Re:Tesla's Autopilot Chief Keller Steps Down After Two Years
by abalone on Thursday April 26, 2018 @07:08PM
(#16936814)
You're just doubling down on very poor reasoning. Collision avoidance can fail 50% of the time and still result in a massive 50% reduction in accidents. Whereas if autosteer fails 50% of the time while seducing drivers into paying less attention, it's going to increase the accident rate. It is not the underlying technologies that matters here, it's the fundamentally different use cases and compares.
> I have a hard time imagining that the automatic breaking has surpassed the rest of the industry to a large enough extent that could make up for the autosteering being as dangerous as you are suggesting.
This is another comprehension error. You claim was "autosteering at worst had no effect on the accident rate." Thus any increase in the accident rate caused by autosteering, not merely a "large" one, would invalidate your claim.
For example the most recent fatality was directly caused by an autosteering error directing the car towards a median. However the accident could have been prevented if the automatic emergency breaking triggered before the collision. Considering it didn't, I have a hard time imagining that the automatic breaking has surpassed the rest of the industry to a large enough extent that could make up for the autosteering being as dangerous as you are suggesting.
It is certainly possible, it just seems unlikely that Tesla threads the needle to be extremely competent at one feature while also being incompetent enough to bungle a very related feature. That scenario relies on a lot more assumptions than the scenario I proposed which is why I described my original scenario as being the most conservative.