I always knew this day would come. Police pull over a Tesla car on autopilot with a drunk driver… who do they arrest?
And how do the cops stop a car on autopilot?
California troopers arrest woman for DUI while Tesla reportedly on autopilot
h ttps://www.foxnews.com/us/california-troopers-arrest-dui-tesla-autopilot
By Peter Aitken, 17 September 2021
Good call, professionals! Guns don’t kill people and if the car driver is wasted drunk then she’s DUI no matter how many steering aids she’s using.
California Highway Patrol officers pulled over a Tesla that was cruising down the 134 Freeway at around 11 p.m. Thursday night. Troopers observed that the driver was unconscious at the time.
An air patrol unit caught the end of the incident as the vehicle slowed to a stop after a CHP vehicle overtook it and stopped in front of it, ABC 7 reported.
Whew. I was afraid the Highway Patrol had a remote control for deactivating late-model cars. You know that tech is coming… but it’s not here yet.
Troopers could not confirm, though, whether or not the vehicle had been on autopilot when it stopped. The driver claimed that it was.
That’s her story and she’s sticking to it!
California drivers have previously had issues with Tesla autopilot, with some drivers taking advantage of the feature in ways that some experts believe is dangerous.
Come on, now. If there’s one legit use for demanding an autopilot in every car, it’s to reach home safely after getting wasted at a party.
But in turn, that means there was a real risk to public safety, that the driver would have puked on all those expensive electronics and turned herself into a speeding metal bullet.
At which point, she could have been arrested as a mass shooter.
CHP in July cited a driver with a DUI after a Tesla on autopilot almost hit a trooper. The troopers had been investigating a head-on crash in San Diego when the Tesla sped by and almost hit a fire truck as well.
“What do you want, officer?”
“YOU ALMOST RAN ME OVER YOU BASTARD!!!”
“Nope, wasn’t me. Blame Elon Musk because this baby was on autopilot.”
Police are NEVER going to accept that an autopilot is to blame because that would make vehicular manslaughter of law enforcement (and everybody else on the highway) pretty much legal.
The number of incidents that involved Tesla’s autopilot feature forced the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in 2018 to investigate Tesla vehicles. In 11 crashes since 2018, 17 people have been injured and one killed.
“No commercially-available motor vehicles today are capable of driving themselves,” an NHTSA spokesperson told Fox News. “Every available vehicle requires the human driver to be in control at all times, and all State laws hold the human driver responsible for operation of their vehicles.”
And once again, I emphasize the impossibility and redundancy of a car that drives itself but must have a human hovering over it to take control at a fraction of a moment’s notice. Humans don’t have reflexes that good and there’s no point in having an autopilot if it’s not saving the human any effort… or blame.
“Whew. I was afraid the Highway Patrol had a remote control for deactivating late-model cars. You know that tech is coming… but it’s not here yet.”
In the late 1990s I was a vendor at Ford Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville, KY. This is where Ford makes F-250 through -550 pickups. I befriended one of the line workers because we both like chess. He told me that technology similar to this was installed on every vehicle – an ignition kill switch. I doubted him at the time, but I honestly never confirmed it one way or the other.