On May 7th, Joshua Brown tragically passed away when his Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) crashed into a tractor trailer. According to reports, Brown had activated the vehicle’s auto pilot mode and was watching a Harry Potter movie at the time of the collision.
The company waited for more than six weeks before disclosing the event, only doing so after government regulators opened an official investigation. Tesla’s founder Elon Musk fired back at critics who said the company should have disclosed the event sooner, saying it was “not material” to shareholders.
Tesla shares shrugged off this important news, rising on the day it was officially disclosed to the market.
Up until this tragic event happened, it seemed like self-driving cars were coming, and they were coming quickly. Rumors are flying that the much-anticipated Apple Car--which is tentatively scheduled for release sometime in 2018 or 2019--will be the first mass market driverless car. And Google has been testing these cars for years now, and Tesla plans to really ramp up production.
This sort of event is something that can give governments pause. It’s easy for backwards-looking regulators to declare self-driving cars dangerous based on just one unlucky event.
Still, there’s simply too much public demand for self-driving cars to kill the movement completely. Eventually we’ll all be driven around by computers. It’s only a matter of time.
As tragic as it is, something like this gives us an important reminder. The technology in Tesla’s autopilot or any other self-driving system isn’t perfect. We must continue to improve it so machines can eventually save countless lives driving us more safely than we can drive ourselves.
