Incident 145: Tesla's Autopilot Misidentified the Moon as Yellow Stop Light
Description: Tesla's Autopilot was shown on video by its owner mistaking the moon for a yellow stop light, allegedly causing the vehicle to keep slowing down.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Tesla developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Tesla drivers.
Incident Stats
Incident ID
145
Report Count
3
Incident Date
2021-07-23
Editors
Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline

Hey @elonmusk you might want to have your team look into the moon tricking the autopilot system. The car thinks the moon is a yellow traffic light and wanted to keep slowing down. 🤦🏼 @Teslarati @teslaownersSV @TeslaJoy
A viral tweet showed a Tesla confusing the moon for a yellow traffic light.
The company's Full Self-Driving tech has made similar mistakes before.
Owners say their cars have been fooled by billboards and Burger King signs.
Tesla CEO Elon Mu…

Washington, DC (CNN)When a dozen small children crossed in front of our Tesla with "full self-driving," I had good reason to be nervous.
I'd spent my morning so far in the backseat of the Model 3 using "full self-driving," the system that T…
Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.