Fatal crash of Tesla Model S in autopilot

I don't know whats going on with latimes.com but their infinite scroll is bugging out on me and loading pages ever 200ms and jumping around.

`Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/53.0.2782.0 Safari/537.36`

The usability question with partial automation has always been this: Will humans mistake excellent automation for perfect automation and come to rely on it and fail to provide adequate oversight?

Tesla's PR engine here makes a number of cringeworthy statements. For example, they say "Neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky." While the statement is literally true (the driver apparently did not notice the trailer, and the sky was brightly lit behind the trailer) it also invites the reader to mistakenly infer that the driver was paying attention and did not notice the tractor only due to the lighting situation. Maybe they were paying attention, but we'll never know.

The PR also reports the average vehicle miles driven in the US per crash death and reports the number of Tesla automated miles driven without a death. That invites the reader to make a comparison of apples and oranges: the US figure is for roads of all types whereas the Tesla figure is restricted to those types of roads where autopilot works.

This might be an orthogonal remark but...the article is simply unreadable from a mobile device. When the ads are reloaded it jumps a page up and this happens every 5 seconds.

Based on how this unfolds, we're going to have self-driving cars in 5 years or 50.

But the Tesla PR machine has been great at handling emergencies so far.