This isn't an honest person that has somehow been mislead about his car's capabilities. In fact, he was recently caught doing the same thing just a few weeks ago, but wasn't arrested after he was caught in that incident.
It turns out that Param Sharma has a long history of committing crimes for attention. He sold a stolen iPhone back in 2014 in order to get attention on Instagram:
My car can tell when someone is sitting in the seat and ding an alarm when they’re not buckled in or turn on the appropriate passenger airbag(s). Surely a Tesla has this same capability?
There is very little that can be done to stop someone who is intentionally trying to violate safety checks. Sadly, the folks who try to ultimately make things worse for all of us.
If its just a steering wheel check then all he needs to do is put his foot on the wheel, which looks like what he did.
If it had a weight sensor in seat then he would also need a heavy enough weight.
If there is also an attention tracking camera then that has to be fooled as well.
No system is perfect it also doesn't mean more couldn't be done, the more friction you add the less people will do it, especially just casual offenders who just jump in the back seat and use a foot to try it out.
How much should be done is an open debate, I am just trying to find out what a Tesla currently does.
The problem is that this overthinks the problem. There are basically three classes of people in play here:
- The jokesters that manipulate the vehicle with a foot or something. There are very few of these in general, as there really isn't a benefit to the operator.
- The sleepers - These seem to be happening too often with Teslas. It seems like face/head tracking could fix it.
- The movie watchers - These can trivially defeat both the eye tracking style approaches and the possibly a camera based approach as well.
- The unfocused, tired, or otherwise slightly distracted. This is by far the biggest group.
To maximize safety, these things need to focus on shaping behavior, not on stopping determined and willfully dangerous adversaries.
I asked what driver checks the Tesla has and you are making what point?
It seems based on other actual answers to my question there is only a steering wheel check.
Are you proposing there should be no checks and it's purely the drivers responsibility therefore my question should not be answered directly instead this should be a debate about risk management?
Please clarify how the GP answered my question and what I missed.
You have no authority to limit the scope of this discussion. Willfully determined actions such as tricking the system and getting in the back seat is reckless driving and is the drivers fault and responsibility. Just like intentionally putting a rock on the gas pedal and jumping into the back seat. Or intentionally driving over pedestrians. It's the person wielding the tool not the tool's fault.
I am the one who asked the question and your response did not answer it. I am still not sure what your point is, are you saying Tesla should have no steering wheel check either?
Can I get a clear response instead of argumentative rambling?
Therenare often physical barriers between a road and sidewalks, or a deliberate separation of pathways from roadways. Do you think we should put sidewalks next to the interstate?
Curbs can help stop accidental inattentiveness that would cause a person to drift off the road, not someone intentionally trying to hit people. The driver deliberately circumvented safety measures. We have sidewalks next to plenty of interstates. Here's an example:
I'm surprised they don't have a safety check to assure that someone is actually in the driver's seat. I mean my non-Tesla vehicle from 2013 has sensors that alert if I'm in the driver's seat without a seatbelt. Likewise it has sensors that alert if there are any passengers without a seatbelt. How hard would it be to have such a simple sensor and bring the car to an immediate halt if the driver is removed from the seat?
Replied elsewhere, but repeating here: It's not a security feature! A driver nag (not unique to Tesla at all) is a reminder to a presumptively-good-faith driver who may have lost attention or fallen asleep, etc...
Cars are dangerous and almost by definition can be used maliciously to terrifying effect, and we just accept that. You don't expect your Civic to protect the world against you running them over, why demand it from another manufacturer?
Let me know when cars stop you from deliberately hitting someone. I'd buy that too. Again, the argument above was not that the car should provide assistive technology (collision avoidance is a totally a thing), but that they should prevent a malicious driver from doing anything harmful.
Because they can do it and because its currently illegal to operate without a person in the drivers seat.
Most cars it's never been a worry because the vehicle would crash immediately when someone moved to the back seat, so if someone attempted this they had a death wish anyway.
Now, we are in a transition phase where cars aren't fully self driving but they have features they take some control over which gives people a false sense of confidence, and Tesla is the worst offender here.
If there is a feature that reliably prevents a Civic from striking a person, you can bet it should be included on every new vehicle. Look at rear view cameras - rarely seen 10 years ago and they are now required by law on new cars in the US because they have proven to greatly enhance the safety of pedestrians.
The legislation hasn't caught up with the tech here - it will soon enough.
> Look at rear view cameras [...] have proven to greatly enhance the safety of pedestrians.
Which is sort of the point I think you're missing: the driver nag doesn't seem to enhance safety much at all. In fact I don't think we have a single known accident (now that everyone seems to be backing off from assumptions about that Texas crash) where someone defeated a Tesla driver nag and got into a crash a human driver would have prevented.
Everyone should agree that we should demand proven safety features be implemented broadly.
The problem is that people seem to be arguing the converse: that because Tesla has this feature, it must mean that autopilot is UNsafe. And that just doesn't seem to be the case.
The system starts monitoring the roadway ahead when your vehicle speed is about 3 mph (5 km/h) and there is a vehicle in front of you.
The CMBSTM activates when:
The speed difference between your vehicle and a vehicle or pedestrian detected in front of you becomes about 3 mph (5 km/h) and over with a chance of a collision.
Your vehicle speed is about 62 mph (100 km/h) or less and the system determines there is a chance of a collision with:
- Vehicles detected in front of you that are stationary, oncoming, or traveling in your same direction.
- A pedestrian who is detected in front of you.
Your vehicle speed is above 62 mph (100 km/h), and the system determines there is a chance of a collision with a vehicle detected in front of you traveling in your same direction.
Disconnecting the seat belt disables cruise control and autosteer in my 2015 Model S 70D. The car then comes to a controlled stop with the hazard warning lights flashing.
The typical setup of seatbelt sensor and weight sensor would be easy to defeat by clipping in the seatbelt (or one of those "alarm stoppers" [1]) and putting something heavy on the driver's seat. Tesla forces you to apply force to the steering wheel, but apparently he did that with his feet.
I'm not sure what else Tesla could do without having too many false-positives.
I used rubber bands and a water bottle. The general motion of the autopilot moves the bottle enough to trick it. Of course my hands were a millimeter from the wheel the whole time and it was just for my own amusement... my wife refuses to even try Autopilot. I only used it to see how it works. Some people love it, but I don't trust it, or at least myself with it. Tesla adaptive cruise is very good and does enough to reduce driving fatigue for me. AutoPilot has made far to many sketchy decisions in the short time I used it for me to trust it, Tesla statistics about its safety or not.
I had to read the part about this being the second time twice when I first saw the story because it seemed so unbelievable.
So he does this stupid and dangerous thing and and for reasons he somehow doesn't get arrested the first time. So what to do? Try it again.
ADDED: And oh. Then goes on to state publicly and in print that he's going to keep doing it. It does look as if he can get his licenses suspended for all of 30 days. The funny (not ha-ha) thing is that it also looks like he could be thrown in jail longer for disobeying the police officer (6 months) than the actual crime (90 days).
Not the sharpest tool in the shed. Attention-seeking on Instagram may not be the worst thing at the moment but it's still a pox.
> The funny (not ha-ha) thing is that it also looks like he could be thrown in jail longer for disobeying the police officer (6 months) than the actual crime (90 days).
Disobeying the police officer is an actual crime, and clearly (in law) the more significant one.
Tesla's advertising and claims of self-driving encourage this kind of behavior. Elon himself tweeted joking approval of the couple who uploaded themselves having sex in the back of a Tesla. It's hard to act like these sort of things are just independent actors.
How do you explain that he was focused on iPhones in 2014? Was that somehow Apple's fault, too?
I suspect - but cannot prove - that he might have something to do with a stock manipulation scheme, targeting companies with high public profiles. If you read the article, he has a rich father. This is intriguing enough to justify further investigation.
Maybe it's related to the thing that's confusing me. I thought I had learned that this shouldn't be possible; that Tesla vehicles won't 'autopilot' without a person in the driver's seat. This story and those claims can't both be simultaneously true unless this case involved some defeat device to allow autopilot without a driver.
The claim that autopilot can't operate without someone in the drivers seat was a key point made by Tesla advocates (including the media ones) attempting to debunk the narrative around a recent crash that killed two people while they were supposedly in the back seat.
So there isn't even something as simple minded as a pressure sensor in the seat to detect a body... a commonplace component with air bag systems. Or it isn't tied into the interlock.
It has sensors in the seat and it uses that to tell you that a seat belt should be buckled up. I don't think any other car does more than that but Tesla's do disengage auto steer and cruise control if the seat belt becomes detached and brings the car to a controlled stop with hazard flashers on.
I would not want it to immediately disengage auto steer just because a wriggled in my seat though.
I do think Tesla could do better but I see no reason why they should be censured for failing to prevent deliberate attempts to circumvent the checks. That would mean that they would have to engage in an arms race against ever more inventive people trying to defeat the system.
The arms race ends the second someone puts a sandbag in the seat to defeat a pressure sensor; at that point Tesla is off the hook. Without that function Tesla is culpable my mind. Argument #1 from Tesla defenders was 'fake news! you can't do that.' Well you can, in fact, and when a civil jury hears how a simple safety function that is entirely commonplace among other car manufacturers is missing from Tesla my point will be vindicated with a massive award for the plaintiffs, no matter how many downmods I collect for my prediction.
I agree about the first part and I would certainly hope it gets suspended. But, assuming he actually does know how to drive, how could/should he have been prevented from obtaining a driver's license in the first place?
Presumably if it is more costly to obtain a license (either in time, effort, or money) then people would be more careful about their behavior and wouldn't risk losing their license that they spent so much effort to obtain on something stupid like this.
Not sure its about exclusion as much as causing one to take it more seriously. Maybe the solution is to take it away for a while when you've been reckless, instead of letting you offend over and over.
Accreditation for the size of vehicle which affects number of passengers, not sure you can just jump right to the top. My understanding is that you have to start small, I could be wrong.
A drivers license is literally required to live in the US. We've had to make it easy because if we don't, we deprive literally millions of people from the ability to feed themselves.
Until we get better city design and layout, we won't be able to make driver licenses stricter.
Of course, you don't literally (in the proper meaning) sense need a driver's license to live in the US. However, your living, working, shopping, entertainment, etc. options are much reduced unless you have enough money to have people drive you everywhere and/or run errands for you. But I basically couldn't live in my current house if I couldn't drive.
> In an interview with The Associated Press on Wednesday, Sharma said he did nothing wrong, and he will keep riding in the back seat with no one behind the steering wheel.
> He believes his Model 3 can drive itself, and does not understand why he had to spend a night in jail.
>He said he started riding in the back seat of autonomously driving Tesla vehicles in 2018 and has gone about 40,000 miles without being in the driver's seat.
They should, at the minimum, suspend his drivers license. He is recklessly putting others at risk.
Does he need a driver's license if he's not actually driving....? I really hope a lawyer doesn't try to make that argument. "Your honor, he's NOT in control of the vehicle!"
But on reflection I think its the wrong move. Its not the drivers first time doing this and there are already have laws in place for this sort of thing, Basically driving license revocation. (I understand that DUI drivers can be required to equip a breathalyzer as a condition to retain their licence, does this option get offered to repeat offenders?)
Revoking auto drive wouldn't prevent the driver from selling the car and getting another Tesla if they REALLY wanted the feature back (It appears the person in question comes from a wealthy family).
I don't feel that the loss of the feature would be much of a deterant and it penalises any other driver of the car who would use the feature correctly (which might even be the cars next owner).
How has this arsehole managed to bypass the autopilot safety feature that brings the car to a stop if seat is unoccupied? This fairly buggers belief he has got away with this for so long.
It's a driver attention nag, not a security feature. Put a weight on the steering wheel and buckle the seatbelt, basically. The purpose to the device is to ensure that the driver doesn't fall asleep or otherwise lose focus, not to defeat an attack by a malicious (non-)driver.
12k down with a 6 year loan would be something like $900 a month. Expensive, but well within the reach of plenty of 25 year olds (especially in industries that frequent HN.)
These are the moments when I am at a sort of loss; maybe more accurately I realize that people live very different lives than what I came to expect as normal. I could not fathom a $900 obligation aside from rent, that I could already barely afford, at 25.
Yeah, I know the math. That is not what I was surprised at.
As a software engineer in Dallas, TX with similar experience to a new grad, $150k was a staggering number to see. Around this time in my life I was lucky to make $60k. At senior I made, maybe, $110k. Cost of living doesn't even begin to approach $100k between the two places. The reality of which makes me sad.
>These are the moments when I am at a sort of loss; maybe more accurately I realize that people live very different lives than what I came to expect as normal. I could not fathom a $900 obligation aside from rent, that I could already barely afford, at 25.
"aside from rent"
What if instead of renting something, you were living with parents and deciding to buy Tesla first?
And what person is frugal enough to save $10k/yr, which is probably around a quarter of their total income at 19 with no degree, but financially dumb enough to use all of that hard earned, long saved money to buy a new Tesla...
Who might have a financial interest in $TSLA dropping. How? Through ownership of competing auto manufacturers or suppliers, or related energy companies in the oil and gas sector, etc.
There is little evidence either way as of yet, but I do think there's enough for the SEC to take a look.
I dunno, if you avoid student loans, a college graduate can probably get an entry-level white collar job making $60k from age 22-25 and save like $40k per year. That's more than enough to buy that car, although it would be irresponsible.
> "I feel safer in the back seat than I do in the driver's seat, and I feel safer with my car on Autopilot, I trust my car Autopilot more than I trust everyone on the road."
> He believes his Model 3 can drive itself, and does not understand why he had to spend a night in jail.
This sounds like the technology version of your typical anti-vaxxer's reasoning. "I believe, therefore it's true".
If people are this desperate for attention at the risk of their safety, consider that all the other drivers on the road just have to move their hands clockwise a few inches to “disable the safety features” and cause total chaos. In most cars the only “safety feature” is the general sanity of the driver.
It's worth pointing out that the frame of the argument: that this is horrifyingly dangerous behavior, is actually kinda belied by the facts on the ground. The car wasn't used properly, but it did in fact drive itself safely.
People need to be aware of this kind of circular logic, which was applied in the Texas crash debates too: the fact that there are still safety controls in place on a new feature that isn't quite ready for full autonomy doesn't constitute evidence that the feature is unsafe. That require an entirely different kind of evidence.
And frankly... while everyone keeps circling around the same minutiae about the driver nag... Teslas on autopilot aren't actually crashing. In fact it's been quite a long time now since we've seen a juicy autopilot failure.
It really seems implausible. So he sat in the back seat with a foot on the steering wheel for more than 50 24-hour days of driving or the equivalent of about 6 round trips from cost to coast in the US? And we pretty much know that Autopilot won't work under all conditions.
Does e.g. the NTSB track "near misses" for human drivers? That would no doubt be great data to have, but it's impractical to collect for all known technologies, even ones widely regarded as having acceptable safety.
Thankfully in this case cars actually crash a lot, so we have good proxy data anyway. And... again, Tesla seems to be doing pretty well. People are desperate for bad news about autopilot, to the extent that we all blew up a story about (what turns out to have been) a routine human driver crash in Texas two weeks ago based on a quote from one fire marshall. But the reality is that the system appears to be doing pretty well.
My point is that "The car wasn't used properly, but it did in fact drive itself safely." isn't really something we can know. We know it didn't collide with anything.
Right, and my point was that this is a specious distinction. It's not a knowable thing for any vehicle, anywhere. So the lack of data for one particular vehicle says basically nothing of any use.
Like it or not, we measure safety in vehicle travel by measuring accidents. Those are objectively identifiable and there are extensive bureaucracies both public and private designed to track them.
And quite frankly, Teslas on autopilot look pretty damn good.
Sigh. A lie, around the world, yada yada. Per the NTSB report, autopilot couldn't be engaged on that road, and the driver was seen on his home security video entering the driver seat just 550 feet from the crash site. As everyone knowledgeable was screaming at the time, that just wasn't an autopilot accident. It got spun that way because one firefighter on scene decided (incorrectly) that "no one was driving the car".
Want to meet the dude himself? In the footage from local station KTVU, he demonstrates how he moves between front and back. "If you take my tesla away I will get another tesla."
114 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 98.2 ms ] threadIt turns out that Param Sharma has a long history of committing crimes for attention. He sold a stolen iPhone back in 2014 in order to get attention on Instagram:
https://www.news18.com/news/buzz/instagrams-richest-and-most...
If its just a steering wheel check then all he needs to do is put his foot on the wheel, which looks like what he did.
If it had a weight sensor in seat then he would also need a heavy enough weight.
If there is also an attention tracking camera then that has to be fooled as well.
No system is perfect it also doesn't mean more couldn't be done, the more friction you add the less people will do it, especially just casual offenders who just jump in the back seat and use a foot to try it out.
How much should be done is an open debate, I am just trying to find out what a Tesla currently does.
- The jokesters that manipulate the vehicle with a foot or something. There are very few of these in general, as there really isn't a benefit to the operator.
- The sleepers - These seem to be happening too often with Teslas. It seems like face/head tracking could fix it.
- The movie watchers - These can trivially defeat both the eye tracking style approaches and the possibly a camera based approach as well.
- The unfocused, tired, or otherwise slightly distracted. This is by far the biggest group.
To maximize safety, these things need to focus on shaping behavior, not on stopping determined and willfully dangerous adversaries.
It seems based on other actual answers to my question there is only a steering wheel check.
Are you proposing there should be no checks and it's purely the drivers responsibility therefore my question should not be answered directly instead this should be a debate about risk management?
Please clarify how the GP answered my question and what I missed.
Can I get a clear response instead of argumentative rambling?
https://www.google.com/maps/@61.2297735,-149.7217745,3a,83.7...
Cars are dangerous and almost by definition can be used maliciously to terrifying effect, and we just accept that. You don't expect your Civic to protect the world against you running them over, why demand it from another manufacturer?
EDIT: But then again, its a Volvo :-P (It's not like they are considered a "hip" manufacturer)
Most cars it's never been a worry because the vehicle would crash immediately when someone moved to the back seat, so if someone attempted this they had a death wish anyway.
Now, we are in a transition phase where cars aren't fully self driving but they have features they take some control over which gives people a false sense of confidence, and Tesla is the worst offender here.
If there is a feature that reliably prevents a Civic from striking a person, you can bet it should be included on every new vehicle. Look at rear view cameras - rarely seen 10 years ago and they are now required by law on new cars in the US because they have proven to greatly enhance the safety of pedestrians.
The legislation hasn't caught up with the tech here - it will soon enough.
Which is sort of the point I think you're missing: the driver nag doesn't seem to enhance safety much at all. In fact I don't think we have a single known accident (now that everyone seems to be backing off from assumptions about that Texas crash) where someone defeated a Tesla driver nag and got into a crash a human driver would have prevented.
Everyone should agree that we should demand proven safety features be implemented broadly.
The problem is that people seem to be arguing the converse: that because Tesla has this feature, it must mean that autopilot is UNsafe. And that just doesn't seem to be the case.
From https://owners.honda.com/vehicles/information/2021/Civic-Sed...
The system starts monitoring the roadway ahead when your vehicle speed is about 3 mph (5 km/h) and there is a vehicle in front of you.
The CMBSTM activates when:
The speed difference between your vehicle and a vehicle or pedestrian detected in front of you becomes about 3 mph (5 km/h) and over with a chance of a collision.
Your vehicle speed is about 62 mph (100 km/h) or less and the system determines there is a chance of a collision with:
- Vehicles detected in front of you that are stationary, oncoming, or traveling in your same direction.
- A pedestrian who is detected in front of you.
Your vehicle speed is above 62 mph (100 km/h), and the system determines there is a chance of a collision with a vehicle detected in front of you traveling in your same direction.
I'm not sure what else Tesla could do without having too many false-positives.
1: https://www.amazon.com/seat-belt-buckle-alarm-stopper/s?k=se...
So he does this stupid and dangerous thing and and for reasons he somehow doesn't get arrested the first time. So what to do? Try it again.
ADDED: And oh. Then goes on to state publicly and in print that he's going to keep doing it. It does look as if he can get his licenses suspended for all of 30 days. The funny (not ha-ha) thing is that it also looks like he could be thrown in jail longer for disobeying the police officer (6 months) than the actual crime (90 days).
Not the sharpest tool in the shed. Attention-seeking on Instagram may not be the worst thing at the moment but it's still a pox.
Disobeying the police officer is an actual crime, and clearly (in law) the more significant one.
I suspect - but cannot prove - that he might have something to do with a stock manipulation scheme, targeting companies with high public profiles. If you read the article, he has a rich father. This is intriguing enough to justify further investigation.
EDIT: apparently this is happening now https://www.thefocus.news/celebrity/param-sharma-parents/
Maybe it's related to the thing that's confusing me. I thought I had learned that this shouldn't be possible; that Tesla vehicles won't 'autopilot' without a person in the driver's seat. This story and those claims can't both be simultaneously true unless this case involved some defeat device to allow autopilot without a driver.
The claim that autopilot can't operate without someone in the drivers seat was a key point made by Tesla advocates (including the media ones) attempting to debunk the narrative around a recent crash that killed two people while they were supposedly in the back seat.
it tries to detect a person, but that's relatively easily tricked.
If so that is inexcusable.
I would not want it to immediately disengage auto steer just because a wriggled in my seat though.
I do think Tesla could do better but I see no reason why they should be censured for failing to prevent deliberate attempts to circumvent the checks. That would mean that they would have to engage in an arms race against ever more inventive people trying to defeat the system.
i can't imagine wanting to do that on purpose. uggggh.
Semi-autonomous vehicles are a new thing, maybe it should require new training.
I also think that Tesla's marketing is misleading: https://www.tesla.com/autopilot
In general, a "learner's permit", "license", and "license for driving commercial vehicles" is a pretty common tiered system that I think is common.
Until we get better city design and layout, we won't be able to make driver licenses stricter.
> He believes his Model 3 can drive itself, and does not understand why he had to spend a night in jail.
>He said he started riding in the back seat of autonomously driving Tesla vehicles in 2018 and has gone about 40,000 miles without being in the driver's seat.
They should, at the minimum, suspend his drivers license. He is recklessly putting others at risk.
"I started drinking and driving and I've done 40,000 miles!" would have most people want him in jail for longer than a night.
If I were Tesla I'd suggest it to the court as an appropriate "punishment" so it was clear it was at the court's orders.
But on reflection I think its the wrong move. Its not the drivers first time doing this and there are already have laws in place for this sort of thing, Basically driving license revocation. (I understand that DUI drivers can be required to equip a breathalyzer as a condition to retain their licence, does this option get offered to repeat offenders?)
Revoking auto drive wouldn't prevent the driver from selling the car and getting another Tesla if they REALLY wanted the feature back (It appears the person in question comes from a wealthy family).
I don't feel that the loss of the feature would be much of a deterant and it penalises any other driver of the car who would use the feature correctly (which might even be the cars next owner).
thus what's so weird?
12k down with a 6 year loan would be something like $900 a month. Expensive, but well within the reach of plenty of 25 year olds (especially in industries that frequent HN.)
Let's say they're only taking home $100k of that after taxes. That means you have $8000 to spend on your life.
They might spend spend $3000 per month on rent (which gets you a pretty decent apartment anywhere and an amazing one in lots of places.)
Let's say they put $2000 of that into savings.
That leaves them with $3000 to spend each month.
$900 a month on a car payment isn't such a big deal at that point.
As a software engineer in Dallas, TX with similar experience to a new grad, $150k was a staggering number to see. Around this time in my life I was lucky to make $60k. At senior I made, maybe, $110k. Cost of living doesn't even begin to approach $100k between the two places. The reality of which makes me sad.
"aside from rent"
What if instead of renting something, you were living with parents and deciding to buy Tesla first?
I'm not saying this is rational
There is little evidence either way as of yet, but I do think there's enough for the SEC to take a look.
Citation needed.
https://dig.abclocal.go.com/ktrk/PICS/MAY2021/051021-ktrk-nt...
Some findings:
- The driver did start off in the driver's seat
- The NTSB tested in the location with another car, and Autosteer would not engage, but that Traffic Aware Cruise Control would
Discussed here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27112010
HN original discussion about the crash: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26852399
> He believes his Model 3 can drive itself, and does not understand why he had to spend a night in jail.
This sounds like the technology version of your typical anti-vaxxer's reasoning. "I believe, therefore it's true".
He is comically arrogant. Not someone I'd like to hangout with, but an interesting (although dangerous) character for sure.
[1] https://www.ktvu.com/news/man-arrested-for-riding-in-back-of...
People need to be aware of this kind of circular logic, which was applied in the Texas crash debates too: the fact that there are still safety controls in place on a new feature that isn't quite ready for full autonomy doesn't constitute evidence that the feature is unsafe. That require an entirely different kind of evidence.
And frankly... while everyone keeps circling around the same minutiae about the driver nag... Teslas on autopilot aren't actually crashing. In fact it's been quite a long time now since we've seen a juicy autopilot failure.
That's how I evaluate my own driving, I think of things much less severe than collisions as incidents.
Thankfully in this case cars actually crash a lot, so we have good proxy data anyway. And... again, Tesla seems to be doing pretty well. People are desperate for bad news about autopilot, to the extent that we all blew up a story about (what turns out to have been) a routine human driver crash in Texas two weeks ago based on a quote from one fire marshall. But the reality is that the system appears to be doing pretty well.
Like it or not, we measure safety in vehicle travel by measuring accidents. Those are objectively identifiable and there are extensive bureaucracies both public and private designed to track them.
And quite frankly, Teslas on autopilot look pretty damn good.
https://www.ktvu.com/news/back-seat-tesla-rider-pulls-same-s...