[Sysreq2]

You are confusing a claim - specifically that “Teslas are dangerous” or “FSD is dangerous” with a much broader reality; that all Cars are dangerous.

You assert that 3 people died this week due to Tesla related fatalities in the US alone. That adds up to more than 150 per year! But considering that Tesla’s comprise 5% of the car market, that 150 is a drop in the bucket compared to the 43000 that die in car accidents in the US every single year.

Tesla’s fully autonomous self driving is about as safe as a regular person. Many of it’s “accidents” as shown by the various investigations have shown that “drivers” in the plurality of cases had several(>5) seconds to react but failed to do so.

The curious case of Tesla’s safety record will one day be a case study in every undergraduate business class. The naysayers want to see the company fail, the CEO fail, or the technology fail. But the problem is not the technology, but rather the people using it. It’s been long known that increasing protective equipment in sport decreases minor injury but paradoxically increase the likelihood of severe ones.

Why? Because people are lulled into a false sense of security. Individuals take risks they would not otherwise due to the inhibition of the natural feedback mechanism that would otherwise deter them from continuing to push the bounds. Since they keep getting away with it, they continue to push, only to discover that the failure mode has gone from mild to extreme.

Those small injuries are the warnings that keep you safe and prevent you from taking greater and greater risks.

Technology is like that. Cars are safer now than ever. Seat belts, crumple zones, air bags - and yet looking at the statistics you would never know it. This has led to urban legend like cars in the 1940s being “safer” due to their all steel construction. But this is not true.

What is true is that people drove slower in the 1940s. Most highway traversal occurred at a mere 40 miles per hour. A far cry from the 80 everyone does on the way to work today. As safety increases so too does our tolerance for risk.

Ultimately, that is the problem with self driving cars. They work too well. They unintentionally encourage drivers to take greater and greater risks. And they get away with it. Until suddenly. They don’t.

[gamblor956]

No, I think you're trying to obfuscate the fact that Teslas are objectively more dangerous than their competitors' cars by claiming that all cars are dangerous, when that is not true, at all.

Teslas get into more accidents than competitors' cars on a per mileage basis, ona per capita basis, and on a per vehicle basis and that's even though Tesla buyers come from the group with the lowest rate of accidents...when driving non-Tesla vehicles.

This cannot be repeated enough. Even though Tesla drivers come from the safest group of drivers when they drive non-Tesla vehicles, these same drivers have far more accidents when driving Teslas. What's more likely, that thousands of people suddenly became dangerous drivers when they bought a Tesla, or that the common vehicle they all bought is dangerous?

[lancesells]

> Tesla’s fully autonomous self driving is about as safe as a regular person. Many of it’s “accidents” as shown by the various investigations have shown that “drivers” in the plurality of cases had several(>5) seconds to react but failed to do so.

It's not fully autonomous if the drivers have to react. No idea if it's safer or not but the naming is terrible.

[Sysreq2]

And that’s honestly a fair critique. I think Elon is definitely an optimist in his technological ambitions. The whole naming of the drive assistance features from Tesla is kind of convoluted and confusing. I think Autopilot, Fully-Self Driving, all of them could have been termed better. I think he sold a dream before it’s time. And I think the pivot away from using LiDAR was probably a mistake as well.

The maxim of make it work and then make it work better probably applies. He has repeatedly said that since humans only need 2 eyes to drive, AI should too - but that completely ignores the neurological differences between a camera outputting a flat 2d image and the complex make up of our eyes. There is a lot happening there behind the scenes, abstracted away by our brain, that he discounts.

Anyways, yeah, I agree. My only concern is people turning against self-driving because of implementation failures in the short term. Self-driving is going to save lives. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water and discount the work being done by people who aren’t Elon. If you seperate FSD from the politics, the business, the fandom, it is an amazing piece of technology. A computer is now driving as well as a person. Like that’s insane. In a different circumstance we would be applauding it in amazement. That team has done amazing work.