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Comment by Fricken | Hacker News Reader

The one fatality with Autopilot happened because the system worked too well, the driver came to trust it when he shouldn't have. The shittier the Comma one is, the more in-the-loop the human has to be, and risk compensation becomes less of a factor.

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What in the fucking hell are you talking about?

A system that is seemingly half blind (repeatedly crashes into vehicles that only partially obstruct the lane), decapitates a guy, crashes another one into a fucking post

It didn't work too well.

It pretended to work too well and gotten people killed. There is a reason MobileEye walked away from Tesla

They are being rather cavalier with their attitude to safety, apparently. (Apparently the falcon wing doors can go nom nom on you if you are not careful too - sure the guys are laughing their asses off, but it's not a good design)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdPPp3hoGQ8

EDIT: OR, EVEN BETTER: http://jalopnik.com/did-tesla-quietly-remove-a-safety-featur...

One fatality in 200 million miles of driving reflects a cavalier attitude to safety? It's not like the guy who died in that accident wasn't familiar with autopilot's reccommended usage, he read the manual, Tesla made it pretty clear you still gotta watch the road while it's engaged. I mean, if you're into misusing cars, any of them will allow you to accelerate into a brick wall if that's your inclination.

I'm not sure what Falcon wing doors has to do with any of this.

There is at least 1 other death in China where autopilot is cited as the cause, and there are many other accidents in China which are not widely reported in the United States (it's easy to find several on Google though, many of which are even posted on YouTube with video proof).

Statistically speaking, Tesla's autopilot is more dangerous than regular driving. They spun bad statistics to claim otherwise. They ignored the difference between highway driving (which is safer) and all driving, and ignored demographics (most Tesla drivers are older and affluent).

It is too early to really draw many conclusions about autopilot, because there is actually very little data. Comparing the number of miles driven by Tesla to the number of miles driven by all other cars in one year is a difference of several orders of magnitude. But they are under investigation, and as more time passes the more damning it seems for Tesla.

It's true that there's too little data to draw conclusions. A Toyota spokesperson claimed we'd need about 8 billion km of autonomous driving to draw statidtically relevant data. and of course, by the time a single company, or even all companies combined have gathered that many miles the technology will have progressed and the early data will be irrelevant.

Safety arguments are only meaningful in these sorts of abstract discusssions, though. Keep in mind that when we decided to place the automobile at the centre of American life in the early postwar era, fatalities per vehicle mile travelled were 10x what they are today. We didn't do it because it was safe, we did it because cars are cool, and some big companies stood to make a lot of money.

You think maybe part of why there haven't been more numerous malfunctions might be because of rigorous NHSTA testing of various parts of the automobile?

Also just because a person on birth control gets pregnant doesn't mean we start pushing pills with unknown success rates in order to get people to use condoms.

If you're imagining that autopilot is anything more than driver assist technology, then there already is numerous malfunctions, autopilot fucks up regularly. With or without NHTSAs involvement, Autopilot (or Comma one) wasn't designed to be safety critical autonomous driving technology. NHTSA has about as much business regulating it as it does regulating whether or not you can hang dice on your rear view mirror.

If it were a form of birth control, level 2 would be the pull-out method: no guarantees, so be vigilant.

Nope. I'm imagining that NHSTA keeps people safe, and I don't want a car anywhere near me that's controlled by something that the NHSTA hasn't had a chance to even evaluate.

It's foolish to believe that real humans, driving real cars, will treat these technologies as mere "driver-assists." Autopilot is used -- shockingly enough -- as an autopilot. And even if they /were/ used perfectly, these systems are exerting physical control over the car -- something that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has a distinct interest in managing. The NHTSA would be grossly negligent if they did not attempt to regulate these devices.

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