In the past few years, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been exaggerating the company’s driving assistance features, and he has also received much attention and controversy. Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving are the company’s advanced driving automatic functions. Although the names of these two functions are reminiscent of fully automatic driving technology, this is not the case. After turning on these two functions, The driver still needs to pay attention to the road conditions at all times.
Most of the criticism of Tesla comes from safety advocates, politicians, and others in the auto industry. In these people’s eyes, Tesla’s lax approach to autonomous driving is putting people at risk. They claim that overly optimistic promises about the capabilities of these systems have caused people to abuse them and eventually lead to car accidents.
In fact, Tesla has similar concerns Tesla. A new book about this electric car manufacturer just published by Tim Huggins records such a story. The title of the new book is Game of Thrones: Tesla, Elon Musk and Century Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century).
According to someone familiar with Tesla’s internal team, at the end of 2016, the company was preparing to release a new version of Autopilot hardware and software (the system had just been launched for a year). Sterling Anderson, who led the company’s Autopilot team ) Began to worry about Musk’s over-commitment.
Anderson knew in his heart that these systems would not be able to fully control the vehicle even after the upgrade. For a long time, Autopilot is mainly oriented to the highway environment. It uses multiple cameras and sensors to keep the vehicle in the lane and keep a certain distance from the vehicle in front.
The book records that Anderson was worried that Musk would say that Autopilot could realize autonomous driving, and expressed his concern to Jon McNeill, then Tesla’s head of sales and marketing.
Employees in Tesla’s legal and public relations department also have the same concerns as Anderson. According to people familiar with the matter, in the first year before this, they have been letting Musk understand that when using Autopilot, drivers need to keep their hands on the steering wheel at all times. However, when Musk drove the reporter to a test drive, he removed his hands from the steering wheel many times.
To make matters worse, in May of that year, a car owner named Joshua Brown (Joshua Brown) encountered a serious car accident. His Tesla Model S crashed into a tractor that was crossing the road, and Brown died. At that time, the vehicle’s Autopilot was on. This is the first accident that put Tesla’s Autopilot technology in the focus of the public.
In October 2016, when Tesla released a new generation of Autopilot system, Musk said that all new vehicles will be equipped with the hardware, and said that eventually, it will allow Tesla to achieve autonomous driving. He also put forward a bold statement: By the end of 2017, Tesla will achieve autonomous driving, which can automatically drive from the east coast of the United States to the west coast.
Higgins wrote in the book that Musk’s remarks made some Tesla engineers very dissatisfied. They thought that the promise Musk made was impossible to complete. Others in Tesla’s leadership also felt unsatisfied. Satisfaction, because all along, when Musk’s expectations are not met, he is often furious.
Higgins said: Not only do they know that his timetable is untenable, but they also know that he will soon find someone to take the blame. His promise made some people feel unable to fulfill it. In the next five years or so, Tesla still has not achieved autonomous driving, and of course, no other automaker has achieved this. Musk is continuing to actively promote Tesla’s Full Self-Driving technology, releasing beta software that is still flawed to thousands of the company’s most loyal customers.
