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

The interesting question is how good self-driving has to be before people tolerate it.

It's clear that having half the casualty rate per distance traveled of the median human driver isn't acceptable. How about a quarter? Or a tenth? Accidents caused by human drivers are one of the largest causes of injury and death, but they're not newsworthy the way an accident involving automated driving is. It's all too easy to see a potential future where many people die needlessly because technology that could save lives is regulated into a greatly reduced role.

>>. How about a quarter? Or a tenth?

The answer is zero. An airplane autopilot has increased the overall safety of airplanes by several orders of magnitude compared to human pilots, but literally no errors in its operation are tolerated, whether they are deadly or not. The exact same standard has to apply to cars or any automated machine for that matter. If there is any issue discovered in any car with this tech then it should be disabled worldwide until the root cause is found and eliminated.

>> It's all too easy to see a potential future where many people die needlessly because technology that could save lives is regulated into a greatly reduced role.

I really don't like this argument, because we could already prevent literally all automotive deaths tomorrow through existing technology and legislation and yet we are choosing not to do this for economic and social reasons.

Airplane autopilots follow a lateral & sometimes vertical path through the sky prescribed by the pilot(s). They are good at doing that. This does increase safety, because it frees up the pilot(s) from having to carefully maintain a straight 3d line through the sky for hours at a time.

But they do not listen to ATC. They do not know where other planes are. They do not keep themselves away from other planes. Or the ground. Or a flock of birds. They do not handle emergencies. They make only the most basic control-loop decisions about the control surface and power (if even autothrottle equipped, otherwise that's still the meatbag's job) changes needed to follow the magenta line drawn by the pilot given a very small set of input data (position, airspeed, current control positions, etc).

The next nearest airplane is typically at least 3 miles laterally and/or 500' vertically away, because the errors allowed with all these components are measured in hundreds of feet.

None of this is even remotely comparable to a car using a dozen cameras (or lidar) to make real-time decisions to drive itself around imperfect public streets full of erratic drivers and other pedestrians a few feet away.

What it is a lot like is what Tesla actually sells (despite the marketing name). Yes it's "flying" the plane, but you're still responsible for making sure it's doing the right thing, the right way, and not and not going to hit anything or kill anybody.

Thank you for this. The number of people conflating Tesla's Autopilot with an airliner's autopilot, and expecting that use and policies and situations surrounding the two should be directly comparable, is staggering. You'd think people would be better at critical thinking with this, but... here we are.