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Beats me why hasnt Tesla auto pilot been shut down already. If the car is on Autopilot then people will get used to it and use that time to check on mail, call

• bdamm 7y ago
  Because the accident rate is still lower than it is with humans driving.
  • w8vY7ER 7y ago
    but that doesn't support the scary narrative!
  • gamblor956 7y ago
    Objectively not true....Autopilot is only used in a small subset of driving situations that are less risky than overall driving. And yet in the last 8 months alone, Autopilot has caused 3 easily avoidable deaths. Autopilot is getting worse not better with time, and Tesla's tendency to introduce regressions (as with the Bay Area crash) means any temporary improvements in driving AI are just that--temporary.
    • dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      >Autopilot is only used in a small subset of driving situations... By a subset of the driving population who are less risky than the overall driving population.
    • dangus 7y ago
      > And yet in the last 8 months alone, Autopilot has caused 3 easily avoidable deaths. This number by itself is absolutely meaningless without more context. In 2017, 37,133 people in the United States died in an automotive crash. It is expected that some number of Tesla owners will die in a crash, regardless of currently engaged safety features. Tesla has produced around 600,000 vehicles in total, including over 100,000 Model 3 vehicles. I'm not making any claim or dispute regarding the effectiveness of Autopilot, whether or not it's improving. I'm just saying, making that statement you made is meaningless at least and misleading at most.
      • deleted 7y ago
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      • gamblor956 7y ago
        I'm just saying, making that statement you made is meaningless at least and misleading at most. I'm just pulling a page from Elon Musk and Tesla's marketing department.
        • deleted 7y ago
          [deleted]
    • thebluehawk 7y ago
      You made several bold claims. Do you have any proof of any of them? The statistic you provided is useless without context. In the last 8 months there were ~24,000 automobile fatalities in the US. What's important is how Tesla Autopilot compares to that. Also, do you have any proof that Autopilot is getting worse over time that doesn't rely on anecdotes?
      • gamblor956 7y ago
        I don't need to prove anything, since I'm not claiming that Teslas are safer than all other cars in all other conditions like Tesla and Elon Musk are. They need to prove their claims, and resorting to spurious comparisons to "miles driven" under conditions in which Autopilot was "working but not actually controlling the car" don't count.
    • deleted 7y ago
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    • jsight 7y ago
      Autopilot cannot cause deaths as autopilot cannot drive. 3 drivers who chose not to pay attention caused those deaths. EDIT: (I'm assuming for the purposes of this statement that you are correct and those were easily avoidable by an attentive driver)
      • task_queue 7y ago
        Weird, given Tesla's claim that with Autopilot "the person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself." [1] [1] https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tesla-autopilot-claims-20180523-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tesla-autopilot-claim...
        • jsight 7y ago
          The words that you quote are from a demonstration video from 3 years ago. The features demonstrated were not available to the public and still aren't. Tesla's has never claimed that a current vehicle can drive itself without the driver being responsible for the vehicle at all times.
          • task_queue 7y ago
            The video was posted directly to the Autopilot page on Tesla's website. The video is also only 2 years old, not 3. > Tesla's has never claimed that a current vehicle can drive itself without the driver being responsible for the vehicle at all times. Yes, they did. Hence why the NHTSA and other groups went after Tesla for their claims about Autopilot.
      • gvb 7y ago
        A passenger cannot cause deaths as a passenger cannot drive. The Tesla autopilot controls the throttle, brake, and steering. That meets my definition of "driving."
        • jsight 7y ago
          I'm sorry, but everything that you said in relation to Tesla there is wrong. My Nissan with ProPilot can also control the throttle, brake, and steering, but that doesn't make me a mere passenger any more than cruise control does. It routinely false positives on frontal collisions and occasionally does things that would be dangerous if I weren't driving. The driver in a Tesla is not a mere passenger, regardless of whether or not they have enabled autopilot. The initial warnings on enabling autopilot as well as the attention nags on the steering wheel all make this perfectly clear to the driver.
  • jonahhorowitz 7y ago
    _Citation Needed_ - I agree we'll get there eventually, but is it currently lower?
    • mannykannot 7y ago
      I think it is likely that certain aspects of the system, such as emergency braking, improve safety, but it may be that the more advanced features (those that actually allow the driver to get away with not paying attention, most of the time) do not. If this is the case -- and I am not saying it is, we need more data -- then the effectiveness of the former should not be used to cover up shortcomings in the latter. If, as Tesla insists, these autopilot crashes are all due to the driver not paying attention, then it seems very plausible that a better attention-detecting system (one that tracked the driver's gaze, for example) would improve safety. Of course, if the system required drivers to do what Tesla says they should be doing, it would not be so appealing. And if, as Musk is saying, drivers are confused or mistaken about the capabilities of the vehicle, then the first response should be to stop making ambivalent statements about them.
  • jonny_eh 7y ago
    The problem is how the cause deaths are perceived. An imperfect (aka "randomly kills you") AI is far scarier than a statistic that people interpret as "x% of bad drivers". Most people think they are better than the average driver. Not to mention that a lot of deaths are due to bad other drivers. It's why people freak out about terrorism more than they do about car crashes or drug addicition.
    • dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      Even bad drivers are very, very unlikely to get in any crashes so long as they're not intoxicated or distracted. Most people will probably never get in a crash (that is their fault) in their life.
  • arkades 7y ago
    > when used properly by an attentive driver who is prepared to take control at all times, drivers supported by Autopilot are safer than those operating without assistance. For the past three quarters we have released quarterly safety data directly from our vehicles which demonstrates that.” Tesla attached a lot more caveats than you did in order to assert superior safety.
  • deleted 7y ago
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  • mtgx 7y ago
    There is no reliable citation that you can give to prove that. Emphasis on reliable, as Tesla's own stats are highly misleading -- they basically compare highway data, because Autopilot is mostly used on highways, to all other conditions in which accidents happen. I'm sure that if Autopilot was active all the time, the rate of accidents would be far higher, and Tesla's numbers wouldn't look so positive.
  • apeace 7y ago
    I don't think engineers should be using logic like this. Say you stumble on a lost civilization in the woods, and they have yet to discover any form of shelter. Any time it rains or snows they all sit on the ground and half of them die of pneumonia. What do we, as engineers, do to help them? Tie some sticks together and make a lean-to? That would certainly reduce the death rate. But I don't think it would be the ethical thing to do. The ethical thing would be to help them build proper buildings out of the best available materials, install an HVAC system, fire alarms, etc. In other words, engineering should seek to maximize benefits for users, and there are cases where choosing not to maximize benefits could be seen as unethical, even if you do provide some benefit. In the case of Tesla, the ethical thing to do would be to include a lidar which can prevent the car from smashing into large objects at full speed. Just because the accident rate is lower does not mean this death or all the others are acceptable. Tesla had a choice of whether to use best engineering practices, and they chose not do. The reason they are doing this is money. They couldn't sell cars with an expensive lidar on it. And they shot themselves in the foot by charging people thousands of dollars for future "full self driving" capability. Now if they don't continue forward with this plan, with no lidar, it will have serious financial consequences for them. Note that other self-driving companies have found a way to make lidar financially viable for them. It's not impossible. Tesla is killing people for money.
    • jsight 7y ago
      That all seems like a big stretch based upon some big assumptions to me. It is far from conclusive that LIDAR alone would make the difference in cases like this, due to the way sensors have to be fused together to handle these kinds of scenarios. There are fair criticisms around Tesla's marketing and implementation, but I don't think "they should already have lidar on there" is really one of them.
    • bdamm 7y ago
      Giving a nomadic tribe a building with HVAC and fire alarms would be unethical. If you then require them to live in those buildings you would meet the standard of cultural assimilation and destruction, as Canada did to the Inuit. As an engineer I find this reprehensible and arrogant.
• mfatica 7y ago
  So you want to stifle technological process because some people can't be bothered to be responsible? Darwinism at work honestly.
• hwillis 7y ago
  same reason street cars aren't hard limited to 70 mph with low acceleration
  • marquis-chacha 7y ago
    I have a fair number of "shall not be infringed" friends (pro 2nd amendment, perhaps to a fault. I make no judgement calls here). An argument I've heard from them goes along the lines of: "yes, we could perhaps reduce things like school shootings and accidental gun deaths with stricter anti-gun legislation. But that comes at the expense of our American freedoms, and a couple of lives simply isn't worth it." Which sounded pretty harsh to me at first, but when you think about it, thats effectively the same as the HN narrative: "yes things like the PATRIOT act could reduce terrorism, but it comes at the expense of our American freedoms, and a couple of lives simply isn't worth it." And now for these cars: "yes removing Autopilot could reduce car crashes, but it comes at the expense of our American (?) freedoms (maybe freedom to drive/technically innovate/something else entirely), and a couple of lives simply isn't worth it." One additional trend I haven't personally witnessed, but I hear about, is that when in some freak accident "a couple of lives" includes the life of someone who one of these gun guys, PATRIOT guys, or car guys knows, their opinion flips.
    • tonyedgecombe 7y ago
      It's often presented as a loss of freedom when in reality it's a tradeoff in freedoms. One group might loose the freedom to carry a gun whilst another group gains the freedom to be safe at school.
      • benjohnson 7y ago
        In my opinion - the freedom codified in the 2nd amendment to let citizens to overthrow an oppressive and unjust government.
      • dsfyu404ed 7y ago
        It seems like wherever we trade away freedoms the thing we're supposed to be getting in return never materializes. Benjamin Franklin has a particularly relevant quote on this subject.
• whttheuuu 7y ago
  lol, should we ban cruise control too bud?
• dkarl 7y ago
  Some of these guys will end up getting killed and 'we told you so' simply doesnt cut it. "I told you so" cuts it for tens of thousands of deaths caused by user error per year. I'm not saying you're wrong about Tesla's autopilot, but it should be put in proper context. Tens of millions of lightly trained people are controlling thousand-pound steel projectiles at speeds where stopping distances are measured in hundreds of feet. Gruesome results are par for the course. I know we're all hoping that these deep-pocketed companies with fancy tech and big research budgets are going to fix it all for us, but they're not going to solve it on their first go.
• tristanb 7y ago
  Have you driven one? I find I am far more alert and less with less cognitive fatigue when it is on autopilot. People may misuse the technology, but they text and drive a car without it. (and have far more accidents). It is far far better. Try it.
  • modi15 7y ago
    I havent actually. But I drive a car with a gear(stick) and whenever I drive a car without one it feels that I can use the hand to hold some coffee or get some texting done. I do get your point regarding cognitive fatigue though but I think we need a conclusive statistic rather than one thrown by Tesla.
  • the_mitsuhiko 7y ago
    I cannot relate to this at all.