As someone who writes software (haven't ever worked for Tesla), I think this statement does provide some credibility. It probably means that the visualization system does understand such scenes and is able to navigate it.
Ofcourse, this statement by itself doesn't absolve Tesla's software of any error. It's important to know the actual root cause before saying who/what is wrong or not, something which the HN community (and in general Internet/people) isn't good at.
As someone who works on software for one of the automakers, I also want to note that there seems to be a lot of focus on the software... but it's also very possible the problem was with the hardware: something in the vision or sensor system was incorrectly installed, defective, was calibrated incorrectly, lost calibration during use, etc.
I'm sure the software can always be improved, but if most cars are driving through this stretch without a problem and his always veers, that sounds like something unique to his vehicle which points to hardware in my opinion. In cars, the software can only ever be as good as the data it receives.
Precisely. Hopefully the NTSB's investigation will be thorough enough to explore the possibility of undetected manufacturing defects in the deceased's Model X when compared to other Model Xs that rolled off the line at the same time.
He owns the car/work in apple/drive the same road to work - for about half year (i.e. >100 times) and according to the article he has just about 7-10 veering incidents here. Like one or two per month.
Fair enough, and if this has only been happening in the last half year and it doesn't always happen... from my experience, I'd be looking at hardware first. It only happened the past 6 months? You mean the coldest 6 months of the year? Hmmm, is one of the sensors or its mounting hardware susceptible to cold weather? Perhaps a sensor was calibrated properly, but it's just barely within the calibrated range and cold weather is enough to push it out of calibration. Perhaps the sensor is defective and the cold is causing it fail prematurely. I wouldn't rule out software, but this sounds more like a hardware issue to me.
Ofcourse, this statement by itself doesn't absolve Tesla's software of any error. It's important to know the actual root cause before saying who/what is wrong or not, something which the HN community (and in general Internet/people) isn't good at.