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US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

(www.reuters.com)
410 points jjulius | 6 comments | 18 Oct 24 16:01 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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ivewonyoung ◴[19 Oct 24 01:34 UTC] No.41884954[source]▶
> NHTSA said it was opening the inquiry after four reports of crashes where FSD was engaged during reduced roadway visibility like sun glare, fog, or airborne dust. A pedestrian was killed in Rimrock, Arizona, in November 2023 after being struck by a 2021 Tesla Model Y, NHTSA said. Another crash under investigation involved a reported injury

> The probe covers 2016-2024 Model S and X vehicles with the optional system as well as 2017-2024 Model 3, 2020-2024 Model Y, and 2023-2024 Cybertruck vehicles.

This is good, but also for context 45 thousand people are killed in auto accidents in just the US every year, making 4 report crashes and 1 reported fatality for 2.4 million vehicles over 8 years look miniscule by comparison, or even better than many human drivers.

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dekhn ◴[19 Oct 24 01:46 UTC] No.41885005[source]▶
Those numbers aren't all the fatalities associated with tesla cars; IE, you can't compare the 45K/year (roughly 1 per 100M miles driven) to the limited number of reports.

What they are looking for is whether there are systematic issues with the design and implementation that make it unsafe.

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1. moduspol ◴[19 Oct 24 01:53 UTC] No.41885037[source]▶
Unsafe relative to what?

Certainly not to normal human drivers in normal cars. Those are killing people left and right.

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2. dekhn ◴[19 Oct 24 01:57 UTC] No.41885058[source]▶
I don't think the intent is to compare it to normal human drivers, although having some level of estimate of accident/injury/death rates (to both the driver, passenger, and people outside the car) with FSD enabled/disabled would be very interesting.
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3. llamaimperative ◴[19 Oct 24 01:57 UTC] No.41885059[source]▶
Those are good questions. We should investigate to find out. (It'd be different from this one but it raises a good question. What is FSD safe compared to?)
4. moduspol ◴[19 Oct 24 02:06 UTC] No.41885086[source]▶
> I don't think the intent is to compare it to normal human drivers

I think our intent should be focused on where the fatalities are happening. To keep things comparable, we could maybe do 40,000 studies on distracted driving in normal cars for every one or two caused by Autopilot / FSD.

Alas, that's not where our priorities are.

5. AlexandrB ◴[19 Oct 24 03:23 UTC] No.41885414[source]▶
No they're not. And if you do look at human drivers you're likely to see a Pareto distribution where 20% of drivers cause most of the accidents. This is completely unlike something like FSD where accidents would be more evenly distributed. It's entirely possible that FSD would make 20% of the drivers safer and ~80% less safe even if the overall accident rate was lower.
6. Veserv ◴[19 Oct 24 03:31 UTC] No.41885449[source]▶
What? Humans are excellent drivers. Humans go ~70 years between injury-causing accidents and ~5,000 years between fatal accidents even if we count the drunk drivers. If you started driving when the Pyramids were still new, you would still have half a millennium until you reach the expected value between fatalities.

The only people pumping the line that human drivers are bad are the people trying to sell a dream that they can make a self-driving car in a weekend, or "next year", if you just give them a pile of money and ignore all the red flags and warning signs that they are clueless. The problem is shockingly hard and underestimating it is the first step to failure. Reckless development will not get you there safely with known technology.