http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/quality-control-...
So Tesla files an FOIA and claims they are the transparent ones. This is a bad attempt at PR.
I disagree. People need to know that autopilot doesn't eliminate their responsibility for safely driving the vehicle and paying attention. People need to know they HAVE to respect the autopilot warnings. If that is happening too much in an area and so is too cumbersome, then don't use autopilot. And to wait a year for that to be released would not be in the public interest. Neither would a year of unanswered BS from short interests and competitors, considering that Tesla's vehicles overall are incredibly safe.
I think NTSB's action to remove Tesla is fine. Tesla felt they had to release such information (and there's a good argument for that, IMHO), but that is against NTSB's policy as it could compromise the investigation. So be it. Removing them may be best for all.
To tell people that you have to pay attention 100% of the time your don't need any of the details. You have stated that over and over again, it just doesn't do enough, because a few weeks later people have forgotten all these statements and new customers or people who just like the car, but don't follow the company might never even have read them.
You could make the same silly linguistic argument about "cruise control."
The problem with this strategy is that literally no one is clamoring for a self-driving car that requires you to have a license, both hands on the wheel, both eyes on the road, and to be alert at all times.
If you have to mention it, fine, but engineer the ways you mention it to have low penetration and low retention.
That is only to weasel out of the legal issues. They are doing marketing stuff that pushes the feature as vastly more capable on the side..For ex Elon Musk tweeting videos that shows cars traveling by itself on unmarked roads..And having declarations such as "The human behind the wheel is only for legal reasons, the car is driving all be itself" and such..
So the actual marketing is based on this unrealistic projection, and only these "statements", which the public will soon forget, is based on its true capability..
Which supports my point. Theses responses likely have had a bigger influence from lawyers than PR folks. The goals of those two groups are almost diametrically opposed to each other. The best thing for Tesla from a legal perspective is to downplay the capabilities of autopilot. The best thing for Tesla from a marketing and PR perspective is to exaggerate the capabilities of autopilot. Tesla is doing the former in these responses. They are choosing the legal response over the PR response. It also should be noted this is also probably the best move from a public safety standpoint. I don't know why people are claiming these responses are PR spin or how these response could possibly sell more cars.
Regarding the rest of your post, I was not talking about Tesla's general marketing. I haven't seen Musk do anything like you claim. That is certainly misleading and irresponsible if he does do that and implies that any current Tesla can "drive all be itself"
Please take a look at the very start of the video attached here [1]. It says "The person in the driver seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself".
Now, the next one [2], where Elon Musk retweeted a video of a Tesla navigating an unmarked road. There is a reddit discussion about the same here [3]
[1] https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2231417/tesla-shows-off-self-d...
[2] https://twitter.com/Teslarati/status/980476745106231297
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/88yk66/elon_ju...
Both videos also show attentive drivers who are able to jump in at a moments notice. The first video is a promo video and the second is from a Tesla fan. I wouldn't be surprised if they were specifically edited to showcase the car's features. I can certainly understand how someone might view these videos and think that autopilot is flawless, but I don't think Tesla is doing anything unethical in those videos.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's some fear over allowing uncertainty to fester for a year while awaiting the results of the investigation. But I think there's a much bigger risk in being perceived as unwilling to play by the same rules as everyone else.
The problem with this is that Tesla clearly believes that autopilot plus an attentive driver is safer than an attentive driver alone. I think that is most likely true.
It is possible that autopilot plus an inattentive driver is less safe than an attentive driver alone. I think this is plausible, but I don't think there is any real evidence to prove this one way or another.
The question then becomes does Tesla have an obligation to save the people in the second group from themselves and in turn put the people in the first group in greater danger?
That avoids prejudging whether it was primarily a defect with the vehicle, or driver error, or both.
Above all just respect the process. It's important to yield to an impartial entity when people have been hurt or killed.
Any faith the driver had in Tesla's autopilot system would be due to Tesla's marketing. If Tesla believes its self driving capabilities are not quite ready for market, maybe they shouldn't be selling it and calling it an "autopilot".
And Tesla said they'd continue to cooperate with the investigation, so why do you think a subpoena is suddenly needed?
We don't know and that's exactly the reason why NTSB has their disclosure policy in place.
It's to stop biased actors from dominating or setting the narrative early, before impartial actors have had a chance to corroborate what happened.
What if the car malfunctioned and the warnings weren't sounding? What if the warnings were sounding even though Huang had his hands on the wheel (as another poster above indicated has happened to them)?
I simply can't take what Tesla says at face value given the huge vested interest they have in controlling the story here.
> Over a year ago, our first iteration of Autopilot was found by the U.S. government to reduce crash rates by as much as 40%.
Why don't they talk only about Autosteer instead of Autosteer+AEB (and other features combined). Why not discuss how many accidents could have been caused by Autopilot if the driver did not correct it. Why is there no commentary on if whether their active driving system would be better run as a passive driver error correction system, as other manufacturers do.
> In the US, there is one automotive fatality every 86 million miles across all vehicles from all manufacturers. For Tesla, there is one fatality, including known pedestrian fatalities, every 320 million miles in vehicles equipped with Autopilot hardware. If you are driving a Tesla equipped with Autopilot hardware, you are 3.7 times less likely to be involved in a fatal accident.
Ahh, so a Tesla is safer than a 10 year old beaten down car with no airbags driven on country roads, I never expected that. Tesla is safer than even a motorbike, what a surprise. And just having Autopilot in your car (even disabled), makes you 3.7 times less likely to die. Does that say anything about Autopilot, or are they just touting non-Autopilot premium safety features?
> There are about 1.25 million automotive deaths worldwide. If the current safety level of a Tesla vehicle were to be applied, it would mean about 900,000 lives saved per year.
So, motorbikes driving in Himalyas are more deadly than a Tesla on California highways, who would have guessed. What does this say about Autopilot again?
> We expect the safety level of autonomous cars to be 10 times safer than non-autonomous cars.
Elon musk also expected driverless cars to be everywhere in 2017. And autonomous doesn't need to mean hands off driverless cars, they keep conflating assistive feature benefits with their hands-off technology.
Of course none of this data is very meaningful. You have to compare the rates of autopilot users to non-autopilot users of similar demographics, and have all crashes recorded, not just fatalities, to get close to a comparative samples.
Road fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants per year (2013, WHO):
UK 2.9
Spain 3.7
Germany 4.3
France 5.1
USA 10.6
Seriously, would Tesla's autopilot lower the crash rate in the UK? In Thailand? I guess it wouldn't change much in European countries, and any good car would do the same in poor countries.
Why not?
Via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r..., here is another table (same countries, same order) giving road fatalities per 10⁹km in 2015:
UK 3.6
Spain 7.8
Germany 4.9
France 5.8
USA 7.1It's hard to gather statistics about thing like that because it just look like a normal drive unless the driver records the near miss which is unusual unless they're driving with a dashcam or have had something happen in the same place multiple times.
Saying clearly that abdicating your responsibility to drive the car can (and has) resulted in deaths does serve public safety. Its critically important that people driving this section of road (and others like it) know about this as soon as possible.
Call it victim blaming if you want, and certainly there was some spin, but it is unfair to say that this has no safety element.
One such example of this is at https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/8a0jfh/autopil...
> Yep, works for 6 months with zero issues. Then one Friday night you get an update. Everything works that weekend, and on your way to work on Monday. Then, 18 minutes into your commute home, it drives straight at a barrier at 60 MPH.
> It's important to remember that it's not like you got the update 5 minutes before this happened. Even worse, you may not know you got an update if you are in a multi-driver household and the other driver installed the update.
The crash rates are for all miles travelled before and after Autopilot installation and are not limited to actual Autopilot use.
Both buckets also have plenty of miles with adaptive cruise control on - the data can't be used for a human vs autopilot comparison.
And even taking those considerations into account, there is a lawsuit [1] asking for the data used to come to those findings which NHTSA and Tesla have both resisted.
Tesla has never proven that Autopilot is safer than a human driver.
[1] https://jalopnik.com/does-teslas-autosteer-really-cut-crashe...
That's (a) comparing Teslas to Teslas, not to all vehicles, and (b) not necessarily comparing safety, but crash rates.
however, if you want to compare AutoSteer vs no Autosteer, you need to compare Teslas to teslas, and compare crash rates not fatalities.
A lot of the other car-safety innovations usually have a failure state where it doesn't put you in a worse off position that you normally would have been in, should that innovation not have existed (e.g., crumple zones, crash-safe interiors, highway design/signage, ABS, etc.).
Reducing the absolute # of car deaths is always a good thing, and undoubtedly # of deaths saved by AutoPilot > # of deaths caused by AutoPilot, but looking at that comparison makes people worrisome, especially if you can picture yourself on the RHS of that equation.
Personally I'm not sure where I stand. I do find it uncomfortable having ever-increasing levels of software complexity in my car.
As noted in the article, the information being released includes blaming the victim and other PR spin. This doesn't serve the public or further highway safety; it further's Tesla's commercial goals.
If Tesla's withdrawal hampers the investigation, let's hope the agency uses its subpoena power to get the info it needs to determine the cause of the accident and what Tesla needs to do to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future.