17 fatalities, 736 crashes: The shocking toll of Tesla’s Autopilot
17 fatalities, 736 crashes: The shocking toll of Tesla’s Autopilot
Crashes have surged in the past four years, reflecting the hazards associated with increasingly widespread use of Tesla’s futuristic driver-assistance tech.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that cars operating in Tesla’s Autopilot mode are safer than those piloted solely by human drivers, citing crash rates when the modes of driving are compared. He has pushed the carmaker to develop and deploy features programmed to maneuver the roads, arguing that the technology will usher in a safer, virtually accident-free future. While it’s impossible to say how many crashes may have been averted, the data shows clear flaws in the technology being tested in real time on America’s highways.
I dislike elon, and I'm never buying a Tesla (I own a different EV already). However, until someone shows me the equivalent human caused rates (for the same type of roads and distance) these numbers just simply don't look out of line with what I would expect for any car.
IMO Self driving doesn't need to be perfectly safe, it just needs to be equivalent or safer than the average human driver.
Yeah this. Maybe I could agree that it’s too soon to be testing these auto pilots on the road, but I dislike how people miss the point with this tech. They set an impossible standard for a technology that could potentially be better than us on the road
@BlameThePeacock @tango_octogono Fair, and in principle I agree. But it's not (only) the people who miss the point and set an impossible standard but foremost Mr Elon Musk himself. He has been promoting Tesla's autopilot and even its self-driving capability for years (although the folks at Tesla will certainly know that the latter won't come anytime soon).
Tesla video promoting self-driving was staged, engineer testifies
A 2016 video that Tesla (TSLA.O) used to promote its self-driving technology was staged to show capabilities like stopping at a red light and accelerating at a green light that the system did not have, according to testimony by a senior engineer.
One of the things we needed for setting reasonable expectations regarding this tech is more reliable information also from Tesla and its CEO. As long as the company itself is frequently flooding the market with unrealistic "news" about this tech, it is good that there are independent investigations imo.
Yeah, this article is ridiculous. Self-driving cars are FAR safer than human drivers. The number of accidents is minuscule compared to what would be expected if the automated features were absent.
We run the real risk of screwing this up if people insist on an automated car never causing a crash, or never hurting anyone. Even if they hurt someone, the point is that it harmed maybe 0.1% of the people that would have been hurt in traditional vehicles.
”Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”
Even if they hurt someone, the point is that it harmed maybe 0.1% of the people that would have been hurt in traditional vehicles.
Where have you got this number from?
This is exactly what I meant in my comment before. Anyone throws out a number and claims it is true. I don't think we should let perfect be the enemy of good, but here are people's lives on the line. We need independent and reliable data.
Yeah, the article reads like a hit piece. Why didn't they even try to do an apples to apples comparison? Same thing when they compared Tesla to Subaru, just raw total numbers. Not normalized to cars sold or miles driven or anything. The raw data is pretty meaningless.
Why didn't they even try to do an apples to apples comparison?
Maybe because the data released by Tesla is incomplete and biased as it appears to serve its sales rather than safety?
It's the company and Elon Musk himself that are frequently making bold statements while it seems that not even the authorities have the data to verify the claims. As the article says:
In a March presentation, Tesla claimed Full Self-Driving crashes at a rate at least five times lower than vehicles in normal driving, in a comparison of miles driven per collision. That claim, and Musk’s characterization of Autopilot as “unequivocally safer,” is impossible to test without access to the detailed data that Tesla possesses.