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Comment by gpickett00 | Hacker News Reader

The overarching tone of the article is "Tesla isn't doing a very good job with its autopilot and could have prevented this". I wonder if there's any data about how many Tesla's get in crashes versus other cars. I'd suspect that given that only 2 people have died in over 1 billion miles driven in autopilot that Tesla's are safer than other cars.

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When a human driver causes an accident you can assume it's an individual mistake. But with a self driving car you know it's a "collective" issue, every (identical) car would probably make the same mistake under the same conditions since they share the hardware, software, and learning data.

This is an advantage when learning but also a disadvantage until that learning is done. Which is why beyond Tesla's intentionally misleading branding for the AP I consider the drivers are ultimately responsible for controlling the vehicle.

I feel like that's absolutely irrelevant. If you trusts a device with your life, it shouldn't kill you under any circumstances other than actual malfunction.

I like to bring up an example of a radiotherapy machines here - a machine that treats you with radiation cannot have a state in which it kills the patient, even if the chance of that happening is 1 out of a million. In that scenario it doesn't matter that a manually operated machine would kill more people on average - an automatic one should kill absolute zero.

Or maybe for another example - plane autopilot has saved countless lives. But any time one fails, every single plane of that type is removed from service until the issue is found and fixed.

I feel like at the moment the approach these companies take is "well yes the autopilot can make mistakes, but it's still safer than manual driving so it's fine, yeah?". No tesla, it's absolutely not fine on any possible layer. Tesla should be disabling autopilot on every single Model S and Model 3 sold until the issue is found and fixed.

That's a staunch overreaction. You're correct in saying that you can equate Tesla's auto-steer and adaptive cruise control to the autopilot in an airplane, however what you fail to account for is that in an airplane operating on autopilot, the pilots are still required by law to be attentive and paying full attention to the system. This is very similar to how Tesla portrays current-generation of autopilot. Sure, their marketing team does state that all cars are capable of self-driving (i.e. they have the required hardware bar HW3 processor), but they never state that current generation cars are self-driving currently. It's on consumers to understand this difference and pay full attention while driving. My mom was a flight attendant on a major U.S. airline until a few years ago, and it wasn't uncommon at all to hear of a an autopilot system malfunctioning ever-so-slightly in that it steers slightly off-course due to a miscalibrated sensor but, since the pilots are actively paying attention, this error never puts the lives of those onboard the plane in-danger. I would say that Tesla's software should be held to the same standard, in that the operator is required and absolutely needs to pay full attention to the system, but there is no need for Tesla to "disabl[e] autopilot on every single Model S and Model 3 sold until the issue is found and fixed"

If anything, it's underreaction - not only Tesla should disable the autopilot on all their models temporarily, there should be heavy fines for both allowing it on the roads in this state and for calling it autopilot in the first place.

>>It's on consumers to understand this difference and pay full attention while driving.

Then this is a crazy assumption to be making. Like literally crazy. Pilots are trained over and over again to pay attention - and they still fall asleep during flights. With cars, even engineers who are employed and paid(!!!) to pay attention have fallen asleep while testing level 3 autonomy[0]. Expecting a regular customer to both understand the difference and pay attention is wishful thinking. The lowest bar for this technology that we should be aiming for is "the vehicle should never under any circumstances fail to observe and react to a stationary object in front of itself". Simple as that. If Tesla's autopilot cannot meet this bar it shouldn't be on the road, no matter how many times safer on average it is than a regular driver.

[0] https://www.thedrive.com/tech/7730/ford-engineers-are-fallin...

More than 2 people have died using Teslas, and more than 2 people have died specifically using Autopilot.

What's extremely worrisome is that multiple people have died from the exact same failure in Autopilot, indicating that Tesla's claims of "data-driven" learning are bunk.

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