Tesla braces for its first trial involving Autopilot fatality::Tesla Inc is set to defend itself for the first time at trial against allegations that failure of its Autopilot driver assistant feature led to death, in what will likely be a major test of Chief Executive Elon Musk’s assertions about the technology.
The second trial, set for early October in a Florida state court, arose out of a 2019 crash north of Miami where owner Stephen Banner’s Model 3 drove under the trailer of an 18-wheeler big rig truck that had pulled into the road, shearing off the Tesla’s roof and killing Banner. Autopilot failed to brake, steer or do anything to avoid the collision, according to the lawsuit filed by Banner’s wife.
Is this the guy who was literally paying no attention to the road at all and was watching a movie whilst the car was in motion?
I legit can’t find information on it now as every result I can find online is word for word identical to that small snippet. Such is modern journalism.
I know people like to get a hard on with the word “autopilot”, but even real pilots with real autopilot still need to “keep an eye on things” when the system is engaged. This is why we have two humans in the cockpit on those big commercial jets.
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I mean, yeah, but I doubt that it’s Tesla’s official stance on the matter
Although it’s far from perfect, autopilot gets into a lot less accidents per mile than drivers without autopilot.They have some statistics here:https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReportEDIT: As pointed out by commenters in this thread, autopilot is mainly used on high ways, whereas the crash average is on all roads. Also Tesla only counts a crash if the airbag was deployed, but the numbers they compared against count every crash, including the ones without deployed airbags.
Oh yeah, potentially cherrypicked statistics straight from Tesla. I’ll believe those statistics when they come from someone not with a horse in the race to adopt autonomous vehicles.
I think it’s been reported that the FSD statistics they put out are worthless because it tends to disable itself right before collisions.
Those stats are misleading though. Autopilot only runs on highways, which are much safer per mile even for human drivers.
Tesla are basically comparing their system, which only runs in pristine, ideal conditions, against an average human that has to deal with the real world.
As far as I’m aware they haven’t released safety per mile data from the FSD cars yet, and until they do I will remain skeptical about how much safer it currently is.
It actually would be really hard to get an unbiased estimate of safety given the current systems, because the data is inherently cherry picked by drivers who can switch the feature on/off depending on how complex the driving task is. What a simple number like crashes per mile really measures is really how likely FSD drivers are to overestimate the system’s ability plus some unknown base rate of unavoidable accidents.
Probably the only way to control for this is looking at cars that are fully autonomous door to door and aren’t limited to pre-selected roads/areas. I don’t know that anyone is even doing that sort of testing.
Hmm you’re right about autopilot mainly being used on highways and those roads are a lot safer. I’ll edit my main comment
This reminds me when you google if a certain company or product is good or legit and the top one is posted from the companies website.
