Imagine you are showing off your favorite car to your friend and it doesn’t approve of the bragging rights, starts the ignition on its own and crashes itself into the nearby trailer. Well, that is what allegedly happened in Utah in very interesting circumstances where a poor Tesla Model S owner was showing off his car to a friend. He then went on an errand for about twenty minutes and when he came back, the car had crashed into the semi-truck trailer that had been parked behind it and had a smashed window as a result of the impact.
Now Overton, the car’s owner was obviously perplexed and reported the incident to the Tesla’s regional manager. According to the car’s logs, Overton had activated the Summon Mode in which the driver can call the car to arrive near him on its own. Now, even if Overton was negligent here, the Summon Mode is part of the autonomous system of Tesla and shouldn’t be crashing into anything on its own even if it is still in its Beta phase. It is indeed a glitch and Tesla needs to have a closer look at it.
These kinds of accidents will surely happen with autonomous driving technology since it is in its early years. But the problem is that Model S has been cleared as an autonomous car even though the safety features to help avoid crash are still causing some problems. Luckily, here no casualty was reported but as Overton says “Imagine a child was there.” Well, Tesla would have been in hot water if such a situation ever presented itself and so it needs to be more careful with its ambitious car automation program. We don’t want a sad incident to dampen the efforts of such brilliant minds of this innovative company, but safety always comes first!