Less rich people, less healthy, driving smaller, older, less well maintained, less safely designed cars in more dangerous/remote locations. That’s a bunch of factors contributing to safety or lack thereof. Vehicle age alone is a huge factor in safety. Even the likelihood the driver and passengers are wearing a seatbelt is likely vastly different between Teslas vs all cars on the road. All those factors add up.

But that’s not even the point. The point is that the numbers Tesla gave are meaningless. Tesla’s stats would only be meaningful if you compared them to similarly sized/priced cars of the same age cohort with the same market segment. The fact that Tesla compares its luxury high-priced large sedans to all cars and not its own segment is itself very telling. They have those stats, and they would use them if they were compelling.

I've heard that before and it still sounds puzzling... Elon Musk has an ego the size of Mars, right? So he wants to sell autopilot-equipped cars to everyone, and his basis for comparison is everyone.

(Last posting from me today.)

Thank you. Do people really want Tesla to use another company's failure / worse #'s via statistics in their review of this accident?

At least they are responsive, seemingly open, and seemingly empathetic. They are obviously handling things in a business first manner as corporations will but it hardly feels as inhuman as people seem to be making it out to be.

My question is honest. I found GP's assertion and its implication astonishing, but if that's how it is...

You forget the key rule: "Move fast and break things", including people and expectations of human decency

There's always someone who expects more. If you make a doodah that reduces (name something bad) by 30% someone will expect 40%, if it improves (name something good) by 50% someone will expect 60%, and by the way it costs too much, whatever it costs.

Name your expectations up front, please.

The expectation is simple: value human life. Don't try to do beta tests and simultaneously market it as if it's production quality. Accidents happen, but own up to them; don't immediately and fervently insist that you were not at fault before the investigation even starts.

It may be easy to casually update software and break builds, but when human lives are at risk a healthy dose of conservatism is appropriate.

But you're right -- it's probably unfair to expect a SV company to prioritize anything over profits (we saw that with Facebook, right?)

I thought about this over the weekend. About that you want, concretely.

Tesla says their cars have drive past that spot 85000 times so far. So you may be asking for some testing that's better at uncovering problems than 85000 whitenoise test instantiations are. Or you may be asking to test, and test, and improve until the software meets the developers' intentions: If their intention is to improve safety by 40% (or 400%, or 40000%) then you may be saying they shouldn't release a version that's improved over the baseline by 20% (or 200%, or 2000%) because that still doesn't realise the design.

Seems a bit absolutist to me. You could equally well make the opposite absolutist argument that having inhouse software that's better than the current released is putting people's lives in danger by inaction/negligence/whatever. That fixing a bug or improving a feature confers a moral obligation to release immediately, lest people's life be put in danger which would be avoided by the new code.

Have you seen some of the drivers out there? Next time you’re in a parking lot take note of all the cars in terrible condition with scrapes and dings all over.