
Tesla Driver Watching Movie While Using Autopilot Crashes into Cop Car - clouddrover
https://jalopnik.com/tesla-driver-watching-movie-while-using-autopilot-crash-1844858198
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mft_
Interesting. The Jalopnik writer suggests that autopilot (in addition to not
seeing the big stationary car and hitting it) “steered the car off the road”.
Is this known, or assumed? Is it possible that the cop car (with its warning
lights on) was parked slightly into the lane the Tesla was driving along?

Interested as these would be totally different failure mechanisms - swiping
the cop car whilst maintaining reasonable position within a lane is pretty
different from deliberately steering out of the lane and heading directly for
the cop car.

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gamblor956
Autopilot really loves crashing into cop cars. This isn't the first time it's
happened...

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pauljurczak
Tesla Insurance is going to be a runaway financial success! Maybe even the
greatest hit of this decade.

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amoitnga
why not full article title?

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clouddrover
Hacker News submission titles are limited to 80 characters.

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rjkennedy98
The tone of this article is incredibly arrogant. Yes the autopilot made a
mistake and yes the driver shouldn’t be watching a video, but to state with
absolute certainty that autopilot is more dangerous because of a single
incident is sensationalistic BS. Does the author realize that 45k people a
year die from driving? Where is the outrage there? I see people watching tv on
their phones all the time while driving without autopilot.

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jocker12
> 45k people a year die

I am not sure you are looking at the correct numbers. according to NHTSA –
[https://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx](https://www-
fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx) there are 1.18 fatalities per 100 millions
miles driven. That means, if an individual drives 15.000 miles per year, that
individual will face the possibility of dying in a fatal crash as a driver,
passenger or pedestrain, once in 6666 years, so the cars and road system are
extremely safe as they are today. Most of the self driving cars developers
recognize this like Chris Urmson in his Recode Decode interview – “Well, it’s
not even that they grab for it, it’s that they experience it for a while and
it works, right? And maybe it works perfectly every day for a month. The next
day it may not work, but their experience now is, “Oh this works,” and so
they’re not prepared to take over and so their ability to kind of save it and
monitor it decays with time. So you know in America, somebody dies in a car
accident about 1.15 times per 100 million miles. That’s like 10,000 years of
an average person’s driving. So, let’s say the technology is pretty good but
not that good. You know, someone dies once every 50 million miles. We’re going
to have twice as many accidents and fatalities on the roads on average, but
for any one individual they could go a lifetime, many lifetimes before they
ever see that.” – [https://www.recode.net/2017/9/8/16278566/transcript-self-
dri...](https://www.recode.net/2017/9/8/16278566/transcript-self-driving-car-
engineer-chris-urmson-recode-decode) or Ford Motor Co. executive vice
president Raj Nair – “Ford Motor Co. executive vice president Raj Nair says
you get to 90 percent automation pretty quickly once you understand the
technology you need. “It takes a lot, lot longer to get to 96 or 97,” he says.
“You have a curve, and those last few percentage points are really difficult.”
Almost every time auto executives talk about the promise of self-driving cars,
they cite the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration statistic that
shows human error is the “critical reason” for all but 6 percent of car
crashes. But that’s kind of misleading, says Nair. “If you look at it in terms
of fatal accidents and miles driven, humans are actually very reliable
machines. We need to create an even more reliable machine.” –
[https://www.consumerreports.org/autonomous-driving/self-
driv...](https://www.consumerreports.org/autonomous-driving/self-driving-cars-
driving-into-the-future/) or prof. Raj Rajkumar head of Carnegie Mellon
University’s leading self-driving laboratory. – “if you do the mileage
statistics, one fatality happens every 80 million miles. That is unfortunately
of course, but that is a tremendously high bar for automatically vehicle to
meet.” min.19.30 of this podcast interview –
[http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/if_then/2018/05/self_...](http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/if_then/2018/05/self_driving_cars_are_not_yet_as_safe_as_human_drivers_says_carnegie_mellon.html)

What you are using is a fallacy, emotional statement done by self driving cars
developers and enthusiasts in order to make people think by adopting this
technology they will be part of a bigger better future, by doing essentially
nothing.

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jvanderbot
> I am not sure you are looking at the correct numbers. according to NHTSA –
> [https://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx](https://www-
> fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx) there are 1.18 fatalities per 100
> millions miles driven.

Proper number seems to be ~40k, and the rate is ~ 11/100,000

This isn't a fermi question, it's just google-able.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year)

