PITTSBURGH _ A man killed in the first fatal crash involving a self-driving vehicle was using a car with less technology than the test vehicle under development at Carnegie Mellon University.
Joshua Brown, 40, of Canton, Ohio, died after his Tesla Model S had its roof sheered off when it drove beneath a tractor-trailer that had turned left in front of it on a highway in Florida. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating the May 7 crash, which occurred while the car was in self-driving mode and apparently failed to apply the brakes.
John Dolan, principal systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, called the accident a tragedy and said the fatality "has the potential of setting back the progress of making this technology a reality."
The Tesla Model S, with a base price of $70,000, is an electric car introduced in 2012 that offers an Autopilot feature that uses cameras and radar to feed information into a computer that controls the car. The self-driving vehicle under development at CMU for nearly 30 years, demonstrated for reporters and state legislators last month in Schenley Park, uses lasers in addition to cameras and radar to help determine conditions on the road, said Dolan.
Tesla did not respond to a request for an interview. In a blog post Friday, the company said, "Neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied. The high ride height of the trailer combined with its positioning across the road and the extremely rare circumstances of the impact caused the Model S to pass under the trailer, with the bottom of the trailer impacting the windshield of the Model S."
Dolan said in his experience cameras and radar often pick up too much information, such as reporting an overpass as an obstruction, so the system has to apply filters for the computer to ignore or the vehicle often would be applying brakes at inappropriate times. However, he said, cameras "can be saturated by bright sunlight" and be "fooled" into not recognizing a solid object.
Radar and lasers "should not be fooled" by bright sunshine, and lasers provide a much more exact shape of an object than radar does, he said.
Dolan said he believes a vehicle using cameras, radar and lasers would have "greater reliability," but he was reluctant to criticize Tesla for putting its system on the market. He stressed Tesla is a private business with a profit motive while CMU is a research facility looking for the best equipment regardless of cost.
"You can never be too safe, but we think the suite of sensors, lasers and radar we have is appropriate," said Dolan, whose team is working with funding from General Motors. "We don't claim our technology is ready to go into the market today, but that isn't our role. The traditional car companies are being more cautious."
One of the potential dangers with self-driving technology, Dolan said, is that drivers become "complacent" and rely too much on the technology, which always has the capability for the driver to override the system. The Chicago Tribune quoted the truck driver in the Tesla incident saying Brown was watching a movie when the crash occurred, although that was not mentioned in the police report.
"Putting this technology in the hands of potentially naive drivers who become overly reliant on it is always a concern," Dolan said.
In its blog post, Tesla said the vehicle reminds the driver to keep paying attention each time the Autopilot is activated, and sensors activate the vehicle's brakes if the driver's hands aren't on the steering wheel. The company noted that Brown's death was the first in more than 130 million miles driven using Autopilot, compared to the U.S. average of one death every 94 million miles.
"As more real-world miles accumulate and the software logic accounts for increasingly rare events, the probability of injury will keep decreasing," the company said. "Autopilot is getting better all the time, but it is not perfect and still requires the driver to remain alert.
"Nonetheless, when used in conjunction with driver oversight, the data is unequivocal that Autopilot reduces driver workload and results in a statistically significant improvement in safety when compared to purely manual driving."
Brown was an advocate for self-driving technology and last month posted a YouTube video showing how the technology helped him avoid a collision with a truck merging into his lane of traffic. His family declined comment through the funeral home that handled his arrangements.
The Chicago newspaper also quoted several of Brown's business associates, who described him as someone who enjoyed driving fast but considered himself a safe driver. The Associated Press reported that records showed he had eight speeding tickets in six years.
