[zaroth]

No, this reasoning is flawed.

The baseline safety of cars is an absolute shit show. 30,000 people dying every year and trillion dollars of damages and lost productivity.

Car A can enable FSD in all cases, be safer in all cases, but still not be a good deal economically for the manufacturer to accept liability.

Car B could be making drivers less safe overall by preventing them from enabling FSD in most cases, but at least they aren’t liable.

[jhugo]

Your comment is predicated on the assumption that FSD (the actual system installed in the car, not a future theoretical perfect system) is safer than the average driver in the situations where Mercedes currently disables it.

I'm not sure we have data to support that? We know Tesla's autopilot is safer on average, but most of those miles will have been driven in the situations where Mercedes allows it to be used.

[FartyMcFarter]

> We know Tesla's autopilot is safer on average,

We don't even know this (even if you restrict it to highway miles), since it's not an apples to apples comparison. General safety statistics include old cars with fewer safety features independent of who's driving the car.

[zaroth]

I am saying such a scenario may possibly exist, not necessarily that it does exist.

Mercedes could be increasing the number of overall deaths by limiting the availability of the feature and still be reducing their liability for when the system is in use.

Let’s say with FSD on all the time that instead of 30,000 people a year dying that only 20,000 people a year die. Would a company accept the liability?

What if the death rate was 10,000? 1,000? 100?

If FSD could prevent 29,900 deaths a year but still see deadly failures 100 times a year, would a company say “I accept the liability”?

So you see, perhaps it’s crucial that companies not be able to be sued out of existence even if a few hundred people a year are dying in exceptional cases under their software, in order to prevent over a quarter million deaths and untold number of maimings every decade.

Also consider in this ethical and legal liability dilemma that these populations are not necessarily subsets, but could be disjoint populations.

[LightG]

"We know Tesla's autopilot is safer on average"

Am I allowed to just use "LOL" on hackernews?

[jhugo]

Well, unless you are going to rebut the statement, I don't see the point.

If you are just basing your point of view on the widely reported Tesla crashes, you might want to look up some actual safety stats. Crashes of human-driven cars happen every day, and they're often fatal.

But as I pointed out, most Tesla autopilot use is presumably in "easy" conditions, which complicates comparisons.

[LightG]

.

[ryantgtg]

You were responding to someone saying that Tesla’s autopilot is safer (based on crash stats per million miles), not FSD. FSD and autopilot are two different features.

[LightG]

Fair enough. I cannot believe those related are not in tight conversation considering the AI element of FSD (or am I mistaken there?).

Either way, in summary, I cannot trust FSD until it is 100% reliable (impossible) and the temporary situation for some time to come (regulated/supervised FSD) drains all the life out of what I enjoy, actual engaged driving! ...

The bits we don't enjoy (stop-start traffic and some motorway driving) have already been taken care off more than a decade ago.

I'd love the option of FSD but ... either FSD will never fully be realised, or will be adopted widely and there'll be some hold outs like me who actually enjoy their driving.

We'll see