Berlin has officially Tesla to stop promoting its cars as “autopilot,” just days after the authorities cautioned Tesla owners the feature existed simply for help, and certainly not as a complete self-drive function.
A Transport Ministry spokesperson validated to Reuters a Sunday report in Bild am Sonntag newspaper, which stated that a written request been submitted to Tesla on Friday.
“It can be validated that a letter to Tesla exists with the request to not use the misleading term Auto-pilot for the motorist support system of the automobile,” she composed.
Although Tesla stands by the previous declarations it has made when autopilot was brought into question, saying the company always made sure to alert motorists the ‘Auto-pilot’ function still needed the driver to take notice of the road at all times. “Just as in a plane, when used properly, Auto-pilot reduces driver work and supplies an added layer of safety when compared with purely manual driving,” a Tesla spokesperson stated.
The automaker had difficult times ever since the accidental death of a Model S owner in Florida. The vehicle had failed to respond to a truck in time. Ever since the automaker has been abandoned by Mobileye, the company behind the driver support functions used in Tesla automobiles. In mid-September, the Israel-based company alleged Tesla was “pushing the envelope in terms of safety.”
That development was met the exact same response by company founder Elon Musk– that a guarantee of total dependence on autopilot had never ever been made.
However just 2 weeks after the Mobileye statement, in late September, German police were called in to investigate a crash involving a Tesla vehicle and a Danish traveler bus just outside Hamburg. As per the authorities, the bus had been aiming to maneuver into the ideal lane of the BAB24 freeway when it was hit from behind by a Tesla automobile belonging to a 50-year-old male from Brandenburg. “The car driver specified that he had actually used the autopilot [feature] of the car. Why this did not work now has to be reviewed,” a Ratzeburg cops statement included.
In Friday’s letter to the automaker, the German motor authority wrote: “In order to avoid misunderstanding and inaccurate clients’ expectations, we demand that the misleading term auto-pilot is not used in marketing the system.”
Tesla is taking actions to enhance the situation, last month launching an update that avoids Auto-pilot from taking control of if the driver has a practice of continuously removing their hands from the steering wheel.
