Are these numbers normalized for the number of cars and car-hours?
I am not aware of any truly fair and impartial comparison of modern Teslas with other modern self-driving (whatever level) car technologies that have shown that Teslas are truly prone to more accidents. Fair and impartial would involve comparing rates, rather than absolute values (although that's just a starting point), correctly determining what model and what technologies were enabled, along with the driver's actions. Most newspapers are looking for clicks and "tesla autopilot crashes" get clicks, and the papers don't have time to do high quality investigative journalism.
(i have no opinions on the matter; I don't own a tesla, don't know much about their technology beyond what I read in the press, and have limited real-life experience with "self-driving", basically just the standard lane-keeping and radar cruise control that's included with my car, which I don't use often, and have found is prone to all sorts of problems)
They weren't offering half the functionality AP claims and they realized the need to track driver attentiveness more robustly than looking for steering wheel torque.
And even after incidents like this Tesla resisted for years before actually using their cameras for eye tracking
As the default assumption when dealing with safety-critical systems is that they are unsafe and the explicit burden of proof is on manufacturer to prove safety, we must assume that it is unsafe. In addition, as no untainted safety analysis can occur at this time, any comparison against alternatives is impossible until they stop blocking audits of their usage data. The only thing we can state for certain is that it is unsafe for any usage by customers since no untainted proof of safety has been produced.
[1] https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2023/02/17/2022-disen...
[2] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...
But the 17 involving a Telsa is where we need to pay attention. LOL
It turns out that one of the things that radar is good for is emergency braking regardless of lighting conditions.
It also helps that other carmakers don't oversell the functionality of their advanced driving functionality; if anything they deliberately understate how well the systems work to avoid giving customers the false sense of safety that Tesla does.
Like… yeah, that’s called an unsafe system my dude.
Newer medical treatments have higher risk, just like experimental transportation methods carry greater risk.
Everyone gets sick/injured and everyone needs to get around, so some suffering in the name of advancing these endeavors seems both inevitable and tolerable. The question is to what degree?
Controlling access to and fallout from these automated driving systems is a temporary priority since the roads they're testing on are far more 'public' than an individual's body undergoing new medical treatment, but the long-term priority must be on getting the systems as safe or safer than other human drivers on aggregate. That will happen, sooner or later, and I'd rather see it sooner as long as the cost of the race isn't catastrophe. The only way to advance is to let it learn...
Humans are able to drive with vision alone in part because we have a high-level conceptual model of the world that we can rely on to fill in the gaps when a straight literal interpretation of vision is wrong or inadequate. We know, for example, that there are not likely to be walls under highway overpasses and that stop signs on billboards are not signs. This is a "strong AI" level problem that a car isn't going to be able to to solve, so instead the best answer is to give the car super-human senses to it doesn't need such a model as much.
That and if we have self-driving cars we want them to be safer than human drivers. That could only reasonably be achieved with super-human senses.
Where's the data that proves this? Tesla has ~2% of the auto market, but ~0.4% of deaths.