Tesla, Autopilot, and the Challenge of Trusting Machines

Drivers can’t have too much or too little faith in self-driving cars.

by

Walter Frick

by

Walter Frick

July 11, 2016

In May a Tesla Model S driving on autopilot collided with a tractor-trailer making a left turn at an intersection in Florida. The owner of the Tesla was killed. Regulators are also investigating a nonfatal crash in Pennsylvania, in which a Tesla driver claims to have been using autopilot at the time of the accident.

Walter Frick is a contributing editor at Harvard Business Review, where he was formerly a senior editor and deputy editor of HBR.org. He is the founder of Nonrival, a newsletter where readers make crowdsourced predictions about economics and business. He has been an executive editor at Quartz as well as a Knight Visiting Fellow at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism and an Assembly Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. He has also written for The Atlantic, MIT Technology Review, The Boston Globe, and the BBC, among other publications.

Tesla, Autopilot, and the Challenge of Trusting Machines

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