Why Tesla’s cars keep crashing

Quoting Elon:

“The whole Tesla fleet operates as a network. When one car learns something, they all learn it. That is beyond what other car companies are doing.” Every Tesla driver, he explained, becomes a kind of “expert trainer for how the autopilot should work”.

Good grief.

On one hand, offline reinforcement learning using the sensor recordings and human driver inputs sounds cool but on the other, the average Tesla driver drives like a jerkass so maybe not the best example to learn from.

In Ireland it’d be the Audi drivers. It’s not that they are terrible drivers, or even below average, but when you hear the conversation a couple times, you start paying attention and confirmation bias kicks in.

I’m not afraid of Tesla drivers. I’m concerned about uncommanded action such as accelerating without driver input. Over reliance on an unreliable autopilot can be considered reckless. My own car has a number of features, from lane keeping to adaptive cruise control that make long and boring trips easier, but it’ll complain loudly if I drive with a single hand for more than a couple seconds.

Even the bad design of the door handles, which should open when airbags are deployed, the door loses power, or the vehicle comes to a stop, is a red flag for me.