Elon Musk: expect a Tesla blog post explaining how Autopilot works

Elon Musk said Tesla has no plans to disable Autopilot after the fatal accident on May 7 that killed the driver, Joshua Brown, a 40-year-old Tesla owner who collided with an 18-wheel semi-truck that pulled in front of him on a Florida highway.

In an interview to Wall Street Journal, Musk confirmed that they are preparing an explanatory blog post, soon to be published on Tesla's website, to educate customers how this features exactly works.

A lot of people don't understand what it is and how you turn it on.

The company reported two weeks ago that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is opening a preliminary evaluation to see if Autopilot worked according to expectations after the recent crash. NHTSA sent the Tesla a letter seeking details of all design changes and updates to Autopilot since its launch back in September 2014, however it has not made any determination about the presence or absence of a defect in the auto maker's vehicles.

Yesterday, The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said it is investigating whether Tesla breached securities laws by failing to disclose to investors the fatal crash. The SEC said the inquiry is in a very early stage and may not lead to any enforcement action by regulators.

Additionally, The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is investigating the crash to determine whether it reveals systemic issues tied to development of driver-less cars and probes of accidents involving them, an agency spokesman said Monday.

Fortune accused Elon Musk of hiding the news of the accident when they raised $1.46 billion in fresh capital from the sale of its 6.8 million new common stock offering on May 18th. The magazine went on to publish a second article, pointing at the "semi-self driving autopilot" as cause for the accident.

Tesla then published a blog post refuting Fortune's accusations and claimed that Fortune never asked the company why the news about the incident were not made public before the stock offering occurred. Tesla said its investigators finished reviewing the cars logs by the end of May, days after the stock offering went place. It reiterated that more than 130 million miles driven with Autopilot engaged since the technology made its debut in October.

Musk told the Wall Street Journal he did not know about the accident at the time of the fundraising.

What we told NHTSA [on May 16] was just that somebody died--it wasn’t that there was an Autopilot incident. I also don’t think it’s material, but I didn’t know about it.

Musk went on twitter two days ago to explain that Autopilot is categorized as Beta to remind people of its imperfection. He clarified that this feature needs more than 1 billion miles of real world driving experience in order to address the remaining 1% of corner cases that prevents it from becoming a dependable technology.

During his presentation at MIT Technology Review in San Francisco, Tesla’s Director of Autopilot Programs Sterling Anderson spoke about the challenges Tesla faces in order to address those corner cases where drivers cannot yet fall back on autonomous driving

...in our experience, these corner cases, the additional cases where we need to address, require fine tuning of specific pieces of specific algorithms rather than turning a crank on a massive machine that is only guaranteed to capture the large center portion of what is fundamentally a very wide distribution.

He also explained how the adaption to autonomous driving is directly related to the level of reservations of an individual.

many do have reservations... but we have found that people got accustomed with it very comfortably and very quickly, the fact that the car is watching for and addressing in many cases scenarios or corner cases that you might otherwise have had your eyes or attention on, alleviate some of the burden of the driver and allows them to focus more on the higher level of judgement and reasoning tasks that humans are better suited for.

The Owner’s manuals of Model S and Model X states that Autopilot may not detect all objects and since the technology "is designed for your driving comfort and convenience and is not a collision warning or avoidance system." The company, while calling Autopilot the most advanced such system on the road, says it doesn’t turn a Tesla into an autonomous vehicle and doesn’t allow drivers to "abdicate responsibility."