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It’s 2025 and you’re cruising down the highway late at night. It’s been a long day and your eyelids feel heavy. All of a sudden, you hear three beeps, lights flash, your car slows down and pulls itself safely to the side of the road.
This scenario is closer to becoming reality than you may think, and although autonomous vehicles get all the headlines, most drivers will experience something like it long before they can buy a car that drives itself.
Full self-driving cars are taking longer to arrive than techno-optimists predicted a few years ago. In fact, in a financial filing Wednesday, Tesla acknowledged it may never be able to deliver a full self-driving car at all.
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Critics, including some legislators, have said the name Autopilot is deceptive, leading people to think that cars with the so-called automated driving abilities can drive themselves.
The alliance, which represents automakers including General Motors, Ford and Toyota, released the principles ahead of a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing on the future of automotive safety and technology.
The principles say that:
Cameras should be considered to make sure drivers have eyes on the road.
And the monitoring systems should be designed so they can’t be “disengaged or disabled” while the partially automated systems are working.
Cars should issue warnings and should take corrective action such as disengaging the automated systems or increasing the distance between vehicles if drivers don’t pay attention, under the guidelines.
Data logs recovered so far show Autopilot was not enabled & this car did not purchase FSD, Musk tweeted this week, referring to the company s full self-driving software. Tesla sells FSD as a $10,000 one-off add-on, which it plans to release widely in 2021. FSD allows cars to park themselves, change lanes, and identify both stop signs and traffic lights. Moreover, standard Autopilot would require lane lines to turn on, which this street did not have, Musk contended. This is completely false, Musk said. He added that journalists who suggested Autopilot was at fault should be ashamed of themselves. Tesla s Vice President of Vehicle Engineering, Lars Moravy, also shared details regarding the accident that he said Tesla had learned from assisting in the local and federal investigations so far.
During a Senate subcommittee hearing Tuesday, executives with the Alliance for Automotive Innovation and Motor & Equipment Manufacturers Association said the U.S. needs better standards and protocols to address automated driving systems like those sold by Tesla under the brand names Autopilot and Full Self-Driving.
Tesla has drawn criticism for its design, testing and marketing of these systems, including failure to prevent drivers from abusing or over-estimating the capabilities of Autopilot and FSD.
Questions are swirling about whether Autopilot or FSD were to blame in any way in recent Tesla crashes the National Transportation Safety Board and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are now investigating. The NHTSA has opened around 28 investigations into Tesla vehicle crashes to date, and about 24 of these are active. NTSB has opened 8 such investigations.