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The takeaway here: self-driving cars aren’t quite ready to drive by themselves.
We should know this already — Tesla TSLA, +5.66% has told us as much — but that hasn’t stopped some drivers from testing the limits of the autonomous technology.
Apparently, another one learned a hard lesson over the weekend as this video of a Tesla Model 3 crashing into an overturned truck on a highway in Taiwan went viral:
Here’s another angle:
According to local news media, the driver, who was miraculously unharmed, was using at least some Autopilot driver-assist features. The brakes were applied at the last second, as you can see from all the smoke, but it was clearly much too late to avoid the collision.
Elektrek’s Fred Lambert pointed out that while the automatic braking system is always improving, it isn’t ready to prevent all accidents like this. “The reason why Tesla and other vehicles on driver-assist features hit stationary objects on the road while at highway speed like that is due to them trying to reduce the number of false-positive braking events,” he explained.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Tesla boss Elon Musk last month expressed his optimism that self-driving cars by the end of 2020 will be able to drive from an owner’s home to their office “most of the time with no interventions.”
Meanwhile, Tesla shares continue to outperform, having more than doubled already this year. At last check, they were up almost 6% in Monday’s session.
