Tesla insists its controversial autopilot software is saving lives. Can it convince the rest of us?
On a balmy Tuesday afternoon in late July, 37-year-old attorney Joshua Neally left work early. He climbed into his new Tesla Model X to drive the 45 minutes from law office in Springfield, Missouri, to his house in Branson, Missouri.
He was going home to celebrate his daughter’s fourth birthday.
He steered the electric luxury SUV into the gathering rush-hour traffic on Highway 68 and turned on autopilot, a feature unique to Tesla that allows a car to pilot itself—braking, accelerating, steering—for long stretches of freeway driving.
It’s a feature that has drawn rebukes from rival companies and sparked investigations by federal regulators after a driver named Joshua Brown was killed in a crash in Florida while using it. Although a Tesla with autopilot is not a true self-driving car, the company’s technology has become a bellwether for Silicon Valley’s ambition to replace human drivers with software.
Neally knew about the Florida crash and the furor that followed. But he had already ordered his Model X after years of waiting and saving, and he was undeterred. When it arrived, he nicknamed it Ender, after the protagonist in the novel Ender’s Game.
By July 26, after a week of driving the Model X, he had grown to cautiously trust it to handle the bulk of his hilly, curvy, sometimes traffic-y commute. “I’m not a daredevil,” he told me. “I promised my wife I’d always be paying attention.”
He doesn’t drive hands-free, or play Jenga, or nod off, or watch Harry Potter movies, as Brown may have been doing when he plowed into the trailer of a semi truck. He admits, however, that he sometimes checks email or sends text messages on his phone
Neally was about 5 miles out of Springfield, near a set of interchanges just beginning to clog with merging vehicles, when he felt something coil and stiffen in his abdomen. At first he thought it was a pulled muscle.
But the pain forked upward from his stomach, he said, until it felt like “a steel pole through my chest.” When it refused to subside, Neally remembers calling his wife and agreeing through gasps that he should probably go to the emergency room.
He doesn’t remember much of the drive after that.
Read more of the original article in Slate.com.
