Estate of Naibel Benavidas Leon Sues Tesla for Autopilot Death
Link to the filing — https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/4iolsjy43/county-court-in-and-for-miamidade-county-florida/neima-benavides-pr-v-tesla-inc/
First, I want to apologize for missing this tragedy. By my count now there are eight people confirmed as being killed by “autopilot”. Three more that have not been confirmed that I am aware of. (Two in one car.)
In this case a Tesla driven by George McGee in Miami Dade County Florida struck and killed a stationary Tahoe. Naibel Benavidas Leon was standing by the vehicle, was thrown seventy-five feet due to the impact and was killed.
Unlike other cases I have seen this one mentions faulty automatic emergency braking as a cause in addition to “autopilot”. They also mention a lack of LiDAR contributing to the crash but not the poor radar. I will reach out to them on this.
Like all the rest this tragedy was unnecessary. It is a myth that public shadow and safety driving can create a legitimate autonomous vehicle. And the lives the process takes are necessary and for the greater good. It is impossible to drive the trillion miles or spend $300B to stumble and restumble on all the scenarios necessary to complete the effort. The process also harms people for no reason. The first safety issue is handover. The time to regain proper situational awareness and do the right thing, especially in time critical scenarios. cannot be provided. Another dangerous area is learning accident scenarios. AV makers will have to run thousands of accident scenarios thousands of times to accomplish this. That will cause thousands of injuries and deaths. The next issues is the use of gaming-based simulation technology which has too many technical limitations to facilitate the creation of a legitimate real-world digital twin. The solution is to use DoD simulation technology and shift most of the autonomous system development and testing over to it.
More information
Tesla “autopilot” development effort needs to be stopped and people held accountable
Tesla “autopilot” development includes Stopping at Green Lights
Forget Tesla’s “autopilot” their Automatic Emergency Braking is a Debacle
The Autonomous Vehicle Industry can be Saved by doing the Opposite of what is being done now to create this technology
NTSB’s Tragically Incompetent Tesla-Banner Investigation Report
NHTSA is Enabling the Crash of the Driverless Vehicle Industry and More Needless Human Test Subject Deaths
My name is Michael DeKort — I am a former system engineer, engineering and program manager for Lockheed Martin. I worked in aircraft simulation, the software engineering manager for all of NORAD, the Aegis Weapon System, and on C4ISR for DHS.
Key Autonomous Vehicle Industry Participation
- Founder SAE On-Road Autonomous Driving Simulation Task Force
- Member SAE ORAD Verification and Validation Task Force
- Stakeholder USDOT VOICES (Virtual Open Innovation Collaborative Environment for Safety)
- Member SAE G-34 / EUROCAE WG-114 Artificial Intelligence in Aviation
- Stakeholder for UL4600 — Creating AV Safety Guidelines
- Member of the IEEE Artificial Intelligence & Autonomous Systems Policy Committee
- Presented the IEEE Barus Ethics Award for Post 9/11 DoD/DHS Whistleblowing Efforts
My company is Dactle
We are building an aerospace/DoD/FAA level D, full L4/5 simulation-based testing and AI system with an end-state scenario matrix to address several of the critical issues in the AV/OEM industry I mentioned in my articles below. This includes replacing 99.9% of public shadow and safety driving. As well as dealing with significant real-time, model fidelity and loading/scaling issues caused by using gaming engines and other architectures. (Issues Unity will confirm. We are now working together. We are also working with UAV companies). If not remedied these issues will lead to false confidence and performance differences between what the Plan believes will happen and what actually happens. If someone would like to see a demo or discuss this further please let me know.
