> Tesla's Autopilot and its Autosteer feature could be why Tesla is so crash-prone.
It isn't obvious that the mortality rate in a crash involving an autopilot is similar to that without one. It could be considerably higher or lower, something you need to know to make good policy or a smart purchase. If there's enough data for a mortality per crash comparison it didn't make it into the article.
> They count pure # of accidents and not accidents per miles driven from what I heard.
> misleading
I will agree that the data presented could be much better than they currently are.
To call this misleading, however, wouldn't you have to have a reasonable prior that the miles driven for Teslas are so much higher than the other brands that the trend we see doesn't make sense?
I would be more persuaded if you said that Teslas are more likely to drive in urban environments where crash risks are higher - it is hard to imagine that two popular brands with ICEs, Ram and Subaru, would have fewer miles driven than Teslas
> I would be more persuaded if you said that Teslas are more likely to drive in urban environments where crash risks are higher
Even then, a cursory Google leads to this:
> In 2021, the rate of crash deaths per 100 million miles traveled was much higher in rural areas than in urban areas (1.72 in rural areas compared with 1.19 in urban areas).
It seems disingenuous to dismiss this offhand as a reasonable proxy for incidents. It would be strange for there to be no correlation between fatal risk of injury, and chance of any injury, or 'incidents'.
It is not disingenuous - it is quite clear that the kind of driving that happens in rural settings (fast, two-lane roads, no lights) is different from the kind of driving that happens in cities (slower, larger roads, street lights, stop lights)
Absolutely not contesting that 'driving is different', but GP was suggesting that crash deaths doesn't correlate with crashes fatal or otherwise, or at least correlates differently enough between rural and urban. Nothing in that link supports that claim.
Intuitively one might say that high velocity crashes could involve more fatalities, but an easy counter to that is that pedestrian deaths would represent more in urban areas.
I'd be skeptical that Tesla vehicles, which are popular in urban areas, would have more miles driven on average than pickup trucks which are more popular (but certainly also present elsewhere) in more rural / exurban areas where travel distances to work and shopping are longer.
In rural areas you see less traffic. Though tesla's ship with power modes that far exceed the traffic limits in most places so speed may be a contributing factor. Especially in the urban setting.
I'm also wondering when the regulation to limit tops speeds in electric cars will occur. It seems inevitable that with the computers onboard the ability to limit speeds based on location data, ie what road you're on, will be here sooner rather than later.
When the opening line is "Just days after Tesla was forced to recall nearly every car it ever made over safety issues involving its Autopilot system..", it's hard to take the rest of the article seriously. The "recall" is actually the NHTSA pushing Tesla to change how they monitor drivers. "The fix will be deployed to roughly two million cars via an over-the-air update that should prevent owners from tricking the system." from TFA's link.
The linked LendingTree article actually says "Across 30 car brands analyzed, Ram has the worst drivers. Nationally, Ram drivers had 32.90 driving incidents (accidents, DUIs, speeding and citations) per 1,000 drivers from Nov. 14, 2022, through Nov. 14, 2023. Tesla (31.13) and Subaru (30.09) were the only other brands whose drivers had incident rates above 30.00.". Without further breakdown of accident/incident types and segmentation by gender & age, TheDrive's article is just wild speculation.
The article quotes both ‘accident’ and ‘incident’ rates and explains the distinction:
> According to LendingTree, between Nov. 14, 2022, and Nov. 14, 2023, there were 23.54 Tesla accidents per 1,000 drivers. Only two other brands had more than 20 accidents per 1,000 drivers, Ram (22.76) and Subaru (20.90). That accident rate also helped it earn the second-highest incident rate, 31.13, behind only Ram (32.90). The difference between accident rate and incident rate is that the latter also factors DUIs, speeding, and any other citations.
It's a little weird to discount an article because it accurately reports a fact, using well-defined terms. It's getting exhausting listening to Tesla fans re-prosecute the definition of 'recall' any time someone uses the term correctly.
I see both sides, a recall is usually a very expensive process of each car returning to a particular car service business and having manual actions performed on it by a mechanic. That might include software updates, plugging in a tool to push an update; but by direct local connection.
OTA updates feel different, particularly when the vehicle isn't physically _recalled_ to a manufacturer controlled service space.
I'm not that familiar with the recall, would NHTSA have demanded it if it were all Tesla cars being physically recalled? (potentially resulting in the end of Tesla?)
The fact that it feels different isn't really relevant. The recall process means Tesla has to track every VIN and keep records on which vehicle is repaired. Consider the hypothetical: if a person stores their Tesla unpowered in an underground garage for ten years, and then takes it out of storage and starts driving it, Tesla will still be on the hook to fix this, even if the OTA update process isn't compatible any more. So despite the fact that most of the subject cars can be fixed remotely, there's nothing stopping this specific recall from becoming a physical recall down the road, if Tesla identifies vehicles that can't get the update OTA.
In these recalls, there's always a negotiation process. NHTSA prefers for vendors to issue voluntary recalls, which is what happened here. Whether or not they would have demanded physical modifications probably depends on how dangerous they consider the defect.
2 million cars isn't even close to the biggest recall so far (I think GM or Chrysler has that privilege, but it's a fuzzy memory). Tesla probably would have survived it even if they had to physically plug a cable into each car to run the update.
It’s called a recall because that’s the name of the legal mechanism used by the NHTSA to make sure a manufacturer tracks all of their vehicles’ remediation. If this bothers you, contact your congressional representatives asking them to force it to use a more marketing-friendly name.
This is a weird hill to die on. Plenty of recalls have been issued for what amounts to software updates, that required driving it back to the dealership. I don't see why it should suddenly be called something else because the car has a connection to the Internet now, removing the need to have it physically present it update.
> I don't see why it should suddenly be called something else because the car has a connection to the Internet now, removing the need to have it physically present it update.
Recall means “call back”.
What we want to say is “update” or “downgrade” or “restrict” or “Fuck Tesla!” depending on the intent.
You could say that you can recall a feature if you disable it in a software update. Even though the software doesn’t actually get returned, but just gets deleted, it’s a metaphorical recall. You are not recalling the car itself, because it doesn’t go anywhere.
I’m not sure defendingg this word use is any more weird than to die on the opposing hill of insisting updating a car’s software is a recall of the car.
You’re not a U.S. citizen so you are unaffected by the term of art used by the U.S. government for a process used to ensure that vehicles operated in the U.S. meet U.S. safety standards. Unless you work in Tesla PR, why spend your life arguing pointlessly about this word?
The use of the word is not wrong. Here is Tesla’s page where they use the word the exact same way. You can just start using the word correctly moving foward, you don’t need to continue to dig.
It's crazy to me that we use the word "recall" to mean "mandatory software update". I have no problem with NHTSA (or whatever) requiring car companies to do updates for faulty software, but the word "recall" is completely inappropriate for this process. A recall should mean that I have to drive it to the dealership to fix/replace some defective hardware component. If I don't even know it happens because the car downloaded a software update overnight, it's not a fucking recall.
the fact that the problem is resolvable OTA is a feature of Tesla, a positive. Another make with the same issue might require a visit to the dealership. The problem is the same. Debating semantics beyond that is without merit.
> It's crazy to me that we use the word "recall" to mean "mandatory software update".
Good news, we don’t. It means that a manufacturer is required to check each vehicle they sold and make it safe or remove it from the road. The key part to understand is that they are required to check each vehicle, not just assume everyone will see the news and contact them.
Since Tesla can fix this with a software update trackable over the air, they’re saving a lot of money but it’s still a safety defect which needs to be corrected.
> The "recall" is actually the NHTSA pushing Tesla to change how they monitor drivers.
That's a recall. That's a government body having to "push" (in your own words no less) to improve safety.
Let's be honest, Tesla generally has to be dragged kicking and screaming to anything for safety (from matters as benign as Elon throwing a tantrum about the aesthetics of airbag warning on sunvisors to the fact that when AP was released, it only did steering wheel checks every fifteen minutes, and it's been several iterations of pressure to make them as frequent as they are now).
It's good to have the advancement of mechanisms for OTA updates.
It's still a recall, no matter how much Tesla fans scream "better than the dinosaurs".
He didn't throw himself at the floor screaming like a child.
I don't recall he ever did that.
And by that I mean: I never forced a car maker to issue a software update.
(That's obviously what "recall" means, like reckless tweeting is "throwing a tantrum".)
> It's still a recall, no matter how much Tesla fans scream
It's possible that both of these are true at once:
1. "Recall" has a legal definition in the car industry
2. "Recall" means returning something to the manufacturer
So you can be right in the first, and others (myself included) can be right that it doesn't make sense to think of a forced software update as a recall. Maybe if everyone's autopilot was forcefully deleted and reimbursed, you could call it a recall of that feature. But if autopilot wasn't taken off the shelves and it just behaves differently, then you're stretching the meaning of "recall" to a philosophical extreme.
> He didn't throw himself at the floor screaming like a child.
> I don't recall he ever did that.
He specifically exclaimed "Fuck it, I don't care, we'll pay the fines" rather than having that adornment in the vehicle. Just because your literalism says that it's not, because there were no mashed fists against the floor, doesn't make it less so, particularly when the definition of tantrum is around outbursts of anger, often immaturely.
> But if autopilot wasn't taken off the shelves and it just behaves differently, then you're stretching the meaning of "recall" to a philosophical extreme.
Also, then I guess two of my Audi recalls weren't actually recalls either. One involved updating the software for the 'passenger occupancy detection system'. A USB stick was plugged into the car. It didn't happen OTA, but nothing was touched or removed or installed on the vehicle. But I'm sure that would somehow be a recall still.
> He specifically exclaimed "Fuck it, I don't care, we'll pay the fines" rather than having that adornment in the vehicle. Just because your literalism says that it's not, because there were no mashed fists against the floor, doesn't make it less so, particularly when the definition of tantrum is around outbursts of anger, often immaturely.
You could say it's an immature choice when you look at the consequences.
But it's not an outburst of anger. No clenched fists, no sweating, no crying, no hissing.
He didn't even raise his voice. Was he angry? Sure, he used the word "fuck".
Throwing a tantrum is an exaggeration. You can call me a literalist.
---
> A USB stick was plugged into the car. It didn't happen OTA, but nothing was touched or removed or installed on the vehicle. But I'm sure that would somehow be a recall still.
You have a good point. The difference between plugging a USB key and sending an OTA update is mostly technical.
The point of making a distinction: When you recall a car (by physically relocating it, to make it clear), you make it unavailable to the owner until it is returned, at great inconvenience to the owner.
If a service update rendered the car unavailable to a similar extent, I'd see the similarity better. I still think the word "recall" would be wrong, not because I'm trying to undermine the extent and severity of the matter. I'm sure we can come up with better, similarly critical words, e.g. "Tesla bricking all their cars for 48 hours".
It'd be interesting to see more data from this. Were the accidents tied to the specific vehicle? Or to all the vehicles requesting the quote? Also, age and other demographic breakdowns would likely be telling. Seeing RAM at the top gives some clues where that might lead.
That was my first thought, too: I’d love to see it broken down by models - Tesla’s marketing has been about sports car performance so I’d bet that if you broke most of these down more you’d see it’s not the brand but certain buyers. I doubt Subaru Forrester drivers are pushing those numbers up, either.
Wouldn't you expect supercar brands Ferrari, Zonder (sp?), Lamborghini, etc., to have terrible crash rates? Especially given the small numbers that most be sold.
It’s an interesting question. I’d think that they’d do better because you have to be a serious car nut to want one even if you’re rich whereas it’s not that hard for an irresponsible teenager to get a more normal car. I’d love to test that guess against hard data, however.
RAM trucks are almost exclusively driven by young-to-middle age-ish men. Additionally they'd be easily stereotyped as, well, assholes. It's no surprise that RAM is consistently near the top of tons of these lists because they're being driven by aggressive morons, on average.
> Last year, the Department of Justice launched an investigation into Tesla and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) found that 322 frontal and other collisions resulted from Autopilot disengaging. As the recall mentioned above highlights, it was too easy for drivers to leave Tesla's Autopilot on its own and completely relinquish control.
We need less technical fixes for things like this and more legal consequences for drivers who are found to have used the system negligently. Want to act like a clown in your self-driving Tesla? Great, you're still responsible for what it does and now you can deal with a criminal conviction, same as someone driving drunk.
We threaten people with death or life in prison and they still do things. I'm skeptical of the ability to prevent bad behavior in this fashion - especially when it's a much greyer area of culpability.
This will not help. Humans are fundamentally incapable of babysitting repeptitive boring tasks that require interaction only in failure cases. Expecting humans to do so is expecting superhuman capabilities and no amount of threatening the drivers with legal consequencces will change the outcome. All you'll achieve is punishing the poor sobs that trusted teslas marketing stunt.
If you want this to change, make Tesla liable and they'll quickly fix this, one way or another.
If all you want is revenge, then by all means, punish them as hard as you wish. Make them listen to tesla autopilot advertising until their ears bleed. The harm is done by that time.
If you want to avoid harm, then you're well served to take the failure mode into account - it's not a conscious decision to take attention away from the autopilot. It's a fundamental psychological mechanism and we're all prone to fall victim. The only way to avoid the trap is to not use autopilot - or change how it works and adress the need for changes to the party that (mis)designed the feature and has power to change it.
Making Tesla criminally liable (in a tangible, punitive sense, not just a $5000 fine per infraction) for every instance of an individual being directly harmed by a Tesla's self-driving mode would be a huge win for society as a whole, but Tesla and their supporters and apologists seem to have this idea that "hey, it's software, it's buggy but we'll fix it and iterate and then it'll be great" without realizing that we're not just crashing and losing the last ten minutes of someone's essay, we're crashing and killing human beings.
It would be an uphill battle for sure, and that's incredibly depressing.
The autopilot is adaptive cruise control + lane keeping. It’s abundantly clear and on top of this plenty of other cars have both features. The only difference is that the wheel is kept more steady.
Why would you make the manufacturer liable for this?
And yet airliners fly across the world constantly without crashing into things. That's literally the job of an airline pilot . . . babysitting repetitive boring tasks that require significant interaction only in failure cases. I was military aircrew, so I know this. Sure actually operating the aircraft is a hell of a lot more complex than a car, but there are also fewer safeguards than they're talking about putting in cars to "keep people's attention." This doesn't require superhuman skill.
Perhaps the pilot licensing/training process filters out those who can't babysit? I would assume though that this versus the car licensing/training process (low bar of required training) is where the difference lies?
Apart from the training and the fact that pilots work in pairs, there’s a host of differences that make a planes autopilot task and behavior fundamentally different from what Tesla misleadingly labels autopilot:
Planes operate in a space with good visibility, any obstacle will be visible with ample lead time.
Planes operate in controlled space, with dedicated and verified spacing between traffic participants, allocated by an external traffic control. Collisions are not rare because pilots jump in within split seconds to avoid them, but because traffic control routes planes away from each other if they converge.
The planes autopilot is in fact less capable than what the teslas autopilot pretends to be. Its limitations are fairly well understood by pilots.
A planes autopilot doesn’t dump the pilot into a “you’ll crash in a second” situation. Handover from autopilot is a different process than what Tesla expects. The planes systems are designed with human psychology and limitations in mind, because of the comparatively high regulatory bar.
You gotta be pretty unlucky to "crash into things" while in the air with autopilot at cruise altitude.
Autopilot on cars is a MUCH harder problem than on an airplane. Plus you're taking about trained professionals and liable companies vs average Joe and negligent developer.
1) The whole airspace environment is heavily regulated (ATC, rules, etc), cooperative (think transponders or TCAS for example) and usually quite sparse (several miles between planes).
2) Pilots are regularly trained and evaluated for these kind of take over in case of emergency.
3) You have two pilots monitoring each other.
4) The development cycles for these automations are far longer, and the QA a lot stricter.
5) At least in the most critical phases (take-off, landing), the automation is not exactly end-to-end. It's more the case of grouping batch of steps together into bigger actions to reduce the load on the pilots. The pilots are still quite busy during these periods and very much in the loop.
That would require a complete revamp of US law and culture. As it is now, you are not a criminal if you stop paying attention and run someone over. Your actions have to rise to a much higher level of wanton criminality before you are ever at risk of a criminal charge. People kill people on sidewalks, in cross-walks, in their living-rooms (!!!) and face nothing more than a $1000 fine for failure to yield.
This kind of change isn't impossible. Drunk driving was once in this same category -- I.e. considered an unfortunate accident rather than a crime. Then Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) ran a 30 year campaign to change the law, change enforcement, change prosecution, and finally (partially) the culture.
But I guarantee the NHTSA has neither the mandate nor the capacity to lead that change.
The law might say that (that's step 1 in the culture change). But the police won't arrest. And if the police arrest, the prosecutors won't charge. And if the prosecutors charge, a judge/jury won't convict. Every one of those people along the way think "there, but for the grace of god, go I". They all drive to work, fussing with their phones while doing it, and just can't bring themselves to consider it a crime. It really is very much like drunk driving in that way.
I don’t doubt what you say, but I’m flabbergasted that phone use really is that common.
I’ve probably used my phone 5 times while driving in the last two years, and I can’t imagine why anyone would need to do it more than that. I do rely on CarPlay and Siri massively.
Dunno where you live, but if you are in North America: take a look around next time you are waiting at a red light, or stopped on the highway in traffic. Look for all the people staring at their laps -- they are not contemplating their navels.
Like my wife always says (whenever a cyclist is killed or maimed in an entirely preventable traffic "accident"), "if you want to kill someone, do it in a car".
We might be in the very beginning of a change like this phone-use while driving. It's already been 10 years of killing by distracted phone use, the laws are starting to change. Enforcement is limited, and the average person still does not give two shits -- in their minds they're just checking their texts, and are totally still in control of the situation.
It will take another 10 years of concerted effort to actually change behaviour. It took MADD 20 years just to get the legal alcohol limit down from 0.15 to 0.08.
The only way to change this is to affect corporate shareholders, not punish users.
Pushing responsibility onto individual drivers for misusing automated systems is not the answer.
Making it painful enough to progress to the technology closer to infallibility is the way forward.
As always it comes down to the incentives and desired outcomes argument.
We aren’t trying to incentivize good behavior. We are trying to close the distance between technical promise and genuine achievement. You, in general principles, have to build the incentives around negative or positive consequences to manufacturers, not punish technology users for not using the half-ass implementation properly.
Top management is almost always most concerned with an innovation’s likely effect on the bottom line and they are accustomed to receiving market feedback, proposals and regulatory guidance that in turn help them prioritize resources to optimize for a return on investment and payback. We want to leverage that decision system to fix self-driving not engage in punitive end-user punishment because end users can’t do anything to change it.
Then outlaw the system. The entire point of the tech is to make it so I don't HAVE to drive. If I still have to have my hands on the wheel, I still need to be paying so close attention that I can take over in the half a second I get to react, then I'm not actually having anything automated. I'm still driving the car.
Either we have to accept these systems, or we need to ban them, but this goofy waffling where we just cripple them to be useless makes no sense to me.
Serious question... What does this actually free you from? Is the occasional adjustment to keep in your lane that much? It's not like cruise control where after holding my foot in the same position for hours my ankle is damn near locked up, and the occasional adjustment helps keep focus.
I just can't figure out what lane centering is supposed to free me up to do instead.
I've used pro pilot on a Nissan on the highway, mostly because the steering felt too light otherwise.
In general, that analogy applies, though. Just like cruise control allows you to effortless maintain a speed, autosteer makes lane centering effortless.
It is basically like power steering that reduces steering effort to exactly zero. The benefit is greater than I thought it'd be, tbh.
I just drove 2000km in the last couple days. I have a car with level 2 driver assistance (ADAS). This includes lane assist.
I keep my hands on the steering wheel virtually at all times. I say virtually because I might let go for 2-3 seconds to untwist a bottle cap if everyone else in the car is asleep, not any different than the “knee steering” I did before. However, the car follows the curvature of the road without a problem.
The main benefit of ADAS, to me, is greatly reduced driver exhaustion. Yes, I am paying attention and actively driving the car, however I can focus on the important things.
The ACC ensures I don’t need to worry about fines for speeding due to a heavy foot. It also ensures that I’m “far enough” from the car in front to keep me (and them) safe. Lane assist means I can spend 20% more focus on understanding what shenanigans are going on 5 cars ahead instead of worrying about drifting in another lane.
Do I rely on it continuously? Nope. Do I trust it completely? It’s bad enough that I can’t. However, after driving 2000km, I’m still fresh enough to engage in a conversation in a foreign language with the in-laws, whereas in my prime, 15 years ago, the same trip would’ve put me to bed instantly.
It reduces the cognitive load of driving. It doesn’t make driving easier, however it reduces the mental burden of being a defensive driver.
It’s not unlike ABS. Could I achieve a lower stopping distance by carefully surfing the grip/skid brake pressure? With practice, on a track, absolutely. Do I get greater peace of mind knowing that at any time a computer is checking 500x per second whether my tyres are losing grip, regardless of my state of mind, whether I’m paying attention, am distracted, the road conditions, or which pair of shoes I’m wearing? Undoubtedly.
> In addition to the functionality and features of Autopilot, Enhanced Autopilot also includes:
> Navigate on Autopilot: Actively guides your car from a highway’s on-ramp to off-ramp, including suggesting lane changes, navigating interchanges, automatically engaging the turn signal and taking the correct exit.
> Auto Lane Change: Assists in moving to an adjacent lane on the highway when Autosteer is engaged.
> Autopark: Helps automatically parallel or perpendicular park your car, with a single touch.
> Summon: Moves your car in and out of a tight space using the mobile app or key.
> Smart Summon: Your car will navigate more complex environments and parking spaces, maneuvering around objects as necessary to come find you in a parking lot.
That's absolutely not what's advertised, described, or purchased. Nobody is buying "lane-centering software", which has been around for like a decade now in some form or another.
At best, I would accept that this is blatant false advertising on the fault of all car manufacturers who offer anything with a name akin to "autopilot".
Great illustration of lying with statistics. This is objectively true, but the conclusions are murky at best. Urban vs highway miles, geographic distribution, driver demographics all almost certainly have more to do with this metric than the car itself.
You guys are trying to discredit the statistics here, but anyone in the Bay Area knows this is true. I wish there were stats on “near accidents” because Tesla drivers would be leading that too.
My buddy hit a construction barrel the other day with his Tesla on FSD Beta. He never once took ownership and kept referring to his accident as "the car hit the barrel".
It doesn't suprise me one bit people get into way more accidents while in a Tesla.
I bet if you split further into Tesla's without any autopilot or FSD what so ever, the stat would return to normal. Or on rental Teslas, which are always speed locked to like 80mph / calm mode and no autopilot or FSD features (at least around me.)
I don't have the self-driving feature in my Tesla; I have, however, developed a significant respect for the torque it delivers. It is, by a long margin, the quickest accelerating vehicle I have ever owned. The first three weeks I owned it, I think I nearly hit several cars: you press the accelerator and then you're there. I had to completely retrain myself to drive the car & carefully feather in acceleration.
I really think this is one of the keys here. People coming from ICE aren't used to that much torque and it comes at the beginning and not the middle of the curve. If the road is even a little wet, I can see how this could be an issue and catch people by surprise. I remember going from a naturally aspirated car to a turbocharged car and getting caught by surprised when it kicked in. I think the surprise for EV drivers might be even worse. Subtle changes like that take time to get used to. I wonder if the statistics can be broken down further into how long someone has driven an EV and see if a different pattern emerges.
I remember one post on reddit where some idiot in a Tesla launched it into an intersection and saw nothing wrong with that -- claming that it was unfair for everyone to give him shit over unsafe driving while he was merely "enjoying" his vehicle.
My wife and I would play a game while walking by the supercharger at our local Target in Sunnyvale: see how many Teslas were driving on nearly bald tires.
Not sure if it's a "tech people not realizing you need to buy new tires" or maybe they aren't used to how fast tires wear down on heavier EVs.
Inevitably when it finally rained in the Bay Area, you'll see at least one Tesla smashed into the guide rail on the 101 up to SF.
Woah, no wonder Tesla owners are driving on bare tires, the official website says that you'd only need to replace them every 6 years [1]. Before we sold our Model X it would eat through tires, we'd have to replace them every 15k miles. Our other cars could keep tires for at least 30k.
> > But they made an electric car. That did revolutionise the industry.
That is what I meant by re-inventing the wheel for political purposes.
The consumer doesn't care about the type of propellent the car uses, it was an imposition from the above which raised the price of cars and reduced their range and aestetics because of batteries design constraints.
Tesla specifically also have very poor interior design and quality of materials.
No they buy because techno-utopian cult leader Elon Musk told them so, the political handouts just gave them an extra 8000$ reasons to make it palatable to the family budget to buy a go kart for rich people.
Some of their best years in the US were years when the tax credit wasn't available. Interest rates were a lot lower back then, though, which makes a surprisingly big difference.
In Australia a lot of people already have solar installed and an electric car increases the roi of that. Tesla has the market only because there isn’t much competition. BYD have entered the market now and will likely change that.
> > Electric cars are better, not worse at almost every metric.
Price, weight, center of gravity, cornering ability and time to "refuel" are much worse.
Also given that price of an EV is already high as it is, manufacturers compromise on quality of interior materials and assembly and you can see it
The metric that matter are way inferior.
> > Model Y is the most popular vehicle ever made in any category electric or not.
Last time I checked the Toyota Corolla sold 50M units, VW Golf sold like 35M units, a couple of Toyota models stand at 15M and 10M respectively. Not to mention the Ford Model T. How many Tesla Model Y got sold some 1.5M? You should check numbers instead of blindly believing the propaganda.
Tesla will never sell that much cars in the history of the company, not just one model.
Not to mention how it's much harder to sell 1M Ford Model T in 1915 than even 10M Teslas in 2023 (not that they will ever sell 10M cars per year)
It's a 150 year old industry, only people who believe propaganda buy into the lie that it's being revolutionized in any way , shape or form.
What is worse about the weight? Are you trying to lift your vehicles? There are trade offs to weight, but I’m not sure it’s worse.
Price is worse if you ignore total cost of ownership… otherwise price is generally better. (Ie model 3 is cheaper than Corolla)
I think you need to drive a Tesla they corner extremely well.
Time to refuel… but you plug it in at night so you don’t need to refuel, I’d call this a trade off not better or worse.
Centre of gravity is basically perfect. What are you referring to as negative here?
Model Y sells more units per quarter than any other vehicle ever. Is that not the definition of popular? Obviously vehicles that have been around longer have sold more volume.
The ex CEO of vw said himself Tesla has revolutionised ev manufacture in a way they struggled to match. Referring to their 45 second model Y production rate.
More weight, they feel like boats in corners, there is a reason why cornering on a motorbike feels better than cornering in a car, and cornering in a light car always feels better than a heavy car. On a heavy EV you can't drift , you can't slide the back, no mechanical feedback, no sound eww.
> > Price is worse if you ignore total cost of ownership… otherwise price is generally better. (Ie model 3 is cheaper than Corolla)
There are Toyotas out there with 1M miles on the same engine whereas Tesla need total overhaul after 100k miles, not to mention diesel trucks, there are diesel trucks out there with 5M miles on the same engine.
> > Time to refuel… but you plug it in at night so you don’t need to refuel, I’d call this a trade off not better or worse.
When I buy a car I want to be able to use it 24/7/365, it is way worse to need 7 hours to recharge as opposed to a 30 seconds splash and go.
> > Model Y sells more units per quarter than any other vehicle ever
And you extrapolate this quarterly data thinking it will reach the same level of sales of VW Golfs and Corollas, that's the mistake. VW and Corolla at cumulatively 200M units sold they moved (and still move the world) , Teslas move a bunch of rich guys who want to virtue signal, there is a limited number of them.
Okay. I ride bikes and EVs. Cornering on a bike (ie two wheels) is way slower and harder than what an EV feels like. I don’t believe you are speaking from experience at all. Else you would know this.
Honestly the whole line of thinking on petrol is better is just change resistance rather than rationality. Most people drive 60 miles a day. Cars stay parked more than they are driven. Electricity is ubiquitous. EVs, particularly teslas solve this: home charging for casual use, super chargers for road trips.
Cornering in an EV with regen and instant torque is not comparable to any other type of vehicle and is vastly superior (even with the extra weight). Having driven a lotus (considered extremely light) and model 3 on the same stretch of road. The model 3 is superior in almost every way. (There is something still fun about rumbling engines and gears that EVs miss).
I think when you look at total cost of ownership you need to look at average length of ownership. Most people do not keep their car for 1M miles. For a Tesla, not really “overhaul” generally it is often a motor and/or battery replacement. It does kind of look like an overhaul given the simplicity of the drive train. But it’s two parts.
On the contrary: Tesla, or EVs in general are Better and safer. They are outselling every other vehicle because of that. Not because there are suddenly more rich people or virtue signallers in the world.
> > Okay. I ride bikes and EVs. Cornering on a bike (ie two wheels) is way slower and harder than what an EV feels like.
It depends on the type of bike and the skill of the rider ;)
> > petrol is better is just change resistance
Re-inventing the wheel should be done for the benefit of consumers, the whole electricity revoloution in automotive is a political thing imposed by the elites who have too much free time on their hands so they worry about how's the climate is gonna be 50 years from now, whereas normal people don't even plan on living that long.
> > Electricity is ubiquitous
So is oil, you need it for literally everything in a city ranging from cement to lubricants to asphalt and it's much easier to transport to the rural areas, quite frankly you and I would not be here if it wasn't the case
> > The model 3 is superior in almost every
Then why does the Model 3 lose every lap time comparisons in corner intense tracks like the Nurburgring or Laguna Seca or Silverstone, and not only that, the gas car will be able to do laps for the whole day, the Model 3 overheats and would leave you stranded
> > Most people do not keep their car for 1M miles
That's because they fail much sooner than that, in an industry which is 200 years old there is nothing left to invent (again if not for political purposes) so old cars seem extremely attractive, BMWs and Mercedes from 2003 have better UI and interiors than many new cars, especially Teslas
> > Tesla are Better and safer
Has Tesla ever achieved anything like Mercedes did in Laredo Texas back in long gone 2005? Video below
I am sure not, because large mouth Musk would have kept tweeting about it, but such levels of reliability in extreme conditions are sadly way beyond the capabilities of the automobiles manufactured in his factories (or should I say tents?)
I think we are looking at this from perhaps different sides.
Oil is only ubiquitous because we painstakingly distribute it. My point was we already distribute electricity quite effectively (without trucks and pumps etc).
I’ll concede a highly skilled rider and a high end bike could outpace/outcorner. But I think the fun of an EV or a Tesla specifically is that anybody can drive at a high level with relative ease because of the weight and low centre of gravity.
I think you are right at the extremes, high end porches out manueveur teslas. High reliability Toyotas out last Tesla. High performance Mercedes out perform a Tesla. But the reason people enjoy teslas is they perform extremely well across a number of those areas.
The EV transition is actually inevitable. Oil is finite, solar is not (we’ll give or take some billions of years). I don’t think it’s about virtue signalling or politics. It’s pure pragmatism. Pushing for more oil consumption is literally kicking the can down the road. Transitioning vehicles to electric extends the use of our finite resource for things we don’t have an alternative for (plastics and rubbers, and long haul air travel)
> Tesla's Autopilot and its Autosteer feature could be why Tesla is so crash-prone.
I disagree with this statement. I think the greater issue is that suddenly, you’ve you’ve given every Tesla owner a car that can accelerate to the equivalent of a base Porsche 911 or better. Most people (I include myself) will not responsibly handle this much power.
I think a lot about those videos where someone gets their first mustang and absolutely RIP out of the parking lot, only to total the car 50 yards down the road, and imagine if every toyota camry out there had that kind of power.
Then you could see this borne out in the data with other EV sthat feature a similar acceleration (and demographic) profile. But I think it’s both, but acceleration is harder to control with legislation.. maybe a limit in urban areas?
That's possible. This data doesn't break it down by model, but it might even be true.
No other make would be as heavily influenced by it as Tesla. EVs are less than 10% of sales for most other makes, so the impact would be nearly negligible.
There is already legislation about acceleration, it falls under e.g. 'exhibition of speed' and everyone one of these modern EVs is able to violate it (and do regularly, afaict).
It's harder to characterize. It could be just a burst of acceleration during an overtaking maneuver, but if this is done while obscured from someone who is about to cross the street, and has judged their safety to do so by the bigger, heavier, slower vehicle in front, then you have a risk of collision. Overtaking is a normal driving maneuver, and limited in duration. Reckless driving, which may be in an exhibitionary manner, is very different in nature and easier to categorise.
If you look at crash data of lots of different vehicles (e.g. IIHS loss data), there's a clear pattern in the predominant cause of crashes in the real world.
It's not how fast the car is, or its safety features. It is the target consumer. Vehicles that appeal to subprime purchasers, boy racers, or other risk takers tend to have higher loss rates compared to similar vehicles.
If you look up high horsepower cars that are known as "old man" sports cars, they tend to have low loss numbers. It is the driver that matters more than any other single factor.
I think the human factor here is a couple of things:
1. many of these drivers are under the impression that their vehicles can drive semi-autonomously, and so they take more risks in not monitoring the system
2. these vehicles are new and high performance, and they appeal to those who want to show off, display status, and take risks in demonstrating the vehicle's capabilities.
I think that target consumer you’re referring to have moved on from modded Integras, Civics, RSXs, and GR86/BRZ Rice Rockets to Tesla Model 3s. You certainly get more HPs/lbft torque for the buck and you don’t even need to tune it. All those people sporting vinyl decals on their cars these days are Model 3 owners.
Even if they aren't boy racers, everyone I have ever rode in a Tesla with enjoys demonstrating the acceleration and autopilot. The buyers are the types of people who enjoy these features. This is a riskier driver than the mindset of someone who doesn't care about those things and bought something else. They see their cars as something to demonstrate, something to experiment with, something to test the bleeding edge of technology with.
When was the last time you saw someone in a late model Buick doing hard launches and showing off the lane-keep-assist?
The average Tesla is very new and pretty expensive (incl to repair) so I'm kind of wondering whether Tesla owners are just more likely to report minor accidents they can get covered by insurance.
When I drove an old Mazda I didn't bother reporting anything short of catastrophic damage (obv if I caused an accident for someone else I'd report)... I don't think that's true for someone driving a new Model Y.
Doing this by brand seems to skew the numbers towards brands with model lineups that attract certain types of buyers, and their inherent behaviors, rather than on the merits of the vehicle.
For example, the bottom of the list is not filled with brands with a lot of safety features, it is filled with brands that predominantly don't (/didn't) target riskier groups of drivers. People who buy boring vehicles drive differently than people who buy powerful and exciting vehicles. There is self-selection at play here.
This is confusing: Tesla publishes that Tesla's vehicles, both with and without autopilot, are the subject of substantially fewer accidents per million miles driven than the US average; last quarter, somewhere ~4.8M miles/accident on autopilot, ~1.5M miles/accident Tesla w/o autopilot, and ~0.5M miles/accident US average.
Given I'd like to assume the best and conclude no one is lying here; obviously what they're measuring is slightly different, but it feels like they're similar enough that we shouldn't be getting entirely opposite outcomes. Do Tesla drivers drive substantially more? Are Tesla drivers just more likely to report crashes to their insurance/police (versus, Tesla's data is probably from automated internal observability)? If Tesla's data is based on internal observability, is that observability underreporting incidents to the mothership?
> Given I'd like to assume the best and conclude no one is lying here
That's a bad assumption. Tesla routinely lies about everything from full self-driving to price to quarter mile times. It's built into the company's DNA.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] threadIt isn't obvious that the mortality rate in a crash involving an autopilot is similar to that without one. It could be considerably higher or lower, something you need to know to make good policy or a smart purchase. If there's enough data for a mortality per crash comparison it didn't make it into the article.
misleading
> misleading
I will agree that the data presented could be much better than they currently are.
To call this misleading, however, wouldn't you have to have a reasonable prior that the miles driven for Teslas are so much higher than the other brands that the trend we see doesn't make sense?
I would be more persuaded if you said that Teslas are more likely to drive in urban environments where crash risks are higher - it is hard to imagine that two popular brands with ICEs, Ram and Subaru, would have fewer miles driven than Teslas
Even then, a cursory Google leads to this:
> In 2021, the rate of crash deaths per 100 million miles traveled was much higher in rural areas than in urban areas (1.72 in rural areas compared with 1.19 in urban areas).
https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/urban...
That would be relevant if we were talking about crash deaths.
https://www.mvmlaw.com/blog/do-car-accidents-happen-more-in-... has multiple links supporting this
Intuitively one might say that high velocity crashes could involve more fatalities, but an easy counter to that is that pedestrian deaths would represent more in urban areas.
(To clarify, referring to the comment above, not the study)
I'm also wondering when the regulation to limit tops speeds in electric cars will occur. It seems inevitable that with the computers onboard the ability to limit speeds based on location data, ie what road you're on, will be here sooner rather than later.
The linked LendingTree article actually says "Across 30 car brands analyzed, Ram has the worst drivers. Nationally, Ram drivers had 32.90 driving incidents (accidents, DUIs, speeding and citations) per 1,000 drivers from Nov. 14, 2022, through Nov. 14, 2023. Tesla (31.13) and Subaru (30.09) were the only other brands whose drivers had incident rates above 30.00.". Without further breakdown of accident/incident types and segmentation by gender & age, TheDrive's article is just wild speculation.
> According to LendingTree, between Nov. 14, 2022, and Nov. 14, 2023, there were 23.54 Tesla accidents per 1,000 drivers. Only two other brands had more than 20 accidents per 1,000 drivers, Ram (22.76) and Subaru (20.90). That accident rate also helped it earn the second-highest incident rate, 31.13, behind only Ram (32.90). The difference between accident rate and incident rate is that the latter also factors DUIs, speeding, and any other citations.
OTA updates feel different, particularly when the vehicle isn't physically _recalled_ to a manufacturer controlled service space.
I'm not that familiar with the recall, would NHTSA have demanded it if it were all Tesla cars being physically recalled? (potentially resulting in the end of Tesla?)
The safety oversight/defect in the first place was no less of a problem before it was fixed, just because it could be fixed remotely.
Here's the official guidance on the topic: https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/documents/14218-...
Here's the official recall report: https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2023/RCLRPT-23V838-8276.PDF
In these recalls, there's always a negotiation process. NHTSA prefers for vendors to issue voluntary recalls, which is what happened here. Whether or not they would have demanded physical modifications probably depends on how dangerous they consider the defect.
2 million cars isn't even close to the biggest recall so far (I think GM or Chrysler has that privilege, but it's a fuzzy memory). Tesla probably would have survived it even if they had to physically plug a cable into each car to run the update.
I'm not a US citizen, so I have no congressional representatives.
This use of the word is just wrong, I don't care about the legal use precedence.
The word "recall" means "to call back, to return". And Tesla is not returning any vehicles.
They're being forced to make a software update. You can make it sound worse if you like.
But it's not a recall in any sense of returning anything anywhere.
Recall means “call back”.
What we want to say is “update” or “downgrade” or “restrict” or “Fuck Tesla!” depending on the intent.
You could say that you can recall a feature if you disable it in a software update. Even though the software doesn’t actually get returned, but just gets deleted, it’s a metaphorical recall. You are not recalling the car itself, because it doesn’t go anywhere.
I’m not sure defendingg this word use is any more weird than to die on the opposing hill of insisting updating a car’s software is a recall of the car.
If one must be a Tesla employee to argue about the word “recall”, you must be a Tesla employee, too.
I think logic is breaking down the deeper these comments nest.
https://www.tesla.com/support/annual-and-recall-service
The important part is "they were required to change something", not where the maintenance physically occurs.
Good news, we don’t. It means that a manufacturer is required to check each vehicle they sold and make it safe or remove it from the road. The key part to understand is that they are required to check each vehicle, not just assume everyone will see the news and contact them.
Since Tesla can fix this with a software update trackable over the air, they’re saving a lot of money but it’s still a safety defect which needs to be corrected.
That's a recall. That's a government body having to "push" (in your own words no less) to improve safety.
Let's be honest, Tesla generally has to be dragged kicking and screaming to anything for safety (from matters as benign as Elon throwing a tantrum about the aesthetics of airbag warning on sunvisors to the fact that when AP was released, it only did steering wheel checks every fifteen minutes, and it's been several iterations of pressure to make them as frequent as they are now).
It's good to have the advancement of mechanisms for OTA updates.
It's still a recall, no matter how much Tesla fans scream "better than the dinosaurs".
Elon didn't throw a tantrum.
He didn't throw himself at the floor screaming like a child.
I don't recall he ever did that.
And by that I mean: I never forced a car maker to issue a software update.
(That's obviously what "recall" means, like reckless tweeting is "throwing a tantrum".)
> It's still a recall, no matter how much Tesla fans scream
It's possible that both of these are true at once:
So you can be right in the first, and others (myself included) can be right that it doesn't make sense to think of a forced software update as a recall. Maybe if everyone's autopilot was forcefully deleted and reimbursed, you could call it a recall of that feature. But if autopilot wasn't taken off the shelves and it just behaves differently, then you're stretching the meaning of "recall" to a philosophical extreme.For the sake of argument, THIS IS SCREAMING!!!
Objecting to a skewed media narrative isn't.
> He didn't throw himself at the floor screaming like a child.
> I don't recall he ever did that.
He specifically exclaimed "Fuck it, I don't care, we'll pay the fines" rather than having that adornment in the vehicle. Just because your literalism says that it's not, because there were no mashed fists against the floor, doesn't make it less so, particularly when the definition of tantrum is around outbursts of anger, often immaturely.
> But if autopilot wasn't taken off the shelves and it just behaves differently, then you're stretching the meaning of "recall" to a philosophical extreme.
Also, then I guess two of my Audi recalls weren't actually recalls either. One involved updating the software for the 'passenger occupancy detection system'. A USB stick was plugged into the car. It didn't happen OTA, but nothing was touched or removed or installed on the vehicle. But I'm sure that would somehow be a recall still.
Mechanism. Intent. Two separate things.
> He specifically exclaimed "Fuck it, I don't care, we'll pay the fines" rather than having that adornment in the vehicle. Just because your literalism says that it's not, because there were no mashed fists against the floor, doesn't make it less so, particularly when the definition of tantrum is around outbursts of anger, often immaturely.
You could say it's an immature choice when you look at the consequences.
But it's not an outburst of anger. No clenched fists, no sweating, no crying, no hissing.
He didn't even raise his voice. Was he angry? Sure, he used the word "fuck".
Throwing a tantrum is an exaggeration. You can call me a literalist.
---
> A USB stick was plugged into the car. It didn't happen OTA, but nothing was touched or removed or installed on the vehicle. But I'm sure that would somehow be a recall still.
You have a good point. The difference between plugging a USB key and sending an OTA update is mostly technical.
The point of making a distinction: When you recall a car (by physically relocating it, to make it clear), you make it unavailable to the owner until it is returned, at great inconvenience to the owner.
If a service update rendered the car unavailable to a similar extent, I'd see the similarity better. I still think the word "recall" would be wrong, not because I'm trying to undermine the extent and severity of the matter. I'm sure we can come up with better, similarly critical words, e.g. "Tesla bricking all their cars for 48 hours".
Are they all excluded from the figures?
Probably accidents per mile would be high, but I doubt accidents per vehicle would be notable.
We need less technical fixes for things like this and more legal consequences for drivers who are found to have used the system negligently. Want to act like a clown in your self-driving Tesla? Great, you're still responsible for what it does and now you can deal with a criminal conviction, same as someone driving drunk.
I think the saying goes "If you're going to kill someone, do it in a car"
If all you want is revenge, then by all means, punish them as hard as you wish. Make them listen to tesla autopilot advertising until their ears bleed. The harm is done by that time.
If you want to avoid harm, then you're well served to take the failure mode into account - it's not a conscious decision to take attention away from the autopilot. It's a fundamental psychological mechanism and we're all prone to fall victim. The only way to avoid the trap is to not use autopilot - or change how it works and adress the need for changes to the party that (mis)designed the feature and has power to change it.
Read this repeatedly until you've answered your question.
It would be an uphill battle for sure, and that's incredibly depressing.
Why would you make the manufacturer liable for this?
(From the top post). If other manufacturers show the same flaw, make the liable, too.
Planes operate in a space with good visibility, any obstacle will be visible with ample lead time.
Planes operate in controlled space, with dedicated and verified spacing between traffic participants, allocated by an external traffic control. Collisions are not rare because pilots jump in within split seconds to avoid them, but because traffic control routes planes away from each other if they converge.
The planes autopilot is in fact less capable than what the teslas autopilot pretends to be. Its limitations are fairly well understood by pilots.
A planes autopilot doesn’t dump the pilot into a “you’ll crash in a second” situation. Handover from autopilot is a different process than what Tesla expects. The planes systems are designed with human psychology and limitations in mind, because of the comparatively high regulatory bar.
Autopilot on cars is a MUCH harder problem than on an airplane. Plus you're taking about trained professionals and liable companies vs average Joe and negligent developer.
1) The whole airspace environment is heavily regulated (ATC, rules, etc), cooperative (think transponders or TCAS for example) and usually quite sparse (several miles between planes).
2) Pilots are regularly trained and evaluated for these kind of take over in case of emergency.
3) You have two pilots monitoring each other.
4) The development cycles for these automations are far longer, and the QA a lot stricter.
5) At least in the most critical phases (take-off, landing), the automation is not exactly end-to-end. It's more the case of grouping batch of steps together into bigger actions to reduce the load on the pilots. The pilots are still quite busy during these periods and very much in the loop.
This kind of change isn't impossible. Drunk driving was once in this same category -- I.e. considered an unfortunate accident rather than a crime. Then Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) ran a 30 year campaign to change the law, change enforcement, change prosecution, and finally (partially) the culture.
But I guarantee the NHTSA has neither the mandate nor the capacity to lead that change.
https://www.dailynews.com/2014/08/27/no-charges-for-lasd-dep...
https://www.scribd.com/document/237940150/Official-document-...
I’ve probably used my phone 5 times while driving in the last two years, and I can’t imagine why anyone would need to do it more than that. I do rely on CarPlay and Siri massively.
It will take another 10 years of concerted effort to actually change behaviour. It took MADD 20 years just to get the legal alcohol limit down from 0.15 to 0.08.
Pushing responsibility onto individual drivers for misusing automated systems is not the answer.
Making it painful enough to progress to the technology closer to infallibility is the way forward.
As always it comes down to the incentives and desired outcomes argument.
We aren’t trying to incentivize good behavior. We are trying to close the distance between technical promise and genuine achievement. You, in general principles, have to build the incentives around negative or positive consequences to manufacturers, not punish technology users for not using the half-ass implementation properly.
Top management is almost always most concerned with an innovation’s likely effect on the bottom line and they are accustomed to receiving market feedback, proposals and regulatory guidance that in turn help them prioritize resources to optimize for a return on investment and payback. We want to leverage that decision system to fix self-driving not engage in punitive end-user punishment because end users can’t do anything to change it.
TLDR; Right instinct, wrong clowns.
Either we have to accept these systems, or we need to ban them, but this goofy waffling where we just cripple them to be useless makes no sense to me.
How is that wrong?
I just can't figure out what lane centering is supposed to free me up to do instead.
In general, that analogy applies, though. Just like cruise control allows you to effortless maintain a speed, autosteer makes lane centering effortless.
It is basically like power steering that reduces steering effort to exactly zero. The benefit is greater than I thought it'd be, tbh.
I keep my hands on the steering wheel virtually at all times. I say virtually because I might let go for 2-3 seconds to untwist a bottle cap if everyone else in the car is asleep, not any different than the “knee steering” I did before. However, the car follows the curvature of the road without a problem.
The main benefit of ADAS, to me, is greatly reduced driver exhaustion. Yes, I am paying attention and actively driving the car, however I can focus on the important things.
The ACC ensures I don’t need to worry about fines for speeding due to a heavy foot. It also ensures that I’m “far enough” from the car in front to keep me (and them) safe. Lane assist means I can spend 20% more focus on understanding what shenanigans are going on 5 cars ahead instead of worrying about drifting in another lane.
Do I rely on it continuously? Nope. Do I trust it completely? It’s bad enough that I can’t. However, after driving 2000km, I’m still fresh enough to engage in a conversation in a foreign language with the in-laws, whereas in my prime, 15 years ago, the same trip would’ve put me to bed instantly.
It reduces the cognitive load of driving. It doesn’t make driving easier, however it reduces the mental burden of being a defensive driver.
It’s not unlike ABS. Could I achieve a lower stopping distance by carefully surfing the grip/skid brake pressure? With practice, on a track, absolutely. Do I get greater peace of mind knowing that at any time a computer is checking 500x per second whether my tyres are losing grip, regardless of my state of mind, whether I’m paying attention, am distracted, the road conditions, or which pair of shoes I’m wearing? Undoubtedly.
> In addition to the functionality and features of Autopilot, Enhanced Autopilot also includes:
> Navigate on Autopilot: Actively guides your car from a highway’s on-ramp to off-ramp, including suggesting lane changes, navigating interchanges, automatically engaging the turn signal and taking the correct exit.
> Auto Lane Change: Assists in moving to an adjacent lane on the highway when Autosteer is engaged.
> Autopark: Helps automatically parallel or perpendicular park your car, with a single touch.
> Summon: Moves your car in and out of a tight space using the mobile app or key.
> Smart Summon: Your car will navigate more complex environments and parking spaces, maneuvering around objects as necessary to come find you in a parking lot.
At best, I would accept that this is blatant false advertising on the fault of all car manufacturers who offer anything with a name akin to "autopilot".
The biggest reduction in drunk driving happened because of ride sharing.
The biggest reduction in piracy was because of availability of legal content.
The biggest reduction in car deaths is going to be creating an alternative to cars.
Human error is a valid defense because humans make a ton of errors, all the time.
I can bet that punishing people for human errors in this context will have a net negative consequence on society as a whole.
It doesn't suprise me one bit people get into way more accidents while in a Tesla.
I bet if you split further into Tesla's without any autopilot or FSD what so ever, the stat would return to normal. Or on rental Teslas, which are always speed locked to like 80mph / calm mode and no autopilot or FSD features (at least around me.)
Not sure if it's a "tech people not realizing you need to buy new tires" or maybe they aren't used to how fast tires wear down on heavier EVs.
Inevitably when it finally rained in the Bay Area, you'll see at least one Tesla smashed into the guide rail on the 101 up to SF.
[1] - https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modelx/en_us/GUID-94F63B1...
There is a bunch of non-auto pilot innovations they’ve made as well.
That is what I meant by re-inventing the wheel for political purposes.
The consumer doesn't care about the type of propellent the car uses, it was an imposition from the above which raised the price of cars and reduced their range and aestetics because of batteries design constraints.
Tesla specifically also have very poor interior design and quality of materials.
If you’re moving the goal posts to subjective opinion on aesthetics, then ok, I have no comment.
Model Y is the most popular vehicle ever made in any category electric or not.
Price, weight, center of gravity, cornering ability and time to "refuel" are much worse.
Also given that price of an EV is already high as it is, manufacturers compromise on quality of interior materials and assembly and you can see it
The metric that matter are way inferior.
> > Model Y is the most popular vehicle ever made in any category electric or not.
Last time I checked the Toyota Corolla sold 50M units, VW Golf sold like 35M units, a couple of Toyota models stand at 15M and 10M respectively. Not to mention the Ford Model T. How many Tesla Model Y got sold some 1.5M? You should check numbers instead of blindly believing the propaganda.
Tesla will never sell that much cars in the history of the company, not just one model.
Not to mention how it's much harder to sell 1M Ford Model T in 1915 than even 10M Teslas in 2023 (not that they will ever sell 10M cars per year)
It's a 150 year old industry, only people who believe propaganda buy into the lie that it's being revolutionized in any way , shape or form.
Price is worse if you ignore total cost of ownership… otherwise price is generally better. (Ie model 3 is cheaper than Corolla)
I think you need to drive a Tesla they corner extremely well.
Time to refuel… but you plug it in at night so you don’t need to refuel, I’d call this a trade off not better or worse.
Centre of gravity is basically perfect. What are you referring to as negative here?
Model Y sells more units per quarter than any other vehicle ever. Is that not the definition of popular? Obviously vehicles that have been around longer have sold more volume.
The ex CEO of vw said himself Tesla has revolutionised ev manufacture in a way they struggled to match. Referring to their 45 second model Y production rate.
More weight, they feel like boats in corners, there is a reason why cornering on a motorbike feels better than cornering in a car, and cornering in a light car always feels better than a heavy car. On a heavy EV you can't drift , you can't slide the back, no mechanical feedback, no sound eww.
> > Price is worse if you ignore total cost of ownership… otherwise price is generally better. (Ie model 3 is cheaper than Corolla)
There are Toyotas out there with 1M miles on the same engine whereas Tesla need total overhaul after 100k miles, not to mention diesel trucks, there are diesel trucks out there with 5M miles on the same engine.
> > Time to refuel… but you plug it in at night so you don’t need to refuel, I’d call this a trade off not better or worse.
When I buy a car I want to be able to use it 24/7/365, it is way worse to need 7 hours to recharge as opposed to a 30 seconds splash and go.
> > Model Y sells more units per quarter than any other vehicle ever
And you extrapolate this quarterly data thinking it will reach the same level of sales of VW Golfs and Corollas, that's the mistake. VW and Corolla at cumulatively 200M units sold they moved (and still move the world) , Teslas move a bunch of rich guys who want to virtue signal, there is a limited number of them.
Honestly the whole line of thinking on petrol is better is just change resistance rather than rationality. Most people drive 60 miles a day. Cars stay parked more than they are driven. Electricity is ubiquitous. EVs, particularly teslas solve this: home charging for casual use, super chargers for road trips.
Cornering in an EV with regen and instant torque is not comparable to any other type of vehicle and is vastly superior (even with the extra weight). Having driven a lotus (considered extremely light) and model 3 on the same stretch of road. The model 3 is superior in almost every way. (There is something still fun about rumbling engines and gears that EVs miss).
I think when you look at total cost of ownership you need to look at average length of ownership. Most people do not keep their car for 1M miles. For a Tesla, not really “overhaul” generally it is often a motor and/or battery replacement. It does kind of look like an overhaul given the simplicity of the drive train. But it’s two parts.
On the contrary: Tesla, or EVs in general are Better and safer. They are outselling every other vehicle because of that. Not because there are suddenly more rich people or virtue signallers in the world.
It depends on the type of bike and the skill of the rider ;)
> > petrol is better is just change resistance
Re-inventing the wheel should be done for the benefit of consumers, the whole electricity revoloution in automotive is a political thing imposed by the elites who have too much free time on their hands so they worry about how's the climate is gonna be 50 years from now, whereas normal people don't even plan on living that long.
> > Electricity is ubiquitous
So is oil, you need it for literally everything in a city ranging from cement to lubricants to asphalt and it's much easier to transport to the rural areas, quite frankly you and I would not be here if it wasn't the case
> > The model 3 is superior in almost every
Then why does the Model 3 lose every lap time comparisons in corner intense tracks like the Nurburgring or Laguna Seca or Silverstone, and not only that, the gas car will be able to do laps for the whole day, the Model 3 overheats and would leave you stranded
> > Most people do not keep their car for 1M miles
That's because they fail much sooner than that, in an industry which is 200 years old there is nothing left to invent (again if not for political purposes) so old cars seem extremely attractive, BMWs and Mercedes from 2003 have better UI and interiors than many new cars, especially Teslas
> > Tesla are Better and safer
Has Tesla ever achieved anything like Mercedes did in Laredo Texas back in long gone 2005? Video below
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMRbV4pIdyc
I am sure not, because large mouth Musk would have kept tweeting about it, but such levels of reliability in extreme conditions are sadly way beyond the capabilities of the automobiles manufactured in his factories (or should I say tents?)
Oil is only ubiquitous because we painstakingly distribute it. My point was we already distribute electricity quite effectively (without trucks and pumps etc).
I’ll concede a highly skilled rider and a high end bike could outpace/outcorner. But I think the fun of an EV or a Tesla specifically is that anybody can drive at a high level with relative ease because of the weight and low centre of gravity.
I think you are right at the extremes, high end porches out manueveur teslas. High reliability Toyotas out last Tesla. High performance Mercedes out perform a Tesla. But the reason people enjoy teslas is they perform extremely well across a number of those areas.
The EV transition is actually inevitable. Oil is finite, solar is not (we’ll give or take some billions of years). I don’t think it’s about virtue signalling or politics. It’s pure pragmatism. Pushing for more oil consumption is literally kicking the can down the road. Transitioning vehicles to electric extends the use of our finite resource for things we don’t have an alternative for (plastics and rubbers, and long haul air travel)
Other companies did too, and other companies would've whether Tesla did or not. It's not clear whether Tesla accelerated that shift or slowed it down.
I disagree with this statement. I think the greater issue is that suddenly, you’ve you’ve given every Tesla owner a car that can accelerate to the equivalent of a base Porsche 911 or better. Most people (I include myself) will not responsibly handle this much power.
No other make would be as heavily influenced by it as Tesla. EVs are less than 10% of sales for most other makes, so the impact would be nearly negligible.
It's not how fast the car is, or its safety features. It is the target consumer. Vehicles that appeal to subprime purchasers, boy racers, or other risk takers tend to have higher loss rates compared to similar vehicles.
If you look up high horsepower cars that are known as "old man" sports cars, they tend to have low loss numbers. It is the driver that matters more than any other single factor.
I think the human factor here is a couple of things:
1. many of these drivers are under the impression that their vehicles can drive semi-autonomously, and so they take more risks in not monitoring the system
2. these vehicles are new and high performance, and they appeal to those who want to show off, display status, and take risks in demonstrating the vehicle's capabilities.
3. they are driven on more dense roads
When was the last time you saw someone in a late model Buick doing hard launches and showing off the lane-keep-assist?
When I drove an old Mazda I didn't bother reporting anything short of catastrophic damage (obv if I caused an accident for someone else I'd report)... I don't think that's true for someone driving a new Model Y.
For example, the bottom of the list is not filled with brands with a lot of safety features, it is filled with brands that predominantly don't (/didn't) target riskier groups of drivers. People who buy boring vehicles drive differently than people who buy powerful and exciting vehicles. There is self-selection at play here.
Given I'd like to assume the best and conclude no one is lying here; obviously what they're measuring is slightly different, but it feels like they're similar enough that we shouldn't be getting entirely opposite outcomes. Do Tesla drivers drive substantially more? Are Tesla drivers just more likely to report crashes to their insurance/police (versus, Tesla's data is probably from automated internal observability)? If Tesla's data is based on internal observability, is that observability underreporting incidents to the mothership?
[1] https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
That's a bad assumption. Tesla routinely lies about everything from full self-driving to price to quarter mile times. It's built into the company's DNA.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38690496