Tesla has been facing the wrath of many in the industry and from competing companies over its Autopilot software that has been held responsible for several accidents. Now crash footage from a wrecked Tesla has been uncovered by a hacker who got his hands on the footage directly from the Autopilot camera’s feed, reports Inverse. Until now, no one knew that crash footage is stored in the Autopilot camera.
Tesla roof camera can be of great help
Tesla’s current Autopilot software version is heavily reliant on computer vision. The system learns what’s ahead with help from live footage from the roof camera. It must be noted that Version 8 of Autopilot will lay greater emphasis on radar, but the rollout has not yet taken place.
Everyone was aware that the roof camera was always rolling, but people assumed that the footage wasn’t stored in it. Now the programmer and Tesla-tinkerer Jason Hughes has proved that assumption wrong. Crashes can take place either due to driver’s fault or because of the Autopilot, and the crash footage stored in the Autopilot cameras could be great help to figure out the real culprit.
“Tinkering with a crashed @TeslaMotors Model S. #Autopilot camera stored these frames from the accident event. #tesla,” tweeted Hughes.
Hughes owns a Tesla himself, and it happened once that his Model S triggered an emergency braking event, which meant it detected an impending crash and slammed on the brakes. Hughes got curious after the incident about if a data dump would take place. He wanted to know if information about the event had been stored by the car or not. He did some investigating and found that the car did store the information.
Avoiding crash via communication
Meanwhile concerns about the safety of self-driving cars is growing day by day, and the answer is wireless communication between the cars, notes Gov Tech. It will help in improving safety across a rapidly evolving range of advanced mobility technologies and vehicles, from semi-autonomous driver assist features like Tesla’s Autopilot to a fully autonomous self-driving car like Google’s.
The technology connects vehicles to each other, to the surrounding infrastructure and even to nearby bicyclists and pedestrians. Both connectivity and automation offer their own sets of benefits, but their combination is a confirmed way to transform the movement of people and goods. It is expected that the U.S. Department of Transportation will propose that all new cars have V2V communication as early as this fall, the report notes.
