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Comment by dangrossman | Hacker News Reader

> 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...

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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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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