By Michael Sheldrick
Only the most quotidian fleet manager might not dream of the possibility of an autonomous, or even better, a self-driving car. Not only might TCO be sliced, by various features, imagine the productivity boosts that could result from what in effect would be a rolling office.
But that dream suffered a serious set back last week when Tesla again pushed the boundaries of this still-nascent realm by introducing Smart Summon, a feature that turns the car into a robot valet, bringing it to its owner.
Forgive the cliche, but what could go wrong? Almost everything, it turns out. We don’t have space to catalog them all. Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and other social media sites received thousands of posts with pictures of damaged Tesla fenders, objects that the car didn’t detect, and many showing panicked bystanders in pursuit of a run-away car. Some of these incidents were staged, some may have been real.
Smart Summon is supposed to be used on private property but this is a deeply gray area. So far, it doesn’t appear that anybody has been killed or maimed.
Through the use of labels, features like Smart Summon and AutoPilot continue to push the idea of self-driving versus an advanced driver assistance system (ADAS), which requires human attention and intervention in certain driving conditions. No sleeping, no hands off the wheel, no air guitar playing.
To assess the damage Elon Musk may have inflicted on the nascent technology, we turned to Alain Kornhauser, Director of the Transportation Program at Princeton University, and one of the country’s most sagacious observers of the relevant technological issues involved in traffic, energy, and the entire range of driver assistance and autonomy.
His weekly analyses are must reading for those following these areas. This week, he took Musk to the woodshed for trivial and foolish features, sometimes ironically known to software engineers as bugs. You can’t get a better capsule of Tesla’s problems even as it celebrated a pretty good sales week
For those interested only in the narrower but hugely significant issue of liability, here’s a nice Reuters roundup on liability and who bears it.
Go back to dreaming about electric cars and their promise of lower TCO, including reduced fuel and maintenance costs and longer life cycles. They now seem to be a lot closer to reality than autonomous driving.
