Recently, a report came out that showed Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ (FSD) Beta technology failing to recognize children on the road, which raised concerns about the software’s safety as the company makes it available to more users. While Autopilot isn’t the same as FSD, Tesla is claiming that its autopilot feature is preventing roughly 40 accidents per day wherein the drivers press the accelerator when they should have stepped on the breaks, as reported by DriveTeslaCanada (DTC).
This is the first time Tesla has been able to quantify how many accidents Autopilot prevents. Tesla’s Director of Autopilot software Ashok Elluswamy talked about accident prevention during a presentation at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR) in June, and also shared a video showcasing how autopilot automatically hits the breaks when the driver mistakenly accelerates.
These predictions are already used to prevent a lot of collisions. For e.g., Autopilot prevents ~40 crashes / day where human drivers mistakenly press the accelerator at 100% instead of the brakes. In the video Autopilot automatically brakes, saving this person's legs (7/12) pic.twitter.com/XtMssPT9cM
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) August 21, 2022
Considering that this specific type of accident is very common, preventing 40 of those per day, in terms of data, is highly impressive, and adds up to 14,600 accidents prevented in a year.
Elluswamy’s presentation also dives into its ‘Occupancy Networks,’ which, according to him, “predicts volumetric occupancy of all the things around a car,” allowing the vehicle to make human-like maneuvers and avoid other vehicles and obstacles on the road. You can check out the full presentation in the embedded video below:
Source: @aelluswamy Via: DriveTeslaCanada
