if only there was a government department to investigate these kinds of things..... Too soon?
this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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Let's get this out of the way: Felon Musk is a nazi asshole.
Anyway, It should be criminal to do these comparisons without showing human drivers statistics for reference. I'm so sick of articles that leave out hard data. Show me deaths per billion miles driven for tesla, competitors, and humans.
Then there's shit like the boca raton crash, where they mention the car going 100 in a 45 and killing a motorcyclist, and then go on to say the only way to do that is to physically use the gas pedal and that it disables emergency breaking. Is it really a self driving car at that point when a user must actively engage to disable portions of the automation? If you take an action to override stopping, it's not self driving. Stopping is a key function of how self driving tech self drives. It's not like the car swerved to another lane and nailed someone, the driver literally did this.
Bottom line I look at the media around self driving tech as sensationalist. Danger drives clicks. Felon Musk is a nazi asshole, but self driving tech isn't made by the guy. it's made by engineers. I wouldn't buy a tesla unless he has no stake in the business, but I do believe people are far more dangerous behind the wheel in basically all typical driving scenarios.
In Boca Raton, I've seen no evidence that the self-driving tech was inactive. According to the government, it is reported as a self-driving accident, and according to the driver in his court filings, it was active.
Insanely, you can slam on the gas in Tesla's self-driving mode, accelerate to 100MPH in a 45MPH zone, and strike another vehicle, all without the vehicle's "traffic aware" automation effectively applying a brake.
That's not sensationalist. That really is just insanely designed.
FTFA:
Certain Tesla self-driving technologies are speed capped, but others are not. Simply pressing the accelerator will raise your speed in certain modes, and as we saw in the police filings from the Washington State case, pressing the accelerator also cancels emergency braking.
That’s how you would strike a motorcyclist at such extreme speed, simply press the accelerator and all other inputs are apparently overridden.
If the guy smashes the gas, just like in cruise control I would not expect the vehicle to stop itself.
The guy admitted to being intoxicted and held the gas down... what's the self driving contribution to that?
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