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Comment by audunw | Hacker News Reader

I don’t see any way you can spin this in a positive light. Yeah, there may be many more FSD miles on Tesla, but if that leads to a bunch of motorcyclists getting hit, then maybe that’s exactly the problem.

We know this is one of the core issues of Tesla FSD: its capabilities have been hyped and over promised time and time again. We have countless examples of drivers trusting it far more than they should. And who’s to blame for that? In large part the driver, sure. But Elon has to take a lot of that blame as well. Many of those drivers would not have trusted it as much if it wasn’t for his statements and the media image he has crafted for Tesla.

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The problem is there isn't enough data here. Killing 5 motorcycles isn't great, but if human driver killed say 100 in the same sample, 5 is actually pretty good. Of course if human drivers kill 1 or 2 in the same sample, 5 is really bad.

The difference to me, as a motorcyclist, is that to prevent humans from crashing cars into motorcycles is complicated. There are a multitude of reasons someone may not be paying attention or may not see another vehicle. This problem with Tesla has an easily implemented solution that could be deployed now but isn't. We don't have such a solution for non-Tesla crashes into motorcycles. How many motorcyclists deaths are we willing to accept to save money? How much money is too much to prevent 5 deaths?

Installing LIDAR isn't an "easily implemented solution", assuming that's what you mean. Otherwise why not mandate that all cars have LIDAR, self-driving or not?

It doesn't have to be LIDAR. Other modern cars that have adaptive cruise control avoid hitting motorcycles using simple radar, and have been doing so for many years.

> Yeah, there may be many more FSD miles on Tesla, but if that leads to a bunch of motorcyclists getting hit, then maybe that’s exactly the problem.

I'd wager far more motorcyclists get hit by humans driving non-Teslas in non-autonomous modes. I could rephrase your comment to:

"Yeah, but if humans drive cars without safety features, and that leads to a bunch of motorcyclists getting hit, then maybe that’s exactly the problem."

... to make the (faulty[1]) argument that driving with FSD turned on is better for motorcyclists.

[1] Faulty not because it's false, but because it is a logical fallacy.

It’s not hyped. You can literally watch how FSD perform all readily live on YouTube, and despite these shortcomings, they’re lightyears ahead of any self driving systems. And it’s going to just get better as they account for all these corner cases.

Tesla is a victim of their own success, they’ve set the bar so high people now expect it to have 0.0000% failure rate.

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