According to a key member of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), automakers may want to slow the rollout of automated features until they have a better understanding of how these new technologies are interacted with by human drivers, who still carry responsibility for monitoring the road even when they?re in use.
That suggestion comes alongside the release of the NTSB’s final report on a fatal Tesla Model S crash involving the company?s Autopilot feature. (The agency had previously released an abstract and summary of the report on September 12; this is the comprehensive analysis.) Conclusions in the 53-page report are consistent with findings issued last month, which indicated that a truck driver?s failure to yield combined with a Tesla driver’s overreliance on Autopilot to cause a fatal crash along a Florida highway on May 7, 2016, which killed the Model S driver, Joshua Brown. The final report is augmented with written comments from board member Christopher A. Hart, who compared the present struggle to meld human and machine in passenger cars to those experienced during the introduction of automation in the aviation industry a generation ago. Although decades have passed, he commented, the auto industry hasn?t learned from aviation?s mistakes.
?They learned from experience that automation ?because we can? does not necessarily make the human-automation system work better,? Hart wrote, referring to the aviation industry. ?That resulted in ...