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.”
If anyone was somehow still thinking RoboTaxi is ever going to be a thing. Then no, it’s not, because of reasons like this.
It doesn’t have to not hit pedestrians. It just has to hit less pedestrians than the average human driver.
It needs to be way way better than ‘better than average’ if it’s ever going to be accepted by regulators and the public. Without better sensors I don’t believe it will ever make it. Waymo had the right idea here if you ask me.
But why is that the standard? Shouldn’t “equivalent to average” be the standard? Because if self-driving cars can be at least as safe as a human, they can be improved to be much safer, whereas humans won’t improve.
Humans absolutely improve.
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.
But they aren’t and likely never will be.
And how are we to correct for lack of safety then? With human drivers you obvious discourage dangerous driving through punishment. Who do you punish in a self driving car?
The average human driver is tried and held accountable