Focus: Tesla braces for its first trial involving Autopilot fatality
www.reuters.com
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.

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.

  • 1rre@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Ok so sure there’s nothing on Tesla’s autopilot, however that’s not to say there’s nothing on autonomous systems…

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8431415/

    In 2018 and 2017, 6,735,000 and 6,453,000 traffic crashes occurred in the United States, which resulted in 33,919 and 34,560 deaths, respectively.

    https://www.orsa.org.uk/reducing-occupational-road-risk/reducing-driver-error-accidents/

    In reality, car crashes aren’t accidents and 94% are due to human error In 2011, British police officers attended 118,404 road traffic collisions (figures from the Department of Transport). In 42% of these crashes, the most frequently reported factor was that the driver ‘failed to look properly’. The second most commonly listed factor for 21% of the crashes was the driver ‘failing to judge the other person’s path or speed’. The third most common contributing factor was the driver being actually ‘careless, reckless or in a hurry’ and this accounted for 16% of the crashes.

    There’s your stats on humans being reckless and dangerous when driving cars, and of course there’s nothing concrete for fully autonomous cars because they aren’t legal anywhere, but here’s some stats on pretty much every existing driver assist - notably they all prevent accidents compared to just a human driving: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8431415/

    It really isn’t a stretch from the 3 most frequent crash causes being human error and human assistance tools reducing accident frequency a bunch to say that all these systems coming together (as they cover near enough everything to do with driving a car) would be safer than a human driver, but I don’t doubt you’ll deny it as you’re asking for something impossible to give (as governments haven’t allowed full autonomous driving cars yet, so there’s no statistics on their use) and so aren’t actually looking for information but to confirm your biases and feel like you’ve “won”, despite the fact there’s no objectively unsuspicious data on the exact situation you’re asking for meaning that you can’t prove yourself right either beyond “I’m a little suspicious of this company so I must be right”