Tesla Autopilot stopped for a rabbit on the road caught on video, owner claims

A Tesla owner shared a dashcam video of his vehicle stopping in front of a rabbit on the road and he claims Tesla Autopilot saw the animal and initiated the maneuver to avoid hitting it.

At a presentation about Tesla’s latest self-driving and computer vision capability last month, Tesla Sr. Director of AI Andrej Karpathy said that they are currently working to identify and react to corner case scenarios that vehicles encounter on the roads.

Karpathy says that they are pooling a lot of different rare events from their entire fleet of vehicles equipped with cameras in order to teach their Autopilot system to react to them.

A Tesla owner claims to have witnessed Autopilot reacting to one of those events – a rabbit crossing the road in an incident caught on the Tesla dashcam feature:

This 🐰 and my car’s bumper should thank @Tesla AutoPilot. pic.twitter.com/qBvjZyx6Sl

— Dealer of Happiness (@dealer_of_happy) May 8, 2019

The owner said that the incident happened last month with his Tesla Model S on Autopilot with the ‘2019.8.5(6)’ software update in Florida during the early hours of the morning.

He claims that the Autopilot reacted to the rabbit before he could by both applying the brakes and turning to the right as seen on the video.

Recently, we have noticed an increase in Tesla owners reporting Autopilot doing impressing maneuvers to save them from accidents.

A Tesla Model 3 owner claimed ‘Autopilot saved his life’ by swerving away in a near-miss on the highway and another similar incident was also caught on video just a few months ago.

Two weeks ago, we reported on a Tesla owner claiming that Autopilot saved his family from a crash in a near miss caught on video.

Electrek’s Take

I really hope all those impressive Autopilot reactions are true.

When I write that owners are “claiming” those maneuvers were done by Autopilot, I don’t necessarily mean that they could be lying about it, but just like people claiming Autopilot is responsible for some accidents, things could be misinterpreted the other way around and we should be careful about it.

It would be surprising that Autopilot could detect and react to a small obstacle like a rabbit.

I’d like to see a verygreen Autopilot visualization video with that footage to see if or how the system actually detects the bunny. That would be crazy impressive.