Two videos that showed Tesla drivers testing the safety of their cars on their own kids were taken off from YouTube.
The tests were designed to demonstrate that Tesla’s Autopilot and “full self-driving” (FSD) beta software, which has automated driving features but does not allow the cars to drive themselves, would automatically detect pedestrians, including children, who are walking or standing in the road and avoid hitting them.
The films were taken down by YouTube because the social media company does not permit anything that depicts or encourages youngsters to engage in risky behaviours, a spokeswoman for YouTube told CNBC, which broke the story. A branch of parent corporation Alphabet, which also owns the Waymo maker of driverless cars, is YouTube.
The Tesla investors’ films were in part a reaction to a television commercial by the Dawn Project, a group that seeks to outlaw hazardous software from safety-critical systems, which featured Tesla’s FSD software repeatedly striking kid-sized dummies on a test track. FSD was referred to as “the worst software ever offered by a Fortune 500 firm” in a full-page advertisement in The New York Times published in January by The Dawn Project, which is led by Dan O’Dowd, CEO of Green Hill Software.
In a video recorded on August 14 by Tesla investor and owner Tad Park, CEO of Volt Equity, is shown driving a Model 3 car at eight miles per hour approaching one of his kids on a San Francisco street. Tens of thousands of people saw the video before YouTube removed it.
Park assured CNBC that his children were never in danger and that he was always ready to take charge. In the video he released, the automobile was seen slowing down without harming or killing him, his child, or anybody else.
Autopilot, an advanced driving assistance system (ADAS) that incorporates functions including traffic-aware cruise control, steering assistance inside clearly delineated lanes, and pedestrian recognition at crosswalks, is a standard feature on Tesla automobiles. The more sophisticated ADAS offered by Tesla is called FSD, and it includes the parking tool Summon as well as Navigate on Autopilot, which now works on city streets and guides a vehicle from an on-ramp to an off-ramp on a highway. All of these features need an attentive human driver who can take over the wheel when necessary.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is looking into a number of incidents involving Tesla cars that may have used an ADAS technology (NHTSA). In order to learn more about how Tesla’s cabin camera evaluates if a driver isn’t paying attention when Autopilot is activated and provides alarms, the federal agency last week revised an ongoing investigation into 830,000 Tesla cars equipped with Autopilot.
Recently, FSD and Autopilot have also drawn criticism at the state level. The California Department of Motor Vehicles complained about Tesla’s alleged dangerous deceptive advertisement of the ADAS capabilities at the end of July.
