Unfortunately, fortunately, Tesla is having to educate people and being very clear to not allow room for panic and unwarranted fear mongering.

I would say it is as to the point as it can be, and that it is heartfelt.

Notice how quick they are to bring up "this is the first fatality in 130 million miles", but AFAICT, traffic fatalities in the US occur at a frequency of around 10 per billion miles [1], which is the same.

So even though this is just one data point, it's spot on the current average for fatality frequency in normal cars.

Furthermore, to gather enough statistics to be able to say with confidence "semi-autonomous Teslas are/aren't safer than normal cars", Tesla either needs to increase their sales volume by several orders of magnitude, or we'll have to wait for ten years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...

If we had data for the "high end modern full-size car" category, it would most definitely be lower than 10 fatalities per billion miles.

If you want to do the numbers to compare the Tesla to other cars, where they measure driver fatalities per million registered years, do this:

130,000,000 miles / 12,000 average miles per year per car = 10,833 years.

That's 10,833 registered years for the Model S.

The IIHS site normalizes to deaths per million registered years, so multiply that number by 92.3, and since we have one death so far, the Tesla Model S is now at 92.3 driver deaths per million registered car years.

Let's compare to other car models:

  Ford Taurus 2WD: 20 deaths
  Hyundai AccentL: 86 deaths
  Lexus LS 460 2WD: 18 deaths
  Acura TL 2WD: 5 deaths
  Audi A4 4WD: 0 deaths (yes, a bunch of car models had zero driver deaths)
  And average for ALL 2011 vehicles: 28 deaths.

Auto-pilot is semi-autonomous... I gather you consider that a risk...

What about Subaru EyeSight? It can autonomously brake. I can drive for hours on the freeway without ever hitting the brake nor gas, even in stop and go traffic. It has warned me multiple times of a sudden slowdown just as I noticed it. It hasn't yet saved me from anything, but if any of those circumstances I'd been distracted (even for a legit reason) it could have. It once warned me of a motorcycle in my path on a very dark night when the dim tail-light of the motorcycle was overwhelmed by the much brighter tail-lights of the cars to its left and right. I would have seen it soon enough, but the car saw it first. Is that a risk to other road-users? Yet, it's automated by some definition.

What about various other manufacturer's lane keeping features? That automation to some degree.

What about ABS? Stability control? Again... automation to some degree.

All of these have their detractors, yet I think statistics clearly show an improvement with each level of driver assist.

How you can draw such a conclusion from a singular data point? That's beyond ridiculous.

> This is the first known fatality in just over 130 million miles where Autopilot was activated. Among all vehicles in the US, there is a fatality every 94 million miles. Worldwide, there is a fatality approximately every 60 million miles.

"4 Times Deadlier!" certainly comes across as sensationalist based on such flimsy data (never mind that the real figure is actually 3.2 and the parent chose to round up rather than down to serve his/her purpose).

Whereas Tesla's statement comes across more as a statement of fact (albiet quite self-serving.. no question about that).

A normal car drives about 100 000 miles in 10 years. You then need one million autonomous cars driving around for a decade before you even know whether they're safer!

Maybe a billion miles are needed for a fatal crash, but for small mistakes it's much less.

Can you give a source for that number as it seems a bit low given warranty numbers.

"Among all vehicles in the US, there is a fatality every 94 million miles. Worldwide, there is a fatality approximately every 60 million miles."

Although US foreign policy and intelligence decisions were more or less directly responsible for 9/11, you don't lecture people at Ground Zero about the dangers of blowback and not being aware of your government's activities.

There's no such thing as "condolences, but...", and Elon Musk has shown a pattern of this kind of tone-deafness before. Not to say he's not brilliant and not to say autonomous cars won't ultimately save many lives, just that he should either listen to his PR department if he overruled them, or fire his PR department if they did this without him.

Excellent, Doc. Further to the point about these statements and Musk's leadership: not too long ago Tesla would include the fact that nobody has been killed in a Tesla in their public statements. I found it completely inappropriate since we all knew it was just a matter of time, sadly. Again they play with fire, as another death with autopilot will really wreck their statistics.

there is no such feature, there is a MobilEye _lane following_ system Tesla repackaged under Autopilot(TM) brand.

Say it out loud - lane following. Mercedes sold this same tech almost 10 years ago, difference is Tesla felt pressure and started believing their own marketing lies about autonomous driving.

I would assume that the higher-end GM cars do have an automatic braking collision avoidance system by now, since that's a pretty standard feature above a certain price point. And I would assume it's not foolproof either, but at least it doesn't lead the driver to think he can take his hands off the wheel and not pay attention to what's happening on the road.

Tesla reiterates every time and makes you confirm you understand that this is not the case. If the driver did it, that's completely on them being irresponsible.

And pilots still make mistakes when adjusting to a context where the autopilot has unexpectedly handed control back to the humans.

one failure and they will take a minor publicity and money hit, two and its going to devastating

Now, this is pure speculation, but I really can't imagine running into the side of an 18-wheeler crossing the highway unless A) I was traveling at a reckless speed (unlikely given that "auto-pilot" was on) or B) I wasn't paying attention to the road.

https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/files/2016/0...

IMO, human (customers') expectations require more than a mere autopilot.

They have to defend autopilot not only to protect the brand but to protect the public's perception of autonomous vehicles in general.

Self driving tech is poised to save many many lives. So from a utilitarian perspective, it's probably justified to take extraordinary measures to make sure reactionary media and public whim doesn't kill it off, however uncomfortable that might seem in the short term.

Whilst this case is incredibly sad (and I don't want to downplay that in any way), if you're trying to minimise the overall amount of fatal crashes, exonerating the tech is the priority (if it is truly not at fault).

2. From the rest of this thread, it sounds like their long-range cameras/radar has very limited FOV.

> They have to defend autopilot not only to protect the brand but to protect the public's perception of autonomous vehicles in general.

They could have done that in two separate posts. This was tone deaf at best.

Why? Why not just build the cars people want? (including cars that people want but don't realize they want yet)

There shouldn't be a political agenda associated with engineering. Build what is needed. Build what people want. Build what people will need. But never "defend my reputation and the reputation of this device that I'm making"

EDIT: I mean, I get why Public Relations are important and so forth. So Tesla is certainly free to do what they want here. But lets not pretend that this carefully crafted "condolence" piece that has come out roughly one and a half months late is anything but damage control for this company.

The computer would have to be 99.99999% reliable to do that.

The accident rate is around 74 per 100 million miles (and fatalities is 1.13).

It's unclear exactly how to turn that into a percentage, but no matter how you do it it's quite high.

Say an accident takes 5 minutes, and people drive 30 miles/hour. Then that works out to 99.999% for humans. If you use the numbers for fatalities then it's 99.99999%.

I.e. 99.99999% of the time, as whole across all [US] humans, people drive in a way that does not cause a fatality.

That's the bar computers have to cross in order to save any lives at all.

Additionally, 92 people are killed in fatal car accidents in the US every day. So it's not as though this is some uncommon occurrence that autonomous vehicles would be unlikely to improve.

It most definitely is not above that bar! The autopilot is combined with a human operating the car.

How many accidents were avoided by the human rather than the autopilot?

I suspect a ton of accidents (i.e. the autopilot has a high error rate).

How many did the autopilot avoid that the human would not have? Probably not that many, if any.

> Additionally, 92 people are killed in fatal car accidents in the US every day. So it's not as though this is some uncommon occurrence that autonomous vehicles would be unlikely to improve.

Do the math.

I did.

0.00001% seems pretty uncommon to me. There is a lot of driving in the US, so even that low of a number is visible, but it's still a low number.

Remember every single computer must be all but perfect to reduce the error rate.

Have you ever seen a computer to be that good? At even something as simple as not crashing? Never mind driving a car.

You have to understand the magnitude of the perfection needed to have any hope of implementing it.

Tell me: Before you read my message, would you have assumed at a computer that is 99% perfect, or 99.9% perfect, would be better than a human?

I can tell you, that until I did the math, I thought so myself.

But 99.99999% is 10,000 better! If the computer was 99.9% perfect you would have almost 1 million fatalities per year (assuming things scale linearly, which I'm sure they wouldn't, probably most of the time driving is easy and 99.9% would still not get into an accident).

> It's a regular, daily occurrence for 92 real human lives every day.

I know. (Although you said that badly: it's not a daily occurrence for those people. But I get your emotion.)

But a computer will not solve this problem, not for a long time. We simply are not able to make a computer that is that good.

Let's see if we can make a web browser that is that good before we try to make a driving computer that good.

It also puts human drivers in a new light. I was of the camp that people are terrible, horrible drivers that kill all the time.

But actually humans are nearly perfect at driving, it's just there are so very very many people driving, so even a tiny cumulative error shows up.

Or probably it avoided 100,000 accidents!

Unfortunately, we are both just guessing.

So please keep your math out of this.

Except I am not guessing. That's the point of math.

The autopilot plus a human, only did slightly better than a human alone. That means the autopilot did nothing, since slightly better is well within the range of normal for a human alone.

> So please keep your math out of this.

What a strange reply. Why keep math out of this?

Are you hoping that this will be real if you ignore all evidence to the contrary?

Right now the evidence is in: Computer assisted cars don't do anything helpful to the accident rate. This bodes poorly for self driving cars, and since the error rate they have to hit is so low, it's really not looking good.

I personally don't expect self driving cars to ever be used on regular streets. Only on computer-exclusive roads, specially marked for them.

I personally can't wait for fully self-driving cars, but it's going to be a big PR battle in the US

Based on what?

Human drivers are very bad. We kill over 32,000 people a year (and that's a 60 year low, just a few years ago it was over 40,000).

So if self driving cars are just a little better than humans, they will save many lives. If they are a lot better than us, they will save many more.

Also don't forget that while each of us is somewhat unique in terms of driving, the cars are not, so a bug in a car's software can amplify issues even further.

There are issues also how cars will behave when they will have to interact with other self driving cars. Those problems are already difficult when writing distributed applications and with cars we don't have luxury of just letting things crash together until things improve.

Only when that's deemed acceptable.

http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff

> But how much work the software does is not what makes it remarkable. What makes it remarkable is how well the software works. This software never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program — each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors.

You say that so glibly. Have you ever done the math? I did, I posted it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12012166

Summary: The computer would have to be better than 99.99999% perfect to save any lives.

That's a hypothetical. You say autonomous cars are "poised" to save many lives -not even avoid many deaths, actively "save".

That's very strong language to use based on an "if" that nobody yet knows the answer to with any certainty.

That is, unless you are privy to some information that the rest of us are not? Are you?

What is it that you base your assertion on? Do you base it on anything or is it just a pretty turn of phrase you thought sounded cool?

There are already videos of assisted-driving cars avoiding accidents which likely would have been fatal. We already know they can potentially save lives. It's something we already accept for flying. Autopilot in planes has resulted in deaths of crew and passengers. So we have precedent in at least one mode of transportation.

Drivers get T-boned or rear end other people all the time. Those are two scenarios where driver-assist could have applied the brakes and actively saving lives for drivers inattentiveness. You'll also find no shortage of Liveleak clips of people being killed by drivers who failed to see them and brake in time. Many being scenarios that Google's self-driving cars have the technology to avoid.

I'm not concerend about assisted driving. I'm concerned about fully autonomous cars being handed complete control in real-world situations.

I'm not just "concerned" about them- they scare the hell out of me.

>> Many being scenarios that Google's self-driving cars have the technology to avoid.

What Google says it programs its cars to do, what it really programs its cars to do and what its cars can really do are all separate things.

The problem is that the current technology level is nowhere near advanced enough to allow fully autonomous vehicles to operate safely. There is a huge number of situations that those cars aren't programmed for, that they can't be programmed for, because those situations are completely unforseeable.

Machine learning has a huge problem with data sparsness. You may train a learner in petabytes and petabytes of data collected from the real world and still miss the vast majority of events that may occur.

That is why, like I say elsewhere, machine learning-based AI makes utterly ludicrous mistakes that humans would never do, even in difficult situations were they can't be expected to perform with 0% error. I've used a few metaphors- here's another one: a human would never mistake a truck for a cucumber. A machine learning algorithm, might.

And what's worse, there's no way to prevent this sort of mistake, or even correct it, because most of the time the models built by such algorithms are simply too complex to be processed by humans in the way a hand-crafted system would be (and goddess knows how hard those can be to process).

Autopilot in a plane doesn't have to deal with obstacles besides the odd mountain here and there.

So I'd say that in many (most?) ways it's easier and safer to autopilot a plane than a car, and as you say, even planes with autopilot have failed.

Planes most certainly do have to deal with wildlife (e.g. birds) appearing suddenly in their path regularly.

In other words, the plane autopilot doesn't "deal" with wildlife at all unless you count running into it. Which is apparently what Tesla autopilot does as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...

From which I quote:

The number of deaths – and deaths relative to the total population – have declined over the last two decades. From 1979 to 2005, the number of deaths per year decreased 14.97% while the number of deaths per capita decreased by 35.46%.

So at least the rate of fatalities is decreasing. I won't claim I know whether that's because humans get better at driving, carse get safer, traffic regulations get safer, or any other factor, but the point is roads are getting safer already and without any autonomous vehicles on them.

[Original bit:] Again- based on what? Why do you say that? What is even your measure of humans getting "better"? Better at what? Better drivers? Better cognitive systems? Better what?

I said no such thing, you are putting words in my mouth.

What I said is that the baseline for traffic deaths is quite high, and if (or when) autonomous cars are even a little better than humans, then less lives will be lost.

I was replying to someone else and you jumped in. You can hold the accusations of putting stuff in places, thank you.

>> What I said is that the baseline for traffic deaths is quite high, and if (or when) autonomous cars are even a little better than humans, then less lives will be lost.

And I said that autonomous cars being better than humans is just a hypothetical.

I'll add that we have no evidence that it's the case. Computers are better at humans at tasks that require fast and accurate retrieval, or computation, but they'll not just magically become better than humans at driving. Somebody has to program them to do that.

So who is going to do that? Do you know how to do that? Do you know anyone who knows how to do that?

The theory is that we'll put enough (real or virtual) cars in enough training situations that they'll learn to drive on their own, but that approach has serious limitations, not least the fact that in the real world there may be an infinite number of situations that a learner will never encounter during training. In any case, with any other cognitive task that we train computers to carry out they end up making completely ridiculous mistakes, which in the case of driving will cost lives.

Until we have a way to develop systems that understand their surroundings, autonomous cars being better drivers than humans is just a dangerous fantasy.

Bad compared to pretty much every other form of transportation that humans employ.

Yes, self-driving cars will save lives if we assume that the self-driving technology is superior to humans in every way. That's almost a tautology though.

Self-driving cars don't get bored, but they don't seem to see white tractor trailers either. Technology has different shortcomings than people do. Whether tech shortcomings result in fewer lives lost than human shortcomings remains to be seen.

It's astounding to me that HN stories about self-driving cars sit right next to stories about iPhones and anti-virus software, and tone of the comments are diametrically opposed. If you read the comments on self-driving car stories, you'd think that technology can do everything better than people. If you read the comments on stories about iPhones and anti-virus, you'd think that everything has terrible bugs, vulnerabilities, and shortcomings.

Isn't Tesla using pure vision? Google also uses lidar, which fixes the problem. EDIT: Looks like I'm wrong and Tesla uses radar.

> Technology has different shortcomings than people do. Whether tech shortcomings result in fewer lives lost than human shortcomings remains to be seen.

Technology also gets better. Ten years ago, people were as bad at driving as they are today. Ten years from now, they'll be as bad as they are today.

Now compare self driving cars ten years ago to self driving cars today. And ten years from now.

> If you read the comments on self-driving car stories, you'd think that technology can do everything better than people. If you read the comments on stories about iPhones and anti-virus, you'd think that everything has terrible bugs, vulnerabilities, and shortcomings.

Those aren't contradictory.

I assume you just pulled that out of thin air but even if you hadn't, it is completely meaningless. We have nothing to compare human performance against. Humans have been driving for more than a century. What are you going to compare that to?

As to how preventable accidents are- sure, if you remove factors like the ones you say, you'll reduce accidents, but humans suffer from those cognitive impairments on top of our extremely well-tuned cognitive apparatus. Computers have nothing of the sort. They may not get distracted, but they're rubbish at doing the thinking that keeps humans safe on the road the vast majority of the time (given that the vast majority of drivers don't get killed in accidents).

To put it plainly, if you put a brick on the gas pedal and lock the wheel, you'll reduce the amount of accidents caused by cogntivie impairments like inattention and poor judgement- but you won't reduce the overall rate of accidents.

In other words, if you hand control to a system that doesn't sleep on the wheel but can also not tell a puddle from a boulder, you will increase risks rather than reducing them.

So long as every Tesla accident makes the homepage of CNBC, unlike the millions that occur in other makers' vehicles.

Tesla puts out an immediate PR, and the breaking news that went up on all the financial sites included quotes from it nearly as fast.

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/30/us-regulators-investigating-t...

Which is about right.

Table 28 of http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus15.pdf#019 is relevant to this discussion

The Tesla Model S will now never be one of them, and in fact, is now among average for fatality rates that includes motorcycles, drunks, and other dangerous factors. It's now not even among the class of luxury cars that have very low driver deaths.

Right now self-driving cars are far too dangerous for public use.

Which version? There is 60, 60D, 70, 70D, 75, 75D, 80, 80D, 85, 85D, 90 and 90D so which one are you talking about? Tesla calls their cars Model S the same way Apple calls their laptops Macbook.

It seems fair to me.

Already down $6/share in after hours trading.

This time, there's an interesting question. Did Tesla remotely access the crash data after the crash? Did they alter any data? Is that verifiable? The NTSB will probably explore that issue. The crash data record in an airbag controller becomes read-only when the airbag fires.

I think they did a fine job of handling this, and with the high visibility of this incident due to the use of autopilot they really had no other option.

https://www.teslamotors.com/de_DE/blog/teslas-antwort-auf-da...

Sure, if all the lawyers will promise not to take some statement out of context and sue them over that.. As long as such lawyers exist and that's the way the legal system works this is what can be expected out of statements from companies..

Personally, I would have used a more neutral title, led with sympathies for the family, and then gone into the technical detail.

If their detectors don't see a white car against a bright background, that's obviously a serious problem.

Edit: Given the down votes, I guess people really want the mental picture. Sad.