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Fatalities, 736 crashes: The shocking toll of Tesla’s Autopilot

washingtonpost.com

1–10 of 23 posts

Re: Fatalities, 736 crashes: The shocking toll of Tesla’s Autopilot

#2
I despise whoever wrote this article. It is almost completely devoid of any real information. Trying to gain an understanding of the situation based on the on the information presented here (Total crash and fatality numbers all time and last year, motorcycle numbers too) is impossible.

If you want to talk about this subject, find the following data: Crash RATES of humans autopilot as well as other driver assistance systems in total and split over various time periods, compared to the number of systems in use in that period, and split over various categories like highway vs rural roads, or type of vehicles involved.

If you can not find this information then you know nothing and don't have anything to say. Just make your article about the fact that these numbers are important and do your best to get an idea. State the absolute number but explain how it is meaningless.

Right now this is just embarrassing.

Re: Fatalities, 736 crashes: The shocking toll of Tesla’s Autopilot

#3
> Former NHTSA senior safety adviser Missy Cummings, a professor at George Mason University’s College of Engineering and Computing, said the surge in Tesla crashes is troubling.

> “Tesla is having more severe — and fatal — crashes than people in a normal data set,” she said in response to the figures analyzed by The Post. One likely cause, she said, is the expanded rollout over the past year and a half of Full Self-Driving, which brings driver-assistance to city and residential streets. “The fact that … anybody and everybody can have it. … Is it reasonable to expect that might be leading to increased accident rates? Sure, absolutely.”

Absolutely terrifying that these beta tests are being conducted on public roads without everyone's consent.

Re: Fatalities, 736 crashes: The shocking toll of Tesla’s Autopilot

#6
post #5

There were 3 million cars sold last year in the US, 1 million had ADAS. Tesla sold 1/2 of the cars with ADAS.

what do you consider ADAS? Saying 1/2 of the cars are Teslas is suspicious as heck. I don't buy it. Where are you getting these numbers from?

Re: Fatalities, 736 crashes: The shocking toll of Tesla’s Autopilot

#7
Who could have predicted that a vaporware implementation that's not even beta would be the cause of all these fatalities?

Autopilot my ass. Just call it what it is (assisted driving) and set realistic expectations with the drivers to what its capabilities are.

Re: Fatalities, 736 crashes: The shocking toll of Tesla’s Autopilot

#8

> Former NHTSA senior safety adviser Missy Cummings, a professor at George Mason University’s College of Engineering and Computing, said the surge in Tesla crashes is troubling. > “Tesla is having more severe — and fatal — crashes than people in a normal data set,” she said in response to the figures analyzed by The Post. One likely cause, she said, is the expanded rollout over the past year and a half of Full Self-D…

> Absolutely terrifying that these beta tests are being conducted on public roads without everyone's consent.

Tesla is by far not the worst offender. I rented a Kia EV6 and the lane keeping feature repeatedly tried to kill me within about 5 minutes of turning it on. I’ve had the same experience with plenty of other brand new vehicles. The only difference is Tesla’s implementation actually works so well that people stop paying attention to the road when they shouldn’t.

Re: Fatalities, 736 crashes: The shocking toll of Tesla’s Autopilot

#9

> Former NHTSA senior safety adviser Missy Cummings, a professor at George Mason University’s College of Engineering and Computing, said the surge in Tesla crashes is troubling. > “Tesla is having more severe — and fatal — crashes than people in a normal data set,” she said in response to the figures analyzed by The Post. One likely cause, she said, is the expanded rollout over the past year and a half of Full Self-D…

> Absolutely terrifying that these beta tests are being conducted on public roads without everyone's consent. Tesla is by far not the worst offender. I rented a Kia EV6 and the lane keeping feature repeatedly tried to kill me within about 5 minutes of turning it on. I’ve had the same experience with plenty of other brand new vehicles. The only difference is Tesla’s implementation actually works so well that people st…

Just an anecdote, but I test drove 3 different kinds of Tesla (S, 3, Y) and the EV6 as well, and I found the lane keeping/cruise control in the EV6 to be substantially better - I think the EV6 has more and/or higher def cameras, although the S I drove had HW4, it was soon after they were introduced and it's possible the software has not yet been optimized for them, and radars to detect cars which Tesla has removed. For some reason, the Teslas seem to lack object permanence, so cars around you will flicker in and out of existence, that doesn't seem to happen on the Kia. I also learned that Tesla actually has completely different code for the base-level TACC (traffic aware cruise control) versus the $15k Autopilot option. I assumed they were mostly the same with features turned off for TACC, but afaik they're completely different code.

Re: Fatalities, 736 crashes: The shocking toll of Tesla’s Autopilot

#10
post #2

I despise whoever wrote this article. It is almost completely devoid of any real information. Trying to gain an understanding of the situation based on the on the information presented here (Total crash and fatality numbers all time and last year, motorcycle numbers too) is impossible. If you want to talk about this subject, find the following data: Crash RATES of humans autopilot as well as other driver assistance s…

I don’t understand why this has been downvoted. The article is clickbait fear-mongering. It claims 17 deaths in 3 years is a “shocking” toll yet and focuses on a couple of nasty accidents, yet has no opinion, comment, or issue with the 40,000 people that die _each year_ due to human error (a figure quoted nonchalantly in the article).

Articles like this prove how irrational humans are. Wanting to ban a system of driving that is quite literally orders of magnitude safer than a human driver, because very occasionally it makes a mistake a human wouldn’t make.

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