[deanak]

So the person responsible for keeping their family alive doesn't look away from the road trying to perform a very common task. A car is designed around the idea that maintaining the driver's attention on the road is the primary function. I am not sure what is driving the design of Teslas for the newer models.

I like Teslas in general, but their decision to remove things like buttons and stalks from their vehicles is both dangerous and stupid, and people have already died because of it.

[jiofih]

You’d imagine they would have engineers think about this stuff. Such dummies!

Looking forward for that link of a death caused by operating the wipers. I haven’t touched mine (not Tesla) for years since they work automatically, maybe other families have special windshield wiper adjustment needs?

[deanak]

https://www.tesladeaths.com/

https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/26/21154502/tesla-autopilo...

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/01/waymo-ceo-tesla-is-not-...

Tesla resists efforts to prevent distracted driving, and also resists the consistent call from regulators properly set expectations for the capabilities of its autopilot feature. People are dying as a result. You'll notice that you won't find the same articles about GM's SuperCruise feature, because they don't oversell the feature and have more safety measures in place to make sure drivers aren't distracted.

Waymo's CEO even claims that Tesla isn't a competitor. There is an obvious conflict here, but he's not the only one saying that 1) Tesla will never have a fully autonomous driving system and 2) their existing autopilot feature is falsely advertised and dangerous.

[jiofih]

Hold on, you were talking about the danger of operating the wipers on the touchscreen. That is completely unrelated to autopilot.

You’re just pushing your agenda here. By the way, a tip on that: that first site completely discredits any kind of safety discussion as soon as it’s mentioned. It scares you with a long list of accidents when only 6 are potentially related to autopilot in a decade of its existence, vs 1.3 million deaths happening every year for all car brands.

[deanak]

https://medium.com/@MidwesternHedgi/teslas-driver-fatality-r...

> Remember that BMW and Audi combined had 9 driver fatalities in nearly 900,000 vehicle years? Clearly, 11 Tesla driver fatalities in 265,000 vehicle years is not a good start. But even those numbers likely understate the danger of driving a Tesla...

> Even without making any adjustment whatsoever for missing fatality data, Tesla drivers are much more likely to die than their peers driving other luxury cars. Eleven deaths in 265,290 vehicle-years is a stunningly high driver fatality rate of 41.46. That’s quadruple the rate of Audi and BMW, and more than triple the rate of all luxury cars combined.

The issue is whether design decisions by Tesla are leading to fatalities. They are, if you compare them to the luxury segment they are in. Advertising an autopilot feature which does not work, and moving standard controls to a distracting, inconsistent touch screen interface is leading to more crashes and more deaths.

Tip of the hat: don't discredit information because you don't like it.

[gonzo41]

There's a really great video about the cockpit design of fighter aircraft. Basically, everything is color coded and feel the same in every plane to avoid mistakes like what telsa is introducing.