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Comment by woofyman | Hacker News Reader

If NHSTA does its job, this shouldn't be an issue in the USA at least.

I know they can deal with the risks, but what about the "informed" part? My pet peeve with Tesla's marketing dept is that there are tons of Tesla drivers who seem to think the autopilot is more capable than it is: https://youtu.be/qnZHRupjl5E Those people are surely not aware of the risks they are taking, so I'd bet even the more responsible users aren't aware of its limits.

OMG that video. I thought people learned their lesson after the FL man's death. The culture is even worse now!

Cars led to more deaths than people had on horseback. I'm starting to feel autonomous vehicles will be the same sort of innovation. More elderly/younger people could use them, and ultimately more deaths will result as people's carelessness increases.

Tesla is still cashing in while resisting safety features like requiring hands on the wheel. Meanwhile, accidents like the death in Hong Kong go mostly unnoticed in the US.

Wow morons, I don't mind them killing themselves, but I do mind them killing someone else.

Wow, that is a scary video.

I'm surprised the NHTSA doesn't have a rule saying auto-pilot should be 100% autonomous, in control, and capable of driving in the current conditions, or it should pull over, turn itself off, and put the car in manual control mode. Counting on drivers to understand when auto-pilot can and can't handle driving conditions seems like a completely stupid idea and a recipe for disaster.

Holy crap. In some sense it is really surprising there's only been one fatality. Just as well tomorrow there might be 10 more if people really do such stuff...

There have been more than just the one fatality. I know of at least one other, but who knows if that's the extent. And there have probably been plenty of crashes and injuries.

> There have been more than just the one fatality. I know of at least one other, but who knows if that's the extent. And there have probably been plenty of crashes and injuries.

Yup. The Tesla accident in Hong Kong (or Heibei province?) [1] seems like another likely case. We only know about that because the driver had a dashcam that saved the video, and the parents found a lawyer to sue. Tesla claims they don't have data on whether or not autopilot was active at the time of the crash. Yet the dashcam survived..

Tesla and others need some regulation with teeth. They should be required to have black-box style data recorders. They should also be required to report accidents involving autopilot.

Currently, car companies are not required to report accident rates involving autonomous-driving modes in most states. I think only California and a couple others require it.

[1] https://electrek.co/2016/09/14/another-fatal-tesla-autopilot...

Tesla:

> Because of the damage caused by the collision, the car was physically incapable of transmitting log data to our servers and we therefore have no way of knowing whether or not Autopilot was engaged at the time of the crash.

Well that is even more troubling. Looking past the suspicious lack of logs from the car in the incident, it should be a rock hard lose-your-business-license requirement for any kind of autonomy in cars, that the log data is preserved in accidents. I can imagine very few scenarios where a black box type of device could not be salvaged from a wrecked car.

EDIT: From the wording, it seems like it may actually have been the 'transmitting' of the data that was impossible. That would make things even worse, if Tesla could not even be bothered to requisition the car data (through legal means if necessary) in a case where a bug in their software may have killed someone.

Its interesting, I vaguely remember reading a report I think by the NHSTA that discusses how, despite the ability for accidents by users not using the features properly, these features still result in a net gain in safety

The Trump administration stated today that they will remove 75% of all regulations currently in place.

Given that self driving cars are a potential job creator you might find those regulations removed.

> Given that self driving cars are a potential job creator

This is the first time I’ve seen someone refer to automated cars as a job creator. It’s almost always presented as the thing that will kill the trucking and taxi jobs by the millions.

In the next 5-10 years (maybe longer ?) it will be a net job creator.

And then a massive job destroyer. Of truly scary proportions.

I fear that myself. Stake holders in the autonomous car business should lobby against that because in the end it's in they're own best interests.

I literally just came to HN after browsing slate.com for a bit, currently on their front page is an article about a railroad company that sent 86% of their lobbying money to Trump and GOP PACs this last election cycle. Half of this company's revenue is based in pesos and susceptible to dollar/peso fluctuations and its core business is related to moving goods back and forth between the US and Mexico. Trump took dead aim at free trade, and NAFTA in particular on the campaign trail. Self interest seems to play no part in who people (and companies, thank you Citizens United) choose to support.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2017/01/23/kansas_city_s...

Edit: expanded on why a for profit company being pro-Republican would be against its own self interest.

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