Two years ago there was an Autopark accident that made the news. Tesla blamed the driver -- very effectively.[1] But if you look closely, it likely was due to a

Two years ago there was an Autopark accident that made the news. Tesla blamed the driver -- very effectively.[1] But if you look closely, it likely was due to an unexpected OTA change in behavior combined with poor UI design. In the accident, the driver double-tapped the Park button which activated the Autopark feature, exited the car and walked away. The car proceeded to move forward into an object. The driver claimed he merely put it in park and never activated the auto-park feature. Tesla responded with logs proving he double-tapped and there were audible and visual warnings. Well, I looked more closely. Turns out Tesla pushed an OTA update that added this "double-tap Park to Autopark" shortcut. And it's one bad design decision after another. First, let's note the most obvious design flaw here: The difference between instructing your car to immobilize itself (park) and instructing it to move forward even if the driver was absent (Autopark) was the difference between a single and double tap on the same button. A button that you might be in the habit of tapping a couple times to make sure you've parked. So it's terrible accident-prone design from the start. Second issue is user awareness. Normally Tesla makes you confirm terms before activating new behavior, and technically they did here, but they did it in a horribly confusing way. They buried the mere mention of the Autopark shortcut under the dialog for "Require Continuous Press".[2] So if you went to turn that off -- that's the setting for requiring you to hold down a FOB button during Summon -- and you didn't read that dialog closely, you would not know that you'd also get this handy-dandy double-tap Autopark shortcut. Third is those warnings. Useless. They did not require any kind of confirmation. So if you "hit park" and then quickly exited your vehicle, you might never hear the warning or see it on the screen that, by the way, that shortcut that you didn't know existed just got triggered and is about to make the car start moving forward while you walk away. So I think it's quite plausible that the driver was not at fault here -- or at least that it was a reasonable mistake facilitated by poor design. It's unfortunate that Tesla was able to convince so many with a "data dump" that the driver was clearly at fault. I still recall that poor NYT journalist that Tesla "caught driving in circles"[3] -- while looking for a hard-to-find charger at night. Now I hope we are developing a healthier skepticism to this (now standard) response from Tesla and look more deeply at potential root causes. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/11/11658226/tesla-model-s-summon-autopilot-crash-letter https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/11/11658226/tesla-model-s-su... [2] https://youtu.be/Cg7V0gnW1Us?t=2m10s https://youtu.be/Cg7V0gnW1Us?t=2m10s [3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/joannmuller/2013/02/14/teslas-gotcha-blog-catches-new-york-times-reporter-driving-in-circles/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/joannmuller/2013/02/14/teslas-g...