A high-profile fatality in a Tesla Model S operated in Autopilot mode reveals that the push toward self-driving cars still has many unsolved problems.
The biggest issue: Automakers and researchers are grappling with the human aspect of self-driving cars. When should drivers take over? Will they have enough time to react if they aren’t paying attention to the road? Or should the car do all the driving, all the time?
“How does the driver know what is their responsibility and what is the vehicle’s responsibility?” said Jim Sayer, director of the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute. If a car’s computer system can’t detect that there’s a problem ahead on the road, it wouldn’t even know to alert the driver, he said.
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