A couple of months ago, Tesla announced that Autopilot Mode would be rolling out to its vehicles. It should be noted that Autopilot is not self-driving but essentially a more souped up and complex version of cruise control, and while it does look like it’s a step towards self-driving cars, other carmakers don’t seem to be too thrilled about it.
One of those carmakers is Jaguar and according to the company’s XF Project Manager Stephen Boulter who spoke to Mashable, it seems that he thinks that Tesla’s implementation of Autopilot mode seemingly without restriction was a “very irresponsible” move on the company’s part.
In fact Tesla seems to think so as well, at least to a certain degree when the announced shortly after the rollout that they were going to make some changes to prevent drivers from doing “crazy things” with it. According to Boulter, his concern is that should any accident occur, it would essentially set the industry and technology back.
“If something happens [with Autopilot], it could set the technology back a decade,” he said. As it stands there are still a lot of regulatory and legal hurdles to clear when it comes to self-driving technology, so we have to agree that any mishap will give the naysayers and critics ammunition to halt the progress. As it stands Google’s self-driving car has been involved in numerous accidents, although thankfully it seems that they were not the cause of any of them, but rather other vehicles were running into them instead.