Tesla Self Driving Car

2a. [1] The Tesla self-driving car is the future of the automobile industry. The car has the ability to drive itself and perform like a normal driver would but a lot safer. Its intention is to change the way we use cars and help prevent less automotive related accidents. The computational artifact illustrates how the car sees the world. It downloads a GPS in order to have assess the roads and ultrasonic sensors to sense what’s around it. Both of these combined create a car that can see what’s going on around it and react to changes on the road. [1]

2b. The design of the computational artifact was pretty simple. First I researched what the car mainly uses to operate, this was the GPS and the ultrasonic sensors. Then I used Microsoft Visio

Tesla’s autopilot system comes with benefits and harmful effects. The benefits are the number of automobile accidents go way down. This was one of the main reasons the car is being produced. The car can sense every obstacle around it and change itself to better the situation. For example, if someone doesn’t know the speed limit in a certain area the car will automatically go that speed. It creates less stress for the human in the vehicle. Often when driving, sometimes people get stressed out or tired while driving and that could lead to accidents or deaths. A few harmful effects could also hold off certain buyers to the car. Even though the car is much safer than any normal driver, it’s still a computer based program driving it and programs can have bugs. For example, if something happened to the program it might not see the car in front of it and end up hitting it or hit someone crossing the street. [3] Another example of a bug leading to disaster took place in Florida this year. A man named Joshua Brown was enjoying a ride in his Tesla when the car’s sensors didn’t pick up a white semi-truck that was directly by him and the car attempted to drive under the truck and ended up getting torn to shreds. The sensors on the car couldn’t pick up semi because the sun was glaring off the semi and the sensors could not see it. However, this was the first related death in a Tesla using the autopilot feature. [3] The cars impact on society could be huge once it comes out

Tesla’s autopilot system uses a lot of data in order to operate correctly. It needs to take in data every second in order to get every sign, line, car and person in order to avoid a collision or fatality. It takes in the speed limit, the speed of the cars around it, the lines on the road, people in the vicinity and tells the car to follow the speed limit and avoid colliding with anything in its area. It should do this about every second because the situation changes so much on the road so it needs to stay up to date. A potential security risk is the car being hacked by other people. Tesla has tried to keep the car as safe and secure as possible but even with the best technology someone will eventually find a way around it. It’s a big scare for some people who may be afraid of someone taking control over the car and having control over them if they are in it. For their data storage unit Tesla bought a 1-million-dollar state of the art data storage system to support its autopilot system. [5] They bought this to insure the car always remembered where it was at all times if it passed the same spot over and over again. This will hopefully give the cars lots of room to have more data about the surrounding areas and make it easier for the system to operate the vehicle