A cynical person might believe Tesla are full of crap and Musk is a snakeoil salesman who lurches from crisis to crisis with ever more outlandish, hyperbolic claims.

Teslas are objectively the safest cars on the planet, as measured by safety agencies around the world, including Euro-NCAP and IIHS. Now even the safest cars are going to have some percentage of accidents, and as there are a lot of Teslas on the road, that very small percentage still adds up to a noticeable absolute number. Of course those accidents need to be investigated, and even the safest car on the planet can still be improved, but the existence of that handful of accidents doesn't invalidate the objective facts of how safe Teslas are.

Teslas are objectively the safest cars on the planet...

A similar view has been expressed in the case of the "Smart Motorways" in England...

National Highways - the agency in charge of smart motorways - says the latest data shows that "smart motorways are our safest roads".

[1]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-68865188

They opened up the hard shoulder/breakdown/emergency lane of what were the safest roads in the country and put technology in to alert drivers of obstructed lanes - yep, that's going to work

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-68865188

I live near one of these aberrations, They are "safe" due to the well known effect that if you make something sufficiently and obviously dangerous people actually take more care.

The issue at hand seems not to be the safety record, but the failure mode. It's great that your car doesn't often hit people, but if when it does hit people it tends to kill them, then that's still a problem.

It's even more of a problem if these are actually avoidable accidents and there is a critical flaw in the safety systems that should be able to prevent them.

It's even more of a problem if your CEO has been claiming that those cars can drive themselves autonomously without harm or damage. This is a (fairly crucial) test of his ability to meet the requirements of responsible corporate behaviour when flaws clearly still exist in the vehicles.

The number of cars Telsa has sold in its entire span of existence compared to just the number of Honda Civics or Toyota Corollas sold in the same time period is probably barely a rounding error.

" Teslas are objectively the safest cars on the planet "

Downvote because you're conflating two entirely different things.

Quote from elsewhere on the web: The Model 3 is rated with the best possible crash rating from NHTSA in the USA - and the IIHS said it was the safest car in the world.

So what this is saying is that the model 3 is the car you're most likely to be able to walk away from if you are unfortunate enough to be involved in a crash. In that way, perhaps it is indeed a very safe vehicle, for the occupants.

However driving assistance with a tendency to go awry and kill other people... does not in any way make it a safe car. Quite the opposite. Usually, with cars, accidents that lead to fatalities are due to mechanical problems or something the driver messed up (or both, if they neglected servicing). In this particular case, if the intelligence goes wrong then it's the car itself, and it doesn't matter one bit how wonderfully safe the car is for the people inside if it ends up inadvertently killing people outside.

The reference to Musk being a snake oil salesman is because while all this autopilot stuff is impressive, it's maybe not yet ready for public roads and it needs to be hammered into people's heads that it is a driver aid, not a driver replacement. Which means, for the love of Christ, stop calling it stuff like "Autopilot" and "Full Self Driving", because - at the current state of technology - that's still an outlandish claim.

People think that by buying a safe car it excuses them the responsibility of learning how to drive the fucking thing! First you learn to drive, then you buy your safe car!

-- George Carlin

Tesla drivers are the worst. They bought a Tesla because they can't/won't drive safely, and are counting on Autopilot to do all the work. Musky says it works and all the advertising says it's amazing. These people get on the road, engage Autopilot, and stop paying attention to driving because Autopilot doesn't require them to. Now you have Teslas crashing into everything because Autopilot is a sham.

Damn. I had to take care of something else before I could finish my above post before you posted yours. It would have fit much better under yours. Oh well.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/tesla-drivers-have-the-highest-crash-rate-of-any-brand-study

Read and weep, fanboy

To be fair, you're talking about two different things.

OP is talking about what happens if you get into a crash. You're talking about how shitty drivers buy Teslas.

Who knew that getting rid of LiDAR in favor of much less reliable optical scanning would have such a deleterious effect on safety? Aside from anyone who has at least an average level of deductive reasoning skills that is.

"Who knew that getting rid of LiDAR in favor of much less reliable optical scanning would have such a deleterious effect on safety?"

I don't think that Tesla vehicles ever had LiDAR. They did have RADAR, but that was discontinued a while ago and was even removed from the car in some cases when people brought their car in for service.

Since the Wizard never gave Elon a brain, he doesn't understand how they work and why humans rely on vision primarily and can get away with it. We still use our other senses to feel out our environment. If somebody enters a room we are in but aren't in our line of sight, we can sense their presence and infer who they are through hearing and even smell. Even if we don't hear them, we might feel them if they block air movement. There was a study on hearing where people put on headphones and blindfolds and a "hole" was moved through a sonic environment. It was very creepy and I have to wonder why that hasn't been tried on a scary movie. It also points up that we don't understand precisely all of the ways we comprehend our environment.

The problem is that none of these enhancements to driver attention monitoring solves the real problem with this level of driver assistance (not actual "auto pilot", despite what Musk is trying to sell). The problem is that it takes time for the driver to react, and on roads and highways, that time just isn't there.

In aircraft autopilot works very well because there is much more time to react to an autopilot disengagement. You are typically not 1-2 seconds from colliding with something or someone when autopilot disengages. If you are, then you have big problems. Also, with aircraft, pilots are trained in human factors, and we understand how to handle the handover from automation to human control. Normal drivers are not trained for any of this, and reading a Tesla owners manual is not proper training.

Air travel also has a dedicated ground crew working to coordinate traffic and will definitely be in touch if you start veering too close to anyone else.

I sometimes wonder if we're doing autonomous driving wrong. Instead of every individual car trying to make independent decisions, maybe have a central system that acts similarly to air traffic control for airlines. Sensors in the road and car tell it where other cars are, how fast they're going, all that yummy telemetry, and then it can coordinate all the traffic on the roads. Then you don't have a case where cars with a SoC specced for having LiDAR sensors are suddenly expected to take on the additional processing required for optical only scanning, on top of everything else they manage. You just have one massive cluster where you can always add additional nodes if you need more processing power.

You just have one massive cluster [...]

But...but...but...isn't that the case now?

If you add a four letter word starting with the letter "f" after "cluster" above... then yes... yes it is.

You just have one massive cluster fuck.

"Sensors in the road and car tell it where other cars are, how fast they're going,"

Like that isn't going to go wrong. The Smart Motorways' sensors are often offline for days/weeks/months at a time and many don't require digging up the road to repair. If they can't be bothered to fix non-functional CCTV cameras watching the roads, how can it be expected that in-road sensors will be maintained?

What you described is part of the spec for PRT (Personal Rapid Transit). The vehicles take care of operating themselves and keeping on the guideway while a central computer tells them how to dispatch, where to turn and how fast to go, but not exactly how to do those tasks. In a closed system, that can work nicely. Even a human driven service vehicle can be accommodated in the system. Before UltraGlobal wound down, they had plans that would allow private ownership of vehicles so somebody could drive to the city with the system and log into the computer for autonomous control. Parking, charging and pickup would all be taken care of. It made a lot of sense for dense downtowns. Not only could people be moved around, so could cargo. Vehicles could go into buildings so a load of dairy products being sent to a grocery store could stop in the warehouse area of the store, be unloaded and the vehicle would be on it's way while those items get moved quickly into the refrigerators/freezers. Passenger vehicles available to the pubic would not have access to those stops and portals could be secured. Employees of the store could be given a pass so they could be routed to the back room where they could get on and off in safety.

That only work if every road user is automated, like for example on the Docklands Light Railway.

Musk stands in path of a Tesla on "Autopilot" - lets start at 5 mph and then repeat at 5 mph increments. If and when the Tesla fails to detect Musk is in it's path and runs him over, then, that is the threshold speed the "Autopilot" can be certified for. Oh, and best have an ambulance/medivac helicopter on standby during the exercise

Except that the ambulance has to be driven solely by Tesla autopilot...

Don't go giving him ideas! The last thing we need are Tesla ambulances and fire trucks on the roads.

Hey, a Tesla fire truck isn't likely to run into the rear end of ... another fire truck.

Right?

"Hey, a Tesla fire truck isn't likely to run into the rear end of ... another fire truck."

IDK, the desire to mate is a strong instinct. What models will they be using to train these AI's?

I like the general idea. Let the CEO literally stand behind in front of the product. If he's not 100% confident that he'll be able to walk away completely unharmed, and willing to actually put his body on the line, then it's not ready to be sent out to punters.

And he has to do it with a randomly chosen example for every hardware revision of every model, under varying lighting conditions including with the car heading towards the sun when it's low.

And then redo it with every software update that affects the system

I like the idea of the snake oil salesman proving he trusts it, but I don't trust him to actually do it under conditions we know the Tesla's have issues with*, and with a vehicle that hasn't been specifically chosen for the task and made sure it's working correctly.

*I seem to remember the Tesla cameras have issues with the sun being "wrong" and the tesla fans saying "well humans get dazzled as well", ignoring the fact that humans can adjust the position of their head/eyes and do things like drop the sunshade, and will typically slow down if dazzled.

*I seem to remember the Tesla cameras have issues with the sun being "wrong" and the tesla fans saying "well humans get dazzled as well", ignoring the fact that humans can adjust the position of their head/eyes and do things like drop the sunshade, and will typically slow down if dazzled.

That's also part of the beauty of something like LiDAR. It doesn't get dazzled by the sun, so regardless of time of day, or other weather conditions*, if you're coming up on some other solid object, it can trigger a warning.

* IIRC, LiDAR doesn't work so well in fog, but then neither does optical cameras or human eyeballs, and we're still talking about one use case where things are basically the same and all the other use cases are vastly improved.

"Let the CEO literally stand behind in front of the product."

What? Like Jeff Bezos taking a flight in a Blue Origin Rocket with his brother and Wally Funk? Good luck with getting Elon to do something like that.

Forbes Dec 2013: [1]Tesla drivers had 23.54 accidents per 1,000 drivers . Ram (22.76) and Subaru (20.90) were the only other brands with more than 20 accidents per 1,000 drivers for every brand.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebanker/2023/12/18/tesla-has-the-highest-accident-rate-of-any-auto-brand/

Interesting link, thanks.

If you click through that link to the site where they got the data from there are some other interesting bits in there.

RAM really not coming out looking very good - topping the charts in a lot of those results - more incidents (not accidents) than any other brand.

BMW has the most drivers caught driving under the influence of alcohol.

And, as you mentioned, Tesla, which are the most accident prone.

Also, a small point but important, your subject line says it's electric cars, but that study covers both EV and ICE - which makes it a much more interesting dataset.

"RAM really not coming out looking very good - topping the charts in a lot of those results"

With a big heavy vehicle it does seem like you would see them in more accidents as they are not nearly as maneuverable as a small compact car. They take longer to stop with a higher center of gravity.

I'm not surprised about the incidence of drink driving with BMW. The person bought the car thinking it would make them more desirable and interesting and instead just drained their bank account and the depreciation has driven them to drink. If I meet somebody, I really hope their dating me doesn't have anything to do with my car other than having one I can use to take them on dates. Have you seen what it costs for a pair of Rammstein concert tickets? If they would rather go see Wishbone Ash at the local club in the BMW..........Not that WA isn't a kickin' show.