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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

I agree. I'm starting to get really weirded out by Tesla's immediate "not our fault!" blog posts every time a Tesla is involved in any kind of accident. I could see the necessity the first few times back when it was new technology to a lot of people (and Top Gear had it in for them), but with it happening over and over it seems whiny and a bit callous. How long to they plan to keep doing this?

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> How long to they plan to keep doing this?

So long as every Tesla accident makes the homepage of CNBC, unlike the millions that occur in other makers' vehicles.

Tesla puts out an immediate PR, and the breaking news that went up on all the financial sites included quotes from it nearly as fast.

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/30/us-regulators-investigating-t...

Yeah no kidding, thousands of people die every year in Fords and no one gives a shit, 1 guy dies in a Tesla and "these cars are unsafe, run for your lives, hide yo kids and yo wife, sell your stock, return your car!". I fucking hate modern media.

It seems newsworthy that the world's first robotic car, specifically designed to see and react to road conditions, drives into the side of a truck.

It was the other way around - the truck drove into the side of Tesla, which didn't react because it didn't saw the truck with its cameras because of combination of brightly lit sky and truck white color.

Ford sells 6-7 million cars each year, so there's going to be close to 100 million Fords driving around globally. There's a little over 100 000 Teslas. So since there is 1000x as many Fords, and assuming every Ford is just as safe as a Tesla, you quite literally get thousands of fatalities a year.

assuming every Ford is just as safe as a Tesla, you quite literally get thousands of fatalities a year.

Which is about right.

According to wikipedia there were 32,675 fatalities in 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i..., around 10 fatalities per 100,000 population.

The CDC data with comparison to other ways people die in the US is at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm

Table 28 of http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus15.pdf#019 is relevant to this discussion

There are entire car models that have had zero driver deaths: http://www.freep.com/story/news/nation/2015/01/29/study-chan...

The Tesla Model S will now never be one of them, and in fact, is now among average for fatality rates that includes motorcycles, drunks, and other dangerous factors. It's now not even among the class of luxury cars that have very low driver deaths.

Right now self-driving cars are far too dangerous for public use.

Wow, there's a lot of factors at play there I'm sure but the engineering teams behind those models should feel very proud indeed.

>The Tesla Model S will now never be one of them

Which version? There is 60, 60D, 70, 70D, 75, 75D, 80, 80D, 85, 85D, 90 and 90D so which one are you talking about? Tesla calls their cars Model S the same way Apple calls their laptops Macbook.

Since I have not seen any of these, can you actually point to large media outlets saying these things?

Did anyone actually say any of those things? Or anything coming close to those things? Or did you just invent a strawman to beat up on the media?

Look at a comparable example with software related car malfunctions. Toyota's unintended acceleration problem made headlines and made it before a judge.

It seems fair to me.

It is because, if Tesla allows it to happen, the media will attack them incessantly over these things because they smell a story (and because a lot of vested interests are willing to pay for PR). If you don't defend yourself in that kind of situation, you die.

"This guy died in a Tesla - you won't believe what happens next!"

Yeah the thing that rubbed me the wrong way was how they responded to the NYT review about cold weather performance. I've been highly skeptical about Elon and Tesla ever since.

Didn't they respond by pointing out that the claims made in the review were false? Was there more follow-up to that story that I missed?

As long as media continues to blame their new cars for clickbait articles and until they are treated the same as any other car manufacturer that's not blamed for every incident involving their vehicles.

As long as emotions drive short term investors, which influences the stock price, which is extremely important for their success and expansion plans.

Already down $6/share in after hours trading.

How long are people like you going to keep speaking dissonance for others every time a Black Swan happens?

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