A Tesla driver in Alberta, Canada was arrested for sleeping while the car was cruising at 140 kmph on the Autopilot. “Alberta RCMP received a complaint of a car speeding on Highway 2 near Ponoka. The car appeared to be self-driving, traveling over 140 km/h with both front seats completely reclined & occupants appeared to be asleep,” posted the official RCMP twitter account.
“The driver received a Dangerous Driving charge & summons for court,” tweeted the RCMP. In a more detailed report on its own website, it was revealed that the driver was a 20-year old whose license was suspended for fatigue. “Although manufacturers of new vehicles have built-in safeguards to prevent drivers from taking advantage of the new safety systems in vehicles, those systems are just that – supplemental safety systems,” Superintendent Gary Graham of Alberta RCMP Traffic Services stated in the RCMP report. It also noted that Tesla’s didn’t come equipped with self-driving systems and onus is still on the driver to drive the car.
Tesla itself doesn’t allow its users to implement the Autopilot feature for full autonomous use. It also adds a number of safeguards such as reminders and requires the driver’s hand on the steering wheel frequently for staying enabled. That being said, many users have proven the ability to manipulate the system and the same has been pointed out by many on Twitter who noted that this was probably a prank.
This comes at the backdrop of Tesla’s founder claiming that a big update for its autonomous capabilities is in the works thanks to the neural network it is running on the DOJO supercomputer. The latest Tesla’s run its FSD chips for its autopilot capability while the older ones are based on Nvidia’s semiconductors. Next week, Tesla is also slated to announce some big updates related to its battery tech at its battery day event.