Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Striking Motorcyclists More Than Any Other Brand: New Analysis
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As someone who likes the open sky feeling, this is why I drive a convertible instead.
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In this case, does it matter? Both are supposed to follow a vehicle at a safe distance
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the cybertruck is sharp enough to cut a deer in half, surely a biker is just as vulnerable.
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they originally had lidar, or radar, but musk had them disabled in the older models.
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Same goes for the other vehicles. They didn’t even try to cover miles driven and it’s quite likely Tesla has far more miles of self-driving than anyone else.
I’d even go so far as to speculate the zero accidents of other self-driving vehicles could just be zero information because we don’t have enough information to call it zero
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I wonder if a state court judge could mandate its use as unsafe?
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Well, only 1 or 2 of those were in a time frame where I'd consider FSD superior to AP, it's a more recent development where that's likely the case.
But to your point, at some point I expect Tesla to use the FSD software for AP for the exact reasons you mentioned. My guess is they'd just do something like disable making turns, so you wouldn't be able to use it outside of straight stretches like AP today.
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Cybertrucks have 17 times the mortality rate of the ford pinto.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/report-cybertruck-safety-ford-pinto/
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Why not? It’s got multiple cameras so could judge distances the same way humans do.
However there have been both hardware and software updates since most of those, so the critical question is how much of a problem is it still? The article had no info or speculation on that
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In this case, does it matter? Both are supposed to follow a vehicle at a safe distance
I think it does matter, while both are supposed to follow at safe distances, the FSD stack is doing it in a completely different way. They haven't really been making any major updates to AP for many years now, all focus has been on FSD.
AP is looking at the world frame by frame, each individual camera on it's own, while FSD is taking the input of all cameras, turning into 3d vector space, and then driving based off that. Doing that on city streets and highways is only a pretty recent development. Updates for doing it this way on highway and streets only went out to all cars in the past few months. For along time it was on city streets only.
I’d be more interested in how it changes over time, as new software is pushed.
I think that's why it's important to make a real distinction between AP and FSD today (and specifically which FSD versions)
They're wholly different systems, one that gets older every day, and one that keeps getting better every few months. Making an article like this that groups them together muddies the water on what / if any progress has been made.
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I mean yeah, I just said above that someone almost killed me. They were probably a human driver. But that's a "might happen, never know." If self driving cars are rear-ending people, that's an inherent artifact of it's programming, even though it's not intentionally programmed to do that.
So it's like, things were already bad. I already do not feel safe doing any biking anymore. But as self driving cars become more prevalent, that threat upgrades to a kind of defacto, "Oh, these vast stretches of land are places where only cars and trucks are allowed. Everything else is roadkill waiting to happen."
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I wonder if it's happened yet
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If it's a Tesla truck, I guess I could splash it with half a Dixie cup full of water...
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You're right, 5 deaths isn't newsworthy in the context of tens of thousands killed by human drivers each year.
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Completely irrelevant to whether or not FSD is safer than human drivers.
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this makes me never want to bike in the US again.
I live close enough to work for it to be a very reasonable biking distance. But there is no safe route. A high-speed "stroad" with a narrow little bike lane. It would only be a matter of time before some asshole with their face in their phone drifts into me.
I am deeply resentful of our automobile-centric infrastructure in the U.S. It's bad for the environment, bad for our wallets, bad for our waistlines, and bad for physical safety.
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The argument is that humans can drive with just 2 eyes, so cameras are enough. I disagree with this position, given that the limitations of a camera-only system. But that's what it is.
Different sensors excel at different tasks and different conditions, and cameras are not always it.
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I wrote the original analysis Mother Jones is citing there. Hah, how about that! Delights me to see it cited in the wild.