Ben Fordham can stop Tesla traffic all over town without even being there

Ben Fordham often makes you slow down and think during his new Breakfast radio show on 2GB, now he’s fully stopping traffic, without even being there.

Fordham is appearing on an advert for his 2GB radio show on buses, which has apparently confused the heck out of a Tesla Auto-Pilot system over the weekend. According to a tweet, the on-board Tesla AutoPilot system believed Fordham’s likeness was a pedestrian about to step out from behind the bus and kept stopping the car.

The Tesla Auto-Pilot function allows a Tesla vehicle to steer, brake and accelerate automatically, with other functions like the option to summon the vehicle to you also included.

Rather than use LIDAR like other ‘self-driving’ cars including Google’s WAYMO vehicles, Tesla instead uses the on-board camera system to map out what is happening. This has lead to the facial recognition feature tripping in this instance. Using cameras certainly makes the AutoPilot feature more affordable, but can lead to these hiccups.

The breakdown was shared on YouTube by Australian Electronics Engineer David Jones on his EEVBlog YouTube channel.

It’s a brief hiccup, which Tesla is probably looking at even now, but as is often the case with these Automatic driving systems, better to be safe than sorry.