1y ago

Tesla braces for its first trial involving Autopilot fatality

www.reuters.com Focus: Tesla braces for its first trial involving Autopilot fatality

Tesla Inc is set to defend itself for the first time at trial against allegations that failure of its Autopilot driver assistant feature led to death, in what will likely be a major test of Chief Executive Elon Musk's assertions about the technology.

Tesla braces for its first trial involving Autopilot fatality::Tesla Inc is set to defend itself for the first time at trial against allegations that failure of its Autopilot driver assistant feature led to death, in what will likely be a major test of Chief Executive Elon Musk's assertions about the technology.

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1y ago

Tesla braces for its first trial involving Autopilot fatality

www.reuters.com /business/autos-transportation/tesla-braces-its-first-trial-involving-autopilot-fatality-2023-08-28/

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Autopilot is not safe.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-autopilot-crashes-elon-musk/
- Isn't it a glorified cruise control/lane guidance system, rather than an actual automated driving system? So it would be about as safe as those are, rather than being something that you can just leave along to handle its own business, like a robotic vacuum cleaner.
  
  The main issue is that they market it like a fully autonomous system, and made it just good enough that it lulls people into a false sense of security that they don't need to pay attention, while also having no way to verify they are, unlike other systems from BMW, GM, or Ford.
  Other systems have their capabilities intentionally hampered to insure that you're not going to feel it's okay to hop in the passenger seat and let your dog drive.
  They are hands-on driver assists, and so they are generally calibrated in a way that they'll guide you in the lane, but will drift/sway just a bit if you completely take your hands off the wheel, which is intended to keep you, y'know, actually driving.
  Tesla didn't want to do that. They wanted to be the "best" system, with zero safety considerations at any step other than what was basically forced upon them by the supplier so they wouldn't completely back out. The company is so insanely reckless that I feel shame for ever wanting to work for them at one point, until I saw and heard many stories about just how bad they were.
  I got to experience it firsthand too working at a supplier, where production numbers were prioritized over key safety equipment, and while everyone else was willing to suck it up for a couple of bad quarters, they pushed it and I'm sure it's indirectly resulted in further injuries and potentially deaths because of it.
  
  hey wanted to be the “best” system, with zero safety considerations at any step other than what was basically forced upon them by the supplier so they wouldn’t completely back out. The company is so insanely reckless that I feel shame for ever wanting to work for them at one point
  What does this remind me of... Oh yeah right, OceanGate
  
  This is an absolutely bald-faced lie. Tesla absolutely does NOT market Autopilot as fully autonomous system. Autopilot is nothing other than lane-centering and adaptive cruise control with emergency braking, and that's it. There is zero ambiguity about it on the vehicle and in documentation. Plus, it specifically requires the driver to maintain control of the wheel.
  You need to stop, drop, and roll or jump in the nearest pool before your pants burn you to a crisp.
  
  Oh really? Is that why for years now, on the front page for Autopilot on Tesla's site, was the infamous "Paint it Black" demo, where in the first 10 seconds it says "The driver only there for legal reasons, the car is driving itself"? What do you think is going to stick in the mind of a potential buyer: that video of the car "driving itself" right on the Tesla website, or the generic 5 line page that you'll see in basically every single car with a satnav these days saying, "Please operate the car safely"?
  Regardless of how much people like you love to get into the technicalities and differences between Autopilot and Full Self Driving and chime in with "ACKSHUALLY" and insert any number of the same tired responses about how autopilot works on aircraft or what it says in the documentation, it changes nothing about how they've shaped the public perception of their system and how people are going to attempt and use it.
  Stop defending their shitty practices. Literally everyone else has figured out how to prevent people from abusing these systems, Tesla won't even bother, because people like you will step in and defend it every time for some fucking reason, and as a bonus it saves them money.
  
  Autopilot is nothing other than lane-centering and adaptive cruise control with emergency braking, and that’s it.
  When you put it that way, the term Autopilot does sound really misleading.
  
  In have this product named Telephone. I absolutely do NOT market Telephone as a remote long distance voice chat system. Telephone is nothing other than a voice-recording and adaptive voice control with emergency saving features, and that’s it.
  
  They literally named it "autopilot". Give me a break. You have zero business calling other people dishonest.
  
  Well there have people accusing Tesla of advertising their cars as much more self driving then they are. Specifically Teals has been accused of false advertising because it is what you describe, but they sell it as a self driving car.
  
  Completely separate systems, a (now) 15k price difference, again with zero ambiguity and ZERO advertising or instruction that allows anyone to enable the system "hands off."
  The only people making claims that Tesla is advertising (they don't even have advertisements) are ignorant people regurgitating FUD they read on the internet.
  
  Evert car review that mentions it advertise s it. Tesla mentions it on their web. The fact that people know about it means it has to be advertised somewhere. I never said it was free.
  
  This is a bullshit argument and you know it. And nowhere on the Tesla website does it say Autopilot allows autonomous driving. Come on, man.
  
  I am being serious. Many people believe that tesla have full self driving because of the name and how tesla and other people talk about it. Hence the talk of class action lawsuits against Tesla.
  So some how people think they made full auto pilot cars.
  
  People that have never been in a tesla, maybe, because they're morons. That does NOT equal TESLA advertising falsely, nor does anyone driving a Tesla have any reason to believe the car will completely drive itself on autopilot, because it literally tells you it doesn't. Source: I own two of them. The entire argument is bullshit and predicated on people unaffiliated with Tesla being morons.
  
  And yet i just saw a stroy about tesla "fsd" full self driving. If tesla calls a feature full self driving then it sounds loke they are advertising a fully autonomous car.
  
  It is just a shit load of if then else statements. If the inputs don't have a corresponding if then it just defaults to doing nothing.
- Driving a car is not safe. 40000 people die on car crashes every year in the US alone. Nothing in that article indicates that autopilot/FSD is more dangerous than a human driver. Just that they're flawed systems as is expected. It's good to keep in mind that 99.99% safety rating means 33000 accidents a year in the US alone.
  
  Former NHTSA senior safety adviser Missy Cummings, a professor at George Mason University’s College of Engineering and Computing, said the surge in Tesla crashes is troubling.
  “Tesla is having more severe — and fatal — crashes than people in a normal data set,” she said in response to the figures analyzed by The Post.
  This would indicate that FSD is more dangerous than a human driver, would it not?
  
  Depends...did you read that study on Twitter or another source?
  
  It's from the Washington Post article linked in the parent comment. Come tf on dude. You look like a douche accusing people of using Twitter as a source when the actual source is literally in the same thread.
  
  It was a joke about Twitter users. Of course FSD is more dangerous than a human. It took all 0f 20 minutes for it to try to run a red on Musk.
  
  That still doesn't tell are those accidents happening more compared to normal cars. If you have good driver assist systems which are able to prevent majority of minor crashes but not the severe ones then the total number of crashes goes down but the kinds that remain are the bad ones.
  
  They are in accidents at higher rates than the normal data set so that's exactly what it says.
  
  You can't just put something on the streets without first verifying it's safe and working as intended. This is missing for Autopilot. And the data that's piling up is showing that Autopilot is deadly.
  
  You can say the exact same thing for people.
  
  Exactly, you can't just drive without verifying that you're a safe driver. That's why we have a process to get a driver's license. Has Autopilot passed licensing?
  
  So if an autonomous car can drive around the block and parallel park it's licensed?
  
  Humans have a lower accident rate than Tesla's autopilot, it says so in the article itself.
  
  I don't see that claim anywhere in the article.
  In fact any comparisons I've found show Tesla's autopilot performing better than humans. One crash 4.41 million miles driven on autopilot in a tesla vs one crash for every 1.2 million miles in a tesla without autopilot, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 484,000 miles.
  https://cleantechnica.com/2021/12/07/tesla-1-crash-per-4-41-million-miles-traveled-on-autopilot/
  
  Yeah thats why we make drivers get licenced.
  
  Being able to drive around the block and parallel park is enough for self driving to be certified?
  
  First of all what is it that you consider safe? I'm sure you realize that 100% safety rating is just fantasy so what is the acceptable rate of accidents for you?
  Secondly would you mind sharing the data "that's piling up is showing that Autopilot is deadly" ? Reports of individual incidents is not what I'm asking for because as I stated above; you're not going to get 100% safety so there's always going to be individual incidents to talk about.
  You also seem to be talking about FSD beta and autopilot interchangeably thought they're a different thing. Hope you realize this.
  
  There are very strict regulations around what is allowed to be in the streets and what isn't. This is what protects us from sloppy companies releasing unsafe stuff in the streets.
  Driver assist features like the Autopilot are operating in a regulatory grey zone. The regulation has not caught up with technology and this allows companies like Tesla to release unsafe software in the streets, killing people.
  
  Exactly. Driver assist features. These aren't something to be blindly relied on and everyone knows this and the vehicle will remind you. Every crash is fault of the driver - not the system.
  Now if you don't mind showing me the data that's "piling up is showing that Autopilot is deadly"
  
  Exactly. Driver assist features.
  Except Tesla isn't selling them as such. Theid advertisement videos as early as 2016 say "the driver is not necessary, the car is driving itself". This is false marketing in its purest and simplest form: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/17/tesla-self-driving-video-staged-testimony-senior-engineer
  
  I'm still waiting for the data that you said is piling up. You also did not specify what number of accidents you find acceptable for a self driving system. It's almost like you're trying to evade my questions..
  
  Give me a breakn The WaPo article is linked above. Also, when it comes to safety, the burden of proof is on those arguing that something is safe.
  
  If there's piles of data it shouldn't be difficult to prove it's unsafe.
  You still haven't even specified what is considered safe.
  
  Stop talking nonsense. The anecdotes that are piling up clearly indicate there is a problem with Tesla's autopilot.
  
  It's in the weapon article you were already linked, you just keep choosing to ignore it. Another user on my blocked list.
  
  Do you think Tesla would get sued if the data wasn't piling up?
  
  Humans my friend. We can hold humans accountable. We can't hold hunks of semi-sentient sand and nebulous transient configurations of electrons liable of anything. So, it has to be better than humans, which is not. If it isn't better than humans, then we'll rather just have a human in control. Because we can argue with and hold the human accountable for their actions and decisions.
- Driving is not safe. These systems could be improved upon, but they've also saved numerous lives by preventing accidents from occurring in the first place. The example in the OP happened while this driver was sitting behind the wheel watching a movie. The first example in your article occurred with a driver behind the wheel. If either of them had been driving a 1995 Honda Civic, these accidents would have occurred just the same, but would anyone be demanding that Honda is to blame?
  
  No, we would (rightfully so) blame the driver for merging into a semi truck that from my understanding was clearly visible.
  
  but they’ve also saved numerous lives by preventing accidents from occurring in the first place.
  There is no data to make this claim. You're just making this up.
  
  Give me a break. You think all these companies are dumping billions of dollars into technology that doesn't work? You're making stuff up. Go watch some dashcam videos on YouTube if you want some proof.
  
  Are you kidding me? I never said it will never work. But that does not mean its current state is safe to trust your life.
  
  You did in fact just say that by saying that I was making up the fact that these systems have saved lives. Moving the goalposts to "you can't trust your life to it" doesn't make your original argument anymore accurate nor does it reference anything in dispute. Nobody said you should trust your life to cruise control.
  
  Nobody did indeed say you should trust your life to cruise control.
  But Tesla did claim you could trust your life to autopilot because "the car basically drives itself", which it obviously doesn't.
  
  Tesla didn't claim that. Musk claimed their early FSD "basically drove itself" in what appears to have been a staged demonstration. This accident and lawsuit are about Autopilot, which is a completely different system.
  
  There is no doubt that one day these systems will be so good that they will make transportation much safer. But there is no data that shows that we're already there.
  
  Actually there is some doubt about that. Completely irrelevant to the present either way though.
  
  You mean you've done zero research on the topic before injecting your opinions, so you simply haven't seen any data?
  https://thedriven.io/2023/04/27/accident-rate-for-tesla-80-lower-than-us-average-with-fsd/
  New data released in its Impact Report show that Tesla vehicles with Autopilot engaged (mostly highway miles) had just 0.18 accidents per million miles driven, compared to the US vehicle average of 1.53 accidents per million miles.
  https://www.monash.edu/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/3219570/The-Potential-Benefits-of-LKAS-in-Australia-MUARC-Report-365.pdf
  A statistically significant 16% reduction in the risk of involvement in all casualty crashes of these types and a 22% reduction estimated for fatal and serious injury crashes was associated with LKA fitment to Australian light vehicle was estimated.
  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27624313/
  The analysis showed a positive effect of the LDW/LKA systems in reducing lane departure crashes. The LDW/LKA systems were estimated to reduce head-on and single-vehicle injury crashes on Swedish roads with speed limits between 70 and 120 km/h and with dry or wet road surfaces (i.e., not covered by ice or snow) by 53% with a lower limit of 11% (95% confidence interval [CI]). This reduction corresponded to a reduction of 30% with a lower limit of 6% (95% CI) for all head-on and single-vehicle driver injury crashes (including all speed limits and all road surface conditions).
  https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/vehicle-safety-features-accidents/
  ADAS functionalities can change the driving experience. According to research by LexisNexis Risk Solutions, ADAS vehicles showed a 27% reduction in bodily injury claim frequency and a 19% reduction in property damage frequency.
  
  We're not talking about ADAS in general, we're talking about what Tesla is selling.
  
  What Tesla is selling was covered in the first link. If you disagree, either provide proof to the contrary or quit "making things up."
  
  That first link is Tesla advertisement, not independently acquired data. It's worthless.
  
  Lol the only relevant link is the first one, which comes from Teslas cherry picked and thoroughly disproven data set.
  
  billions of dollars into technology that doesn’t work?
  Absolutely. Heard of the F22?

159 comments