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From the same article:

Uber's system killed a person. They received a huge backlash and their permission to test self-driving cars have been revoked in the state of Arizona. They also pulled out from testing California as well.

Waymo had 13 non fatal crashes, of which, 12 of them were other drivers' fault. One was caused by the software where the car wanted to maneuver around some sand bags on the road and side swiped a bus. No injuries. Google took the blame and said it's a learning experience. AFAIK, Waymo cars are not available to public by default.

Tesla had multiple fatal accidents as a result of "Auto Pilot" which is just a bunch of driver assistance systems taped together and marketed as a complete self-driving system. At every single accident, Tesla never admitted the blame, and just reiterated it's statistically safer to drive with AutoPilot than without.

Obviously, this pisses people off. The never-take-the-blame attitude gets old and annoying. It's like a colleague who would throw everyone under the bus to avoid taking the blame.

Secondly, I've seen the video of the accident with the Apple employee. It's clearly AP error and I don't care if it's statistically safer to drive with AP, if a system causes and accident that I could have avoided easily, I don't trust that system.



I don't disagree. But in the end, looking at statistics, it's still safer to drive with AP indeed.

Self-driving cares are done for the first time (I mean, almost fully autonomous ones). Accidents will happen still. We are very far away from a good generic AI that can adapt to different tasks so it's gonna be a bumpy road, pun intended.


> But in the end, looking at statistics, it's still safer to drive with AP indeed.

There's no publicly shared statistics that show that. You may have been confused by Tesla's PR.


That's not the right conclusion I don't think. That published statistic is referring aggregates and averages.

As we know there are safer and riskier drivers on the roads.

If everybody was driving with AP the total number of accidents would drop.

However if you are already a safe driver, there's a chance that AP is riskier.

I don't want to bash AP to the ground, I think the tech is still phenomenal, and forced the car industry to catch up. However Tesla has the attitude of the classic move fast and break things mentality and not willing to take responsibility for it. When lives are at stake, you gotta do better than that.

You don't get to blame the customers for getting distracted for using a system that's literally called and marketed as Autopilot.

There's a reason similarly capable other cars in the market their systems as driver assistance and will force you to give input on tighter intervals.




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