https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/28/17172178/tesla-model-x-cr...
In the moralistic sense, yes, Tesla needs to be reprimanded for its actions. However, lying in this manner is often well-protected by law, if you manage to include enough legalese disclaimers somewhere, and I suspect Tesla has enough lawyers to make sure that legalese is sufficient to disclaim all liability.
That seems overly optimistic, if not an outright fabrication.
Please provide evidence.
Given that the only full-self driving system out there is Waymo's, which uses completely different hardware than Tesla's, it is impossible to back your claim, unless you develop a fully-self-driving system on top of Tesla's hardware.
So until that is done, your claim is false, no matter how many caps you use.
My phone also has cameras and a processor. Are you implying that my phone is as equipped to drive a car as a human?
A monkey has eyes, a brain, arms and legs. Are you implying that a monkey is as equipped to drive a car as a human?
This couldn't be further from the truth as automated vehicles still suffer from edge cases (remember the lethal accident involving a concrete pillar) where humans can easily make better decisions.
A system that is advertised as superior to human judgement ought to strictly improve on human performance. Nobody expects that to mean that the car drives perfect 95% of the time but accidentally kills you in a weird situation. This 'idiot savant' characteristic of ML algorithms is what makes them still dangerous in day-to-day situations.
Do you know how many people die in normal, non-self-driving cars? It's never possible to get 100% accuracy.
Who do you blame?
No one is saying guns, or cars, aren't dangerous. However this kind of false advertising leads people to use cars in dangerous ways while believing they are safe because they've been lied to.
(Side note, there is some fine print you never read that says the safe-gun technology only works when you point the gun at a single person and doesn't work on crowds.)
It means this will kill people but fewer people than humans would and they have actual data that backs this assertion up.
The benchmark is not an alert, cautious, and sober driver because that's often not how actual people drive. So right now it's often safer to drive other times it really is safer to use autopilot, net result fewer people die.
Ideally Tesla's marketing would say it's safer than drunk, sleepy, and reckless drivers, though it might not sell as many Autopilots.
I also imagine that cars will learn from both human and each others' driving patterns over time, which (under effective guidance) should enable an enormous improvement in a relatively short period of time.
However, I take the other interpretation. I don't think crashes are randomly distributed. That that scenario is absolutely perfect is really the problem because of humans. All a crash takes is a second of attention lapse at a really bad time. And in such perfect circumstances we get bored and take road safety for granted as opposed to driving at night or navigating around some tricky curves. And that's a perfect scenario to end up getting yourself killed in. And more importantly here, that's also the absolutely perfect scenario for self driving vehicles who will drive under such conditions far better than humans simply because it's extremely trivial, but they will never suffer for boredome or lack of attention.
Or well, I just put four cameras on my car and inserted their USB wires into an orange. I declare that this is enough for FSD now. I don't have to prove anything for such an absurd statement?
So, do you think it may be possible that people do understand the distinction and are STILL not convinced?
You may be breaking the law as well, depending on the gun laws in your area, but as I understand it (IANAL) the manslaughter charge of entirely on the shooter.
Tesla owner faces 18-month ban for leaving the driver's seat https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/29/tesla-owner-faces-road-b...
In that study there are two buckets, one which is total Tesla miles in TACC-enabled cars and then after the update total Tesla miles in cars with TACC + Autosteer and they calculated on airbag deployments. Human driven miles are going to dominate both of those buckets and there's a reason the NHTSA report makes zero claims about Tesla's safety relative to human drivers. It's totally outside the scope of the study. Then add in that some researchers who are skeptical of the methodology and have been asking for the raw data from NHTSA/Tesla have yet to receive it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16932350
Autosteer, however, is relatively unique to Tesla. That’s what makes singling out Autosteer as the source of a 40 percent drop so curious. Forward collision warning and automatic emergency braking were introduced just months before the introduction of Autosteer in October 2015. A previous IIHS study shows that both the collision warning and auto emergency braking can deliver a similar reduction in crashes.
You can define it however you want. By any common sense definition of safety Tesla has not proven that their autopilot is 'safer' than a human driver.
>10x or 100x the number of deaths would be small price to pay to get everyone in autonomous vehicles.
This supposes a couple things. Mainly that autonomous vehicles will become safer than human drivers, that you know roughly how many humans will have to die to achieve that and that those humans have to die to achieve it. Those are all unknown at this point and even if you disagree about the first one (which I expect you might) you still have to grant me two and three.
Can Autopilot not run passively and prevent human errors? Why are the two options presented seem to be only "only a human behind the wheel, not assisted by even AEB" and "Full autopilot with no human in the car at all".
But if you build faulty staircases that make people slip, they can still put you in jail or sue you.
Same if you push them down the stairs.
false equivalency. you need at least compare per mile, at best by driver demographic since most tesla drivers are in the high income and maybe in the safety conscious bracket
Deaths caused by Uber and Tesla hold little repercussions for them other than bad PR.
The US govt celebrates removing regulations which benefit its corporations at the cost of its citizens
Financial ruin for the company that was willing to put that BS below it's letterhead? Yeah, sure, in proportion with the harm caused. That said, human life isn't sacred. It and everything else gets trades for dollars all the time. A death or three shouldn't cripple a big company like Tesla unless they were playing so fast and loose that there's significant punitive damages.
In a large company like Tesla it shouldn't be marketing's job to restrain itself. That's not safe at that scale. There should be someone or a group who's job it is to prevent marketing from getting ahead of reality just like it's security's job to spend all day playing whack-a-mole with the stupid ideas devs (especially the web ones) dream up. Efficiently mediating conflicting interests like that is what the corporate control structure is for.
People using your product in accordance with your marketing should be considered almost the same as in accordance with your documentation. While "people dying while using the product in accordance with TFM" is not treated as strict liability it's pushing awfully close.
I see it as a simple case of the company owning up to its actions. It failed to manage itself properly, marketing got ahead of reality. You screw up and someone gets hurt then you pay up.
It's one thing to talk about punitive damages and liability, these are factual mechanisms of our legal system. But just because damages can be paid and are on a regular basis they do not imply that there is some socially acceptable let alone codified price for a human life. And we should hope for our own sake there never is.
I agree that marketing should not be allowed to let their imagination run wild to the detriment of the company.
In the case of the liability bit IANAL but that's likely to differ between industries. Some sectors like aviation are highly regulated and require certification of the aircraft and the airplane flight manual is tied to that serial number and is expected to be, correct and free of gross errors for normal operation. So liability can vary. Are you suggesting from experience that there is no liability in the case of Tesla taking into account their industry's context? I don't know enough about their industry to judge, just looking for clarification.
Wow. Uhm, slavery is illegal if you haven't heard. We made it illegal because life is sacred.
Punitive damages go part way to help prevent this, but not far enough to guarantee that it never happens.
Had the society truly believed life to be sacred, I suspect we’d have very different business practices and penalties that are not limited to financial ruin.
You can build a highway overpass with a center support on the median for X and there will by a small chance of someone crashing into it and getting killed. You could design one without a support on the median but it will cost Y (Y is substantially more than X). Now scale that decision to all overpasses and you've got a substantial body count. At the end of the day it's a trade-off between lives/injury and dollars.
It seems odd to argue that. Yeah of course we can't stop doing things, but it doesn't mean we don't try really hard to avoid killing people.
Yes, and both Elon Musk as an individual and Tesla Motors as an organization agree. How they approach that idea is somewhat different from what we're used to though.
Their basic assertions are (in my words): 1. Vision and radar based technology, along with current generation GPUs and related hardware, along with sufficiently developed software, will be able to make cars 10x safer. 2. How quickly total deaths are reduced is tied directly to how quickly and widely such technology is rolled out and used. 3. Running in 'shadow' mode is a good source of data collection to inform improvements in the software. 4. Having the software/hardware actually control cars is an even better source of data collection to accelerate development. 5. There is additional, incremental risk created when the software/hardware is used in an early state. 6. This is key: the total risk over time is lessened with fast, aggressive rollouts of incomplete software and hardware, because it will allow a larger group of people to have access to more robust, safer software sooner than otherwise would be possible.
That last point is the balance: is the small additional risk Tesla is subjecting early participants to outweighed by how much more quickly the collected data will allow Tesla to produce a more complete safety solution?
We don't know for sure yet, but I think the odds are pretty good that pushing hard now will produce more total safety over time.
> life is sacred
This is my background as well, and its an opinion I personally hold.
At the same time, larger decisions, made by society, by individuals, and by companies, must put some sort of value on life. And different values on different lives. Talking about how much a life is worth is a taboo topic, but it's something that is considered, consciously or otherwise, all day, every day, by many people, myself included.
Most every big company, Tesla Motors included,make decisions based on these calculations all the time. Being a 'different kind of company' in many ways, Tesla makes these calculations somewhat differently.
Why then does Tesla have a pass? There's no evidence it's actually safer. And there's no evidence that the company is truthful. We don't accept when a pharmaceutical company says, "no, it's good. Trust us." That would be crazy. We should not accept Tesla's assurances with blind faith simply because they have better marketing and a questionable ethical standard.
http://driving.ca/tesla/model-s/auto-news/news/iihs-study-sh...
Tesla is safer for the community based on the statistical data. Also it is safer than a human driving. I’m not saying it will never crash just that it will crash less than a human.
Maybe another way to compare it would be to an autopilot in airplanes. Sometimes it fails so we might as well be angry at the airline companies if they advertise it. But a pilot would make more mistakes than the autopilot with the current workload.
Side note: if you are going to downvote you can comment on why. Negative feedback is very useful and helps build better argumentative skills.
What is lower and compared to what? I am tired of this vague misleading statements by Elon musk, Tesla and their supporters.
They claimed Autopilot + driver is 40% safer than a driver alone. And that includes Automatic emergency braking. Is it a surprise that AEB reduces accidents?
Why is that used as proof that Tesla's software is FSD. FSD implies that the car is capable of driving without a driver.
Is Autopilot alone safer than a driver? There is no proof of that
But what you should compare is Autopilot alone compared with a driver assisted by Autopilot. So, is Autopilot better than Driver+Autopilot? I can assure you its not, the driver still adds value.
Reddit is dominated by tesla's marketing team. Upvoting, downvoting, and commenting.
Here you get a real discussion regarding Elon's outlandish promises.
One of the big issues here is the concept of "human error", as though a statistical average is some sort of monolith that can be applied to all humans. The truth is that many people lack the basic skills and attributes needed to drive safely (concentration, attention to detail, the ability to multitask effectively). This is true even before factoring the millions of elderly people who are unable to tie their own shoes or operate a self-checkout kiosk who are out on the road making things more dangerous for everyone (including themselves). Performing virtually any task better than "the average human" is a very, very low bar to hurdle. The question is, what standard should we be using to determine who (or what, in the case of self-driving cars) should be allowed to pilot a multi-ton vehicle on public streets? The truth is that we favor convenience over safety (and I'm not even arguing that this is a bad thing - just that it is an often ignored fact) in many facets of society, and in order to have an intelligent debate about self-driving cars we ought to recognize and acknowledge this fact.
People just assume that if a computer does something, it's going to be perfect. It isn't.
Most humans can't even "self-walk" without occasionally stumbling and falling. Does that make human locomotion dangerous and false?
I admit I recently upped that number from "5-10 years minimum" after seeing the media reaction to recent driver-assist systems related accidents — it became clear to me that the old adage "the autonomous car does not need to be perfect, it only needs to be better than an {average, good, skilled} human driver" is simply wrong, because autonomous car brand X will be regarded - and judged - as if all X cars are one driver. Thus, these cars actually need to be much better than humans in essentially any traffic situation, because it simply won't be acceptable for "autonomous cars of brand X" to kill a few thousand people each year in every country. People would equate this to a single human driver mowing down thousands.
This effect is not necessarily bad, I don't have the inside information, but it's likely (or at least probable) that manufacturers invested in this technology observed the same and drew a similar conclusion.
The question now is whether the car makers make autonomous cars that good, or invest into massive PR campaigning to change public perception towards "each autonomous car is like an individual driver and it doesn't need to do much better than that".
We've seen the latter before. Jaywalking and avenues are just two examples.
Still a bit deceptive, to me. Reminds me of "...electroplated in 16 carat gold...".
At some point, critical thinking is required to navigate the world. The customer should ask “and when will the software catch up?” And I’ll concede that the overwhelming majority of the population doesn’t think like that. Should Tesla update the site with statements to confirm the negative cases? e.g. “Our software can’t yet do X, Y, Z, etc”
At some point, they will have to provide said demo or they will be facing a class action lawsuit that will bankrupt the company.
that's false too. how would one prove that the current shipped hardware is sufficient for autopilot? some hardware is present for sure, but is it all needed as they claim? they cannot know, since they don't have an autopilot using such hardware to achieve the stated goal. they believe it is sufficient, which is quite not the same as the claim and it is also being vocally challenged by experts that criticize the decision of omitting full lidar coverage
Also, how can we even know the hardware is sufficient unless said software exists and shows that what we think is possible is indeed possible?
Some hardware is present, but that it is sufficient for full self-driving is simple speculation for which Tesla has no reasonable basis. The only way for them to know it is sufficient is to have self-driving implemented on it, which they obviously don't.
Its at best empty puffery and at most outright fraud, but in either case it's a knowingly unjustified claim, even if not knowingly false.
Or are you suggesting that there are Tesla owners who are (a) sitting in their driveway wondering why their car isn't driving them to work or (b) returning their cars upon finding out many of the features on the Autopilot page require regulatory approval?
Tesla driver caught turning on autopilot and leaving driver’s seat on motorway Culprit admits he knew what he had done was ‘silly’ but that the car was capable of something ‘amazing’
It's really not that deceptive. People would have to be a lot dumber than they actually are to be confused about it.
I'd say that if they're claiming to be able to deliver full self-driving autonomy to existing cars via purely a SOFTWARE upgrade, then that's pretty deceptive, since I am pretty sure not even Tesla knows exactly what hardware might be required for such capability. They'll know when they build it, but not before.
That's one level past dishonest. Honest advertising would just be "none of our cars have full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver".
But this is on another level. Have they ever actually ran software that does, indeed, have this capability? Or do they have a detailed enough specification of that software, so that they can verify that it will, indeed, run on that hardware once it's written?
It's probably a safe bet that they haven't, and they don't, and in fact there is no way to verify that the hardware is in fact capable of running such software. This is likely a good engineering bet (i.e. the hardware is probably enough to support their current software approach, and they'll hit the software's limitations before they hit the hardware's), but advertising engineering bets as safety-related selling points is really irresponsible. Bet with your own money all you want, but not with people's lives.
Who's to know if there isn't a third key component necessary for that, behind yet another technical term?
Isn't Tesla's autopilot doing better than humans do in the same number of miles? We just all hear about it every time a Tesla is in a crash. If we heard about every human driver car accident, it would be overwhelming.
edit:
from this article: https://electrek.co/2018/03/30/tesla-autopilot-fatal-crash-d...
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.
Disclosure: I am one of the co-authors
every 320 million miles in vehicles equipped with Autopilot hardware.
does not mean 320 million miles with autopilot controlling the vehicle. Who knows how many of those miles are human driven?
Since a Tesla is often owned by people with better economic means, their statistics is not representative of all vehicles. The average vehicular fatality rate of this demographics and vehicle type could be well below that of Tesla with Autopilot.
What is the accident statistic for Teslas not equipped with Autopilot hardware?
If Autopilot enabled cars are so much safer than human drivers, can they pass a written and road side driver's license test?
> Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars
> All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver.
https://www.tesla.com/autopilot/