“Something felt off\u2014the steering wheel jerked one way, then the other, and the car decelerated in a way I didn’t expect. I turned the wheel to take over,” Krikorian, who is now the CTO of Mozilla, wrote.<\/p>\n
“I don’t know exactly what the system was doing, or why. I only know that somewhere in those seconds, we ended up colliding with a wall,” he added.<\/p>\n
Krikorian said he had a concussion, but otherwise, no one was hurt in the crash, which took place while he was on his way to drop his son off at a Boy Scouts meeting in San Francisco. Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
![\"Tom](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/67939ee2ae09223df2bb5b8d.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Every time Tom publishes a story, you’ll get an alert straight to your inbox!\n <\/p>\n
\n Stay connected to Tom and get more of their work as it publishes.\n <\/p>\n
But the tech executive, who ran Uber’s self-driving division from 2015-2017 and oversaw testing of a fleet of autonomous vehicles, said that the incident taught him a disquieting lesson about AI-powered driving tech: it’s easy to switch off when systems are so close to perfect.<\/p>\n
“I was asked to snap from passenger back to pilot in a fraction of a second\u2014to override months of conditioning in the time it takes to blink,” he wrote.<\/p>\n
Modern driver assist systems, like Tesla’s Full Self-Driving<\/a> (FSD), can handle nearly every driving situation.<\/p>\n However, these AI systems are not infallible. Tesla and other manufacturers require drivers to supervise the vehicle and be ready to take over at a moment’s notice if something goes wrong.<\/p>\n “A machine that works perfectly needs no oversight. But a machine that works almost perfectly? That’s where the danger lies,” Krikorian wrote.<\/p>\n FSD has a history of incidents<\/p>\n Incidents of FSD making mistakes are well-documented. Tesla is facing regulatory investigations<\/a> over reports that vehicles equipped with the software drove on the wrong side of the road, ran red lights, and attempted to drive through railroad crossings<\/a>.<\/p>\n The company has faced several lawsuits<\/a> over fatal crashes involving FSD and its predecessor Autopilot, and last year was ordered to pay just over $242 million in damages over a 2019 crash that left a 22-year-old woman dead.<\/p>\n Elon Musk’s automaker has also been scrutinized over its marketing of FSD and Autopilot, with a California judge ruling last December that Tesla’s advertising<\/a> falsely suggested cars equipped with the tech could drive themselves.<\/p>\n Tesla is not the only manufacturer to get into hot water over its driver assist system.<\/p>\n Ford is facing a regulatory investigation over two fatal crashes in 2024 that involved the Detroit automaker’s BlueCruise tech<\/a>, with documents released by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) earlier this month suggesting that both drivers were distracted prior to the crashes.<\/p>\n Uber had its own run-in with the challenges posed by assisted driving tech in 2018. A year after Krikorian left the company, an Uber test vehicle driving autonomously with a safety operator struck and killed a pedestrian<\/a> in Arizona.<\/p>\n