Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Striking Motorcyclists More Than Any Other Brand: New Analysis
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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.
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No, the zero accidents for other self-driving vehicles is actually zero
You may have heard of this little boutique automotive manufacturer, Ford Motor Company. They're one of the primary competitors, and they are far above the mileage where you would expect a fatal accident if they were as safe as a human.Ford has reported self-driving crashes (many of them!). Just no fatal crashes involving motorcycles, because I guess they don't fucking suck at making self-driving software.
I linked the data, it's all public governmental data, and only the Tesla crashes are heavily redacted. You could... IDK... read it, and then share your opinion about it?
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Bahaha, that one is new to me.
Back when I worked on an ambulance, we called the no helmet guys organ donors.This comment was brought to you by PTSD, and has been redacted in a rare moment of sobriety.
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Fascinating! I don’t know all this. Thanks
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It will do nothing. By the time a propane cylinder would rupture, even if we assume it actually ignites too, it would add very little to a massive crash that killed everyone and desintegrated everything.
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I remember finding a motorcycle community on reddit that called themselves "squids" or "squiddies" or something like that.
Their whole thing was putting road tyres on dirtbikes and riding urban environments like they were offroad obstacles. You know, ramping things, except on concrete.
They loved to talk about how dumb & short-lived they were. I couldn't ever find that group again, so maybe I misremembered the "squid" name, but I wanted to find them again, not to ever try it - fuck that - but because the bikes looked super cool. I just have a thing for gender-bent vehicles.
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Negative. I'm a meat popsicle.
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They are illegal in every developed country.
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They had radar. Tesla has never had lidar, but they do use lidar on test vehicles to ground truth their camera depth / velocity calculations.
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So to drive with FSD is 8x safer than your average human driver.
WITH a supervising human.
Once it reaches a certain quality, it should be safer if a human is properly supervising it, because if the car tries to do something really stupid, the human takes over. The vast vast vast majority of crashes are from inattentive drivers, which is obviously a problem and they need to keep improving the attentiveness, but it should be safer than a human with human supervision because it can also detect things the human will ultimately miss.
Now, if you take the human entirely out of the equation, I very much doubt that FSD is safer than a human.
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The range on ultrasonics is too short. They only ever get used for parking type situations, not driving on the roadways.
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You mean like this Euro NCAP testing, where Tesla does stop and most others don't?
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There's been 54 reported fatalities involving their software over the years.
That's around 10 billion AP miles (9 billion at end of 2024), and around 3.6 billion on the various version of FSD (beta / supervised). Most of the fatal accidents happened on AP though not FSD.
Lets just double those fatal accidents to 108 to make it for the world, but that probably skews high.
That equates to 1 fatal accident every 98 million miles.
The USA average per 100 million is 1.33 deaths, so even doubling the deaths it's less than the current national average.
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Fair enough!
At least one of the fatalities is Full-Self Driving (it was cited by name in the police reports). The remainder are Autopilot. So, both systems kill motorcyclists. Tesla requests this data redacted from their NHTSA reporting, which specifically makes it difficult for consumers to measure which system is safer or if incremental safety improvements are actually being made.
You're placing a lot if faith that the incremental updates are improvements without equivalent regressions. That data is specifically being concealed from you, and I think you should probably ask why. If there was good news behind those redactions, they wouldn't be redactions.
I didn't publish the software version data point because I agree with AA5B, it doesn't matter. I honestly don't care how it works. I care that it works well enough to safely cohabit the road with my manual transmission cromagnon self.
I'm not a "Tesla reporter," I'm not trying to cover the incremental changes in their software versions. Plenty of Tesla fans doing that already. It only has my attention at all because it's killing vulnerable road users, and for that analysis we don't actually need to know which self-driving system version is killing people, just the make of car it is installed on.
