Elon's refusal to adopt lidar - statistically probably fine, anecdotally it could turn out very badly for any one person which is a hard thing to swallow if it's you...
Adopting Lidar would of course provide Tesla with higher-quality input for their self-driving model. But the quality of the input isn't the whole equation; you need to process it as well. In other words, adopting Lidar would incur costs not only on the hardware side, but also on the software side, which of course would result in more expensive cars. More expensive cars means less cars sold, and less cars sold means less data, which in turns means less input.
Does this result in a worse model? Again, I don't know, but I do know that the issue is more complicated (and not only because of the reasons I mentioned here) than many people seem to think.
Is this sarcasm?
As much as it's absolutely the driver's fault, it's also an inevitable accident.
Wrongful death is about $500k-$1M (but should be higher). Tesla market cap is $500B. Damages for O(one million people) are equal to Tesla's market cap, so this is not even bad for business; it's simply factoring in externalities into the cost of doing business.
A good split might be criminal system for the driver (which ranges from fines to prison time, and is designed to be punitive), and civil system for Tesla (which is only financial, but designed to cover the financial cost of the death to the family).
I really wish every single death ended up splitting a fine amongst all companies even tangentially involved.
Grandma fell down the stairs and died? Well fine the architect who designed those stairs, and the builder who built them.
Sure, all those companies will pass the cost back to the consumer, but the government will pass the fine revenue back to the consumer in the form of reduced taxes.
Ends up net zero overall, but everyone now has a real incentive to look out for the health and safety of others.
- Unsafe product is shipped
- Damage is done
- Someone pays for it (ultimately the consumer)
The difference is that if the consumer directly pays for it, companies have every incentive to make unsafe products, and those costs are very, very high.
If the companies pay for it, the free hand of capitalism steps in, and optimizes such that any safety measures where expected returns are positive are implemented (and those where expected returns are negative, not).
If a death costs $1M, and I can do a safety measure which reduces odds of death by 0.01% for $100, it's cost-neutral. If that same measure costs $50, an efficient business will implement it. If it costs $200, it won't.
That allows global optimization. By setting the price of death, you can have a set point for what safety measures will be taken, the system optimizes adequately well, and deaths go down, so fewer costs are passed back.