Tesla Model 3 Highland crashes into wall in Malaysia – Autopilot or not, pay attention on unfamiliar roads

Did you see this yesterday? A brand new Tesla Model 3 Highland was involved in an accident in Taman Bukit Serdang, demolishing a concrete block wall that sealed off a housing area – a very common sight here in Malaysia. The collision caused significant damage to the front of the electric sedan and set off the front airbags.

According to the viral Facebook post, the driver, who was coming from dinner, said that the road was too dark for them to see the road ahead. However, the images and video show that the road was brightly lit with street lights, making that excuse more than a little flimsy.

Now, of course, you can make your own conclusions from the incident, bearing in mind that none of us know what exactly caused it. One of the theories being floated about is that Autopilot – which uses the camera-only Tesla Vision system – wasn’t able to prevent the accident, whereas a conventional radar-based autonomous emergency braking system would’ve. This would expose a potential weakness in relying solely on cameras.

It does stand to reason that a radar would’ve been able to detect a solid wall – although it’s likely the radar sensor would’ve needed to corroborate its data with a camera to eliminate false positives. But more importantly, Tesla’s engineers probably didn’t feel the need to make Autopilot recognise a wall coming towards the driver.

In any case, Tesla isn’t the only company to have a camera-based collision prevention system – so does Honda, let’s not forget (to be fair, cars fitted with camera-based Honda Sensing have been involved in their own spate of accidents). Plus, virtually every system that only offers AEB functionality is a camera-only system. So clearly, Tesla Vision isn’t the thing to blame here.

There have also been question marks surrounding the navigation system. A fellow user of the Model 3 posted a video in the comments showing their car’s navigation system putting up directions that go through the wall. Tesla does use map data from Google, but Google Maps doesn’t do this (we’ve tried), so obviously there’s something different – and perhaps flawed – with regard to how the car itself plots its directions.

Then there’s the fact that this particular car was fitted with the Model S’ steering yoke, which may have caused a loss of control (highly unlikely, given that it’s a straight road). And if we take the driver’s purported excuse of the road being too dark at face value (we don’t), you can also make an argument that the Model 3 Highland’s lack of stalks make it difficult to activate the high beams.

In case you were wondering, the high beams are activated by pressing and holding the high beam button on the left spoke of the steering wheel (pressing it once activates the flashers). Stalks or no stalks, however, you should really familiarise yourself with the controls of your own car before you drive it.

All of that is immaterial, of course. You can make all kinds of excuses regarding the (really not) dark road, the Autopilot system, the car’s navigation or the lack of stalks, but the fact of the matter is that as an operator of a two-tonne motor vehicle capable of hitting 200 km/h, your primary job is to pay attention on the road ahead.

That does not change even if you have an advanced semi-autonomous driving system, which is what Autopilot ultimately is. No matter if you have the base Autopilot, the extended system or even the expensive so-called Full Self Driving package (which doesn’t even work in Malaysia), the Model 3 cannot drive itself, which means the sole responsibility of preventing an accident falls on the driver.

It’s stated in the post that the wall has been on that road for close to a decade, and either nobody has hit it before or there have been accidents that have never been reported (probably because the car that hit it wasn’t a Tesla). We should also point out that Malaysian road users are barred from driving hands-free and you will be fined if you let your car (whether it’s a Tesla or not) drive for you.

Whether the driver was intoxicated or simply put too much faith in the car’s systems, it’s brutally clear that Autopilot doesn’t make you immune to collisions. Which means that, just like driving any other car, you have to pay attention to your surroundings whenever you’re on the road. It’s just common sense.

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