Police Bavaria, a group of police officers in the German region of Bavaria, have uncovered a strange safety issue with a Tesla. During normal patrol operations A police car noticed a Tesla pull up with no one behind the wheel. And trying to stop it turned out to be a lot harder than I thought.
Let’s start at the beginning: The agents intercept the car on the A70 autobahn in the direction of the city of Bayreuth. Although the car drives without any particular problems and at a reasonable speed, the alarm is triggered by the Tesla driving without anyone behind the wheel.
They decide to stop the vehicle immediately, but the task turns out to be very difficult. The car, controlled by autopilot, maintained its cruising speed of 110 kilometers per hour and also kept a constant distance from the police patrol.
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The agents’ repeated stop signs were useless, in part because the man in the car was sound asleep in the specially reclining seat. This strange form of chase lasted about a quarter of an hour, during which the Tesla calmly crossed the Bamberg-Hafen motorway junction.
Eventually, when the man on board woke up, he stopped the car and allowed the police to inspect it. According to the report, the man was under the influence of drugs and, a very interesting detail, he would have managed to fool Tesla’s autopilot safety system thanks to the use of some weights on the steering wheel.
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Let’s actually remember it The autopilot works when the driver has his hands on the steering wheel. Pressure regulation on the steering wheel is not constant, but every few seconds to ‘confirm’ the presence and test the driver’s attention, prompting him to intervene in emergency situations.
However, more and more Tesla vehicle users are able to using weights and other objects that simulate the pressure of a hand to fool the autopilot. Up to extreme cases like this one in Germany.
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A practice unequivocally condemned by the Highway Code and one that Tesla itself has not lost sight of. The company has promised a constant release of updates to the Full Self-Driving Beta, aimed precisely at curbing behaviors that fool security systems. The solution appears to be one that involves increasingly pervasive use of the internal camerawhich constantly records the level of attention of the driver.