Because people buy this feature because they don't want to drive (as a human); what does it matter how it compares to other self driving systems?
It is in fact so good that people can sleep in their cars and not crash -- and I wouldn't bet that the guy who sleeps in the car only did it once!
If you are going to compare it to human drivers, it also matters which humans you compare it to. Every time I drive I see people doing things far stupider than what a Tesla would do. Driving skill, and judgment, is so unevenly distributed in the human population that it would not be difficult to find a large number of humans who underperform the Tesla system.
It would be weird to punish Tesla for not being perfect. It has delivered self driving features that are already better than a lot of the humans on the roads today, and better than all of its competitors.
Let's go a bit deeper into your argument:
> Because people buy this feature because they don't want to drive (as a human); what does it matter how it compares to other self driving systems?
Ok, pretend you are someone who is looking to buy a self-driving car because you don't want to do the driving. Wouldn't you want to buy one that works well? It's a matter of life and death, after all. So you would do some research to find out who had the best systems. If you did that you would find out that Tesla's system, despite all the criticism it gets, is one of the few on the market that is worth buying.
This thinking is absolutely going to get someone killed. It’s also why Tesla faces so much criticism.
Any improvement under 99.999% is unremarkable because the end product is unusable. No one is going to buy a car that crashes once a year.
Disengagements should be unheard of if Elon wants to continue selling FSD.
Even the worst component of the driving system (the driver) is solidly over 99.999%. And every single hardware component is vastly better than the driver. The Pinto, a classic example of a death trap, only resulted in a hardware-induced fatality something like every 1,000,000,000 miles, or using the minute basis above a fatality every 1,500,000,000 minutes (99.9999999%, 9 9s). The person you responded to is correct, 99.999% is unusably, criminally bad.
[1] https://cdan.nhtsa.gov/tsftables/National%20Statistics.pdf
This comment is everything that's wrong with FSD and its marketing.
The bar isn't what self-driving cars can do in general (besides the fact you completely ignore that other companies are operating driverless taxis as we speak).
>It's a matter of life and death, after all.
Consider this: it's not just life or death for you. Do you understand that bystanders and other drivers don't want to be part of your experiment? The selfishness is unreal.
If you want to ban FSD, then go ahead and vote for a ban. But it’s not realistic to say that FSD is allowed only when it’s perfect — no technology reaches perfection without first passing through a phase of imperfection.
Out of politeness I engage in chit-chat with the drivers, but I would be completely comfortable reading hacker news in the backseat or even sleeping. I hope self-driving reaches this level of ability soon; I’m going to be to old to drive in 15 years.
To get a perspective of what this requires, reflect carefully on what your brain is attending to while you drive. Does it ever require higher levels of reasoning than pattern matching? It does for me. I regularly encounter issues that would confuse current technology: bad fog, reckless drivers, icing on overpasses, drivers going the wrong way, a marathon blocking my route, boisterous junior high-school students walking along the curb, detours, temporary lanes inconsistent with actual markings, broken traffic lights, and damaged or vandalized traffic signs. I could sleep soundly on my way being driven by a professional driver under such circumstances.