Joshua Neally is a lawyer and Tesla owner from Springfield, Missouri, who often uses the semi-autonomous driving system called Autopilot on his Tesla Model X. One fine day, when Neally was driving his Tesla Model X, he developed a potentially fatal blood vessel blockage in his lung. The disease is called pulmonary embolism and could have taken his life but for Tesla’s autopilot. Neally told Slate that Autopilot drove him 20 miles down a freeway to a hospital. The hospital was right off the freeway exit, and Neally was able to steer the car the last few meters and check himself into the emergency room, the report said. Tesla’s Autopilot technology has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. First, it was in the news for the May crash, and a second non-fatal crash in Montana in June. Both accidents are being investigated by National Highway Transportation Safety Commission and the National Traffic Safety Board. Earlier this week, a group of researchers hacked into the Autopilot system and jam the radar to prevent it from seeing an object in front of it. It is not easy to do, but it is possible that a hacker could exploit that to cause a high-speed collision, researchers said.
