Sully Sullenberger, FTC and several watchdog groups go after Tesla Autopilot

Michael DeKort
2 min readJul 27, 2019

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Today “Sully” Sullenberger, several watchdog groups and the FTC went after Tesla for misleading and reckless “Autopilot” claims.

Of course, they are only seeing the tip of the iceberg. They still don’t get that the issue is not that he is overselling it. The issue is he is overselling it and that he can never get close to making his promises. And will kill thousands of people trying when he either tries to train the system on thousands of accident cases or ignores them.

It is impossible to drive the one trillion miles or spend over $300B to stumble and restumble on all the scenarios necessary to complete the effort. In addition, the process harms people for no reason. This occurs two ways. The first is through handover or fall back. A process that cannot be made safe for most complex scenarios, by any monitoring and notification system, because they cannot provide the time to regain proper situational awareness and do the right thing the right way, especially in time critical scenarios. The other dangerous area is training the systems to handle accident scenarios. In order do that AV makers will have to run thousands of accident scenarios thousands of times. that will cause thousands of injuries and deaths. The solution is aerospace/DoD simulation technology and systems/safety engineering. (Not gaming engine-based systems as they have significant real-time and model fidelity flaws in complex scenarios).

Please find more information in my articles below.

Using the Real World is better than Proper Simulation for Autonomous Vehicle Development — NONSENSE

The Hype of Geofencing for Autonomous Vehicles

SAE Autonomous Vehicle Engineering Magazine-End Public Shadow Driving

All the Autonomous Vehicle makers combined would not get remotely close to L4

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

- Lead — SAE On-Road Autonomous Driving SAE Model and Simulation Task

- Member SAE ORAD Verification and Validation Task Force

- Expert — DIN/SAE International Alliance for Mobility Testing & Standardization (IAMTS) group to create sensor simulation specs

- Stakeholder for UL4600 — Creating AV Safety Guidelines

- Member of the IEEE Artificial Intelligence & Autonomous Systems Policy Committee (AI&ASPC)

- Presented the IEEE Barus Ethics Award for Post 9/11 Efforts

My company is Dactle

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Michael DeKort
Michael DeKort

Written by Michael DeKort

Non-Tribal Truth Seeker-IEEE Barus Ethics Award/9–11 Whistleblower-Aerospace/DoD Systems Engineer/Member SAE Autonomy and eVTOL development V&V & Simulation

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