Honestly still waiting for someone—could be Canada, the EU or California—to announce heightened approval standards for (or even a moratorium on) cameras-only self-driving cars on public streets.
Tesla has roughly 0.3% VIO TOTAL in the US (taking global statistics into account it's barely measurable), and a fraction of that fraction are actually using FSD on a regular basis - so I would sure hope they kill "a lot fewer people".
Indeed. My point is: so why focus on regulation that targets <0.1% of traffic fatalities?
Here's an alternative idea that would save a lot more lives:
Take the camera-based driver attention monitoring that works in my seven year-old Tesla, which notices IMMEDIATELY if I look away from the windshield for more than a second or two, and then require that in the human-driven cars.
Estimates for annual deaths in the US from distracted driving are between 3,250 and 12,400. An in-cabin camera is not expensive or specialty hardware. The tech is there, the costs are low. We could save a lot of lives!
If we're ignoring that to focus on Tesla's FSD, the goal is not sensible regulation or saving lives.
> Take the camera-based driver attention monitoring that works in my seven year-old Tesla, which notices IMMEDIATELY if I look away from the windshield for more than a second or two, and then require that in the human-driven cars.
This exists already in Subaru vehicles, even ones with ICEs. It's called "DriverFocus." It's super helpful. However, I don't believe the technology is mandated in all vehicles yet.
The driver drowsiness alert in Teslas seems to be much more limited than that. It only activates at speeds over 60km/h, when driven for more than 10 minutes, and when Autopilot is not engaged. I wonder why they disable it when Autopilot is on?
AutoPilot is already independently monitoring driver attentiveness. With FSD, if your eyes are visible, it's watching your eyes. If it can't see your eyes (or you don't have FSD), it falls back to requiring the driver to apply a small and specific bit of torque to the steering wheel consistently.
The drowsiness alert would be superfluous when it's watching your eyes. It's already going to yell at you if it can't see your open eyes looking out the windshield for more than a second or two.
Whether or not the "steering wheel torque" method is better than a vision-based driver drowsiness alert is probably debatable, but it would be pretty tough to fall asleep while also applying exactly the right amount of torque to keep Autopilot engaged.
OP's point is a Subaru monitors its driver just as closely as a Tesla but over a broader range of circumstances. You don't need Teslas in your jurisdiction to get this safety win.
> Take the camera-based driver attention monitoring that works in my seven year-old Tesla, which notices IMMEDIATELY if I look away from the windshield for more than a second or two, and then require that in the human-driven cars
This. Put it on all vehicles that are driven (exc. waymo, zoox, and the like).
It yells at me sometimes when I'm driving down my drive way and looking at my goats instead of the driveway, which is fair. It also yells at me when I look at the mirrors for 'too long' or if I look for 'too long' for potential cross traffic when crossing an intersection (when driving late at night, I try to look for potential red light runners, but you have to spend more time looking). It also tells my spouse to sit up when she already is. Chances are this alert is going to be disabled, because it's a bigger distraction than anything else.
It also likes to alert about cross traffic when I start moving to sequence after traffic I saw that is in motion. Those alerts would be handy if it were about traffic I didn't see though, so I don't want to turn them off, even though so far they've been unhelpful.
>Indeed. My point is: so why focus on regulation that targets <0.1% of traffic fatalities?
A: Citation? Just because it's less than 0.3% of cars on the road doesn't mean it's less than 0.1% of fatalaties. And citation that doesn't let Tesla pass off any FSD crash as "driver error" which they have a horrible habit of doing. If FSD disengages at impact, they call that driver error, which is absolute bullshit.
And because Tesla is taking 0 accountability for it, they are passing it onto the driver. They want to have their cake and eat it too. If you or I are driving distractedly and kill someone, we face serious criminal and financial repercussions.
If FSD decides to swerve out of the lane and into oncoming taffic, Tesla wants to shrug and say "I guess the driver should have been better". That's trash, and should be banned from our roads summarily.
Well, my claim was fairly specific, so it's quite easy.
There are ~42k traffic fatalities in the US each year. Cameras-only self driving cars are a tiny fraction of the number of total cars.
The highest estimates I've seen for annual traffic deaths with an ADAS involved (not even implying causation) is in the range of dozens. Cameras-only self driving cars would be a fraction of those. As a result, there are quite possibly more than a thousand traffic fatalities each year caused by human-driven cars for each ONE caused by a cameras-only self driving car.
But my original claim was only that they kill a lot fewer. That seems self-evident.
That's cute, and also totally irrelevant. Nobody cares about absolute numbers, the thing to care about is the rate. Pick your denominator, but I like deaths per million miles.
Polonium ingestion also kills fewer people than self driving cars, so by that token, polonium ingestion is perfectly safe.
> Meanwhile, there are ~42k traffic deaths per year that could be prevented by focusing on human-driven cars
Eh, there are over a hundred thousands deaths attributable to Musk's actions in the White House [1]. I agree with you on the short-term calculus. But trusting Tesla to help reduce those traffic deaths--and furthermore, enabling its position of power--puts those states' sovereignty in jeopardy. Swapping lives for sovereignty is an old (and trusted) trade.
