Tesla’s autopilot is said to have caused more than 1,000 accidents, according to internal data. The Californians had already lost the technology leadership in autonomous driving due to a number of wrong decisions.
AWhen Tesla announced in 2013 that it would equip its vehicles with an “autopilot”, many industry insiders asked themselves: How was it possible for a Californian niche supplier, which at the time only produced a few thousand cars a year, to overtake the entire German automotive industry on the right? They had been working seriously on driving automation since the late 1980s. But the publicly funded joint projects of manufacturers, suppliers and universities hadn’t gotten very far up to that point.
After all, the adaptive cruise control, the result of the European research project “Prometheus”, allowed the speed to be automatically adjusted to the traffic situation on the motorway. Another technology made its debut in the Volkswagen Passat CC in 2008: the car kept an eye on the lane markings on expressways and steered the vehicle so that it stayed on the lane. As soon as the driver took his hands off the steering wheel for a few seconds, a warning sounded, and shortly thereafter the system marketed as a lane departure warning system switched off.
