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Comment by evancoop | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, this is a statistic without context. If a random, Toyota fails on the highway and causes a fatal collision, it's unlikely to yield an article of this ilk.

So, how frequently has this type of failure occurred? How often does that type of failure result in a fatality?

The analog here is that polls suggest parents believe the probability of a child abduction is higher now than 50 years ago, though the data show the opposite. The difference? The discussion on cable news when the event occurs. Availability bias is powerful. The car industry is likely to incur the same phenomenon.

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I think if a Toyota’s ebrake triggered on a Highway and caused a fatality, we’d hear about it in the national news.

But it doesn’t happen, so we don’t.

I could be wrong, but I think the interest of this article is that this type of accident never occurs with other cars, thus the newsworthiness.

To my understanding this is an issue with pretty much all auto-braking cars

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/02/nhtsa-to-investigate-ho...

The Hacker News audience has an extreme hatred of tesla. I think its mostly political personally. Musk disagrees with a couple of the left's untouchable rich elites and all of a sudden you get a million submissions every time a tesla is involved in an accident.

Thanks for the research and posting the article. So it does exist in other cars, but much less frequently. This article has 1.7 million affected cars and “ 278 complaints, the NHTSA says that only six of them alleged collisions with minor injuries, and no severe incidents have been reported.”

Compared to Tesla where there’s like half a million cars and at least one fatality.

Of course, this could be user error (eg, fall asleep, wake up, slam on brakes) so I don’t think blame can be assigned, but I don’t think Tesla gets an inappropriate amount of news coverage here.

Elon Musk is a fraud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Tesla,_Inc.

>But it doesn’t happen, so we don’t.

Seriously? https://www.motorbiscuit.com/thousands-honda-cr-v-models-str...

It's all about clickbaiting Tesla in headlines for eyeballs. And HN loves it.

No one died there. And Honda doesn’t advertise their automatic braking as beta of full self driving. I don’t think it’s a close comparison.

You're confusing Autopilot with FSD.

Also, we don't know yet if the Tesla crash is due to the auto braking, do we?

From the article:

"Last month, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched a preliminary investigation into Tesla after hundreds of owners reported that their vehicles would sometimes unexpectedly slam on the brakes for no apparent reason."

> If a random, Toyota fails on the highway and causes a fatal collision, it's unlikely to yield an article of this ilk.

That's an interesting way to frame it. Surely the cars travelling behind the car in question are the ones who caused it, by travelling without leaving a safe stopping distance?

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