A Tesla with Full Self-Driving activated crashed into the rear of a motorcycle and killed the rider. The system was doing the driving: steering, acceleration, braking. All of it. The human was, presumably, supervising. Presumably.
Full Self-Driving is not full self-driving
Read that name again. Full Self-Driving. It promises everything and delivers supervised assistance. Tesla owners pay a premium for the badge, then discover the fine print the hard way. The car handles highways well and then meets something its training data underrepresents, like the back of a motorcycle, and physics takes over.
Rear-end collisions are the oldest failure in the book for these systems. A bike brakes hard, the car misjudges distance or closing speed, and there is no time left for the human supervisor to become a driver again. Reaction time is a cruel thing. Two seconds of distraction is a lifetime at highway speed. Tesla long shipped this software as a beta, which is a strange word for something steering two tonnes of metal at highway speed. Beta is for apps that crash. This crashes differently.
Every one of these crashes spawns a second problem: the footage war. Real clips, fake clips, selectively edited clips, all fighting for narrative control while lawyers circle. A deepfake video detector online exists for exactly this moment. Upload the clip, check the verdict, then decide what you believe. Deepfake detection started with fake celebrity videos. Its most useful job might be settling arguments about real accidents.
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Incident facts
- Date: 2024-01-01
- Company / actor: Tesla
- Harm type: physical harm
- Severity: critical
- Source: AIAAIC Repository
