A Tesla Model S seems to have autonomously crashed into a parked trailer some weeks ago, and a quarrel between its owner and the automaker ensued.
Tesla notes that the incident was due to the improper use of the car's Summon feature. The company backs its statement with data downloaded prior to the crash, showing that the owner of the Model S disregarded a number of rules pertaining to the self-parking capability.
Jared Overton, the owner of the vehicle, tells his version of the story.
The man parked his Model S behind a trailer. He then got out and engaged in conversation with a fan of Tesla Motors for about a minute. Afterward, he went inside a nearby business and exited 5 minutes later. When he did, his car had already crashed into the trailer, leaving its windshield broken and the A-pillars bent.
Tesla points out that first of all, the Summon feature is still in beta and it is explicitly intended only for use on private property. As the function was enabled on the street, this violates one of the manufacturer's explicit indications.
What is more, the company says that the Summon feature is dependent on the driver's presence and attention.
The carmaker explains that Overton did not use the feature according to the user manual. According to Tesla, the operator has to be ready to intervene should Summon fail to detect objects in the vicinity. Tesla notes that when Summon is activated, the driver gets a notification in audio and written form in the touch screen display.
"The driver had the opportunity to cancel the action by pressing CANCEL on the center touchscreen display," The Verge quotes Tesla's response.
Overton claims that he was next to the car for up to a minute after exiting the vehicle. Tesla, on the other hand, points out that Summon started to run 3 seconds after the man closed the car's door. If the company is right in its data analysis, this means that the man must have seen his car starting to move.
Something does not add up, but so far only the car manufacturer has the digital proof to back its side of the story. A number of vehicles already have black boxes that record data in the event of a car crash, but Tesla's logs are an impressive collection.
"They can tell me what they want to tell me with the logs, but it doesn't change what we know happened here," Overton declared for KSL.
Safety concerns led to Summon getting updated earlier this year, but the new case might call for a new software reworking.
There is a small chance that the accident was caused by a glitch in the Summon commands, which set the car on a collision course with the trailer. Tesla does mention in its feature description that Summon has a standardized field of vision, and it will not register anything outside of it as an obstacle. The high trailer could meet the criteria and virtually be "hidden" from Tesla's sensors. The sensors analyze an area in line with the front and rear ends of the car.
