Washington DC (CNN)Carmine Kupani tried to set the record straight. So he asked his young son to stand in the road as the Tesla raced through the parking lot.
"Some people look at it and say, 'Oh, this crazy dad, what are you doing?'" Kupani told CNN Business. "Well, I do a lot of that sort of thing, but I'm going to make sure the kids don't get hit." '' test . His son was standing near the end of the aisle with his smartphone to film the test.Kupani accelerated the Tesla from the other side, going into "fully self-driving" and reaching speeds of 35 mph. did. Tesla braked steadily and came to a complete stop - long before his son.
But this is also another example of the unintended consequences of actually introducing unfinished and disruptive technology. This shows how willing some Tesla followers are to defend it and the company. Enough people appeared to be pursuing their own experiments, so one government agency took the unusual step of warning people not to use children to test automotive technology.
NHTSA said in a statement Wednesday, "Consumers should not create their own test scenarios or use real people, especially children, to test the performance of vehicle technology." hm,” he said. The agency called the approach "extremely risky."
Testing Tesla
Earlier this month, California resident Tad Park said another Tesla enthusiast would like to test "fully self-driving" with his child. See you thinking, two kids. Park told CNN Business that it was "a bit of a challenge" to get his wife to agree. She agreed when he promised to drive the car.
"I'm not going to push the boundaries because my kids are more valuable to me than anything else," Park said. "I'm not going to risk their lives."
His Tesla slowed down as he approached the 'box boy. Then he picked up speed again and hit a cardboard mannequin. Kadamuro speculated that this may have been because the camera was short so he could not see the box coming right in front of the bumper and short he forgot the box was there.
Kadamuro said his videos started as entertainment. But he wanted people to know that "fully autonomous" isn't perfect.
"I find that many people have two extreme thoughts about the 'fully self-driving' beta," he said. "People like Dan think it's the worst thing in the world. I know some friends who think it's almost perfect." , said it also conducted other tests in which Tesla moved at high speeds and effectively maneuvered around a "box boy."
According to Raj Rajkumar, a professor of research at Carnegie Mellon University, the computer vision system that Tesla cars rely on is more capable of sensing things like young children than sensing large objects or adults. Detecting small objects quickly and accurately would generally be more difficult. Self-driving car.
The more pixels an object occupies in the camera image, the more information the system needs to detect features and identify the object. The system is also influenced by the data it is trained on, such as how many small child images it is exposed to.
"Computers with machine learning His vision is not 100% foolproof," he says Rajkumar. "Just like with any disease diagnosis, there are always false positives and false negatives."
Tesla did not respond to requests for comment and does not typically engage with his media outlets.
"Wild West Chaos Rules"
Some Tesla supporters had criticized O'Dowd for using cones as his lane markings in his first test. Others claimed that O'Dowd's test driver forced Tesla to press the accelerator and bang the mannequin, but that wasn't shown in the video released by O'Dowd. He also pointed out that a blurry message was displayed on the Tesla car's screen as an indication that Tesla was pushing the accelerator to test it.
O'Dowd told CNN Business that the blurry message referred to unavailability of supercharging and uneven tire wear. CNN Business didn't provide a clearer video of what happened inside the car with O'Dowd during the test, so we couldn't independently confirm what the message was saying.
O'Dowd is the founder of the Dawn Project, an effort to make computers safe for humanity. He ran for U.S. Senate this year in a campaign focused solely on his criticism of “fully self-driving cars,” but was unsuccessful.
NHTSA is currently investigating Tesla's driver assistance technology, so changes may come first.
"The software that controls the lives of billions of people in self-driving cars has to be the best software ever created," said O'Dowd. says. "We're using absolute wild west chaos rules, and we've got some pretty scary stuff."