Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jacquesm 1790 days ago
It's quite simple, really: any software that pretends that it can be in control of a car should be subject to the same kind of test that ordinary drivers have to do before being allowed to take to the road. Then, the manufacturer should assume all liability for errors made by their product. Just like a real person would. They can choose to insure or self insure.
1 comments

Those successfully tested ordinary drivers also kill many people every year. In 2019 in the US alone more than 35.000!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

Under all circumstances, over all of the miles driven. Tesla is very good at spinning things but in an apples-to-apples comparison they are doing much worse than those ordinary drivers.
Where do you have apples-to-apples comparison? As far as I know, this does not exist.

NHTSA is investigating Tesla, some 20-30 accidents. If they find that Tesla is doing something seriously dangerous, I'm sure they will force Tesla to take corrective actions.

The same applies to European regulators.

> Where do you have apples-to-apples comparison?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2020/07/28/teslas...

> But the Autopilot record ballparks to 1.1M miles between accidents off freeway and 3.5M on-freeway.

> By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 479,000 miles.

So, Tesla numbers are better even in the article you link, but still not apples-to-apples comparison. Accident vs. crash.

And Tesla is adding pro forma camera driver monitoring.

Cherry picking the one line that can be twisted like that is a bit silly don't you think?

Let's start with this segment of the title:

"Teslas Aren’t Safer On Autopilot"

Then, further down:

"Teslas are not safer with Autopilot on"

"Of the 2.1M miles between accidents in manual mode, 840,000 would be on freeway and 1.26M off of it. For the 3.07M miles in autopilot, 2.9M would be on freeway and just 192,000 off of it. So the manual record is roughly one accident per 1.55M miles off-freeway and per 4.65M miles on-freeway. But the Autopilot record ballparks to 1.1M miles between accidents off freeway and 3.5M on-freeway.

In other words, about 30% longer without an “accident” in manual (with forward collision avoidance on) or TACC than in Autopilot. Instead of being safer with Autopilot, it looks like a Tesla is slightly less safe.

But not a lot less safe. And if the predicted 3:1 ratio of accidents freeeway to non-freeway is too high, it might even be about the same. But almost certainly not 1.5 times better as Tesla’s numbers imply."

Which I think is a pretty fair and even handed evaluation of the available data.