Watch Tesla Autopilot help avoid a truck out-of-control

A Tesla owner shared a video of what appears to be Tesla Autopilot helping avoid a truck out-of-control in the right lane.

During the early days of Autopilot, Tesla was limiting the system from making drastic evasion maneuvers in order to avoid causing accidents.

Instead, it would only apply brakes or steer away if it wasn’t 100% certain a collision was inevitable. It could still reduce the impact by slowing the car.

However, we have recently noticed an increase in the number of reports from Tesla owners showing Autopilot, or more specifically active safety features powered by Autopilot, avoiding crashes by doing some impressively aggressive evasive maneuvers.

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 last year.

More recently, Autopilot helped avoid crashing into animals, like a pig and a deer.

Now another Tesla Model 3 owner provides an interesting example of Autopilot swerving out of the way of a truck that was going out of control before the driver could see it:

The driver wrote in the description of the video:

“Tesla Autopilot saved my butt today. I don’t know if I would’ve swerved left as quickly as the autopilot did without needing to check there first for traffic. It all happened pretty quickly, but I am reasonably sure there was an initial hard jerk ‘controlled by the car’ and I turned the wheel more thinking the autopilot was messed up which kicked it off.”

He is confident that the Autopilot managed to act to avoid an accident before he could.

As usual, keep in mind that even though Tesla’s Autopilot is showing impressive performance, you should still pay attention at all times and be ready to take control with your hands on the wheel.

The video was filmed through Tesla’s TeslaCam integrated dashcam feature.

In order for TeslaCam and Sentry Mode to work on a Tesla, you need a few accessories. We recommend Jeda’s Model 3 USB hub (now also available for Model Y) to be able to still use the other plugs and hide your Sentry Mode drive. For the drive, I’m now using a Samsung portable SSD, which you need to format, but it gives you a ton of capacity, and it can be easily hidden in the Jeda hub.