When the first Knight rider came out in the 80’s, The self-thinking and self-driving car named K.I.T.T was worldwide known as the car of the future. Now, 30 years later, most of the self-driving and self-thinking features that K.I.T.T had are in a standard Tesla car (with a much simpler interface than all the buttons in that K.I.T.T had). Although this looked very cool in the series , the self-driving cars bring a lot of controversy when you want to produce them for the mass market. Are the self driving cars that safe? How do you program the decision making system when an accident occurs? Who is responsible when a accident occurs? These questions all concern about the safety of the car, but a part is forgotten, namely the user part.
This October Tesla announced that the new models X and S have a software upgrade on their self-driving software. This sounds not very special but this announcement had a very interesting note.
“Please note also that using a self-driving Tesla for car sharing and ride hailing for friends and family is fine, but doing so for revenue purposes will only be permissible on the Tesla network, details of which will be released next year”
So translating this note to normal English, Tesla says that you can’t use the self-driving car when you are a Uber driver or taxi driver. This is weird because in the “Master plan part 2” written by Elon Musk himself he states under the paragraph “Sharing” the following.
“You will also be able to add your car to the Tesla shared fleet just by tapping on the Tesla phone app and have it generate income for you while you are at work or on vacation, significantly offsetting and at times potentially exceeding the monthly loan or lease cost”
So what Tesla is trying to do is to create a platform which will compete with Uber and traditional cabs by monopolizing their own cars. But how does Tesla wants to check if you are not asking money for the ride? How do present thieves from stealing the car when the driver is not there? It could be that the usability part of the self-driving car can add a lot of questions to the already long list of questions about self driving cars. Let’s hope that Elon Musk will give some answers soon.
https://www.tesla.com/nl_NL/blog/master-plan-part-deux
Via Uber geld verdienen met je zelfrijdende Tesla? Dat kun je wel vergeten
