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What I don't get is this part, "Story’s death — one of 40,901 US traffic fatalities that year — was the first known pedestrian fatality linked to Tesla’s drivin

by IcePic 1y ago

What I don't get is this part, "Story’s death — one of 40,901 US traffic fatalities that year — was the first known pedestrian fatality linked to Tesla’s driving system" Regardless of if its FSD or the autopilot system under investigation, if this in fact is the first recorded death that is directly linked to the car driving itself, and tesla has had cars around for what, 12 years by now with varying degrees of self-driving and steering assistance, then it would be somewhat prudent to compare against say all the accidents made by tesla drivers not using any versions of FSD/autopiloting. If it then shows that running with it on is 10%, 50% or 90% "better" in avoiding accidents, then it is still a net win. But I don't think there is statistics to say that this first death attributable to the self-driving in itself makes it worse than people (with all our flaws) driving manually. There seems to be some kind of weird double standard where we let people get drivers licenses and run around causing X% accidents per year, then automakers add more or less helpful steering aids and get this figure down to X/2 or X/5 or X/10% and we somehow scream for regulating computers from helping us drive? If there existed a button to reduce cancer by half, to a fifth, a tenth of what the current rates are for contracting it, I can't see many people trying to legislate so that we could never push said button until it removes ALL cancer from any patient ever. I get that self-driving is far from perfect, but if it helps, then it helps. What more is there to say? Each and every death is tragic, not trying to be all utilitarian about it, but it seems (to me, with limited facts) that these tools overall seem to make driving slightly safer than not using them, and I can only guess that if even more cars would be using automatic distance to car in front and stuff like that, the numbers would go down even more since people tend to be somewhat more chaotic while driving which I gather makes it hard on the computer to account for. And lastly, pet peeve about "recalled 2M cars". Yes, the term is like that, makes it sound like millions of cars had to go to the dealership or service, whereas someone codes up a fix, pushes a button and a week later, all cars are now running that fix. But that doesn't make for dramatic headlines if you have an agenda. Yes, I have an M3, no I don't like EM heiling on tv, but that was hard to predict 4 years ago.

ck45 1y ago
I’ve discussed this topic quite a lot of times in the past years, taking both sides eventually. Usually the conclusion is with a human driver you (usually) have a responsible and liable person. It’s not that clear for FSD, and that’s what scares people.
- taylodl 1y ago
  It's very clear for FSD - it's a level 2 driver assist system and by definition that means the driver is legally responsible for everything that happens. That's the single biggest reason I would never use FSD. I'm not going to put myself in a position of being held legally liable for the actions of somebody else's software.
- lotsofpulp 1y ago
  The human driver is responsible and liable, that is why the interior camera monitors the person’s eyes to remind them to watch the road, and I think disabled driver assist software after 3 strikes. https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/models/en_us/GUID-E5FF5E84-6AAC-43E6-B7ED-EC1E9AEB17B7.html https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/models/en_us/GUID-E5FF5E8... > WARNING Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is a hands-on feature. Keep your hands on the steering yoke (or steering wheel) at all times, be mindful of road conditions and surrounding traffic, and always be prepared to take immediate action. Failure to follow these instructions could cause damage, serious injury or death. It is your responsibility to familiarize yourself with the limitations of Full Self-Driving (Supervised) and the situations in which it may not work as expected.
- tpxl 1y ago
  > It’s not that clear for FSD, and that’s what scares people. It is crystal clear, the liability and responsibility is on the human behind the wheel. The 'person driving' is some engineer thousands of miles away with no incentive not to crash the vehicle, and that is what scares me.
ankurdhama 1y ago
The problem here is not self-driving, the problem is that for some reason Tesla don't want to use Lidar/Radar for self driving and instead just use cameras. This seems like complete arrogance from Tesla and nothing more. The article talks about this.
- IcePic 1y ago
  Wasn't it the radar/lidar what caused lots of crazy brakes when you ran towards a bridge or something else that reflected the signal as if there was a still standing vehicle or so?
- lotsofpulp 1y ago
  “Complete arrogance” means they do not want to use lidar/radar for pure ego, and there would be no negative effects of using it. Which is not true, as it would increase the costs of the producing and repairing the vehicle. One of Tesla’s major achievements is hitting the $30k to $50k price point with an 80% solution for self driving (regardless of their marketing it as 100%).
  - lurking_swe 1y ago
    i suppose it’s a “major achievement” when we make something cheap that also makes roads more dangerous for humans? I guess that’s true if we view the world through a financial lens. Otherwise no it’s not impressive IMO. Especially with their very very unethical advertising of it, calling it “full self driving” and “autopilot”. Full self driving is something like waymo.
    - lotsofpulp 1y ago
      How does it make roads more dangerous for humans? It requires the driver to be paying attention. If drivers are driving distracted, that’s not a problem with any car, it’s a problem with humans wanting to look at their phone. At least the Tesla is monitoring people’s eyes to try to prevent them from distracted driving.
Daneel_ 1y ago
I feel like a lot of these systems, while reducing some types of incidents, also cause others. I know the lane-keeping assist function in my 2024 car (that turns itself back on every time I start the car) has a healthy appetite for trying to veer the car into oncoming traffic whenever I’m on a road with no lane markings. This is quite common on suburban roads. So far I’ve been lucky, but if it happens at just the wrong moment I can absolutely see it causing a head-on collision that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. For me this is the crux of the issue - these systems greatly improve some situations, but it’s not acceptable to do so at the expense of worsening others.
- smallnix 1y ago
  > these systems greatly improve some situations, but it’s not acceptable to do so at the expense of worsening others Can you elaborate please? E.g. do you mean that such tradeoffs are not acceptable, even if they result in a net benefit?
  - taylodl 1y ago
    It's not a tradeoff. "Driving better than a human" means avoiding mistakes humans make and not making mistakes humans don't make.
    - lotsofpulp 1y ago
      Every mutually exclusive choice is a tradeoff, by definition. Perhaps the better word is “driving better than human drivers as a collective” to refer to a lower auto collision/injury rate. It might not be strictly more capable than a single ideal human always paying attention, but that is neither here nor there when comparing if software assisted driving is better than non software assisted driving. The easiest way to analyze this is to see if auto insurance companies offer a discount for using the software assist, as they are most directly impacted by population wide changes in the metric we are interested in (although I don’t think Tesla shares sufficient data about when and if FSD was used for auto insurers to be able to discern this).
TestingSpike1 1y ago
It's not acceptable to have FSD crashes same as it's not acceptable for people to crash. Here, sun just made a tesla kill someone, could have been you or your family. Everyone else predictably slowed down. Who is responsible and should be sent to jail for murder? The FSD software developers?, the driver since he was doing fuck all?
- IcePic 1y ago
  > It's not acceptable to have FSD crashes same as it's not acceptable for people to crash. Not sure what you mean by that? We could prevent almost every death, for instance by limiting speeds to <10 for instance, that would remove SO many accidents and incidents. It would also make travel take a really long time, like as if it was 200 years ago and you rode your horse across the country. But it would prevent almost all serious accidents. So the statement "its not acceptable for people to crash" is not true in a general sense. We are already balancing a certain amount of risk versus convenience of riding at speed to get places fast, to get transports in a timely manner and so on. Some countries, like Germany has roads with free speeds and get really horrible crashes at times involving many cars. Others place maximum limits to try to strike some kind of balance between accident rate/impact and the convenience or speed people would like to have, but from what I can tell, no country has set the limits so low that it actually fulfills what you wrote, that it is not acceptable for people to crash. It is solvable today, just not popular to make that actual decision. But it could be done and people would stop dying on the roads.
  - IcePic 1y ago
    And I was meaning to circle back again to the comparison of incidents and crashes with or without computer assistance but got derailed. =) If we then figure that we are in the situation where those who decide are balancing between X% fatalities per year when people drive like they do currently, why would it be controversial to allow FSD or other similar techniques to have the same or lower rate of crashes? I'm not buying into Teslas own statistics on crashes per km/mile because lying with statistics is kind of easy, but lets pretend one or all car manufacturers manage to get cars to have 0.4% crash rate per year when people have 0.5%, why would anyone then want to prevent people from using FSD? Why would we apply a different set of standards for one "type" of driver and not the other? And if we were to apply different standards, which might be reasonable, why would we not choose the "safer" one? Not claiming we necessarily are at a place where computer assisted driving is demonstrably safer, but when we actually can prove it is even just a tenth percent better, by that time I think we should have an answer for this question.
akoboldfrying 1y ago
I agree with you that comparing the rates of accidents is what's important. It's especially important to think about what's in the denominator of these rate measurements. I think the right denominator is "per km driven". (Accidents per hour of driving is OK but penalises faster cars -- people usually need to move a fixed distance, from A to B, and a faster car travels that fixed distance in less time.) The numerator (fatal accident count) for Tesla FSD may indeed be just 1 (I didn't see this claimed in the article, but it seems the data is somewhat public, so presumably if there were more fatalities, they would have reported them), but the Tesla FSD denominator might be quite low too, which might make its rate comparable to or worse than the human one. Of course, we'd need a much greater sample size for any confidence, so it would make more sense to compare non-fatal accidents, which are more common.
- paulryanrogers 1y ago
  Also note that over the air updates mean a Tesla may behave differently every time you get inside one. It could get better or worse or just different. If the human behind the wheel has to compensate, they'll have to be extra vigilant despite the non-incident times lulling them into false sense of security. So do you run the numbers per FSD version? Do you insist they must be certified before they make changes? People are unpredictable too, yet we have a mental model of their/our behavior and our own personal limits. When I get in the car I have confidence in how I'll perform, and without FSD, will remember to constantly maintain control. And a 'flaw' in one person's wetware is limited to them. No one can push out a fleet update causing humans to start targeting pedestrians instead of avoiding them.
helsinkiandrew 1y ago
> If it then shows that running with it on is 10%, 50% or 90% "better" in avoiding accidents, then it is still a net win I think this is the first pedestrian death - there's a couple more in cars with FSD running, and lots more when autopilot was engaged: https://www.tesladeaths.com/ https://www.tesladeaths.com/ > There seems to be some kind of weird double standard where we let people get drivers licenses and run around causing X% accidents per year... Thats exactly the problem Tesla (and others have). Most polls still say large portions of the public don't feel safe with self driving cars on the road (For example: https://today.yougov.com/technology/articles/51199-americans-warm-to-driverless-cars-though-skepticism-remains https://today.yougov.com/technology/articles/51199-americans...). People understand about DUI, fatigue, driving too fast, etc. But a lot of automated driving deaths seem to be avoidable by a human with a bit of common sense.
- ivewonyoung 1y ago
  > lots more when autopilot was engaged: https://www.tesladeaths.com/ https://www.tesladeaths.com/ Blaming all of those or even most of those on autopilot seems extremely disingenuous, appears to be a misleadng propaganda website.
  - gruez 1y ago
    Yeah wtf? I skimmed the first three entries and so far as I can't tell how FSD was involved, or even why Tesla (the company) was at fault. I guess technically those were deaths, and they were caused by a Tesla, so "telsadeaths.com" isn't inaccurate, but you'd be laughed at if you started a site called "toyotadeaths.com" with all the fatalities toyota cars were involved in.
    - ivewonyoung 1y ago
      > they were caused by a Tesla It's not even that, it includes entries like where a Toyota Tacoma pickup was driving on the wrong direction on the highway, ran into a Tesla and someone died. https://archive.is/GhYIs https://archive.is/GhYIs It's not even just deaths that happened in a Tesla for any reason because it also includes deaths in other vehicles, it's just any death where a Tesla was in the vicinity or something. Reminds me of the very popular "study" that did the rounds on all over the media and on here and Reddit where they counted suicides in a Cybertruck as being its fault to make it look artificially bad against the Ford Pinto. These false claims go unchallenged on Reddit because moderators will permanently ban anyone posting inconvenient facts, and BlueSky is probably worse. And given all the massive number of misinformed people, these propaganda tactics actually work pretty well.
os2warpman 1y ago
> And lastly, pet peeve about "recalled 2M cars". Yes, the term is like that, makes it sound like millions of cars had to go to the dealership or service, whereas someone codes up a fix, pushes a button and a week later, all cars are now running that fix. But that doesn't make for dramatic headlines if you have an agenda. That's not provocative. The vast majority of recalls in the modern age are software updates. Ford just recalled 1,075,299 vehicles due to backup camera failures last week and the fix is a technician plugging a cable into the vehicle and running a software update. The only difference is Tesla does it over the air. It was reported as "Ford Recalls More Than 1 Million Vehicles with Backup Camera Issue". No agenda. Factual, plain language writing.
berdario 1y ago
> if this in fact is the first recorded death that is directly linked to the car driving itself There have been 51 such deaths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_crashes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_crashe... > There seems to be some kind of weird double standard where we let people get drivers licenses and run around causing X% accidents per year I'm all for safe self driving, but the double standard here it's what's allowing Tesla to continue unpunished. The autopilot/FSD algorithm/AI/implementation is relied upon as if it was a driver... But when a driver kills someone the driver is (or should be) prosecuted, and shouldn't go back immediately on the road before proving that they can drive a vehicle safely. For humans you can blame "errors of judgement"... A person might not always reliably behave exactly in the same way when in the same situation (in both good and bad ways, e.g. distraction) But FSD instead means that a Tesla car using the same FSD version, in the same road and sky conditions, will always behave in the same way... If a human would cause an accident on that Arizona road in the same way, you could take their driving license away, and know that other road users don't risk being maimed by them anymore. The double standard here instead allows for thousands of other Teslas, with the same FSD version, to drive on the same road... Knowing full well that it's only a matter of time before the same conditions happen again, and a different Tesla would replicate the crash, endangering other road users.
- kmacleod 1y ago
  I'd prefer a blame-free NTSB investigation. It was a fault. Find the root cause, fix it, carry on. You're correct, they can still ground a fleet, but there doesn't also need to be a prosecution.
- gruez 1y ago
  >The autopilot/FSD algorithm/AI/implementation is relied upon as if it was a driver... Doesn't FSD still come with the disclaimer that the human driver should still be monitoring it? >For humans you can blame "errors of judgement"... A person might not always reliably behave exactly in the same way when in the same situation (in both good and bad ways, e.g. distraction) >But FSD instead means that a Tesla car using the same FSD version, in the same road and sky conditions, will always behave in the same way... Depending on how much you believe in free will, you could argue that humans will also "behave in the same way" given similar circumstances. For instance, being sleep deprived because of DST switchover, for instance. Moreover, I don't see any reason why humans getting distracted by a phone or whatever should be meaningfully different than a Tesla on FSD getting confused by a particular way the road/sky conditions lined up, especially if the latter occurs randomly.
danso 1y ago
> then it would be somewhat prudent to compare against say all the accidents made by tesla drivers not using any versions of FSD/autopiloting. One issue with this is that FSD/Autopilot is designed to disable itself in non-optimal road conditions. I know Musk claims FSD/AP is the only system to not have "restrictions", but you can check any of the Tesla & self-driving subreddits and find people complaining how they weren't allowed to use the driving systems in rain or extreme sunshine, and even some night time conditions. So now you're comparing the accident rate of FSD/AP under safe conditions, against vehicles that are driving through dangerous conditions that FSD/AP aren't allowed to. But accident rate is just one thing to be concerned about. If you picked 100 licensed human drivers and had them drive through the accident scene described in the article, I would happily bet $1000 that every driver, or at least, 99/100, would handle it without crashing. If 100 Tesla vehicles using the same version of FSD and camera hardware were driving through the scene described in the article, what would the accident rate be? The concern is that it seems like the deadly Tesla was acting as expected. Even worse, this sounds like a baseline scenario for any driving-assisted vehicle to handle: if the cameras are receiving an extreme amount of light/glare, why is FSD/AP not designed to drive cautiously (and then disable itself)?
tzs 1y ago
When a car with a driver assist system is the at fault vehicle in a fatal accident, how is it decided whether or not to blame the driver assist system? Is it only blamed if it was in control at the instant the accident occurred? Or does it also get the blame if it was in control shortly before the accident and made poor decisions that set up the accident but then realized it could not handle the situation, disengaged, and told the human to take over?

by IcePic 1y ago

ck45 1y ago

I’ve discussed this topic quite a lot of times in the past years, taking both sides eventually. Usually the conclusion is with a human driver you (usually) have a responsible and liable person. It’s not that clear for FSD, and that’s what scares people.

taylodl 1y ago
It's very clear for FSD - it's a level 2 driver assist system and by definition that means the driver is legally responsible for everything that happens. That's the single biggest reason I would never use FSD. I'm not going to put myself in a position of being held legally liable for the actions of somebody else's software.
lotsofpulp 1y ago
The human driver is responsible and liable, that is why the interior camera monitors the person’s eyes to remind them to watch the road, and I think disabled driver assist software after 3 strikes. https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/models/en_us/GUID-E5FF5E84-6AAC-43E6-B7ED-EC1E9AEB17B7.html https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/models/en_us/GUID-E5FF5E8... > WARNING Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is a hands-on feature. Keep your hands on the steering yoke (or steering wheel) at all times, be mindful of road conditions and surrounding traffic, and always be prepared to take immediate action. Failure to follow these instructions could cause damage, serious injury or death. It is your responsibility to familiarize yourself with the limitations of Full Self-Driving (Supervised) and the situations in which it may not work as expected.
tpxl 1y ago
> It’s not that clear for FSD, and that’s what scares people. It is crystal clear, the liability and responsibility is on the human behind the wheel. The 'person driving' is some engineer thousands of miles away with no incentive not to crash the vehicle, and that is what scares me.

ankurdhama 1y ago

The problem here is not self-driving, the problem is that for some reason Tesla don't want to use Lidar/Radar for self driving and instead just use cameras. This seems like complete arrogance from Tesla and nothing more. The article talks about this.

IcePic 1y ago
Wasn't it the radar/lidar what caused lots of crazy brakes when you ran towards a bridge or something else that reflected the signal as if there was a still standing vehicle or so?
lotsofpulp 1y ago
“Complete arrogance” means they do not want to use lidar/radar for pure ego, and there would be no negative effects of using it. Which is not true, as it would increase the costs of the producing and repairing the vehicle. One of Tesla’s major achievements is hitting the $30k to $50k price point with an 80% solution for self driving (regardless of their marketing it as 100%).
- lurking_swe 1y ago
  i suppose it’s a “major achievement” when we make something cheap that also makes roads more dangerous for humans? I guess that’s true if we view the world through a financial lens. Otherwise no it’s not impressive IMO. Especially with their very very unethical advertising of it, calling it “full self driving” and “autopilot”. Full self driving is something like waymo.
  - lotsofpulp 1y ago
    How does it make roads more dangerous for humans? It requires the driver to be paying attention. If drivers are driving distracted, that’s not a problem with any car, it’s a problem with humans wanting to look at their phone. At least the Tesla is monitoring people’s eyes to try to prevent them from distracted driving.

Daneel_ 1y ago

I feel like a lot of these systems, while reducing some types of incidents, also cause others. I know the lane-keeping assist function in my 2024 car (that turns itself back on every time I start the car) has a healthy appetite for trying to veer the car into oncoming traffic whenever I’m on a road with no lane markings. This is quite common on suburban roads. So far I’ve been lucky, but if it happens at just the wrong moment I can absolutely see it causing a head-on collision that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. For me this is the crux of the issue - these systems greatly improve some situations, but it’s not acceptable to do so at the expense of worsening others.

smallnix 1y ago
> these systems greatly improve some situations, but it’s not acceptable to do so at the expense of worsening others Can you elaborate please? E.g. do you mean that such tradeoffs are not acceptable, even if they result in a net benefit?
- taylodl 1y ago
  It's not a tradeoff. "Driving better than a human" means avoiding mistakes humans make and not making mistakes humans don't make.
  - lotsofpulp 1y ago
    Every mutually exclusive choice is a tradeoff, by definition. Perhaps the better word is “driving better than human drivers as a collective” to refer to a lower auto collision/injury rate. It might not be strictly more capable than a single ideal human always paying attention, but that is neither here nor there when comparing if software assisted driving is better than non software assisted driving. The easiest way to analyze this is to see if auto insurance companies offer a discount for using the software assist, as they are most directly impacted by population wide changes in the metric we are interested in (although I don’t think Tesla shares sufficient data about when and if FSD was used for auto insurers to be able to discern this).

TestingSpike1 1y ago

It's not acceptable to have FSD crashes same as it's not acceptable for people to crash. Here, sun just made a tesla kill someone, could have been you or your family. Everyone else predictably slowed down. Who is responsible and should be sent to jail for murder? The FSD software developers?, the driver since he was doing fuck all?

IcePic 1y ago
> It's not acceptable to have FSD crashes same as it's not acceptable for people to crash. Not sure what you mean by that? We could prevent almost every death, for instance by limiting speeds to <10 for instance, that would remove SO many accidents and incidents. It would also make travel take a really long time, like as if it was 200 years ago and you rode your horse across the country. But it would prevent almost all serious accidents. So the statement "its not acceptable for people to crash" is not true in a general sense. We are already balancing a certain amount of risk versus convenience of riding at speed to get places fast, to get transports in a timely manner and so on. Some countries, like Germany has roads with free speeds and get really horrible crashes at times involving many cars. Others place maximum limits to try to strike some kind of balance between accident rate/impact and the convenience or speed people would like to have, but from what I can tell, no country has set the limits so low that it actually fulfills what you wrote, that it is not acceptable for people to crash. It is solvable today, just not popular to make that actual decision. But it could be done and people would stop dying on the roads.
- IcePic 1y ago
  And I was meaning to circle back again to the comparison of incidents and crashes with or without computer assistance but got derailed. =) If we then figure that we are in the situation where those who decide are balancing between X% fatalities per year when people drive like they do currently, why would it be controversial to allow FSD or other similar techniques to have the same or lower rate of crashes? I'm not buying into Teslas own statistics on crashes per km/mile because lying with statistics is kind of easy, but lets pretend one or all car manufacturers manage to get cars to have 0.4% crash rate per year when people have 0.5%, why would anyone then want to prevent people from using FSD? Why would we apply a different set of standards for one "type" of driver and not the other? And if we were to apply different standards, which might be reasonable, why would we not choose the "safer" one? Not claiming we necessarily are at a place where computer assisted driving is demonstrably safer, but when we actually can prove it is even just a tenth percent better, by that time I think we should have an answer for this question.

akoboldfrying 1y ago

I agree with you that comparing the rates of accidents is what's important. It's especially important to think about what's in the denominator of these rate measurements. I think the right denominator is "per km driven". (Accidents per hour of driving is OK but penalises faster cars -- people usually need to move a fixed distance, from A to B, and a faster car travels that fixed distance in less time.) The numerator (fatal accident count) for Tesla FSD may indeed be just 1 (I didn't see this claimed in the article, but it seems the data is somewhat public, so presumably if there were more fatalities, they would have reported them), but the Tesla FSD denominator might be quite low too, which might make its rate comparable to or worse than the human one. Of course, we'd need a much greater sample size for any confidence, so it would make more sense to compare non-fatal accidents, which are more common.

paulryanrogers 1y ago
Also note that over the air updates mean a Tesla may behave differently every time you get inside one. It could get better or worse or just different. If the human behind the wheel has to compensate, they'll have to be extra vigilant despite the non-incident times lulling them into false sense of security. So do you run the numbers per FSD version? Do you insist they must be certified before they make changes? People are unpredictable too, yet we have a mental model of their/our behavior and our own personal limits. When I get in the car I have confidence in how I'll perform, and without FSD, will remember to constantly maintain control. And a 'flaw' in one person's wetware is limited to them. No one can push out a fleet update causing humans to start targeting pedestrians instead of avoiding them.

helsinkiandrew 1y ago

> If it then shows that running with it on is 10%, 50% or 90% "better" in avoiding accidents, then it is still a net win I think this is the first pedestrian death - there's a couple more in cars with FSD running, and lots more when autopilot was engaged: https://www.tesladeaths.com/ https://www.tesladeaths.com/ > There seems to be some kind of weird double standard where we let people get drivers licenses and run around causing X% accidents per year... Thats exactly the problem Tesla (and others have). Most polls still say large portions of the public don't feel safe with self driving cars on the road (For example: https://today.yougov.com/technology/articles/51199-americans-warm-to-driverless-cars-though-skepticism-remains https://today.yougov.com/technology/articles/51199-americans...). People understand about DUI, fatigue, driving too fast, etc. But a lot of automated driving deaths seem to be avoidable by a human with a bit of common sense.

ivewonyoung 1y ago
> lots more when autopilot was engaged: https://www.tesladeaths.com/ https://www.tesladeaths.com/ Blaming all of those or even most of those on autopilot seems extremely disingenuous, appears to be a misleadng propaganda website.
- gruez 1y ago
  Yeah wtf? I skimmed the first three entries and so far as I can't tell how FSD was involved, or even why Tesla (the company) was at fault. I guess technically those were deaths, and they were caused by a Tesla, so "telsadeaths.com" isn't inaccurate, but you'd be laughed at if you started a site called "toyotadeaths.com" with all the fatalities toyota cars were involved in.
  - ivewonyoung 1y ago
    > they were caused by a Tesla It's not even that, it includes entries like where a Toyota Tacoma pickup was driving on the wrong direction on the highway, ran into a Tesla and someone died. https://archive.is/GhYIs https://archive.is/GhYIs It's not even just deaths that happened in a Tesla for any reason because it also includes deaths in other vehicles, it's just any death where a Tesla was in the vicinity or something. Reminds me of the very popular "study" that did the rounds on all over the media and on here and Reddit where they counted suicides in a Cybertruck as being its fault to make it look artificially bad against the Ford Pinto. These false claims go unchallenged on Reddit because moderators will permanently ban anyone posting inconvenient facts, and BlueSky is probably worse. And given all the massive number of misinformed people, these propaganda tactics actually work pretty well.

os2warpman 1y ago

> And lastly, pet peeve about "recalled 2M cars". Yes, the term is like that, makes it sound like millions of cars had to go to the dealership or service, whereas someone codes up a fix, pushes a button and a week later, all cars are now running that fix. But that doesn't make for dramatic headlines if you have an agenda. That's not provocative. The vast majority of recalls in the modern age are software updates. Ford just recalled 1,075,299 vehicles due to backup camera failures last week and the fix is a technician plugging a cable into the vehicle and running a software update. The only difference is Tesla does it over the air. It was reported as "Ford Recalls More Than 1 Million Vehicles with Backup Camera Issue". No agenda. Factual, plain language writing.

berdario 1y ago

> if this in fact is the first recorded death that is directly linked to the car driving itself There have been 51 such deaths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_crashes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_crashe... > There seems to be some kind of weird double standard where we let people get drivers licenses and run around causing X% accidents per year I'm all for safe self driving, but the double standard here it's what's allowing Tesla to continue unpunished. The autopilot/FSD algorithm/AI/implementation is relied upon as if it was a driver... But when a driver kills someone the driver is (or should be) prosecuted, and shouldn't go back immediately on the road before proving that they can drive a vehicle safely. For humans you can blame "errors of judgement"... A person might not always reliably behave exactly in the same way when in the same situation (in both good and bad ways, e.g. distraction) But FSD instead means that a Tesla car using the same FSD version, in the same road and sky conditions, will always behave in the same way... If a human would cause an accident on that Arizona road in the same way, you could take their driving license away, and know that other road users don't risk being maimed by them anymore. The double standard here instead allows for thousands of other Teslas, with the same FSD version, to drive on the same road... Knowing full well that it's only a matter of time before the same conditions happen again, and a different Tesla would replicate the crash, endangering other road users.

kmacleod 1y ago
I'd prefer a blame-free NTSB investigation. It was a fault. Find the root cause, fix it, carry on. You're correct, they can still ground a fleet, but there doesn't also need to be a prosecution.
gruez 1y ago
>The autopilot/FSD algorithm/AI/implementation is relied upon as if it was a driver... Doesn't FSD still come with the disclaimer that the human driver should still be monitoring it? >For humans you can blame "errors of judgement"... A person might not always reliably behave exactly in the same way when in the same situation (in both good and bad ways, e.g. distraction) >But FSD instead means that a Tesla car using the same FSD version, in the same road and sky conditions, will always behave in the same way... Depending on how much you believe in free will, you could argue that humans will also "behave in the same way" given similar circumstances. For instance, being sleep deprived because of DST switchover, for instance. Moreover, I don't see any reason why humans getting distracted by a phone or whatever should be meaningfully different than a Tesla on FSD getting confused by a particular way the road/sky conditions lined up, especially if the latter occurs randomly.

danso 1y ago

> then it would be somewhat prudent to compare against say all the accidents made by tesla drivers not using any versions of FSD/autopiloting. One issue with this is that FSD/Autopilot is designed to disable itself in non-optimal road conditions. I know Musk claims FSD/AP is the only system to not have "restrictions", but you can check any of the Tesla & self-driving subreddits and find people complaining how they weren't allowed to use the driving systems in rain or extreme sunshine, and even some night time conditions. So now you're comparing the accident rate of FSD/AP under safe conditions, against vehicles that are driving through dangerous conditions that FSD/AP aren't allowed to. But accident rate is just one thing to be concerned about. If you picked 100 licensed human drivers and had them drive through the accident scene described in the article, I would happily bet $1000 that every driver, or at least, 99/100, would handle it without crashing. If 100 Tesla vehicles using the same version of FSD and camera hardware were driving through the scene described in the article, what would the accident rate be? The concern is that it seems like the deadly Tesla was acting as expected. Even worse, this sounds like a baseline scenario for any driving-assisted vehicle to handle: if the cameras are receiving an extreme amount of light/glare, why is FSD/AP not designed to drive cautiously (and then disable itself)?

tzs 1y ago

When a car with a driver assist system is the at fault vehicle in a fatal accident, how is it decided whether or not to blame the driver assist system? Is it only blamed if it was in control at the instant the accident occurred? Or does it also get the blame if it was in control shortly before the accident and made poor decisions that set up the accident but then realized it could not handle the situation, disengaged, and told the human to take over?