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Two Soylentils wrote in with news of a fatal accident involving a Tesla vehicle. Please note that the feature in use, called "Autopilot" is not the same as an autonomous vehicle. It provides lane-keeping, cruise control, and safe-distance monitoring, but the driver is expected to be alert and in control at all times. -Ed.
Man Killed in Crash of 'Self-Driving' Car
Tech Insider reports that an Ohio man was killed on 7 May when his Tesla Model S, with its autopilot feature turned on, went under a tractor-trailer.
Further information:
- Tesla Motors blog
- NHTSA report
- video uploaded by the victim, demonstrating use of the autopilot feature
Tesla Autopilot - Fatal Accident
Accident is reported to have happened in May, and reported to NHTSA/DOT immediately by Tesla. But not public until the end of June -- something a bit fishy about this reporting lag.
On the other hand, the accident is described as one that might have also been difficult for an alert human to have avoided:
The May crash occurred when a tractor trailer drove across a divided highway, where a Tesla in autopilot mode was driving. The Model S passed under the tractor trailer, and the bottom of the trailer hit the Tesla vehicle's windshield.
"Neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied," Tesla wrote.
This was the first reporting found--by the time it makes the SN front page there may be more details. Because this is a "first" it seems likely that a detailed investigation and accident reconstruction will be performed.
(Score: 2) by CirclesInSand on Friday July 01 2016, @11:14PM
It is a sign of political immaturity to talk about goals rather than policies.
The policy you want to put in place is "create a government organization that has veto power over which products go to market". In your imagination, this achieves a goal of government employees hiring the best and brightest engineers who for some reason are out for hire rather than working in the industry. The motivation of the business owners not to kill their customers isn't enough, those government employees have a better motivation: altruism. So the government employees will save us from the greedy businessmen who don't realize that killing your customers is bad business.
Now this is what happens in reality. The government program is created. They are immediately swamped by lobbyists hired by the incumbent owners in the industry. Those lobbyists will tell the government employees which "engineers" to hire. Those government fake engineers will pretend to understand safety better than the actual designers. The government employees now have 3 groups of people to try to appease: (1) the incumbent business owners who have a lot of money and clout enough to make life and election hell for the regulators, (2) customers, who never had a problem anyway, because the business owners don't want to kill their customers, and (3) voters who don't actually know what the new government program does. Guess which one will have the most influence.
This is called regulatory capture. They pretend it takes a long time for this to happen, but in reality it happens immediately and people pretend not to notice for as long as possible.
Now you have an organization with the power to shut down competition with no one to worry about except the incumbent business owners. The business owners are now compelled by law to exploit every legal ability they have to promote their own business (it is called fiduciary responsibility), not to mention a personal interest in doing so. So what do you think happens when a new company shows up with a competing product? If you said "healthy competition, both sides trying to show customers that their product is safer", you got zero points. The new company will be forced to go through a gauntlet of hurdles put in place by the government, none of them will be motivated by safety, all of them will be motivated by the lobbyists of the incumbent industry. A time tested technique is to simply make tests expensive, rather than useful, so that only the incumbent businesses can afford to pass them. Another common technique is to make the tests subjective, so it all is decided by who can bribe the regulators more.
A lack of competition actually makes things less safe because no one is at the mercy of customers any more. Management will be replaced by those who are better at litigating rather than those who are better at designing (Steve Jobs was exactly this).
If anyone at this point is thinking "well, we'll create a regulatory agency to regulate the regulators", then I pity them.