Preferring to die by human error instead of shitty software doesn't make logical sense to me and feels like your trying to justify something irrational. Autopilot either drives safer than me or doesn't. And I wouldn't let a drunk friend drive me either.

> but independent analysis shows there’s just not enough data to say

Do you link a trustworthy analysis? I can't remember reading one that wasn't from a highly polarized source.

The poster, camjohnson26, did not say die, the poster said crash.

Camjohnson26's point as I understood it was to compare two situations:

1. A crash that occurs because one of the drivers was extreme drunk,

2. A crash that occurs because of an autopilot in one of vehicles did not make the current action.

In the first case most people and the legal system will likely conclude that the drunk driver was at fault. In the second case it will be more difficult to determine who was at fault. This second case may add legal, insurance and ethical complications that camjohnson26 wishes to avoid. For instance what if your insurance decides you are at fault for activating the autopilot under unsafe conditions?

Seems reasonable to me. The driver is always responsible.

It certainly does if both auto pilot Tesla’s and standard vehicles are resulting in death, but the law will provide a remedy to your survivors and heirs in one instance and actually turn around and hold you liable in another instance.

After all the post was about liability and clearly nothing to do with how the poster prefers to die, which you somehow read into it.

That being said, I'm on board with the self driving cars, we should approach it with a logical head and really try to figure out what we should do, not what feels good.

I beg to differ. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...:

”Comparing motorways (controlled-access, divided highways) […] the United States had 3.38 road fatalities per 1 billion vehicle-km on its Interstate-type highways, often called freeways”

I think that number better reflects where Tesla’s autopilot is used. Also, if you remove motorcycle deaths from that number, I can’t see how the Tesla could be significantly safer, let alone four times less deadly.

I think you should also correct for vehicle age (older cars and lighter cars are less safe). You could (and, IMO, should) also correct for vehicle size/price, as Tesla drivers won’t be interested in whether their car is safer than other cars on the road, but in whether it is safer than what they could have bought instead.

And of course, there’s the elephant in the room. I expect that Tesla drivers prevented at least half the deadly accidents that would have occurred if Autopilot did all the highway driving.

They don’t make fraudulent misrepresentations to the public regarding their technological capabilities to self-drive which people rely on leading to fatal accidents.

But when those car manufacturers are at fault for the accidents vis-a-vis some manufacturing defect...they or their suppliers are liable.

20% of those are from motorcycles where collisions are far more dangerous. Of the remaining cars, a number of them happen in stronger weather conditions (where autopilot does not function yet) or cars that are old and unsafe. The number of fatal accidents for luxury cars with modern safety ratings under good weather conditions is much, much smaller.

This data is all available from the NHTSA at https://cdan.nhtsa.gov/tsftables/tsfar.htm , though it might take a bit of finagling to get the queries you want out of these tables. If there is a better source, please let me know.

So for a successful rollout they need to be much safer than human drivers. This is something that looks achievable. But if you try to push them out too early you might get a backlash that delays progress and costs more lives in the long run through slower adoption when they're ready.

Though I'm not sure you could compare them really at all in this specific case regarding the autopilot. I'm not sure how many of the traditional vehicle fatalities involve someone flipping on their cruise control and taking their hands off the wheel and ignoring the road in the same manner that the autopilot fatalities seem to have occurred.

It's like trying to compare Rotweilers to Pitbulls. Both are dangerous but one of them is 20x more dangerous.

That means Tesla should have driven 0.3 billion miles. Might be at the same level. Definitely not orders of magnitude different.

Automated systems are held to a higher standard. Telsa's Autopilot apparently has trouble spotting trailers and decapitates the occupants. Cite all the accident figures you want; it won't stop the reporting about Autopilot wrecks.