A Sleeping Driver's Tesla Led Police On A 7-Minute Chase

"When a pair of California Highway Patrol officers pulled alongside a car cruising down Highway 101 in Redwood City before dawn Friday, they reported a shocking sight: a man fast asleep behind the wheel," reports the San Francisco Chronicle:The car was a Tesla, the man was a Los Altos planning commissioner, and the ensuing freeway stop turned into a complex, seven-minute operation in which the officers had to outsmart the vehicle's autopilot system because the driver was unresponsive, according to the CHP... Officers observed Samek's gray Tesla Model S around 3:30 a.m. as it sped south at 70 mph on Highway 101 near Whipple Avenue, said Art Montiel, a CHP spokesman. When officers pulled up next to the car, they allegedly saw Samek asleep, but the car was moving straight, leading them to believe it was in autopilot mode. The officers slowed the car down after running a traffic break, with an officer behind Samek turning on emergency lights before driving across all lanes of the highway, in an S-shaped path, to slow traffic down behind the Tesla, Montiel said. He said another officer drove a patrol car directly in front of Samek before gradually slowing down, prompting the Tesla to slow down as well and eventually come to a stop in the middle of the highway, north of the Embarcadero exit in Palo Alto -- about 7 miles from where the stop was initiated. Tesla declined to comment on the incident, but John Simpson, privacy/technology project director for Consumer Watchdog, calls this proof that Tesla has wrongly convinced drivers their cars' "autopilot" function really could perform fully autonomous driving... "They've really unconscionably led people to believe, I think, that the car is far more capable of self-driving than actually is the case. That's a huge problem."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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