Following an accident where a Model S failed to avoid a parked vehicle on a Beijing commuter highway, Tesla chose to remove the terms “self-driving” and ‘Autopilot’ from its local website.
According to Autonews, all references to ‘Autopilot’ and the term “zidong jiashi”, which means both “self-driving” as well as “autopilot” were taken off the web page for the Model S by late Sunday, though Autopilot was reinstated the following day. Before this weekend, both terms are said to have appeared several times on the site.
Thankfully, unlike the fatal crash in the US earlier this year that pressured regulators into taking a harder look at what the rules should be for automated driving, in this incident nobody was hurt.
“At Tesla we are continuously making improvements including to translations,” a Tesla spokeswoman said on Sunday when asked about what had happened on the website. “We’ve been in the process of addressing any discrepancies across languages for many weeks. Timing had nothing to do with current events or articles.”
Now, Tesla is going with a phrase that can be directly translated as ‘self-assisted driving’ which does seem to better fit a system that’s meant to merely assist a driver and not fully take over for him.
