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Comment by vgt | Hacker News Reader

I think we're seeing Elon Musk's strategy of hitting the market early play out here. Same thing is happening with "autopilot" - the aggressive marketing has clearly cost lives, but it helps Tesla in their future endeavors (for now, at least).

By contrast, Google's self-driving tech is years and years ahead of Tesla's. Google is not interested in going to market with this technology until it's 100% ready.

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It's worth mentioning that Google lost most of their team working on self-driving cars this year. In fact, I think every person in charge (Thrun, Levandowski, Urmson, plus whoever else) has left.

"the aggressive marketing has clearly cost lives"

Tesla has suggested the opposite -- that the crash rate when the car is on autopilot is already lower than normal.

Tesla spun bad statistics to make that claim. They're comparing highway driving to all driving, and highway driving is statistically safer. They're also ignoring demographics, as Tesla owners tend to be affluent and older. If you take this into consideration, it actually suggests that it's less safe, however with such a tiny sample size it's too early to draw any conclusions from the data.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/10/0...

> Google's self-driving tech is years and years ahead of Tesla's.

Source?

It's an apples to oranges comparison; the two companies have quite different approaches, and it's totally unclear how it's going to turn out for either one.

You can find a ton of opinions about it, though, here and other places.

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