Draft #1: Product summary and analysis
The article “Tesla Autopilot Self-Driving Automobile Technology” by Tung in 2018 introduces how Tesla cars use its forward-facing radar and ultrasonic sensors around the car to navigate and cruise through traffic with ease. Through cruise control, the radar and sensor on the car can track the distance and positions of the traffic ahead and adjust its speed accordingly. However, Tesla autopilot only aids drivers partially, it cannot work well when the car is traveling at a speed of 20MPH and below, some examples when the driver should be driving instead of autopilot is when it drives in residential zones with many streetlights and stop signs. When driving through residential areas at low speed, the driver must put their hands on the steering wheel, if the steering wheel’s sensor doesn’t sense the driver’s hand, it will alert the driver via audible and visually. The car will slowly come to a stop if it still doesn’t sense the driver’s hand on the wheel. In the near future, Tesla will upgrade its car’s system to allow it to park itself into a parking slot even when the driver is not in the car.
The necessity of
the Tesla autopilot has been debated widely, with detractors citing accidents
caused by the autopilot itself. For instance, in Jan 2018, a tesla car was
driving along the road and crashed into a fire engine that was parked by the
roadside. This type of accident will be avoided if it was a person driving the
vehicle instead of autopilot. But statistics show that from Jan – Apr 2018,
tesla car with autopilot on, recorded “1 accident for every 2.87million miles”
and without autopilot, “1 accident for every 1.76million miles”. By comparison,
National highway traffic safety administration (NHTSA) recent data shows that
“in the United States there is an automobile crash every 436,000miles”. This
factor shows that the tesla autopilot system helped to prevent accidents from
happening drastically, tesla also prompts the driver to keep their hands on the
wheel and keep a lookout on the traffic as drivers are not supposed to fully
depend on the auto-driving system yet. Tesla has since upgraded its software to
recognize different objects clearly to prevent accidents like this to happen.
Tesla uses
electricity-powered engines to function; this means that it's more
environmentally friendly as compared to conventional petrol/diesel cars.
Exhaust emissions from petrol/diesel cars create harmful air pollution for the
environment. Furthermore, the electric vehicle engine has fewer moving parts,
therefore requires less regular servicing as compared to petroleum engines.
Drivers will never have to travel to a gas station to top up petrol, instead,
they can just charge their car when they reach home.
Tesla just
updated its software to “version 10.0”. Its new feature “smart summon” allows
the car to automatically park itself into empty parking lots as long as the
owner is in its line of sight. Tesla can upgrade itself like most
smartphone/computer does, as long as it is connected to the WIFI, it can
automatically update “over-the-air”. Tesla drivers and passenger can enjoy cool
features brought by the update, for example, the V10.0, driver, and passengers
can enjoy Netflix while the car drives itself in the highway as well as playing
games while stuck in traffic from the 17’ touch screen display mounted in the
vehicle.
Retrieved from:
Ergon Energy, the benefit of electric vehicle
Tesla.co, software updates
Business insider ( tesla updates
it's software)
SlashGear, Telsa autopilot accident
rate
BBC News, tesla design failure
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