Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Veserv 1022 days ago
“Some” grains of salt? The “safety statistics” should be straight up ignored out of hand.

Do you trust VW if they first party report their emissions? Philip Morris if they first party report the effects of smoking on lung cancer? Unaudited first party reports are literally worthless. They have every incentive to lie or misrepresent.

For that matter, Tesla has repeatedly, actively lied to consumers and misrepresented their products.

The current director of Autopilot software, Ashok Elluswamy, admitted under oath to staging the initial “Paint It Black” Autopilot demo video claiming full self driving capability: “The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.”.

The company misrepresented the range of their cars and actively suppressed complaints and gaslighted customers requesting service [1].

As for the “safety statistics” themselves, they are completely devoid of any information. The only information reported is a single ratio munging both Autopilot and FSD together.

They do not break out the products. They do not enumerate the crashes. They do not even report the number of crashes or number of miles used for calculating their “statistics”. They can not even be bothered to publish the damn numerator or denominator of their safety numbers. This is grade school level reporting and they are being allowed to drive 2 ton machines on public roads.

In contrast, this is what Waymo reports: https://storage.googleapis.com/waymo-uploads/files/documents...

A 30 page research paper itemizing the specific crashes. Methodology, references, evaluation models, comparisons, etc. That is what a proper safety report looks like, not the grade school bullshit Tesla marketing is pushing. Tesla safety and compliance should be ashamed of themselves for prioritizing marketing over human lives.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-ba...