A Tesla Model 3 owner was cruising on the highway on Autopilot as usual when the semi-truck on the right did an unexpected move. The high-speed truck swerved to the left as the Model was passing by.
It all happened in a swift moment, for the human driver it might not have been possible to respond as quickly. Tesla Autopilot looks and feels on the sides as well with its side-repeater and B-pillar cameras and a suite of 12 ultrasonic sensors around the vehicle.
According to the owner he had purchased the Full Self-Driving (FSD) package and had recently received the latest Tesla FSD Computer (HW 3.0) retrofit from the automaker.
He posted his experience of this incident in the description of his video as follows:
Tesla autopilot saved my butt today. I don’t know if I would’ve swerved left as quickly as the autopilot did without needing to check there first for traffic. It all happened pretty quickly, but I am reasonably sure there was an initial hard jerk ‘controlled by the car’ and I turned the wheel more thinking the autopilot was messed up which kicked it off. I saw out of the corner of my eye the truck/heard its brakes.
I was all swerving to get back to my original lane, then speed up to get away from the truck.
As soon as the driver honks or the car feels an event has occurred, it saves the video clips on local USB storage from multiple cameras installed around the vehicle. This is why the owner of this Tesla Model 3 was able to post the incident’s footage from multiple angles.
We asked the Model 3 owner about how fast his car and the truck was going and he replied:
I was doing maybe 5 over the speed limit there, I believe ~70mph. The truck was at 60 or so. I was behind them for a bit then moved over to pass/sped up a bit to expedite the overtake before the autopilot avoided the collision.
Last year, the ‘save clips on honk’ feature recorded a flying hammer coming out of nowhere and hitting the Model 3 windshield.
Tesla Autopilot acts on machine learning from the global fleet of more than 1 million Tesla vehicles that have accumulated billions of miles of data to feed the Tesla Mothership. The probability of Tesla Autopilot demonstrating the Full Self-Driving capability in the near future is way ahead of any other automaker right now.
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- ‘Elon Musk under promises and over-delivers’, Sandy Munro discusses Tesla vs. the auto industry
- ‘Ferrari and Lamborghini are in the same way people use horses now’, Jay Leno’s Model Y review
- ‘Tesla Short Shorts’ are here — demand breaks the Tesla website
