Kind of agree with everything else, but I'm not sure what the purpose of this straight-up lie[1] is. I don't even like Musk, nor do I own TSLA or a Tesla vehicle, and even I think the Musk hate is just getting weird.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_crashe...
>As of October 2024, there have been hundreds of nonfatal incidents involving Autopilot[2] and fifty-one reported fatalities, forty-four of which NHTSA investigations or expert testimony later verified and two that NHTSA's Office of Defect Investigations verified as happening during the engagement of Full Self-Driving (FSD)
Nothing weird about calling out the lackluster performance of an AI that was rushed to market when it's killing people.
>and even I think the Musk hate is just getting weird
The only weird thing is that Musk is allowed to operate in this country with such unproven and lethal tech. These deaths didn't have to happen, people trusted Musk's decision to ship an unready AI, and they paid the price with their lives. I avoid driving near Teslas, I don't need Musk's greed risking my life too.
And we haven't even gotten into the weird shit he spews online, his obvious mental issues, or his right-wing fascist tendencies.
https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a62919131/tesla-has-highes...
They are not way off in some other safety category like motorcycles or airplanes.
Either Tesla is just a pos which is unsafe at any speed or its self driving features are so good at offing people it more than makes up for any other factor.
1950s cars without seatbelts were probably in the same order of magnitude as is riding a mothercycle its a weird stadard.
In actuality you are more than twice as likely to die if you drive a Tesla. 4x if you pick the model by.
Tesla is as high as 10
Motorcycles are something crazy like 267
Yes driving a Tesla is far safer than driving a crotch rocket but far more dangerous than a 10 year old Carolla which is concerning.
Either it is incredibly poorly designed as far as crash safety which doesn't appear to be so or its software kills enough people to more than make up the difference.
Which is it? I'm guessing if we are relying on Tesla to investigate the state of the software that auto pilot is only being implicated when it is engaged till the end whereas most crashes probably see the human take over unsuccessfully prior to the endpoint.
This small difference you're observing is likely because people drive like idiots in them. You'll see that other vehicles which encourage bad behavior have similar death rates.
My point was, their safety systems don't put them in a significantly safer category, like a bus, train, or a plane, all of which are orders of magnitude safer.
The logical conclusion is that the car is more dangerous with the obvious suspect being autopilot
> there is no reason to believe Tesla drivers are worse in fact as with all expensive vehicles its population is liable to have fewer younger more dangerous drivers
Ah yes, just like all drivers of expensive hellcats are known for their safe driving?
No, Teslas are not driven by the same demographics as Toyota Siennas. Have you taken a rideshare in a city before?
> The logical conclusion is that the car is more dangerous with the obvious suspect being autopilot
The last I checked, the data showed that people wreck them at about the same rates with or without the driver assistance features engaged.
If you drive lifetime 800,000 miles which is damn easy to do in America in a car that has 6-10 fatalities per billion miles your lifetime risk of dying or killing someone are up to 0.6% absolute not relative.
To be crystal clear its the difference between rolling a 500 sided die vs a 125 sided die where if you roll a one your brains end up on the dash.
Its a big difference and ascribing a difference in mortality to the drivers is equally poor. Its not just unfounded its counterfactual young drivers which largely can't afford Teslas are disproportionately involved in such crashes.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/book/countermeasures-that-work/young-d....
Purely based on driver demographics one would expect fewer fatal crashes.
Please explain an absolutely massive increase in fatal crashes.
Every single one of those people were tragedies, no doubt about it. And there will always be fatalities while people use FSD. You cannot prevent it, because the world is big and full of unforeseen situations and no software will be able to deal with them all. I am convinced, though, that using FSD judiciously will save far more lives than removing it will.
The most damning thing that can be said about full self driving is that it requires good judgement from the general population, and that's asking a lot. But on the whole, I still feel it's a good trade.
That’s also why people tend to shy away from people with mental health issues. We don’t have a good theory of mind to intuit their behavior.
Fact is, humans in general are imperfect operators. The ai driver only has to be an alright driver, not a perfect one, to route around the long tail of drivers that cause most all the fatalities.
I think you missed my point. Because software is more opaque, it has a much higher threshold before the public feels comfortable with it. My claim is it will have to be an outstanding driver, not just an “alright” one before autonomous driving is given the reins en masse. In addition, I don’t think we know much about the true distribution of risk, so claims about the long-tail are undefined and somewhat meaningless. We don’t have a codified “edge” that defines what you call edge cases. Both software and people are imperfect. Given the opaqueness of software, I still maintain people are more comfortable with human drivers due to the evolved theory of mind. Do you think more people would prefer their non-seatbelted toddler to be in a an average autonomous vehicle by themselves or with a human driver give the current state of the art?
But more to my point, humans are also irrational so statistical arguments don’t translate well to policy. Just look at how many people (and professionals) trade unleveraged stocks when an index fund is a better statistical bet. Your point hinges on humans being modeled as rational actors and my point is that is a bad assumption. It’s a sociological problem as much as an engineering one.
Fixing that would require "full self stopping". Coming soon[1].
[1] ... for some value of "soon", that is.
This is some kind of logical fallacy, a false equivalence or maybe a red herring. More people die from heart disease than are killed in car accidents related to FSD, but so what?
> I am convinced, though, that using FSD judiciously will save far more lives than removing it will.
This might be true, I even think it probably is, but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence to support it. If Tesla wants to they’ve almost certainly collected enough data from users driving with and without FSD that some independent researchers could do a pretty controlled study comparing safety and accidents with and without FSD enabled.
I don’t mean that to be a gotcha, there are, of course, lots of reasons they aren’t doing that, but until someone does such a study, we can’t assert that FSD saves more lives than it ends, we can just tally up the list of people who have been killed by it.
That’s similar to how I feel about LLM’s. Amazing as an input to a system but you need real engineering guardrails around them.
This is a statement of faith.
IMO cars are dangerous, whether they have a level headed experienced driver or an all seeing all knowing AI, sometimes a car pulls out from a blind drive or a tire fails and swerves into oncoming traffic. It's not clear to me why people think having a computer drive 95% of the time so they don't have to will make them better able to avoid accidents in exceptional cases.
In the case of pilots, even tho a computer can handle all manner of weather, pilots are still required to put in manual flying time so they actually know how the craft handles under their control, so that they can be ready to take over in case of exceptional events. I think we will see the same regulation in cars eventually, requiring drivers to have minimum hours per year in order to continue piloting craft, even if AI is good enough to do it most of the time.