The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on Tuesday published a critical video about Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA)'s driver-assist systems, highlighting “longstanding concerns” regarding the company's camera-based technology.
The video, which represents a part of the Journal’s comprehensive investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot system, suggests that this technology has been a key factor in several crashes, some of which have been fatal.
Specifically, the investigation gathered data and video from more than 200 Tesla Autopilot crashes, revealing how the driver-assist algorithms process inputs from Tesla Vision cameras in real-time.
The video highlights a fatal accident from May 2021 involving Steven Hendrickson, who was driving his Tesla Model 3 in Autopilot mode on his way to work. An overturned double trailer appeared on the highway, which Tesla’s system failed to recognize, resulting in a full-speed collision that killed Hendrickson.
“The kind of things that tend to go wrong with these systems are things like it was not trained on the pictures of an overturned double trailer. It just didn’t know what it was,” said experts who reviewed the footage.
The WSJ’s video points out similar issues where Autopilot misinterprets the lights of emergency vehicles, leading to crashes.
The investigation notes that Tesla's self-driving crashes result from both hardware and software issues, including slow algorithm updates and inadequate camera calibration. While the findings raise significant concerns, more independent analysis may be necessary to challenge Elon Musk's assertion that Tesla's self-driving feature is ultimately safer than human drivers.
The Wall Street Journal cross-referenced individual state accident reports with the federal database maintained by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and reenacted 222 Tesla crashes. Of these, 44 incidents occurred when Teslas on Autopilot "veered suddenly," and 31 happened when the vehicles "failed to stop or yield," with the latter causing the most severe accidents.
Analysts who reviewed the crash footage and the Autopilot system's algorithmic operations indicated that it would take time to train the system to handle all road scenarios.