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by elil17 1795 days ago
The Waymo car in that video drove extremely safely give that it was confused. It was conservative and thought it might have seen and obstacle so it stopped. Did this inconvenience other drivers? Absolutely. But it was not a major safety risk. In fact, slowly coming to a stop is the legal and correct thing for a confused or impaired human driver to do. In comparison, Teslas seem to rapidly and suddenly brake for no explainable reason while traveling at fast speeds and do so routinely. Further, Teslas have other safety issues which are indicative of sloppy design (such as the fly-by-wire passenger doors that will trap back sheet occupants in the car if the electronic system is disabled). This is a failure of Tesla specifically, and regulating to stop it wouldn’t really slow down others like Waymo.
2 comments
Reason077 1795 days ago
> ”Teslas seem to rapidly and suddenly brake for no explainable reason”

The reason is widely known. Phantom braking is caused by rogue radar reflections that confuse the car into thinking there’s an obstruction in its path, activating the AEB automatic braking.

The real question is, why does it happen more often with Teslas than with other cars equipped with radar AEB? Maybe Tesla’s is just more sensitive.

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hungryhobo 1795 days ago
heh, i guess their fix to that is to just get rid of radars altogether.
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wpietri 1794 days ago
Exactly. There's a big difference between approaching this problem with a "first do no harm" perspective and a "move fast and kill a few people" perspective.

And this part from the previous poster strikes me as a big problem: "They were lucky it didn't lead to an accident and as long as they keep the fleet to 600 cars then yeah, the accident rate will be much lower than Tesla's AutoPilot, shipped in more than a million cars."

That seems like an excellent reason to keep the number of active cars very, very small. Rather than, as stated, an excuse for shrugging at a death rate at least 1667 times higher.

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elil17 1793 days ago
100% agree! And I don’t think the approach needs to be “first, do no harm”. I would be very happy with “move at a normal pace and do your best not to kill anyone.”

But “move fast and kill people” is ludicrous and it’s exactly what Tesla is doing.

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