The Good,The Bad,and The Ugly: Evaluating Tesla’s Human Factors in the Wild West of Self-Driving Cars

Abstract

With self-driving vehicles no longer a pipe-dream of science fiction comes the growing pains of the new technology. Tesla Motors is the industry leader in implementing new self-driving technologies. Tesla has used new technology in many ways to improve the human factors of their cars, but there are also design flaws that represent threats to efficiency and safety. This paper details the good, the bad, and the ugly of Tesla’s designs, not as a way to negatively impact Tesla’s reputation, but to point out the potential human factors issues that relate to the rise of self-driving cars in general. While the future for autonomous cars has never seemed so promising, it is abundantly clear that we are nowhere near a reality in which the human does not need to be considered.