In an incident that was horrific beyond words, late last month, a stunned family watched in horror as a car plowed into the Katy, Texas home of a 76-year-old mother and grandmother, killing her. The driver has been charged with manslaughter. In the aftermath of the crash, it emerged that the car in question was a Tesla, and that the driver was making use of full self-driving mode (FSD) around the time the crash occurred. The victim’s family has named Tesla and the driver as defendants in a lawsuit. But per Electrek, Tesla was able to view crash data very quickly after the incident, and the head of AI at the company, Ashok Elluswamy, said the driver “manually overrode self-driving by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100% of the accel pedal in this residential area.” In the days after the crash, Tesla fans took issue with coverage that characterized the car as in FSD when the crash occurred. CEO Elon Musk seemed to agree, replying to a post, “Yes, this makes no sense. FSD drives slowly through neighborhood streets and this was a high speed crash!”
But Musk seems to be assuming bad faith, as if coverage implied FSD had suddenly shifted into, perhaps, some kind of previously unannounced homicidal maniac mode and attacked a house. If anyone was saying this is what happened, they should apologize. It’s clearly not what happened.
