[toomuchtodo]

Regulators (NHTSA in the US specifically, but other countries as well) continue to allow it.

Elon is a bit of a monster (personal opinion), but regulators have the final say. When they force FSD to be pulled, then there is weight behind the argument, but this hasn’t happened and that sends signal.

You already share the road with inattentive drivers and drunks, so the risk acceptance/appetite benchmark has been set. FSD is arguably better than both cohorts, considering number of deaths caused.

As always, nuance. More people will die in the next ~10 minutes from traffic deaths than have ever been attributed to Tesla’s autopilot or FSD (33 total, as of this comment).

https://www.tesladeaths.com/

(Again, not a billionaire simp, just a rationalist; booo on Elon, but props to Tesla engineers in the aggregate; personally, I hope he gets blown out the door and JB Straubel takes over as CEO)

[maxbond]

> You already share the road with inattentive drivers and drunks...

The second is a crime and I believe the first is a misdemeanor. Getting caught in either scenario repeatedly will cause you to lose your license.

So we may share the road with dangerous drivers, but we don't accept it. So it isn't grounds to accept more danger.

Really this line of argument is always wrong. The presence of danger should make you less comfortable accepting additional danger, not more. It's not like they cancel out, they sum. (One might say that mature and accessible self driving technology would take these drivers off the road, but the situation today is immature technology and high end vehicles.)

As a self described rationalist, I think you should take another look at that - to me, it reads like you're saying that because it doesn't feel like we're taking on additional marginal risk in comparison to the risks we've already taken on, we don't need to worry about how we're actually doing so, so I was caught a bit off guard when you said you were a rationalist.

[shash]

Also, is it essentially the same "driver" in all those Teslas? If one driver was responsible for 33 deaths over a couple of years, they'd have lost their license long ago!

[jancsika]

> FSD is arguably better than both cohorts, considering number of deaths caused.

I'm skeptical of any digital technology use case where the analogies/comparisons tend to be:

a) to non-digital things, when there are perfectly decent digital comparisons to be made (e.g., autopilot in the airline industry)

b) to conspicuous non-digital things, here drunk or inattentive humans

c) more or less a $small-human-scale-X improvement on the performance/efficiency/safety of the non-digital thing, often implying a future $unspecified-X improvement that, say, Moore's law would suggest (not saying you're doing the latter here, btw)

Those last two especially. I'm just imagining someone hawking a newfangled realtime audio system, claiming that it outperforms hand-punching a player-piano score. It's a silly example for sure; but on a regular basis on HN I read how Bitcoin is no worse than fiat in terms of global energy use, how crypto scam rates are roughly equivalent to wildcat banks in the old west (and hey, we eventually improved on those, so...), and how many more humans cause car deaths than these intractable systems which are "arguably" better than drunks.

[adamjcook]

> Regulators continue to allow it, and their opinion > internet randos.

This is true.

> When they force FSD to be pulled, then there is weight behind the argument.

Well, I suppose that it is pretty hard to dispute this, but it should be recognized that the NHTSA (the theoretical regulator of vehicle and highway safety in the US) is extremely weak and virtually non-existent.

The NHTSA lacks anything close to the skill sets necessary to independently, proactively and robustly scrutinize even rudimentary mechanical issues (which has been confirmed by several USDOT OIG reports over the years).

With opaque, complex automated systems and software... the NHTSA stands no chance.

The NHTSA lacks the internal skill sets to understand any of the comments that I have made elsewhere on this post.

Again, you are not wrong per se, but again, it should be recognized that the NHTSA is concerned primarily with establishing plausible deniability to protect the agency and with headlines rather than protecting the public with solid regulatory processes and oversight.

(Coincidentally enough, yet another USDOT OIG report was buried in a Friday afternoon release: https://www.autoblog.com/2023/06/02/nhtsa-fails-to-meet-inte.... I kid you not, every four years or so the USDOT OIG releases another critical report on the NHTSA that focused on issues not rectified in the previous report. It is like Groundhog Day.)

> You already share the road with inattentive drivers and drunks, so the risk acceptance benchmark has been set.

This is true.

Because the US public does not demand change and because roadway deaths are high, but distributed across time and space... the NHTSA remains weak and overall US transportation policy remains dreadfully poor.

> FSD is arguably better than both cohorts, considering number of deaths caused.

Unquantifiable.

There is no way to accurately and independently quantify the downstream safety impact of FSD Beta.

Sure, perhaps the NHTSA believes that (because they must given their structural issues), but we should recognize why such assumptions are flawed.

> More people will die in the next few minutes from traffic deaths than have ever been attributed to Tesla’s autopilot or FSD (33 total, as of this comment).

There is the possibility for "indirect" incidents caused by FSD Beta where the FSD Beta-active vehicle is never physically impacted.

We cannot assume that those do not exist.

And we also cannot assume that the media is able to pick up on every Tesla vehicle-related incident - even as well-followed as Tesla, the company, is.

In fact, other than the automaker's word, in many cases, safety investigators like those from the NTSB cannot independently and forensically establish specific root causes.