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Comment by wiz21c | Hacker News Reader

the guy comes forward and says "I'm going to make an autopilot for the masses". He/We know it's tough to do. The guy release its autopilot. It's not quite ready for prime time. Double problem : the guy goes into a tough business alone, the guy makes stuff that's not 100% ready.

I like it when people try to do hard stuff, that's fine and maybe heroic. But they have to be prepared : if testing the whole thing must take 10 years to be safe and a gazillion dollars, then so be it. If it's too much to shoulder, then they should not enter the business.

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> if testing the whole thing must take 10 years to be safe and a gazillion dollars, then so be it. If it's too much to shoulder, then they should not enter the business

That sounds like a succinct explanation for why we've been stuck in LEO since December 19, 1972.

We've got 7 billion+ humans on the surface of our planet. We lose about 1.8/s to various tragedies.

Most of which are of less import than helping automate something that's responsible for around 32,000 deaths in the US every year. Move fast, break people for a just cause, escape risk-averse sociotechnological local minima, and build a future where fewer people die.

I don't think the issue is that Tesla's cars are dangerous. The issue people are raising is that they pretend, at least through implications, that their cars can safely drive for you.

Tesla is also not doing any kind of super special research into self driving cars. The system their cars use is (afaik) an OEM component (provided by MobileEye) that powers the driver assist features of many other brands, too.

Instead of actually improving the technology they have chosen to lower the safety parameters in order to make it seem like the system is more capable than it actually is.

Safe is like 'secure'. It's a relative concept, and the level of safety we are willing to accept from products is something that should be communally decided and required by law.

We shouldn't go off expecting that someone elses ideas of safety will jive 100% with our own, and then blame them when someone else buys a product and is injured.

Should Telsa drive-assist deactivate and slow the car after 10 seconds without touching the wheel? Probably, but I won't blame them for not doing so if there is no regulatory framework to help them make a decision. It's certainly not obvious that 10 seconds is the limit and not 11, or 15 or 2 seconds.

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