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Comment by fallingknife | Hacker News Reader

> The regulator originally said it was looking into 11 such crashes. A 12th occurred on Saturday

But there are 4500 crashes every year, and that's only including ambulances (https://www.ems.gov/pdf/GroundAmbulanceCrashesPresentation.p... pg 22). So why is Tesla being investigated for being involved in 0.25% of these crashes when they made up 3% of car sales in 2020?

Also, radar ignores stationary objects on any car. Why is only Tesla being investigated when this exact same flaw exists in every other car manufacturer that uses radar based cruise control?

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> So why is Tesla being investigated for being involved in 0.25% of these crashes when they made up 3% of car sales in 2020?

How does the proportion of sales in one year have anything to do with the proportion of crashes that involve cars on the road which were purchased at any time? Furthermore, this is Teslas on autopilot mode--not Teslas in manual driving mode

>> So why is Tesla being investigated for being involved in 0.25% of these crashes when they made up 3% of car sales in 2020?

> How does the proportion of sales in one year have anything to do with the proportion of crashes that involve cars on the road which were purchased at any time? Furthermore, this is Teslas on autopilot mode--not Teslas in manual driving mode

Also, a faulty design is a faulty design, regardless of the proportion of total accidents it causes. All faulty designs should be investigated. The theoretical existence of a "faultier" design isn't a get out of jail for all other designs.

Unfortunately, Tesla has a lot of apologists whose main concern seems to defend it for all criticism, even if the arguments required to do that are specious and unreasonable.

They're looking specifically into crashes happening on autopilot though, so using that 3% figure assumes people are using the tesla in autopilot mode 100% of the time

The poor statistics of this comment aside, if I drove into 12 emergency vehicles in a year, I can assure you I would also be investigated.

Unless, apparently, you were a car manufacturer that isn't Tesla.

Which other car manufacturer has its assistance system crash into emergency vehicles more often than that? If there is one, that certainly should be given the same attention, yes.

Maybe because every other car manufacturer calls it "cruise control" and not "full self driving autopilot"?

or lane assist that protests after a few seconds of you taking the hands off the wheel

Funny then the Ford calls it Co-Pilot. There are many names that companies use, the idea that they all call it cruise control is just non-sense.

And Tesla also doesn't call it 'full self driving autopilot'. They simply call it Autopilot.

these are 12 crashes into stationary emergency vehicles, whereas your figure is almost certainly mostly driving ambulances.

I think the right stat to measure is - of all the Tesla cars out there, how many had crashes, and compare this against the average for other car brands/models.

I'd hope that "automated driving" has standards much much higher than the average.

Are those 12 crashes in one year? The 0.25% figure could be further off.

No offense but that is whataboutism.

I think every crash, where an investigation could prevent another crash in the future, should be investigated.

Shouldn't Tesla "celebrate their mistakes" (yes, morbid, sorry) and see this as an opportunity to improve their product?

Tesla is already putting a lot of resources into improving Autopilot and FSD. I'm not sure how regulators are going to help that process, and I think there are a couple possible pitfalls:

(1) Will they take relative risk into account? If the car sometimes crashes but less often than humans, will that be sufficient, or considered a flaw because it's not perfect and regulators hate looking bad?

(2) Will they take progress into account? If the car drives worse than humans but its accident rate drops 10% per year, then after some number of years we'll accumulate fewer total accidents than if we hadn't allowed progress to continue. That's important because progress won't continue without lots of cars on the road using Autopilot and FSD betas.

I never crashed into a stationary vehicle or had a crash. I want a FSD vehicle to be at least as safe as me, not some bad or drunken driver, that's what FSD should be measured against.

If the FSD vehicle is safer than the average driver, but not as safe as you, then you should want the FSD to be allowed by regulators. The average safety of other drivers will increase, lowering your chance of an accident, without degrading your own driving if you don't use FSD yourself.

It isn't whataboutism to ask that statistics include the necessary context. The person you are replying to doesn't give a full and proper context, but that doesn't make attempting to provide that context "whataboutism".

Sorry, but that - "So why is Tesla being investigated for being involved in 0.25% of these crashes when they made up 3% of car sales in 2020?" - pointing at others/numbers to detract from your own mistakes clearly is whataboutism.

Nope, it really isn't.

Go read about what "whataboutism" is and where it came from. It is a rhetorical technique where you deflect criticism by asserting that the group you are being criticized by is hypocritical because they do the same thing they are accusing you of doing.

There is no implication of hypocrisy here, nor could there be since the NHTSA doesn't make cars...

Instead this is a comment asking a legitimate question about the basis for the investigation given the overall rates of occurence for the incident in question. Other repliers attempted to answer this question, you decided to try to shut down discussion by mis-applying a rhetorical label.

They should, but people here are afraid that this looks like a government overreaction that won't actually find an accurate result.

IMO, they are wrong and this will likely lead to guidance for all automakers, including Tesla. I doubt anything that comes out of this will be a problem for Tesla, if anything it might end up being harder for the others.

NHTSA is pretty reasonable most of the time.

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