Tesla always blame the "driver" (and publicly so, nonetheless) when they are killed by their "autopilot" (which is actually driving, that is fulfilling the purpose indicated by its name, despite being not very good at it...) -- either directly, or by carefully stating misleading statements that are both technically correct and incredibly dishonest in the context of both the events and the surrounding text.
Why people are still using their shit is beyond me. Why they are still authorized to sell it under this marketing (like the name given to it, or the mismatch between the restriction and the practice), I also can't understand: it should be better regulated by the authorities.
This is probably the worst part about driving a Tesla: Your car is going to testify against you. Because Tesla can and will make a statement like this, and they will always throw you under the bus. Which is a terrible way to treat a customer, as a general practice.
Presumably Tesla/the car is telling the truth as it saw it. I don't think you're suggesting they're falsifying the logs.
> Which is a terrible way to treat a customer
I'd assume that Tesla sells you a vehicle, not PR or legal services that protect you in case of an accident. Your expectation that Tesla should take the blame is unreasonable by any standard.
I'm not saying Tesla is lying. But I am saying that I could spend six figures on a car from a company that is ready and waiting to stab me in the back. Or, I could spend five figures on a Toyota, knowing that Toyota is not going to sell me out if my car crashes.
I mean, look, it makes sense Tesla has to defend itself, especially legally, but there's a big difference between pulling out the logs when you need to for the lawyers and the regulators... and making a public blog post blaming the customer.
I think you're absolutely correct, and moreover that the difference comes from that it's in Toyota's best interest to think about the long term, play good guy and dip into their rainy day money for any costs associated with that.
Whereas with Tesla, they're leveraged out to here with stock valuation based on promises and projections, and if their key tech is perceived as seriously flawed, they're not going to exist as a company in the long term.
As far as I can tell, Toyota (or other car manufacturers) would be just as inclined to argue driver error in crashes (especially once involved in litigation). See e.g. https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman14_toyota_ua_... for a discussion of some Toyota crashes.
I think there's a significant difference between a company who will defend itself reasonably in court, and one which is actively collecting telemetry on your car, and will proactively write a blog about how badly you drove.
There is a nuance here though: unlike a "classic" car, tesla and other modern cars clearly have access to a wealth of data about your driving and your crash. The scope of lying by omission, of even simply misinterpreting the wealth of data is much larger.
I do think it's reasonable to ask of them to either keep completely silent; or to be completely open - perhaps by giving complete access to all data to a truly independent third party, and not picking which facts they think are fit for public consumption, and which are not.
I admire what Tesla has achieved - but this is a company under considerable pressure. They may well go bankrupt; and every incident matters. They are under terrible pressure to massage those facts to make them look good. I can't help but treat any statement like this no differently to any other ad - it's easily possible to be misleading even when there is some possible interpretation that isn't an intentional untruth.
Everybody knows people aren't good at sitting around doing nothing and maintaining focus. Distracted driving isn't a new risk. So the question is: are the safety benefits to a driver aid really greater than the risk they cause by encouraging distraction? Even if the driver aid catches 99% of all risks, that may yet be a net negative. Personally, I don't think it's reasonable for a system that encourages distracted driving to then claim it was the driver's fault they were distracted. No amount of small print or big fat warnings can ever excuse ignoring reality. If the autopilot is contributing to driver inattention, then the driver's inattention is no longer just the driver's fault. Not that I'm at all sure that's what's happening here, but there are some ominous indications, that is for sure. Without an autopilot, who takes their hands off the wheel for more than 6 seconds on a drive like that?
You know how many plane crashes are not the fault of human error? Very few.
I have a friend that investigates planet crashes. He’s told me that between pilot error, human error, hubris, flying when conditions are too dangerous, poorly trained or sloppy mechanics only about about 1% really can’t be classified as being caused by humans. He said the stats are a bit skewed because like any organization that reports on human performance they’ve been influenced to be a bit “flexible” when assigning blame.
Some of this is a quirk of how the NTSB reports accidents. For instance if a small plane suffers engine loss in flight, the cause of the accident will be listed as "failure of pilot to land the aircraft safely without power". Which is technically true, but most ordinary folks would blame the engine failure for the crash, not the pilot. It reflects a culture where the pilot is absolutely responsible for the aircraft and its passengers. That's the exact opposite of where the self-driving car industry is going.
Human error is distinct from driver/pilot error. It's possible (though quite unlikely) that there 0% pilot error in all plane crashes, and 99% human error.
Given that plane auotpilots are roughly comparable with Tesla's autopilots, one wonders how many plane crashes have occurred while the plane was in autopilot, and what fraction of those crashes were attributed to pilot error.
Why people are still using their shit is beyond me. Why they are still authorized to sell it under this marketing (like the name given to it, or the mismatch between the restriction and the practice), I also can't understand: it should be better regulated by the authorities.
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