Well, we could also talk about the time the Tesla accelerated into a gore point when the lead car followed the lane to the overpass. Or the couple of times the Tesla drove into a semi trailer. Or the several other stationary emergency vehicles they've hit. At least the semi's were moving.

We don't really know how well the Tesla automation does vs human drivers, because the statistics are complex, and Tesla only gives us deceptive summaries.

The capabilities that Tesla cars have aren't that much different than other luxury cars, but the other manufacturers don't have NTSB investigations, because their marketing isn't convincing people the car can drive itself.

> The capabilities that Tesla cars have aren't that much different than other luxury cars, ... because their marketing

It's actually somewhat impressive, if frustrating, how well Tesla's marketing works.

In a previous article here a couple of weeks ago, a Tesla owner was touting "how much better" Tesla's blind spot monitoring was than "other manufacturers", because it took speed differentials into account, while my 2015 Audi A4 did exactly the same thing. If you were faster than someone in your blind spot, it wouldn't activate. If speeds were similar, it'd activate at close range. If they were vastly outpacing you (I'd see it when adjacent to a HOV lane), it'd activate well within a safety distance to factor in speed differential.

While there are "dumb" Blind Spot sensors, multiple Tesla owners were of the fervent belief that this was an example of how unique Tesla's technology is.

Even 2011 has it, and I am sure it wasn't the first year it was available either.

> Adults drive into stationary objects all the time

I agree. But do they when alert and focused and when they clearly see the object? I highly doubt it.

This Tesla was all of those things, and still crashed.

That's a non-sequitur unless the average driver the autopilot is replacing is alert and focused.

Or you could have only the automatic emergency braking in a vehicle, and not autosteer.

Stop acting like it's all or nothing. The technology behind autopilot is being touted as driverless/self-driving, but it can do passive accident avoidance. That should be the benchmark to compare too.

In this particular case, humans get distracted and get in an accident. Autopilot is dumb as shit and gets in an accident. But a human with an emergency braking system is smart and doesn't get in an accident on the account of driver distraction.

There are accidents caused by cruise control.

That's your Level 1 example. Yet Level 1 systems are not banned.

I didn't recommend banning. But to stop saying "it's safer than an average driver".

There are many Tesla Autopilot accidents under investigation, and their relative infrequency is due to the fact that a.) accidents themselves are rare, and b.) Autopilot (mercifully) has yet to see widespread deployment in the U.S. vehicle fleet.

> As far as I'm concerned, there is only one criterion that matters when evaluating self driving cars: is it better than human drivers?

By that measure, no tech company has contributed more to self-driving than Facebook Inc, masters of distraction. Relative safety isn't a good metric.

What's a better metric? When deciding whether self driving cars is something to encourage or discourage, the obvious question to ask is: Does this improve safety?

You can make moralistic arguments about why you don't like this or that, but at the end of the day you are causing unnecessary deaths when you choose to suppress a system which is better than human drivers.

> is it better than human drivers?

The bar is much higher than that. People accept people killed by other humans suddenly becoming ill or briefly not paying attention. We accept human error. We do NOT accept machine error.

So the criterion is that autopilots should avoid a lot of accidents that humans risk getting into (e.g. lack of attention) but it must not be involved in ANY accidents that a human paying attention would get into.

In the end, no one really cares about the overrall safety or the statistics of it all, when it comes to acceptance of new systems. What matters for public perception (so in the end legislation) will be an almost impossible bar for autonomous vehicles, because they don't have the benefit of acceptable human error that we give flesh drivers.

I agree with your thesis that facts don't matter when forming public opinion. Feelings and perceptions matter much more.

I do disagree about the mechanism. I don't find that humans are very generous to one another - public opinion very often assumes the worst and takes the least generous interpretation. People are more than happy to vilify a reckless driver who caused a death.

I think the mechanism here is media coverage. We are still seeing articles pushed out by media corporations about this one accident from a year ago. Meanwhile, human drivers kill thousands of people a day and you don't hear a peep about it. So naturally public opinion becomes scared of self driving cars and ignorant of the real issue.

All of that is really tangential to my point, though. My point is that "feelings over facts" is grossly immoral when ignoring facts causes tens of thousands of preventable deaths each year.

>The fact that we are still discussing this _one_ accident that happened _a year ago_ indicates to me that the answer is a resounding yes.

It takes a long time to do an investigation. This is one of a number of incidents. You should try actually reading facts instead of Elon's Twitter.

Not all the time, only when not paying attention. This system was paying attention and still run into obstacles. Can you imagine a human driver looking at something on the road and going "eh, I don't know what this is, so I probably should not brake".