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Comment by femto113 | Hacker News Reader

"our data shows that, when used properly by an attentive driver who is prepared to take control at all times, drivers supported by Autopilot are safer than those operating without assistance"

This is nonsense. The whole core of the argument against this sort of system is that it induces inattention. The fact that Tesla consistently refuses to share full data on identical models driving with autopilot turned on, enabled but not turned on, and not enabled is extremely suggestive that the overall safety rates for autopilot on are not better.

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That might very well be the case.

Still we as a society usually decide not ban things that hurt only irresponsible people. There is an exception to this for children, but they are banned from driving already.

If the autopilot crashes start resulting in a number of deaths outside of the drivers car that might shift the public opinion.

We do not need to wait to know that high-speed collisions pose a threat to other people in addition to those in the vehicle that causes it.

Lawn Darts only killed one person before they were banned, I think Autopilot is at 3 or 4 and counting, and Uber's driverless system has killed at least one pedestrian.

Never heard about Lawn Darts.

> In the previous eight years, 6,100 people had been sent to the emergency room due to lawn darts in the U.S. Out of that total, 81% were 15 or younger, and half of them were 10 or younger. On the week the commission voted to ban the product, an 11-year-old girl in Tennessee was hit by a lawn dart and sent into a coma.

From wikipedia. It's a bad example.

It once was the canonical X in "we banned X why haven't we banned Y" (where Y is something like "assault rifles" or "peanuts") but perhaps only for people of a certain age. A more recent example: the Boeing 737 MAX was grounded after two accidents out of a few hundred thousand flights.

It's a sad "research study" in ergonomics. You can't really make a partial automation, it's a double penalty.

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