intersections, or do anything else that would put people in danger.
Of course, you still have to know when to stop, but that would be during situations where cruise control would NOT be appropriate.
Tesla wants people to use these features in cities, where you’ve got kids and people walking around. Totally different, and I think they should be held accountable for how they’ve marketed these features.
Yes, and no. The infrastructure would need to be designed for self-driving vehicles, or you get too many unpredictable variables that aren’t properly accounted for. As they are today, they shouldn’t be allowed on public roadways.
We had an autonomous bus one municipality over that ran off the road and hit a tree and critically injured the operator. God forbid this happened near a school. A human driver wouldn’t have done that unless they were impaired.
You claimed there was no point if you have to pay attention. I was responding to that and pointing out there are all kinds of things that currently assist in driving that still require paying attention. Self driving just replaced more of that, just as adaptive cruise control replaced more of that than cc itself.
Liability is a whole different question. although, I have to laugh the idea of humans not making mistakes
We’re talking about features that are intended to two very different purposes.
Cruise control is designed so that a driver doesn’t have to keep their foot pressed on a gas pedal for hours on end (causing physical discomfort or injury) if they are going a constant speed. You are still required to drive, so cruise control was never an alternative to driving.
But these marketed self-driving features are made to replace the act of driving, while still expecting that the person in the vehicle has their full attention and control over it when the car decides to break bad.
There’s a massive different, IMO.
Seems like “assisted-driving” might be a better term, even if it results in fewer sales. 😂
Again, “You claimed there was no point if you have to pay attention. I was responding to that and pointing out there are all kinds of things that currently assist in driving that still require paying attention.”
I agree with you that it should not be marketed as SD and that there is a massive difference between the two. But in the way I compared them, in response to the argument you made, those differences make no difference.