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Comment by gamblor956 | Hacker News Reader

Objectively not true....Autopilot is only used in a small subset of driving situations that are less risky than overall driving. And yet in the last 8 months alone, Autopilot has caused 3 easily avoidable deaths.

Autopilot is getting worse not better with time, and Tesla's tendency to introduce regressions (as with the Bay Area crash) means any temporary improvements in driving AI are just that--temporary.

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> And yet in the last 8 months alone, Autopilot has caused 3 easily avoidable deaths.

This number by itself is absolutely meaningless without more context.

In 2017, 37,133 people in the United States died in an automotive crash. It is expected that some number of Tesla owners will die in a crash, regardless of currently engaged safety features.

Tesla has produced around 600,000 vehicles in total, including over 100,000 Model 3 vehicles.

I'm not making any claim or dispute regarding the effectiveness of Autopilot, whether or not it's improving. I'm just saying, making that statement you made is meaningless at least and misleading at most.

I'm just saying, making that statement you made is meaningless at least and misleading at most.

I'm just pulling a page from Elon Musk and Tesla's marketing department.

You made several bold claims. Do you have any proof of any of them? The statistic you provided is useless without context. In the last 8 months there were ~24,000 automobile fatalities in the US. What's important is how Tesla Autopilot compares to that.

Also, do you have any proof that Autopilot is getting worse over time that doesn't rely on anecdotes?

I don't need to prove anything, since I'm not claiming that Teslas are safer than all other cars in all other conditions like Tesla and Elon Musk are. They need to prove their claims, and resorting to spurious comparisons to "miles driven" under conditions in which Autopilot was "working but not actually controlling the car" don't count.

>Autopilot is only used in a small subset of driving situations...

By a subset of the driving population who are less risky than the overall driving population.

Autopilot cannot cause deaths as autopilot cannot drive. 3 drivers who chose not to pay attention caused those deaths.

EDIT: (I'm assuming for the purposes of this statement that you are correct and those were easily avoidable by an attentive driver)

A passenger cannot cause deaths as a passenger cannot drive.

The Tesla autopilot controls the throttle, brake, and steering. That meets my definition of "driving."

I'm sorry, but everything that you said in relation to Tesla there is wrong. My Nissan with ProPilot can also control the throttle, brake, and steering, but that doesn't make me a mere passenger any more than cruise control does.

It routinely false positives on frontal collisions and occasionally does things that would be dangerous if I weren't driving.

The driver in a Tesla is not a mere passenger, regardless of whether or not they have enabled autopilot. The initial warnings on enabling autopilot as well as the attention nags on the steering wheel all make this perfectly clear to the driver.

Weird, given Tesla's claim that with Autopilot "the person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself." [1]

[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tesla-autopilot-claim...

The words that you quote are from a demonstration video from 3 years ago. The features demonstrated were not available to the public and still aren't.

Tesla's has never claimed that a current vehicle can drive itself without the driver being responsible for the vehicle at all times.

The video was posted directly to the Autopilot page on Tesla's website. The video is also only 2 years old, not 3.

> Tesla's has never claimed that a current vehicle can drive itself without the driver being responsible for the vehicle at all times.

Yes, they did. Hence why the NHTSA and other groups went after Tesla for their claims about Autopilot.

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