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Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving linked to hundreds of crashes, dozens of deaths
(www.theverge.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Is the investigation exhaustive? If these are all the crashes they could find related to the driver assist / self driving features, then it is probably much safer than a human driver. 1000 crashes out of 5M+ Teslas sold the last 5 years is actually a very small amount
I would want an article to try and find the rate of accidents per 100,00, group it by severity, and then compare and contrast that with human caused accidents.
Because while it's clear by now Teslas aren't the perfect self driving machines we were promised, there is no doubt at all that humans are bad drivers.
We lose over 40k people a year to car accidents. And fatal car accidents are rare, so multiple that by like 100 to get the total number of car accidents.
The question isn't "are they safer than the average human driver?"
The question is "who goes to prison when that self driving car has an oopsie, veers across three lanes of traffic and wipes out a family of four?"
Because if the answer is "nobody", they shouldn't be on the road. There's zero accountability, and because it's all wibbly-wobbly AI bullshit, there's no way to prove that the issues are actually fixed.
The answer is the person behind the wheel.
Tesla makes it very clear to the driver they you still have to pay attention and be ready to take over any time. Full self driving engages the in cabin nanny cam to enforce that you pay attention, above and beyond the frequent reminders to apply turning force to the steering wheel.
Now, once Tesla goes Mercedes and says you don't have to pay attention, it's gonna be the company that should step in. I know that's a big old SHOULD, but right now that's not the situation anyway.
That doesn't give me warm and fuzzies either... Imagine a poor dude having to fight Mercedes or Testla because he was crippled by a sleeping driver and bad AI... Not even counting the lobbying that would certainly happen to reduce and then eliminate their liability