Tesla's unregulated and (some might say) reckless roll-out of self-driving technology could indeed be the biggest threat to the technology's realization.

As you point out, all it will take is a few fatalities for public opinion to harden against self-driving, and laws will start banning or severely restricting it. Rather than being wowed by Tesla's gung-ho approach, boosters of self-driving technology should be angered by it.

Totally disagree - the public is complacent about death insofar as it is not reported on by the media. If the media reported on daily accidents, and the carnage they bring, nobody would drive. In general, unless you assume this is going to be so bad that it can't be ignored, your prior should mostly be informed by how much you think the media will try to capitalize on a moral panic about self driving cars or not.

Wait. You disagree that the media will try to capitalize on a moral panic?

I phrased it poorly. I think the odds of the media turning self driving cars into a moral panic is quite low. I don’t think such a panic will materialize organically.

I don’t buy the FUD. By all measures driver assist programs make the road safer. These cars are not out on the streets massacring people like human drivers are. So meh.

What measure are you talking about here? Has Tesla published any stats about FSD?

The other stats in this thread make it sound like Tesla is not even the same league as other attempts at driving.

Yes, they have, lots of public data. The latest show that autopilot on is just slightly better than a human re. safety (but Teslas overall are about 10x safer than the average car already).

Tesla has not provided any numbers supporting that, and what numbers they have provided are so obviously flawed as to be either designed to mislead or produce by someone utterly ignorant of statistics. I’m assuming the former, but who knows.

But we are talking about FSD, not autopilot, a very different beast.

You’re asking for evidence that can’t possibly exist yet. They’ve only had the FSD beta out for a week, and only for a tiny subset of the fleet. It takes time to accumulate accurate stats and publish them. According to the NHTSA, there is one accident for every 479,000 miles driven. For Teslas with automatic safety features disabled (no AEB), the accident rate is 1/3rd the NHTSA average.[1] They’ll need tens or hundreds of millions of miles driven to get accurate safety figures.

1. https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

Many other FSD companies are doing testing with professional safety drivers, sometimes on closed courses or in specific cities with well-understood road systems. Presumably Teslas has done the same thing, and they have data from that? If they don't have such data, that means they're trying to develop this data using amateur Tesla owners on public streets all over the country, which seems quite a bit less safe.

Other manufacturers all rely on high resolution maps for anything approaching self driving. This is why Waymo is geolocked to a single city.

This is a beta release, you have to be quite gullible to think anyone would deploy untested software on the roads.