The Tesla Snooze Control
Soon to be a distant memory?
It’s a sad day for owners of Tesla’s cars with the autopilot feature. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened an investigation to look into 11 crashes involving Teslas hitting vehicles at “first responder scenes” when in autopilot mode.
It took a few years for the safety agency to wake up (!). Drivers have been crashing while using the autopilot mode since 2016 but the agency always concluded that there were no defects in the car and stuck to its opinion until the other day.
Drivers have been allowed to do all kinds of fun things up until this investigation. But they should have known better than to hit first responder vehicles. That’s what alerted the agency into thinking that maybe there was something amiss. So no more driving into parked fire trucks, police cars, and other shiny emergency vehicles. Fun while it lasted.
Depending on the outcome of the investigation, this may mean that drivers will no longer be able to watch a movie while the car drives itself.
More importantly, drivers will no longer be able to nap at the wheel. No more fully reclining the front seat for a snooze while the car is zipping along at 93 mph. Sure, Tesla changed its software to oblige drivers to keep their hands on the steering wheel. Pretty clever. But they were outsmarted by a guy who figured out that shoving an orange in the wheel mimics the pressure of a hand.
The most devastating aspect of the investigation could be that drivers will no longer be able to sit in the back seat while the car is crossing a boring stretch of the road. One such driver was arrested on misdemeanor charges — no biggie. So he was raring to go again when he got back on the road. The driver, known as “GoldCollarLavish” on Instagram, said “I’m gonna go in the back seat right now. You feel me? I’m waiting for my car to charge.”
He also said, “Elon Musk really knows what he’s doing.”
Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
