What is the average firetrucks-stricken per million driven km for other cars?
Tesla is so many orders of magnitude worse in this area than human drivers that it will be laughable for them to try to resort to Musk's usual lie -- that Teslas are better drivers than humans.
My remark on that is : non-stationary emergency vehicles also cause accidents, so the number is not comparable with Teslas/SmashedEmergencyVehicle.
But when a piece of software deployed by an OEM has a problem, then it is a systematic failure where all cars of that OEM are having the very same problem and then the OEM has to do something.
It's probably hard to intuit, and no one explicitly thinks about this (except AI engineers and researchers), but emergency vehicles are parked in a way that is "obvious" to human drivers.
Every situation is different -- how much shoulder there is, etc. What the visibility is. The driver unconsciously makes a judgement call to be visible (to humans). There is no way they can judge how an AI is going to view them (which changes from time to time, and across AIs).
So the only solution is for the AI to err in the same way that humans do, or not at all.
It doesn't matter the question of "Oh, what was the accident rate when people where unexpectedly speeding?"
What matters was that single type of car by one OEM. If that OEM has some type of problem with its cars, then its a systematic failure which needs to be investigated and resolved by that OEM.
Similarly, if the AI driver crashes in that situation in a similar (or even less) rate to the base rate (manual driving), you would likely not reasonably bring a suit.
Either way you should arrive to improve the AI, but the base rate does matter, and telling someone their question does not matter because you personally don't care about it is bullshit.
It is the same here. Comparing individual human choices and errors leading to striking emergency vehicles with an equipment failure (Tesla’s detection and control software) leading to striking emergency vehicles is not a comparison and it is no more an excuse to not hold Tesla accountable than it would be to not hold Toyota accountable because their accelerators stick less often than a teenager decided to mash the gas on his new car and wrecks it.
If AI driving is not worse than the base rate in that specific circumstance, that would be very relevant information.
FWIW, I think we're very far from ethically introducing AI driving into the mainstream.
A systematic failure would be striking every emergency vehicle for instance.
So it needs to be investigated what are the circumstances and the OEM needs to resolve the issue.
This is really the glory of automated driving - once an issue is identified, it can be addressed in all the vehicles of that type simultaneously.
[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00187208187861...
In any case the article clearly suggests that it's a systemic issue due to using too few sensor modalities in conjunction with too little training data. Hence it's not restricted to firetrucks, but many new, unlearned situations.