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Comment by rmellow | Hacker News Reader

Serious question: How is Tesla legally allowed to beta test machines capable of killing on pedestrians who are none the wiser and have no business with Tesla?

The fatal crashes might have been Tesla's passengers, but the article doesn't specify. The question still stands though.

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Part of it is that Tesla lies about the safety of these things. We still haven’t gotten to the bottom of the switching off the FSD right before a crash scam.

Another part is that their legal team will aggressively attack anyone online suggesting their cars are anything but perfect.

If the technology was actually safer on average, your question would still be legitimate, it’s a question for society to decide what future we want.

The fact is, being a pedestrian has become far more dangerous now due to texting and large SUVs, always be vigilant.

Because people want to use it, are using it, and there needs to be a force to stop them from using it. If the risks are not absurd, people simply don't care.

The same could be said about driving in general (which kills over 100 people on an average day just in the US). People either underestimate or don't care how dangerous driving is.

Tesla/Elon fans will tell you because human drivers also kill alot of people therefore we should also let robots kill people because as long as they statistically kill less people than human drivers they are therefore "safer", so it's fine to let them kill people as well, otherwise it's a double standard if only the human drivers are allowed to kill people and the product of their favorite mega corporation and meme lord is not allowed to kill just as many people while trying to learn how do drive.

So now you have humans and robots out to kill you on the streets. What a time to be alive.

Good summary of the facts.

Sounds like it’s not “safer”, it’s just safer.

Depends on the statistics you use to claim that they are "safer".

It's not so easy because money is fungible. Instead of buying a rich person gokart you could buy an F-150 which will protect you the old school way (with lots of mass and metal around you).

And have money to spare to order an Uber if you are too high/drunk to drive. And you can also select the Uber with the greatest mass/height and metal around you

That's a good argument to discourage both humans and robots from driving cars.

That sounds like a perfectly good argument unless you are challenging the premise that it's less likely to kill someone than a human driver?

Is it not possible that driving is an inherently dangerous activity, and unless you don't move at all there is some risk of an accident?

In which case you are holding Tesla to an impossible standard, which we don't hold human drivers do.

We send human drivers to jail. That's not an Impossible standard.

Can you tell us what threshold for self-driving cars is allowable then? Half the rate of human drivers? One-tenth? And explain why they are expected to be better.

Jaywalking was invented as a crime to put the blame on the pedestrian rather than the car/driver. There was a huge lobby by automobile manufacturers to change the status quo and transfer liability.

In Europe it's not...

Because regulators in Europe care a bit more.

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