Copying a reply from earlier...

Google isn't doing this out of the goodness of their heart. They have always been required by law to send autonomous vehicle accident reports to the DMV, which are made available to the public on the DMV's website.

https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/testi...

So the transparency itself is mandatory. Google merely chose to control the message and get free PR by publishing an abbreviated summary on their website too. Judging by this comment, it's working!

For example, here's the full report on Google's accident in February, the first one where the autonomous car was the vehicle at fault: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/3946fbb8-e04e-4d52...

(see also studentrob's excellent reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12084444)

Then why on earth is Tesla being opaque and seemingly passing the buck with their PR?! I don't get it.

And, Tesla may be unwilling to start reporting driver-assist accident rates to the public unless the other driver-assist car companies are forced to do it too.

I'll make an addendum to my above comment.

You could have opened the first report[1] on that page and notice this is wrong.

> June 6, 2016:​ A Google prototype autonomous vehicle (Google AV) was traveling southbound on Berkman Dr. in Austin, TX in autonomous mode and was involved in a minor collision north of E 51st St. The other vehicle was approaching the Google AV from behind in an adjacent right turn-only lane. The other vehicle then crossed into the lane occupied by the Google AV and made slight contact with the side of our vehicle. The Google AV sustained a small scrape to the front right fender and the other vehicle had a scrape on its left rear quarter panel. There were no injuries reported at the scene.

[1] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en...

Well, that's awesome that Google reports on accidents outside of California too.

Thank you for correcting me, delroth.

Edit: I see the downvote. Am I wrong? Is being a CEO all rainbows and sunshine? Maybe I got some detail wrong. Feel free to correct me.

I like it when people try to do hard stuff, that's fine and maybe heroic. But they have to be prepared : if testing the whole thing must take 10 years to be safe and a gazillion dollars, then so be it. If it's too much to shoulder, then they should not enter the business.

That sounds like a succinct explanation for why we've been stuck in LEO since December 19, 1972.

We've got 7 billion+ humans on the surface of our planet. We lose about 1.8/s to various tragedies.

Most of which are of less import than helping automate something that's responsible for around 32,000 deaths in the US every year. Move fast, break people for a just cause, escape risk-averse sociotechnological local minima, and build a future where fewer people die.

Tesla is also not doing any kind of super special research into self driving cars. The system their cars use is (afaik) an OEM component (provided by MobileEye) that powers the driver assist features of many other brands, too.

Instead of actually improving the technology they have chosen to lower the safety parameters in order to make it seem like the system is more capable than it actually is.

We shouldn't go off expecting that someone elses ideas of safety will jive 100% with our own, and then blame them when someone else buys a product and is injured.

Should Telsa drive-assist deactivate and slow the car after 10 seconds without touching the wheel? Probably, but I won't blame them for not doing so if there is no regulatory framework to help them make a decision. It's certainly not obvious that 10 seconds is the limit and not 11, or 15 or 2 seconds.

Tesla tells us "it's the driver's fault that he died while using our Autopilot".

Either Musk approved this message, or he didn't bother to read it before it went out, and didn't bother to apologize afterwards.

I think we can draw some conclusions from that.