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Comment by bboygravity | Hacker News Reader

I'll still take Tesla FSD over the average earthling driver any day.

That video does nothing to change that. Why should it?

> I'll still take Tesla FSD over the average earthling driver any day

Sure. As long as Tesla itself, the company and its leaders and its shareholders, are held personally liable for any major autopilot or FSD fuckups.

Be it a monetary ticket or time in jail, have them all serve that responsibility each and every time. And if a long stint in "jail" - i.e. not being able the conduct business of any kind for that period - is too traumatic for the company to survive, then maybe they'd rethink their level of recklessness.

And certainly, if I'm in any sort of roadside screwup nearly regardless of fault, my insurance rates are going up a lot, for a long time. So too should that be the case for Tesla and their products whenever and wherever their software makes a decision that is involved in or the cause of the same.

> As long as Tesla itself, the company and its leaders and its shareholders, are held personally liable for any major autopilot or FSD fuckups.

Are you sure?

That would include everyone who owns S&P 500 index funds, probably most (if not all) pension funds, etc.

Shareholders? Yes, doubly so. They 1. knew better 2. enabled that

Fund managers? Triply so. They 1. knew better 2. enabled that 3. with other people's money

Why do you include the company management and shareholders, but not the workers who actually create the car?

Workers have very little input on releasing a product or the direction in which a product goes.

Lol. Sure. I'm absolutely fine with that and everything else it would imply.

The entire issue of excessive CEO compensation for the sake of driving stock price, while being completely divorced from any repercussions of any knowingly harmful actions is exactly the capitalism part of "late stage capitalism" that sucks.

Let's restate your question -- Why should shareholders not get to benefit from blatant disregard for truth or safety without any liability on the line when that stance results in collateral damage?

You should not. I have Tesla FSD and without constant monitoring by a very cautious human driver it is a murder machine. The choice is not “human vs. Tesla” it is “human vs. dangerous Tesla mitigated by humans of varying degrees of competence.”

No you wouldn't. The average human driver is vastly safer than Autopilot. I will agree that autopilot is better than the worst 10% of drivers and maybe on par with the worst 20%. That group causes most accidents and almost all severe accidents. The average human driver drives something like 200,000 miles without any accidents.

edit: Upon looking up some stats I might have misremembered, in any case the median human drivers is definitely vastly safer than Autopilot.

Cars driven with autopilot were at 4.8 million miles between accidents in Q4 2022, by your metric Autopilot is by definition vastly safer than the median human driver

https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

you are missing the point, it requires a human to monitor and take over. So by definition it's still human doing the work. And humans with autopilot are not a random sample of humans, it's a biased sample.

That “report” is grade school level garbage.

Try to find the number of miles driven or crashes in the report, you know, the numerator and denominator. You will not find it because they seem to think that a “safety report” is a single number. You would fail a 6th grade science fair project if you did that.

And they seem to think it is okay to deliberately publish such a report for two ton machines with software that has killed dozens of people. They are either so stupid they should not be allowed near a safety-critical device or they are being deliberately deceptive to a level that would make Elizabeth Holmes blush.

So no, their safety report is anti-evidence for safety. Only somebody with something to hide would publish such a deficient and deceptive report.

How many "average" drivers do you run into every day that accelerate into cross traffic on a red light?

Not defending the buggy FSD in this specific video, but I've seen drivers anticipate a green and jump a bit into a red light. If you are the impatient type who inches forward the entire time you have a red light for no reason, you can easily move into the actual intersection, especially at smaller intersections. I've done it myself from time to time, nobody's perfect.

This is obviously worse because you have to be paying attention and be able to quickly take over, but it's not like this type of thing would never happen with a human driver.

I've seen several do exactly that on Reddit's IdiotsInCars over time.

And most people would agree that the people in those videos should be getting tickets and worse.

With their software, Tesla is more of an active participant in those ill-fated decisions and mistakes. So they deserve to bear more of the responsibility.

The question is about average driving. Would you be okay with self driving cars on the streets that drive at the level of videos posted in IdiotsInCars?

Average Pittsburgh drivers?

Hey now, just because YOU haven't read the "unwritten Pittsburgh driver's manual (zeroeth edition)" doesn't mean NONE OF US have ...

See here for pre-release addenda, all that's available on the public internet this moment:

https://www.reddit.com/r/pittsburgh/comments/dv9j08/what_are...

Now, if yinz'll excuse me, the driver in the opposite lane going straight has out-of-state plates. So, I need to stop typing this message to peel out / teach them a valuable lesson about right-of-way when the stop light changes in Yinzerville - as I head to a city-government-sanctioned hazard-light parking spot directly in front of Primanti's to pick up my slaw with fries and sandwich garnish (and sugar with coffee and cream).

Well I don't drive much, but when I do I definitely see people running reds.

The question is how many. If you encounter 100 cars on your daily commute are >50 of them running red lights? Or is it more like the bottom 1%? Would you be okay if self driving cars on the street fall in that 1%?

What evidence exists that Tesla FSD is actually safer than an average driver?

First party so some grains of salt are required, but they publish safety statistics.

https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-fsd-beta-safety-crash-statis...

Both autopilot (basically lane-keeping) and FSD have multiple times higher miles driven between crashes than the US average.

This is not a fair comparison - Tesla is comparing miles driven by their systems, which are inherently limited in scope to "easier" scenarios (only lane assist/only on highways/ect), against total US average, which includes _all_ gnarly road situations.

It is fair in the context of another driver being worried about being hurt by a Tesla.

From the second link:

As per the company, a Tesla with FSD Beta engaged experienced an airbag-deployed crash about every 3.2 million miles in the last 12 months. This makes the system about five times safer than the most recently available US average of 600,000 miles per police-reported crash. It should be noted that FSD Beta specifically works for inner-city streets, which involve tons of edge cases and unpredictable driving behaviors from other vehicles.

AP better be safer than me on average, because anytime it gets a little confused it just squawks loudly and hands control back to me. Then if there's a crash 1 millisecond later they'll chalk that up to the human.

I really find it hard to understand how anyone who has driven a Tesla with AP for any distance thinks it is safer than a human driver. Maybe just drivers who are always texting or drunk. AP is the least defensive driver on the road, it needs close supervision.

“Some” grains of salt? The “safety statistics” should be straight up ignored out of hand.

Do you trust VW if they first party report their emissions? Philip Morris if they first party report the effects of smoking on lung cancer? Unaudited first party reports are literally worthless. They have every incentive to lie or misrepresent.

For that matter, Tesla has repeatedly, actively lied to consumers and misrepresented their products.

The current director of Autopilot software, Ashok Elluswamy, admitted under oath to staging the initial “Paint It Black” Autopilot demo video claiming full self driving capability: “The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.”.

The company misrepresented the range of their cars and actively suppressed complaints and gaslighted customers requesting service [1].

As for the “safety statistics” themselves, they are completely devoid of any information. The only information reported is a single ratio munging both Autopilot and FSD together.

They do not break out the products. They do not enumerate the crashes. They do not even report the number of crashes or number of miles used for calculating their “statistics”. They can not even be bothered to publish the damn numerator or denominator of their safety numbers. This is grade school level reporting and they are being allowed to drive 2 ton machines on public roads.

In contrast, this is what Waymo reports: https://storage.googleapis.com/waymo-uploads/files/documents...

A 30 page research paper itemizing the specific crashes. Methodology, references, evaluation models, comparisons, etc. That is what a proper safety report looks like, not the grade school bullshit Tesla marketing is pushing. Tesla safety and compliance should be ashamed of themselves for prioritizing marketing over human lives.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-ba...

If you think a typical random 44 minutes of the average person driving includes an attempted running of a red light, you're out of it. If most people drove like this all the time, the average car driver would already be six feet under. Telsa leans on this sort of extreme misanthropy to pitch their product as a better alternative. Tesla FSD drives worse than a drunk teenager, let alone a normal person on a normal day.

Inb4 the bicycle crowd arrives to tell me that the average car driver commits 50 felonies a minute.

When you say earthling are you restricting it to US citizens? Because the US driving test is firmly middle of the pack.

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