This is a dishonest comparison. You're comparing the Tesla to an "average" that includes 1995 Corollas that will happily let a telephone pole into the cabin and 1999 Dodge Dakotas that will readily turn into a pancake if you put them on their roof.

You're also comparing across economic classes and demographic groups. Your average Tesla owner is not going to be working 3rd shift or making a 100mi commute and consequently has a much lower chance of starting a small logging operation after falling asleep at the wheel or harvesting venison at high speed. Your average Tesla owner is also likely of an age where they're too old to be driving dangerously fast for conditions all the time but not yet old enough to be getting bad at driving. Basically the mean/mode Tesla owner is a wealthy-ish 30-something to 50-something man and that's a really safe demographic compared to the national average.

If you want to make a fair comparison compare the Teslas models to other sedans of similar age and price.

> the driver’s hands were not detected on the wheel for six seconds prior to the collision

What Tesla does not say is that the six seconds the driver's hands were not on the wheel was immediately preceding the crash. It is any six seconds before the crash.

Admittedly this is a very dark reading, however, this reading is supported by their further claims that the driver 'had multiple warnings', which was in fact fifteen minutes ago, and for an unrelated event.

This is the kind of sketchiness that makes people wary of Tesla. Funny thing is, they make cool tech, they don't need to do any of this, nor things like discounting the 'gas savings' from the sticker price. I genuinely don't understand where their apparent need for pushing the definition of truth to its breaking point is coming from.

Had they not openly misrepresented their autopilots' capabilities, they wouldn't have lie in this bed of their own making now.

https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/autopilot?redirect=no

In the beginning of this video there's the caption "The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself."

If the lawyers in this lawsuit are any good they will have a field day with this.

It is definitely NOT a feature that has been released to the public.

The traffic aware cruise control and self-steering features tesla has released to the public require your hands to be on the wheel. If you take your hands off the wheel you will get a small warning, then a larger warning and finally a huge alert.

By the way, if you show a pattern of ignoring alerts it will refuse to drive for you anymore.

> Huang’s hands were detected on the steering wheel only 34 seconds during the last minute before impact.

If during the last minute before impact the hands were missing for any 26 seconds, then it makes no sense to say that they were missing for any 6 seconds. The 6 seconds can only be consecutive before the impact, right?

"This is the kind of sketchiness that makes people wary of Tesla."

Its the kind of sketchiness that make me wary of the stuff people post about Tesla. If the driver had multiple warnings - about anything, any car company will mention that, there is nothing exceptionally sketchy about Tesla doing so. And that is all on which you based your incredible interpretation of "six seconds prior to". Its just an entirely made up accusation.

> the only way for this accident to have occurred is if Mr. Huang was not paying attention to the road [1]

Tesla has made a habit of drawing conclusions about investigations that have just begun. It is sketchy, and people have noticed.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-says-fatal-model-x-aut...

> At 3 seconds prior to the crash and up to the time of impact with the crash attenuator, the Tesla’s speed increased from 62 to 70.8 mph, with no precrash braking or evasive steering movement detected. [1]

This means the vehicle gave the driver less time to respond. I'd argue the manufacturer bears some responsibility.

[1] https://ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/HWY1...

One theory is Musk has been misrepresenting the company's products for years in order to keep the valuation high, and he's now dug the hole so deep he can't find a way out.

This can only make sense if you ignore all the weird, incoherent, inchoate, abusive, and absurd things that come out of Elon Musk.

    > [...]misleading about having an investor
    > they didn't have[...]

1. TSLA told the SEC Musk's personal Twitter fell under their purview.

2. SEC: OK, thanks!

3. Musk proceeded to talk shit on Twitter.

4. The SEC got upset, TSLA agreed to have all of Musk's investor-related musings reviewed before posting.

5. Musk proceeds to share investment-related musings on Twitter again without going through that process.

6. The SEC tightens the screws.

There's mistakes, and then there's dangerously infantile and reckless behavior from a CEO and the board.

It's not even about the specifics of what he said. How hard is it to have one Twitter account for your random musings and another one for investment commentary?

Or, hire a full-time small team of lawyers whose only job is to be constantly VNC'd into your phone and shut it down if you're about to violate the SEC's terms about your use of Twitter.

If only there had been some prior warning signs, I don't know, maybe the board having some actionable thing to work with earlier. Say, like Musk calling a worldwide hero "pedo guy" on Twitter a year earlier, which might suggest that maybe his impulsive use of social media should be reigned in?

https://forums.teslarati.com/threads/hands-on-the-wheel-dete...

https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/hands-on-steering-wh...

https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/tesla-autopilot-not-se...

I don't get why it matters. Why is Tesla's responsibility greater or lesser based on the position of the driver's hands? The driver could have had one hand on the wheel while mousing around on a laptop with the other. Or he could have been intensely focused on the road ahead with his hands resting on his legs, inches away from the wheel.

I'm neither defending nor attacking Tesla here, because I don't think I have sufficient information to have an opinion either way. But I'm pretty sure that learning the answer to this particular question wouldn't have any bearing on any opinion I might eventually form.

And it wasn't malfunctioning. He wasn't a dead man. He was very much alive, understood the warnings, understood that the car expected him to keep his hands on the wheel and keep paying attention to the road. He understood the warnings so well that he was capable of avoiding them with such proficiency that he did not receive one for 15 minutes.

That's how dumb that argument is.

If a driver ignores the requirements of their driver license AND the vehicle's clearly worded warnings, then the driver is entirely responsible. Claiming that the driver is not at fault because they interpreted the word "autopilot" to mean "I can disregard my responsibility as a driver and ignore the vehicle's very clear warnings" is absurd.

Also the Tesla fatality stat is them playing with numbers. Majority of fatalities happen where autopilot wouldn't be used. Only 15% of fatalities happen on the freeway and highways. I bet that number goes to single digits with pedestrian deaths.

https://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/roadway-and-environment/f...

I didn't know Tesla sold motorbikes too.

Why do they still do this? What's the point if not trying to mislead the public?

You're answering your own question there; they're doing it not with assumed evil intent ("let's lie about the safeties so that people kill themselves ! meuahahah") but for PR and stock reasons, but it ends up being the same result: they want people to see autopilot as "it drives for you" if you're a car buyer or an investor, but they also want people to see it as "it's just a helper, it doesn't drive you need to drive" if you're a regulatory agency, a judge or a customer that got into a crash.

As for the stats comparison removing motorbikes is a big one sure, but you could go one step further and take into account only the miles on free/highway and let's compare it again, because if the US is anything like here in France most accident are in the 15 Km around the drivers' home (probably because the driver feel "safer" because he knows the road) and that's also when autopilot is the least likely to be on. Meaning they're comparing themselves with a lot of miles where they're not competing.

And even further than that, no matter how safe/unsafe you are, if all your crash ends up with "the driver should have been handling the wheel but wasn't" then it doesn't mean all those drivers did it wrong, for me it's more a case of "you disengage/safety system is incapable of handling a case that's causing fatalities yet is common enough that all your crash report point at it".

Additionally, the Tesla cohort is really modern high-safety passenger vehicles IMO. A < 5 year old passenger vehicle with stability control, etc could easily be statistically as safe as a Tesla.

A 15km radius from my house would nearly cover all but the most far-flung areas of the medium-sized city that I live in. The vast majority of my driving would be within that radius, so it's not surprising the majority of my driving accidents would be within that radius.

Just for reference, a disk with a radius of 15km would have an area of 700km². You could compare that with the area of Chicago (590km²) or New York City (780km²).

You’ll often read this, yes, but I read a fascinating breakdown that called BS on the whole thing.

It's that last item that I'm focussing on.

In other words, are we statistically more likely to crash near home? Yes. Are we more likely to have an accident simply because we are close to home? Not likely. If two thirds of accidents (for example) are within 5 miles of home, what percent of your driving is within 5 miles? If it's also two thirds, then it's a useless statistic that is thrown around for FUD purposes.

I can't back it up right now, though.

I live pretty much exactly one mile from my work, and the two nearest shopping centres are less than half a mile beyond that.

I'd definitely be interested in seeing some heat maps of representing this data. It's easy to believe that the majority of people live close to at least one of the places they most often travel to, whether that is a workplace or other activity, and I think you're right that this is an important metric within which to consider such statistics.

This is the game-as-played, vs the game-as-we-wish-it-were-played. If you don't want a player to engage in this, don't accept it in any of the players, like the plaintiff.

I wouldn’t assume that. Videos of this exact scenario prove that the reaction time required is on the order of a few seconds.

Everything Tesla says here exaggerates driver culpability, like saying he received “multiple warnings” (15 minutes ago and completely unrelated). Don’t let that hypnotize you into thinking he was being irresponsible here. There may have been other factors at play such as getting blinded by the sun during those few critical seconds of Autopilot error.

(Since California uses comparative fault in these kinds of cases, legally this would seem to at best reduce but not actually eliminate Tesla's liability, even were a jury to be convinced by it.)

> If you are driving a Tesla equipped with Autopilot hardware, you are 3.7 times less likely to be involved in a fatal accident.

Which I suspect says nothing about the vehicles (much less autopilot hardware specifically, and even less the autopilot function), and everything about the age demographics of Tesla owners, because age is a significant factor in accident rates, and there are probably disproportionately few teenagers and other very young drivers driving Teslas.

https://aaafoundation.org/rates-motor-vehicle-crashes-injuri...

HN's Contrarian Skeptics Brigade can correct me on this (I repent!), but I think this is not very different than saying:

"10 out of all 100 people get this disease. We tested this hand-picked group of 10 people and found that only 1 of them had it. This small group is ten times more healthy than the general population!"

The number of Tesla cars with Autopilot in circulation must certainly be a small fraction of all vehicles on US roads (including bicycles, etc). It makes sense that, if you look for an event in a smaller population you should expect to see it happening in a different rate than in a larger population - for the same reason that if you toss a coin ten times and count the proportion of heads it may well be different than 0.5, but if you toss it one million times you're much more likely to see it landing heads half of the time. More observations allow you to better estimate the true distribution of events.

On the other hand I think people mostly know the score. I'm sure the driver in this crash knew he should have been looking and autopilot was not 100% reliable. I enjoy riding motorcycles which have a stupid high death rate compared with cars. It's a free world to some extent.

One immediate problem with real world stuff like this is selection. How do we know that Tesla is safer because it is built more safely than normal cars, rather than that perhaps people who are more safety conscious buy a Tesla? After all it's a more expensive car, the kind of thing you might only be able to afford once you're a bit older, the same time that you might have kids to worry about. But older people are also not the type to be racing around fast and furious style. Maybe there's an imbalance in the man/woman distribution?

It's a real can of worms to unpick these kinds of things. You find it all the time in social sciences.

Maybe you can find stats for Teslas without autopilot, or other cars with autopilot, and other cars without auto. And stats for how Tesla drivers are distributed according to age and sex?

Did you mean to ignore the fact that Tesla knows the score?

Tesla knows all of those statistics about its drivers, and knows how those numbers compare to other published data.

And they chose to write up the data in the manner they did.

In which configuration of all possible worlds is this ok?

In light of this new context, has your thinking around this subject changed?

Of course Tesla and any other firm that releases stats to prove a point need to do so honestly. And they would have made the exact same considerations that I listed. So yeah, they should have released more representative stats.

I'm sure the PR people don't know anything about stats though, plus they would want to pick whatever they think makes the company look good.

10/100 is same percentage as 1/10, so groups would have same mean.

Your point is fair though, but it would be more appropriate to make the example 0/10 in the small group when there was a ~1/10 chance of that happening (based on larger groups distribution) so its not super significant.

Why would you trust the "hands-on-steer" sensors? There was a sensor problem, after all. No reason to trust the manufacturer when they claim these other sensors did work properly.

If turning off automated features in a Tesla would lead to more deaths would that still be the right thing to do? At some point in automations progress this will become the Trolley Problem thought experiment, with one side being "Five people die but it was their own fault" and the other side is "One person dies but a machine did it" and we will have to decide which is morally correct.

Driving while checking a phone is illegal in most jurisdictions I'm aware of. Humans driving cars could eventually be seen in a similar light - there is no defense of choosing to drive yourself if a machine that is statistically better than you was available to do the job. It would literally be endangering other road users. And it isn't clear why a rational driver would choose to drive themselves anyway, other options being available.

The only blockers are (1) how good are computers really? and (2) how much extra does it cost?

I would also like to point out, that dividers like these are dangerous in of themselves. There should never be knife-like intrusions into the driving space on a high speed road of any kind. They are also quite uncessary, a few simple left right signs that bend over when you drive over them followed by basically grass would have been a much better outcome. That being said it is still tragic.

From experience driving around it, humans get dangerously close to the divider due to trying to change lanes much too late -- either into or out of the exit lane, often with a significant amount of braking. Durable cones separating the lanes might be an option, but would add significant maintenance expense.

The Tesla in question collided with the obstacle while its automation was attempting to maintain a lane, and because the automation detected that the car ahead had moved out of the lane, it also accelerated into the divider.

I seriously doubt many (or any) human drivers would misinterpret the position of the lane in this manner at this exit, especially given the conditions (clear day, sun high avoiding glare) despite the poor striping in the area.

and based on personal experience, he was probably overconfident because the person who sold him that car was overconfident.

i remember my first tesla autopilot test drive on a freeway...i was a bit nervous...constantly stepping in when i thought the car was tail-gating or not breaking fast enough and the salesman had a very nonchalant attitude as if I was being needlessly anxious about it.

PRwise, yes. But it could've been 7.4 kids who would grow up fatherless for the rest of their lives.

That thing is called "auto-pilot". If its purpose is not to self drive a car, maybe it should be renamed.

I had an Opel company car for two years, full of tech (lane assist, auto break, sign detection etc etc etc) after a year and a half I realized how much I relied on this stuff (hint way way too much!) our brains are wired in a way to do as much as possible with as little attention as possible...

So it is better for 10 humans to die at the hands of other humans, than one machine caused death? In what moral framework is that true?

If there were any. One of the claims in the lawsuit is "failure to warn" and the preliminary report of the NTSP says "the alerts were made more than 15 minutes before the crash".

We do know he received warnings. And we can strongly infer that he knew how to actively avoid receiving warnings. Therefore I can't possibly fathom how Tesla could be responsible for a "failure to warn".

Tesla's have detection is extremely rudimentary and requires the driver to apply torque to the wheel on order to be "detected". You could be grasping the wheel hard enough to turn coal into diamonds and it STILL wouldn't detect your hands unless you move the wheel slightly.

Tesla's "hand on wheel" detection is terrible. It basically only works if you have one hand on the wheel at the 2 or 10 o'clock position; you have to be slightly tugging on the wheel. But not TOO much or it disengages.

I would usually drive, on long straight sections of the Interstate, with my hand at the 5 o'clock position, resting on my thigh and grasping the wheel. Very little steering input is necessary. But the Tesla always detects this as "hands not on wheel". Ditto if I have both my hands on the wheel, because the pulling force evens out between the left and right side of the wheel.

I basically never drive without my hands on the wheel, but Tesla kind of always detects "hands not on wheel". Sometimes I notice it before it sounds the audio alert, but sometimes I don't.

Cannot say that I am shocked, though.

Exactly. I imagine hell freezes over before we see such data. Tesla did not even provide complete data to NHTSA [1]

[1] https://www.thedrive.com/tech/26455/nhtsas-flawed-autopilot-...

I really want one, but trust erodes at record speed with this kind of cherry picked and misleading claims.

Hands on the wheel is such a stupid metric. Two hands on the wheel whilst watching a film on an ipad doesn't do a damned thing.

What matters is whether I'm paying attention, a much harder to measure metric. Am I looking at the road, judging distances, hazards, etc.

I say this every time autopilots come up - I think it is impossible for a human to give up responsibility for reacting to 99.99% of input and still retain attention for the remaining 0.01%. I certainly don't believe I can do it, and don't intend to use a car that ever expects it.

https://np.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/b36x27/its_back...

This doesn’t sound right.

Last time I looked in to this, Telsa’s software intentionally ignores station objects when the vehicle is traveling at speed.

Has this changed?

"The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself."

creates very different expectations from

"While the car is driving itself, the person in the driver's seat is keeping his hands on the steering wheel and his attention on the road at all times."

The other is found after scrolling down several screens.

Which would you consider the more prominent message?