Sorry, Tesla: your Auto Park is rubbish
Tesla Model S goes 100 per cent ‘bad valet’ in Queensland. Tesla blames the owner... My conclusion: Auto Park is another rubbish Tesla gimmick. Here’s why…
Some would say Tesla is (at least in part) a religion. Therefore, this video is proudly brought to you by ‘heresy’. Visit Heresy.com for more. Enter the promo code ‘AutoExpert’ for 10 per cent of your next criticism of Zeus, Odin, Osiris or Thor.
I do apologise (almost) for what I am about to say, and beg forgiveness from Pope Elon I and (of course) Electric Jesus. (And isn’t it funny how they’ve never been seen in the same room together. Just saying.)
I got this hilarious phone call yesterday from a producer named Rob on ABC radio in Brizvegas. Drive show host Steve Austin... not that Steve Austin. This one is even braver, because he gets me on his show, live, occasionally. Like, what could go wrong?
Anyhoo, 80-year-old senior Australian finance wizard Noel Whittaker, AM, author of 22 books on money, apparently went out (quietly) and joined the cult of Electric Jesus, and procured for himself a $175,000 Tesla Model S.
I don’t know why, when he could have had a perfectly fine BMW. Anyway...
So the finance dude’s Tesla has Auto Park. And, he’s at the shopping mall picking up a case of Bollinger James Bond Millesime Limited Edition 2011 Champagne and half a dozen braised swans for dinner - or something - and he’s reversing into a parking spot, as you do.
Electric Jesus reaches out, using The Force, and says ‘Would you like to use Auto Park?’ On the message centre. The Whitt-meister goes ‘OK’. Hits the button. Like: ‘approved’. Mission control: We are ‘go’ for autonomous parking. Release the friggin’ robot.
The mighty Model S obediently engages Auto Park…and immediately crashes itself into the brick wall behind. (According to Mr Whittaker.)
Which I think you’d agree is the ideal outcome … endlessly entertaining for you and me, and of course perfect for journalism generally. The swan-eater emerges from the wreckage, thankfully unhurt, promptly calls Tesla, and they go (I’m paraphrasing): It’s entirely your fault mate - there’s no way we’re paying the $8000 repair bill. That’s down to you.
There’s a certain sympathetic dimension - a degree of anticipated commiseration and empathy - which, I would argue, is entirely absent from that exchange.
The Cult’s position on this is - apparently - that ‘Auto Park’ is just a name, and you still have to be in charge when you let EJ’s mad parking robot off the chain. Which kinda forces me to ponder if perhaps the meaning of the word ‘automatic’ is in some way ambiguous.
How would you feel if your car’s ‘auto’ transmission still needed you to be in charge of the gearshifts? (I’d be miffed - especially if they didn’t tell me up front, on the showroom floor, before I paid the big bucks.)
Doomed to repeat history…
Of course, Tesla does have a track record of releasing technology that’s almost good enough. For example, Autopilot that sees almost every truck turning across your path.
On the 7th of May 2016, 40-year-old Joshua Brown died when his Tesla Model S collided with what we would call a semi-trailer while Autopilot was calling the shots, in Florida. About three years later 50-year-old Jeremy Banner was killed in eerily similar circumstances in a Tesla Model 3.
In fairness, Autopilot may have saved lives as well, by preventing crashes that may have occurred, had a human been at the helm. We’ll never know. We don’t report crashes that don’t occur.
But after a two-year investigation the US National Transportation Safety Bureau recently declared Tesla’s Autopilot at fault, on the balance of probability, in a crash that killed an Apple employee whose Tesla Model X hit a concrete barrier on a freeway in California. He was playing a video game at the time.
Tesla seems to make vehicle owners the final (de facto) lab rats for its imperfect tech systems. Take ‘Auto Summon’ - an app-based system that drives the car from where it is parked, to you, almost as fast as you could walk to it, provided of course it does not have a nervous breakdown because there’s too much traffic en route.
Systems really should be failsafed before public deployment, and there should be regulations ensuring that they are. With penalties if they’re not. That’s the way we used to roll, back when ‘facts’ mattered.
Take airbags - they can be badly manufactured, of course, and I’m looking at you, Takata. But in terms of their operation, they are rock solid. They are properly automatic. They do not deploy when you’re just driving down the street. They do not deploy in crashes where your life is not at risk. They do not fail to deploy when required.
That’s why they’re so good at saving lives.
But how would you feel if we invented a clever new system called ‘steering’, which controlled the car’s direction in bends, accurately, almost all of the time? Or brakes, which could be relied upon dependably to stop the car for pedestrians and red lights … almost every time that was required?
Fault lines
Why does Electric Jesus get a free pass on ethical violations of this nature?
On my world it is absolutely unacceptable to imply that a system is automatic when in fact it requires human oversight to maintain safe operation.
This Auto Park prerequisite (for ongoing driver engagement) must not be buried in the fine print - because the marketing department will inevitably sex up the tech and give drivers an entirely inflated impression of its capability.
I can see how easy it might be non-technical people to presume it’s okay to play videogames at freeway speeds - because they think the tech is so good that ‘waking up dead’ seems an implausible outcome. Elon’s brilliant. He’s Tony Stark. He re-uses rockets. He’s on a mission to Mars - but not until he saves the planet single-handedly, right?
Instead of Auto Park, I suggest they call this system ‘Park Assist’. (Since it’s not actually automatic.) I have next to no sympathy for Mr Whittaker - I mean, if he eats swan every night and drinks James Bond Bollinger, he’s got the $8000 for the repair, right? It’s a trivial sum, to him.
What concerns me is that next time this could be a mum or a dad parking the car at home in this way. And a child could walk out between the car and the wall, with tragic consequences. There’s no comedic dimension when that happens. It’s all long faces, right over the horizon.
And if most other carmakers had this happen with their tech, even some of the more unethical carmakers, it’s a pretty safe bet they’d be taking a good hard re-think of that system.
And I would argue that, no matter how faithfully you worshipped EJ up to that point, an event of that enormity is a catalyst for outright apostasy. People don’t get over that kind of thing. (Pro tip: driveway runovers are the second most common cause of accidental death in children, here in Australia, after drowning in the backyard swimming pool. Never complacently reverse a car, anywhere, but especially at home.)
This kind of failure is foreseeable. If I can see it and you can see it, how come Tesla can’t? If a bright boy like Mr Whittaker can be convinced by a slick user interface to put his faith in the mighty Electric Jesus parking robot - how many other people are reversing Teslas today, courting disaster? Plenty, I’d suggest.
Check out Brad Templeton’s report on Forbes, titled ‘Tesla’s Auto Park Might Someday Be Better Than Useless.’
EJ’s electric tech is actually quite impressive. It really is. Many aspects of the rest of Tesla cars are rubbish, however. And this means - heresy time - take it all with a healthy dose of skepticism. Because he’s not the messiah. He’s just a very naughty boy.
The Ford F-150 is popular in the United States for a reason, it’s not just a cultural icon and a comfortable truck, it’s highly functional. There’s a reason American pick-ups are gaining traction in Australia.