Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) stock hasn’t had the best run this year. TSLA is down 11% so far in 2016, shedding over 9% over the past month alone.
The issues are myriad, from Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk’s tweets, a questionable buyout of SolarCity Corp (NASDAQ:SCTY) and catastrophic accidents involving Tesla’s flagship autopilot.
While Musk’s tweets and deal with SCTY have impacted Tesla’s stock price the most, its brand hasn’t exactly been massaged by the autopilot accidents.
If Musk wants to achieve his vision for an all-electric future, he needs to assure the market that Tesla’s semi-autonomous vehicles are indeed safe. Even if the logic is already in his favor, a handful of high-profile crashes involving the technology is enough to keep people on the sidelines until autopilot technology is perfected.
And Tesla has to do so before Ford Motor Company (NYSE:F) or General Motors Company (NYSE:GM) beat it to the punch.
Tesla’s Plans for Autopilot
After the death of Joshua Brown while driving a Tesla Model S in autopilot mode, Musk promised to keep autopilot running and to better educate the public on proper use of semi-autonomous driving.
In lieu of such a blog post, Tesla is unveiling new safety restrictions to autopilot that the company hopes will eliminate the possibility of accidents like Brown’s.
As of right now, Tesla’s autopilot system alerts the driver to take control when entering a situation beyond its control. If the driver ignores, or somehow misses the visual alert, the autopilot system currently does this:
“When the driver failed to respond to 15 seconds of visual warnings and audible tones, Autosteer began a graceful abort procedure in which the music is muted, the vehicle begins to slow and the driver is instructed both visually and audibly to place their hands on the wheel.”
That abort procedure, Tesla says, was initiated in a couple of the accidents involving autopilot. The driver simply failed to heed the warnings from the system.
Now, according to Electrek, a pending update will make it much harder for drivers to ignore the system’s alerts as well as keep them from reengaging autopilot until the car is parked.
Clearly, Musk is aiming to keep people engaged with their surroundings, rather than, well, sleeping. Still, a strongly worded blog from the man himself would go a long way in informing the public that this is not your futuristic fully autonomous TSLA car … yet.
As of this writing, John Kilhefner did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.
