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Comment by marcinzm | Hacker News Reader

I would have thought so before but we've had multiple people killed in auto-pilot related accidents already and people still buy. Tesla will spin the news and results and probably get a settlement statement that makes them look not so bad. Especially if everyone is in the same boat and failing to get the technology working well enough. Then Tesla will simply boast at how much better they are than competitors.

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Crisis PR is an interesting thing. Each incremental death from AV causes less repetitional damage. Uber had a big shitstorm when they first killed someone, now they kill someone every day and the response is crickets. This is less of an issue than people like to make of it.

>Uber had a big shitstorm when they first killed someone, now they kill someone every day and the response is crickets.

Umm, what? Source?

Realize the phrasing may have been confusing - I'm talking about regular Ubers, not self-driving.

My quote was from a person internal to Uber. Below is a TC article citing a public report on US Data. Numbers in that are roughly 50/year, or a fatality in America every week. Every day may have been a stretch, but I'd guess you could deduce that Uber drivers worldwide are involved in a fatality accident at least every day.

*also - this is obviously a lower rate than non-Uber drivers per mile

https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/05/ubers-fatal-accident-tally...

I have a friend, commuting 6hrs every day (3hrs + 3hrs back) in a Tesla model S, using autopilot (3 days a week). He has been doing it for almost a year now. So far, so good... given the number of miles driven, it is actually pretty good.

No it isn't. As the article implies, the number of miles driven, or even the amount of time driven, isn't a good estimate of AI quality. The best standard is the number of unusual events that the autopilot could handle without human intervention.

I've had 30 hours of driving in a Tesla, and I had to intervene 6 times, twice with no warning. That doesn't mean that Autopilot isn't a useful tool, but it does require operator diligence.

When I said that it is pretty good, I base it solely on the fact that my friend is still alive, even while driving 6hrs per commute mostly on autopilot. I will have to ask him how often he has to intervene (mostly highway). But I do know that he has been watching a lot of Netflix during his commute... so your mileage might vary.

It is like Ethernet vs token ring. Not as safe and especially no guarantee. Some packet or life lost. Ethernet win for simplicity and ease of expansion/installation and surprisingly for management. Not completely safe. No driving is.

30K people get killed in car accidents in the US, and "people still buy". Heart disease kills half a million a year and people still eat twinkies. What else is new? That's called "freedom".

The issue is that if I paid a ton of money for something, I do generally expect to get what I paid for. And in this case that's not gonna happen.

[*] Hypothetically, I'm not presently a Tesla customer.

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