A group of Tesla fans and investors has inadvertently exposed Tesla’s shadiness regarding crashes involving Autopilot by attempting to claim that the advanced driver-assist system was not active in a crash test.
It was not only active, but it also disengaged itself less than a second before the crash—a known shady behavior of Tesla’s Autopilot.
Yesterday, we reported on a crash test video that demonstrates the difference between camera-based and lidar-based advanced driver assist (ADAS) systems by famous engineering Youtuber Mark Rober.
The video included a series of tests in which a Tesla Model Y on Autopilot went against a vehicle equipped with an ADAS system powered by a lidar sensor.
The last test was the headline-grabbing one as it tested to see if the vehicles would stop for a Wile E. Coyote-style fake road wall in the middle of the road, but it was simply to illustrate the clear advantage of lidar in this case.
The other tests involving fog and rain where lidar outperformed Tesla’s vision-based system were obviously the more relevant and newsworthy tests.
I thought it was simply a well-made video that illustrated the difference between vision-based systems, like Tesla’s, and lidar-based systems, which are more commonly used by companies delivering self-driving technology and now even regular ADAS systems.
But I was surprised to see my X feed inundated with Tesla fans calling me “fake news” for posting it.
The accusations started with an account named “AI Drivr” who is part of a group called “Rebellionaires”, which help “Tesla all-ins investors”. They claimed that “Autopilot wasn’t even turned on during the test”:
They also claimed that I ignored this fact because I wanted “a good anti-Elon article”.
They even got my article on the video “community noted” (since removed, but I have a screenshot here):
The only problem for them is that Autopilot was turned on during the test as clearly shown in the video below.
Rober accelerates to the test’s set speed of ~40 mph. You can see he tried to double-tap the stalk but sort of misses the second, though he quickly does it again, and you can see Autopilot turns on.
It’s true that Autopilot disengages a fraction of a second before the crash when it is impossible to stop it:
From the video, it is clear that Autopilot is engaged, and neither the ADAS system nor the automatic emergency braking system activated to avoid the accident.
However, Autopilot appears to automatically disengage a fraction of a second before the impact as the crash becomes inevitable.
It would still count as an “Autopilot crash” as crashes that happen within 5 seconds of Autopilot being engaged count as Autopilot crashes. The community note was eventually removed from my article this morning, but AI Drivr and his “Tesla all-ins” never issued a retraction to their defamatory comments.
The funny thing is that I missed that Autopilot disengaged at the last second, but the attacks from Tesla investors pointed it out and actually exposed video evidence of a shady practice from Tesla that has been reported in the past.
In NHTSA’s investigation of Tesla vehicles on Autopilot crashing into emergency vehicles on the highway, the safety agency found that Autopilot would disengage within less than one second prior to impact on average in the crashes that it was investigating:
“On average in these crashes, Autopilot aborted vehicle control less than one second prior to the
first impact.”
This would suggest that the ADAS system detected the collision but too late and disengaged the system instead of applying the brakes.
Now, it looks like the Rober video has caught this behavior on camera.
There are many issues with the way Tesla reports or doesn’t report ADAS data. As we previously reported, Tesla went out of its way to avoid reporting data to the California DMV about its autonomous driving tests.
Furthermore, Tesla has been abusing NHTSA’s self-driving crash redaction policies. The automaker is required to report all crashes where Autopilot or its “Full Self-Driving” systems are involved, but it has consistently had all important details redacted from the reports.
You can download the report here, where you can see that all the important data from Tesla crashes and almost all instances are fully redacted, which is not the case for most other automakers.
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