This is a misleading title. The driver died due to injuries sustained by crashing into a barrier then getting run into multiple times, not because of the fire.
Sure, but it promotes the "Silicon Valley car tech is killing people" narrative. How many times would you ever see the headline, "Old woman crushed by a Buick?" Probably never. But if it were a Tesla -- then the headline would be "Elon Musk kills old woman with a Tesla" -- or something equally ridiculous.
With the Uber self driving car story in Arizona, a human driver wouldn't have been able to avoid hitting that person -- the victim essentially committed suicide by traffic, but the "angle" of the story has continued to be some variation of "self driving cars are killers."
It's the media generating click-bait by playing to ignorance or Luddite fears.
For many years, you'd see headlines like "SUV crashes into a house and kills a small child." As if the fact that the vehicle was an SUV was material, when the actual cause was a driver who fell asleep at the wheel. But that sort of title played into the big SUV backlash that happened in the early 2000s. I never saw, "Convertible kills small child," or "Hatchback plows through a wedding, killing the groom." It was always, "SUV this" and now it's "Tesla that" or "Self-driving car this.."
Now, we see the same thing: anything "self driving," anything "Tesla" or "Uber" or anything related to those "evil" Silicon Valley people gets top billing and clicked. A local taxi driver assaulting a drunk girl wouldn't make the local news. An Uber driver being slightly rude to a pet cat would make international headlines.
"Man dies in auto accident doesn't get the emotions working like "Man murdered by an Uber driven by killer robot."
With the Uber self driving car story in Arizona, a human driver wouldn't have been able to avoid hitting that person -- the victim essentially committed suicide by traffic, but the "angle" of the story has continued to be some variation of "self driving cars are killers."
It's the media generating click-bait by playing to ignorance or Luddite fears.
For many years, you'd see headlines like "SUV crashes into a house and kills a small child." As if the fact that the vehicle was an SUV was material, when the actual cause was a driver who fell asleep at the wheel. But that sort of title played into the big SUV backlash that happened in the early 2000s. I never saw, "Convertible kills small child," or "Hatchback plows through a wedding, killing the groom." It was always, "SUV this" and now it's "Tesla that" or "Self-driving car this.."
Now, we see the same thing: anything "self driving," anything "Tesla" or "Uber" or anything related to those "evil" Silicon Valley people gets top billing and clicked. A local taxi driver assaulting a drunk girl wouldn't make the local news. An Uber driver being slightly rude to a pet cat would make international headlines.
"Man dies in auto accident doesn't get the emotions working like "Man murdered by an Uber driven by killer robot."