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In May 2016, nearly six months after Mr. Musk’s words were published on Fortune, Joshua Brown, a Model S owner, was killed in Florida after Autopilot failed to recognize a tractor-trailer passing in front of him. He had radar and camera in his car.
Mr. Musk had a brief meeting with the Autopilot team and briefly touched upon the accident. According to the two people who attended the meeting, he didn’t go into details of what went wrong, but told the team that the company needed to work to ensure their cars didn’t crash into anything.
Tesla later said that at the time of the crash, Autopilot’s camera was unable to distinguish the white truck from the bright sky. Tesla never publicly explained why the radar did not prevent the accident. Radar technology, such as cameras and lidar, is not perfect. But many in the industry believe that means you need as many sensors as possible.
Less than a month after the crash, Mr. Musk said at an event hosted by Recode, a tech publication, that autonomous driving is “a fundamentally solved problem” and that Teslas can already drive safer than humans. He did not mention the accident in which Mr Brown died, but Tesla did say: a blog post A few weeks later – with the headline “A Tragic Loss” – he said he promptly reported the episode to federal regulators.
Musk and Tesla soon showed renewed interest in radar, although it’s unclear whether they were affected by the fatal crash, according to the three engineers working on the autopilot. The company began an effort to create its own radar technology instead of using sensors made by other suppliers. The company hired expert Duc Vu from auto parts company Delphi in October 2016.
But 16 months later, Mr. Vu abruptly parted ways with the company after Tesla had a disagreement with another executive over a new wiring system in their car, the three said. In the weeks and months that followed, other members of the radar team also left.
Three people said that a few months after those departures, Tesla actively reclassified its radar effort as a production-oriented research initiative.
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