The U.S. government’s road safety agency is again investigating Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” system, this time after getting reports of crashes in low-visibility conditions, including one that killed a pedestrian.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says in documents that it opened the probe on Thursday with the company reporting four crashes after Teslas entered areas of low visibility, including sun glare, fog and airborne dust.
In addition to the pedestrian’s death, another crash involved an injury, the agency said.
Investigators will look into the ability of “Full Self-Driving” to “detect and respond appropriately to reduced roadway visibility conditions, and if so, the contributing circumstances for these crashes.”
Exactly. The current rate is 80 deaths per day in the US alone. Even if we had self-driving cars proven to be 10 times safer than human drivers, we’d still see 8 news articles a day about people dying because of them. Taking this as ‘proof’ that they’re not safe is setting an impossible standard and effectively advocating for 30,000 yearly deaths, as if it’s somehow better to be killed by a human than by a robot.
If you get killed by a robot, you can at least die knowing your death was the logical option and not a result of drunk driving, road rage, poor vehicle maintenance, panic, or any other of the dozens of ways humans are bad at decision-making.
“10 times safer than human drivers”, (except during specific visually difficult conditions which we knowingly can prevent but won’t because it’s 10 times safer than human drivers). In software, if we have replicable conditions that cause the program to fail, we fix those, even though the bug probably won’t kill anyone.
