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posted by janrinok on Monday April 02 2018, @01:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the I'll-wait-until-the-bugs-are-ironed-out dept.

Tesla Model X driver dies in Mountain View crash

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

The driver of a Tesla Model X has died following a highway crash in Mountain View, leaving a number of safety questions.

Source: https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/24/tesla-model-x-driver-dies-in-mountain-view-crash/

Tesla Crash: Model X Was In Autopilot Mode, Firm Says

In a post on its website, the electric-car maker said computer logs retrieved from the wrecked SUV show that Tesla's driver-assisting Autopilot technology was engaged and that the driver doesn't appear to have grabbed the steering wheel in the seconds before the crash.

The car's 38-year-old driver died after the vehicle hit a concrete lane divider on a Northern California freeway and caught fire. The accident happened March 23.

[...] In its Friday post, Tesla said the crashed Model X's computer logs show that the driver's hands weren't detected on the steering wheel for 6 seconds prior to the accident. It said they also show the driver had "about five seconds and 150 meters of unobstructed view of the concrete divider" before the crash but that "no action was taken."

The company cited various statistics in defending Autopilot in the post and said there's no doubt the technology makes vehicles safer than traditional cars.

"Over a year ago," the post said, "our first iteration of Autopilot was found by the US government to reduce crash rates by as much as 40 percent. Internal data confirms that recent updates to Autopilot have improved system reliability."

"Tesla Autopilot does not prevent all accidents -- such a standard would be impossible -- but it makes them much less likely to occur," the post reads. "It unequivocally makes the world safer for the vehicle occupants, pedestrians and cyclists."


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  • (Score: 2) by tonyPick on Tuesday April 03 2018, @08:48AM

    by tonyPick (1237) on Tuesday April 03 2018, @08:48AM (#661865) Homepage Journal

    So good you posted it three times?

    Anyhow: Tesla is being deliberately misleading with their statements here - they're comparison is to "all accidents over all groups of drivers in all conditions" when they are in fact covering a relatively low-accident subset of the driving population (luxury car owners) and also only handling the safest of driving conditions (highway driving, clear conditions).

    One of the Ars commenters ran the numbers, and Tesla safety is worse, even against a baseline of Luxury Vehicles:
    https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/tesla-says-autopilot-was-active-during-fatal-crash-in-mountain-view/?comments=1&post=35079915 [arstechnica.com]

    TDLR;
    Tesla claim "one fatality every 320 million miles" (which isn't counting the crashes where the records aren't recoverable, so it's a best case).
    Being very charitable to Tesla when looking at the stats then the worst of the comparable cars was the Lexus ES330, with one fatality every 417 million miles

    And that's being very generous to Tesla, because it doesn't account for the fact Tesla AP isn't functional in any of the conditions that make accidents more likely (snow, heavy rain or fog), and that's for 2002 era safety systems, so conventional cars will do even better.

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