JAKARTA - Car accidents can occur due to various factors, such as being too confident in driving assistance features. However, the case of a car that misunderstands voice commands to turn off the headlights while driving is certainly not a scenario that many people imagine.
This is the incident that is suspected to have occurred in China. A Lynk & Co Z20 driver reportedly gave a voice command that actually turned off the headlights of the vehicle while the car was moving. As a result, the driver admitted that he could not see the road divider until the vehicle finally hit him.
The entire incident was recorded on the dashboard camera (dashcam). The voice assistant system in the car is said to have misinterpreted a natural command to turn off the interior reading lights as an instruction to turn off all vehicle lights, including the headlights.
When the owner tried to turn the lights back on via voice control, the system responded that "the operation could not be completed." Shortly after, the car hit the road divider.
Technically, car manufacturers generally equip vehicles with security systems so that vital features such as headlights are not easily disabled, especially when the car is running. However, software programming still has gaps.
Not all possible scenarios can be perfectly anticipated, including the misinterpretation of voice commands like this. In response to the incident, Lynk & Co moved quickly.
Reported by Cnevpost, Tuesday, March 3, the Deputy General Manager of Sales of the company Mu Jun, conveyed through the Chinese social media platform, Weibo, that the company had released an over-the-air (OTA) emergency update. The update is claimed to improve the system logic so that the headlights cannot be turned off inappropriately through voice commands.
Interestingly, various reports say this problem is not only potentially occurring in one brand. A number of vehicle owners from other brands such as Zeekr and Deepal are also testing voice assistant systems in their cars.
With general commands such as "turn off all lights", some users claim to still be able to turn off the lights, including those that should be protected by the safety system. For information, the Lynk & Co Z20 is also marketed in Europe under the name Lynk & Co 02.
Until now, there is no certainty whether units sold outside the Chinese market have similar vulnerabilities, or whether other brands in the United States have the same gaps. In the design of conventional vehicle safety, important systems such as lighting are usually integrated with each other and protected from interference from a single command.
In the midst of the transformation towards increasingly intelligent and connected vehicles, this kind of software disruption is a risk that is difficult to avoid. Fortunately, this incident did not develop into a widespread problem and was immediately addressed through a system update.
The English, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and French versions are automatically generated by the AI. So there may still be inaccuracies in translating, please always see Indonesian as our main language. (system supported by DigitalSiber.id)
