Then the HN comment should have disclaimed it as such. I'm no Tesla FSD fan, but given the disregard Musk has demonstrated for safety, it's not cool to joke about things that could plausibly be true.
I also apologize for jumping to the conclusion that it wasn't a joke. Perhaps if we lived in a less edge-lord dominated tech media landscape, the comedy would be more easily discernible from reality!
> The system didn't know what this was, so it smashed at full speed into the trailer.
I feel like this will be a never-ending battle with a camera-based system. There will always be some visual situation not seen before. Shouldn't the default behavior be to slow/stop or throw up its metaphorical hands and release control back to the driver?
Adding a LIDAR will add a problem of "the system couldn't decide between believing a lidar or camera, decided to go with LIDAR which was wrong, and smashed into a perfectly visible wall".
It doesn't look like Tesla ever was in a state that it didn't have problems. It's a very new area where all solutions are filled with unsolved problems.
Removing lidar was 100% a cost saving that was ordered by Elon. I am sure there are internal investigations showing all kind of problems when lidar is removed, and Elon choose to ignore them all to save a few bucks.
Look at what he did at twitter. As soon as he was put in charge he removed all safety measures to save money and now twitter is full of bots and scammers. Why do people assume he runs Tesla any differently??
Tesla is the least successful of all these companies. Waymo is successfully running a robotaxi business in a few select locations. Mercedes is successfully offering a full self driving solution in certain very limited but very well-defined parameters.
Tesla is selling a driver assisted system that can't reliably turn the car or park it without manual intervention a decent percent of the time.
Waymo announced a $5B investment to expand service. They also announced a new sensor suite. The new vehicle will have no steering wheel. The vehicle and sensor hardware are real and being demo'ed. They charge real money and have 10,000+ paying customers per week. That's small compared to Uber, but the expansion signals that Waymo can scale up without hiring a lot more vehicle monitoring support people.
Plus with LIDAR being an active system you're more likely to see nothing or garbage where the ground and a road is supposed to be. Good idea to stop if there's a hole in reality!
With camera+AI it's the opposite. For too many things AI won't really know what they are - it's mainly looking for things that it does recognize. With unclassified pixels everywhere, of course the default is to ignore what it doesn't understand, otherwise the system would never work. You can see this with the Tesla happily driving through some unrecognized pixels.
LIDAR-based systems can operate without having to unsafely ignore things that they can't account for or that don't make sense.
Teslas have 3 front facing cameras with a lot of overlap, so that same problem has already been decided on. The issue is not new, it's just one more view to merge.
I'm not saying anything about the quality change. I'm saying that adding lidar is not a change that requires new types of decision. They already have answers for "what to do if one camera identifies something but another doesn't". Same class of problem with the lidar, even if it needs to be solved differently.
That argument never made sense to me. If we hit a scenario where the camera makes a mistake, we will do the wrong thing 100% of the time. Adding more sensors would have made more sense to me but that would have made the cars more expensive and the existing fleet would need a retrofit.
I genuinely believe that more people would be put off buying a Tesla if the headlines were "Teslas randomly slow down" compared to "Teslas randomly kill people".
People wouldn't buy a car that slows down occasionally because they'd accept it would happen to they and they'd find it annoying. They'd happily buy a car that randomly kills people because they'd tell themselves it's only happen to other people.
I wonder if, contrary to all Musk said, the Robotaxi will have Lidar and what Tesla buyers feel then. Because each Robotaxi is 23/7 on the road and will see much more usage compared to a car, so there should be more incidents per car, with an - assumed - increase in Robotaxis we'll see an significant increase in incidents.
Also Robotaxi customers might complain more - or sue - compared to Tesla owners.
Why should anyone believe Musk? He promised a solar powered Tesla coup in 2008, and the stories have only become wilder since. I think robotaxi is the same sort of fantasy.
It seems like Elon conflates what he wants to be true and what is actually true. It’s much better for the business model if cars don’t need expensive LIDAR to get full self driving. With just cameras, the cost to install them in every car and thus have the ability to sell FSD to every customer is low. With LIDAR you have to make cars with it and without it, and then you can’t sell it like an app to them later. (I suppose you could maybe do something like pre-wire the car for LIDAR and make it easily installable but you’re still probably going to need the user to take the car to the dealer which may be enough friction to reduce sales significantly.)
This is reply without understanding. The "reality distortion field" is a web of lies the person convinces themself are true. They still originate as lies. In this case, it's just business. People have a hard on for this guy's word salads because they want it to be true. It sounds cool, and would be. His hype and vision are just marketing to be mostly ignored.
He makes a lot of predictions about what he thinks he will be able to accomplish in the future, many of them people think won’t happen, and then they do. That’s the reality distortion field. The Steve Jobs bio covered it well. People often think things can’t work, even past the point at which they do. Like a smart phone with no keyboard.
I do not think he’s always truthful by any means. But a failed prediction is not a lie. as the great George Costanza once said, it’s not a lie if you believe it.
I mean, he said he could put rockets in space much cheaper than the governments and defense contractors and he did. He said he could build the first new American car company in several decades and get people to want to drive electric cars, both of which seemed insane at the time, and he did.
He’s always overly-optimistic about cost and timeline and he’s got a whole host of issues due to his mental illness but the dude did do several extremely impressive things that nobody thought would happen.
Compared to what he has accomplished you can understand how “a car can drive itself without LIDAR” seems easily believable. It may be wrong, but it’s not as hard to imagine as Starlink was ten years ago.
> If you think it isn't lies, then you accept he's not very intelligent or at least illogical.
Or delusional.
I think he's a smart guy. I don't think he's remotely as smart as he thinks he is, but smart nonetheless. So calling him a willful liar is, in my view, giving him the benefit of the doubt because the other explanations are even worse.
> It seems like Elon conflates what he wants to be true and what is actually true.
This is going to bite him in the ass w.r.t. Starship, too: Rapid reusability, return to launch site, and in orbit refueling are just the major aspects of a dependency hairball in Starship. Either it all works, or none of it works well enough to actually be more efficient than a non-reusable second stage.
It's not technically impossible to solve. Humans drive with vision, audio, and balance inputs, so in extremis if you want a self-driving car you can hire a chauffeur.
However, no matter how easy or difficult it is to drive with vision alone, more data is better: driving with vision plus lidar will be easier.
Tesla's mistake seems to be relentless optimism. If self driving were simple, then it'd be here today and the market would be competing on how to add it to cars with minimal additional cost. There, the data-light method would have an advantage. Yet self-driving is not in fact here, and for equal capital investments a company like Waymo using sensor fusion will probably get there before Tesla.
The obvious counterpoint being that while humans can drive cars, part of the narrative for self-driving AI is how often we crash them and kill people in the process, and one of the advantages an AI could have is integration of so many more sensor modalities than mere humans.
(Other advantages, such as "never gets drunk, tired, or distracted" would still apply, but are not necessarily sufficient).
> Humans drive with vision, audio, and balance input
And they also make mistakes. Human driving is "impossible to solve" too. And it's not even about experience and individual abilities. Visual illusions can happen to anyone if they're unlucky - one night I had to convince myself to drive "into the wall", because my brain decided the hole under a bridge was a wall and the bridge was empty space due to colours being just right. You can't avoid that whether the driving system is software or wetware.
tesla et al don't "remember" anything, whereas we do. For you to think there was actually a wall there you'd have to assume you either missed the signs saying the road was closed or someone had stolen all the signs and you're the first person to be caught in their trap.
a self driving (or even self-stopping/accident avoidant) car does not remember it didn't see any signs saying road closure, it can only go off what is in front of it.
whenever i watch the videos of the FSD screen in traffic, you see things popping in and out of existence. This, to me, is why "FSD" cannot be better than a human, even with advanced sensors. Maybe if all cars were networked, but guess what, i will never own one, i'll buy old cars until they outlaw it, and then i'll probably sit in my house and wait to die. But until "non-network equipped cars are banned nationwide for any purpose" what do you propose?
Also this was on the front page on my phone's app, but it wasn't on the first 5 pages on the website - is this whitewashing by someone at HN or what?
So Tesla's business model will be to hire each driver a chauffeur? And somehow that's robotaxi tech? It's more probably than the current hardware succeeding.
The only thing it needs to do is to build a 3D model and ensure the car's speed isn't faster than anything in front of it. It doesn't need to know whether it's a trailer or a bird or Superman. Just that if the relative speed is negative, then adapt the car's speed. Maybe ignore small things like insects or birds, if you're that inclined.
There is Gaussian splatting now. That seems fast enough for real-time, and would provide all that you need for this. If enough Gaussians are about to hit the windshield, slow the f* down.
It's not a problem with a camera based system. It's a problem with an overly complex AI+camera based system. If the car has to recognize what the camera sees before it will react, it's going to hit things. But you can have a camera based system with good binocular vision to build a depth map, no AI stuff. It doesn't matter if it's something seen before. If something is there, you don't need to know what it is, just don't hit it.
The AI stuff is helpful for a lot of self driving decision making, but detecting objects for collision avoidance needs to be simple and reliable.
Showing the camera footage from these vehicles (and the Uber ATG incident) causes a fallacy most people don’t even realize - eyes are way better than current cameras. So you think visibility was worse than it is, things were further away and approaching more quickly, and so on. So people are inclined to look at the video and say it was clear no one could avoid that. Which is just an inditement of the sensor tech but unless you see the scene yourself or have other sensor data, it’s not so obvious.
Yeah that’s what I meant. The fallacy being that people assume the cameras are as good as their eyes, especially when looking at footage shot through them without any basis for comparison.
I thought so, and yes, the resolution on them (at least as experienced while driving) is not high. They can see in several directions at once, so that’s good.
It’s not hard to imagine a car having better visibility than a human with cameras. But I don’t think they do yet.
Strictly speaking, this is not at all true. Eyes are pretty bad at this, much worse than cameras have been for a long while.
Vision, however, is much better. This is because of all of the postprocessing our brains do with the raw information our eyes put out before we actually "see" what our eyes are pointing at. But even that is full of errors (think optical illusions).
The raw image your eyes produce is full of literal holes where there is no image at all (it's often referred to as "like looking through a slice of swiss cheese"), and the rest is mostly out of focus.
You don't see that because your brain does a ton of fixing up and filling in the blanks before you perceive things. Much of what you think you're seeing is actually your brain reconstructing things.
Quote from Tesla critic Missy Cummings in the WSJ piece: "There is no question that someone is going to die in this technology, the question is when"
This is obviously true. However, I never heard these critics say that about cars without autonomy features. Way over a million people killed each single year around the world by that technology. Where was the concern for human life?
To anyone looking at it rationally, without emotion, it's clear that humans are not good at this task and that computers will eventually make roads safer than ever. The question is not if but when. Currently that data is debatable but some argue this point has already happened and cars with computer-assisted driving are already safer than those driven entirely by humans.
> it's obvious that humans are not good at this task and that computers will eventually make roads safer than ever.
It’s obvious that SOME humans are bad at this task.
It’s not at all obvious that a computer will ever be better. I’ve yet to see a single example of a computer that doesn’t trip all over itself on a snowy road, or lock up when someone intentionally marks up the roadway with graffiti that a human wouldn’t think twice about.
For FSD to be a net benefit, it only has to be better than an average driver. It's quite possible that FSD will be rather used by below average drivers (with excellent drivers opting to still drive themselves), further increasing the benefit.
that's a silly fallacy pushed by musk marketing. quit propagating it.
if the best driver in the world dies because they used FSD, then fsd is the cause so it must be as good as the best driver in the world to have not killed that human. q.e.d.
It’s also quite possible that worse than average drivers prefer to drive and better than average drivers prefer to use FSD, which might decrease overall safety.
This could be due to Dunning-Kruger, age based trust of new things, socioeconomics, etc.
Except in most scenarios another human can anticipate what even a bad driver is going to do. Meanwhile FSD still slams on the brakes when it sees a tree shadow moving across the road because it can't differentiate between a shadow and a real object.
We are a LONG ways off from FSD being better than the average driver. Anyone saying otherwise is apparently living in the Bay Area or one of the places an influencer lives that Tesla tries to game the system, because it is trash everywhere else. It still can't handle navigating a road that has the option to continue straight or go around a curve which even a novice driver can navigate without pause.
You could level similarly-contrived criticisms against humans where machines could do better too. Of course there will be edge-cases either way - the question is the overall balance, which tips further towards machines each day.
In the future, vehicles could have their FSD augmented by direct comms with each other, in a trustless way. If the entire traffic network ended up interconnected, it'd behave as a single system, approaching 100% self-awareness.
Obviously, no ordinary human drivers could get anywhere near that level of situational awareness, nor ability to coordinate in parallel. All they have is a small cone of vision/hearing, a bit of sensor augmentation, and little else.
>In the future, vehicles could have their FSD augmented by direct comms with each other, in a trustless way. If the entire traffic network ended up interconnected, it'd behave as a single system, approaching 100% self-awareness.
We can't get Amazon and Microsoft to agree on a single object-storage standard, and you think you're going to get every major auto manufacturer, including ones regulated by opposing nations to agree on an automobile communication standard? That who controls? And it won't be considered a national security risk to allow a foreign manufacturer to be able to potentially gridlock the entire traffic pattern(s) of a nation?
>All they have is a small cone of vision/hearing, a bit of sensor augmentation, and little else.
Which literally no amount of compute power has been able to replicate or surpass to date.
I'm not suggesting next year, or even next decade. But it will happen. You think profit-driven, hierarchical, centralised, closed and proprietary non-interoperable systems are our future? Novel idea! Best of luck with it.
If history has shown anything, it’s that humans are really good at standardizing globally.
For instance, we all use the metric system… we all use Nema plugs into the wall… we all speak English… we definitely all eat beef… ok, I’m confident we all at least use the same ammunition in our weapons several hundred years later? No?
The problem is when you balance the humans that are remarkable drivers with those that are terrible, the average trends towards terrible. Any kind of assistance for the terrible drivers would be helpful.
Besides, other vehicles have now active safety functions that seem to work extremly well. There are car models out there with ZERO fatalities so far thanks to this technology. So FSD being an improvement compared to really bad drivers is not really an improvement.
"... Tesla Model S was in "full self-driving mode" when it suddenly deployed the brakes. A total of eight vehicles crashed, nine people injured, including a 2-year-old boy."
I think it's your interpretation that's odd. Don't give me wrong I'm not an Elon fan, but I at least like where that technology is headed.
If I were given a choice between one in five chance of death by cancer, or a one in six chance of death by Russian roulette, I'm going to take the Russian roulette it doesn't matter that it's a dumb game. What matters are my better odds.
This isn't to say that we should accept people playing Russian roulette it's just that if Russian roulette is a cure for cancer then we got to accept those stats.
Now if we're going to compare active safety functions to Russian roulette with rubber bullets, then maybe the FDA should mandate Russian roulette with rubber bullets.
> it's clear that humans are not good at this task
True
> and that computers will eventually make roads safer than ever
Nothing suggests this is true, so far. Computers are much less able than even humans to devise the right reactions to the complex environment of the road.
In the laws that assign liability to the at-fault driver and in the most heinous cases charge them with vehicular manslaughter. I'll accept autonomous driving on public streets when the vehicle manufacturers accept liability for accidents caused while their self-driving functions are active. My understanding is that currently Tesla always says "actually the driver is at fault because our Terms Of Service say they should have intervened when the computer didn't know what to do." That's not autonomous driving and they don't get credit for vehicle-miles driven as long as the system is allowed to throw up its hands and say "your problem now, human."
This assertion ignores qualitative issues, like "Do Teslas fail to 'see' motorcycles?" You can be better than an average driver and much much worse in specific situations.
I do wonder if Tesla put its resources towards crash avoidance instead of FSD, maybe we would be more enthusiastic. I don’t really need my car to automatically drive straight, I need it to have inhuman reflexes to make the instantaneous decisons that will save my and my family’s lives.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] thread* Fixed a bug where telemetry wasn't wiped after a crash
* Various fixes and improvements
If it's not a joke it seems like something that should be prevented by regulators.
It would be no different than airplanes wiping their flight data recorders after a crash.
I feel like this will be a never-ending battle with a camera-based system. There will always be some visual situation not seen before. Shouldn't the default behavior be to slow/stop or throw up its metaphorical hands and release control back to the driver?
If I remember right it was lidar overriding the camera as the set up when Tesla was using lidar...
Look at what he did at twitter. As soon as he was put in charge he removed all safety measures to save money and now twitter is full of bots and scammers. Why do people assume he runs Tesla any differently??
Tesla is selling a driver assisted system that can't reliably turn the car or park it without manual intervention a decent percent of the time.
Plus with LIDAR being an active system you're more likely to see nothing or garbage where the ground and a road is supposed to be. Good idea to stop if there's a hole in reality!
With camera+AI it's the opposite. For too many things AI won't really know what they are - it's mainly looking for things that it does recognize. With unclassified pixels everywhere, of course the default is to ignore what it doesn't understand, otherwise the system would never work. You can see this with the Tesla happily driving through some unrecognized pixels.
LIDAR-based systems can operate without having to unsafely ignore things that they can't account for or that don't make sense.
Merging a camera with a camera, and a camera with a completely different kind of a sensor cannot be "the same problem". It's absurd.
People wouldn't buy a car that slows down occasionally because they'd accept it would happen to they and they'd find it annoying. They'd happily buy a car that randomly kills people because they'd tell themselves it's only happen to other people.
At some point new buyers attitude will change from "this will never happen to _me_" to "shit, this happens all the time".
Also Robotaxi customers might complain more - or sue - compared to Tesla owners.
I don't think he conflates those things in his own mind, only in his rhetoric. In other words, I think that Musk lies when it suits his purposes.
It’s a charisma that convinces other people of what’s true. Elon has that, that’s why said hard on exists. He often turns out to be right.
If you think it isn't lies, then you accept he's not very intelligent or at least illogical.
The simplest answer is he's voicing his ultimate vision for a product without basis in reality like the solar powered roadster, robotaxis, etx.
It's marketing and the result is the same whether he lies or not, only distinction is if he's mentally handicapped or dishonest.
I do not think he’s always truthful by any means. But a failed prediction is not a lie. as the great George Costanza once said, it’s not a lie if you believe it.
It's marketing. You're making things very complicated and distorting reality.
Not all that many.
He’s always overly-optimistic about cost and timeline and he’s got a whole host of issues due to his mental illness but the dude did do several extremely impressive things that nobody thought would happen.
Compared to what he has accomplished you can understand how “a car can drive itself without LIDAR” seems easily believable. It may be wrong, but it’s not as hard to imagine as Starlink was ten years ago.
Or delusional.
I think he's a smart guy. I don't think he's remotely as smart as he thinks he is, but smart nonetheless. So calling him a willful liar is, in my view, giving him the benefit of the doubt because the other explanations are even worse.
This is going to bite him in the ass w.r.t. Starship, too: Rapid reusability, return to launch site, and in orbit refueling are just the major aspects of a dependency hairball in Starship. Either it all works, or none of it works well enough to actually be more efficient than a non-reusable second stage.
It's not technically impossible to solve. Humans drive with vision, audio, and balance inputs, so in extremis if you want a self-driving car you can hire a chauffeur.
However, no matter how easy or difficult it is to drive with vision alone, more data is better: driving with vision plus lidar will be easier.
Tesla's mistake seems to be relentless optimism. If self driving were simple, then it'd be here today and the market would be competing on how to add it to cars with minimal additional cost. There, the data-light method would have an advantage. Yet self-driving is not in fact here, and for equal capital investments a company like Waymo using sensor fusion will probably get there before Tesla.
(Other advantages, such as "never gets drunk, tired, or distracted" would still apply, but are not necessarily sufficient).
And they also make mistakes. Human driving is "impossible to solve" too. And it's not even about experience and individual abilities. Visual illusions can happen to anyone if they're unlucky - one night I had to convince myself to drive "into the wall", because my brain decided the hole under a bridge was a wall and the bridge was empty space due to colours being just right. You can't avoid that whether the driving system is software or wetware.
a self driving (or even self-stopping/accident avoidant) car does not remember it didn't see any signs saying road closure, it can only go off what is in front of it.
whenever i watch the videos of the FSD screen in traffic, you see things popping in and out of existence. This, to me, is why "FSD" cannot be better than a human, even with advanced sensors. Maybe if all cars were networked, but guess what, i will never own one, i'll buy old cars until they outlaw it, and then i'll probably sit in my house and wait to die. But until "non-network equipped cars are banned nationwide for any purpose" what do you propose?
Also this was on the front page on my phone's app, but it wasn't on the first 5 pages on the website - is this whitewashing by someone at HN or what?
There is Gaussian splatting now. That seems fast enough for real-time, and would provide all that you need for this. If enough Gaussians are about to hit the windshield, slow the f* down.
If so I agree that that is a fallacy, they definitely are not as good as eyes, and I’d think anyone who drove a Tesla would agree.
“causes a fallacy most people don’t even realize - eyes are way better than current cameras.”
This implies “eyes are better than cameras” is a fallacy. But the rest of the comment makes me think you’re right.
It’s not hard to imagine a car having better visibility than a human with cameras. But I don’t think they do yet.
Strictly speaking, this is not at all true. Eyes are pretty bad at this, much worse than cameras have been for a long while.
Vision, however, is much better. This is because of all of the postprocessing our brains do with the raw information our eyes put out before we actually "see" what our eyes are pointing at. But even that is full of errors (think optical illusions).
You don't see that because your brain does a ton of fixing up and filling in the blanks before you perceive things. Much of what you think you're seeing is actually your brain reconstructing things.
This is obviously true. However, I never heard these critics say that about cars without autonomy features. Way over a million people killed each single year around the world by that technology. Where was the concern for human life?
To anyone looking at it rationally, without emotion, it's clear that humans are not good at this task and that computers will eventually make roads safer than ever. The question is not if but when. Currently that data is debatable but some argue this point has already happened and cars with computer-assisted driving are already safer than those driven entirely by humans.
It’s obvious that SOME humans are bad at this task.
It’s not at all obvious that a computer will ever be better. I’ve yet to see a single example of a computer that doesn’t trip all over itself on a snowy road, or lock up when someone intentionally marks up the roadway with graffiti that a human wouldn’t think twice about.
if the best driver in the world dies because they used FSD, then fsd is the cause so it must be as good as the best driver in the world to have not killed that human. q.e.d.
This could be due to Dunning-Kruger, age based trust of new things, socioeconomics, etc.
We are a LONG ways off from FSD being better than the average driver. Anyone saying otherwise is apparently living in the Bay Area or one of the places an influencer lives that Tesla tries to game the system, because it is trash everywhere else. It still can't handle navigating a road that has the option to continue straight or go around a curve which even a novice driver can navigate without pause.
How to I objectively test if I'm a good enough driver to be better off without FSD?
In the future, vehicles could have their FSD augmented by direct comms with each other, in a trustless way. If the entire traffic network ended up interconnected, it'd behave as a single system, approaching 100% self-awareness.
Obviously, no ordinary human drivers could get anywhere near that level of situational awareness, nor ability to coordinate in parallel. All they have is a small cone of vision/hearing, a bit of sensor augmentation, and little else.
You’re not even going to build an actual strawman before claiming to have knocked it down?
We can't get Amazon and Microsoft to agree on a single object-storage standard, and you think you're going to get every major auto manufacturer, including ones regulated by opposing nations to agree on an automobile communication standard? That who controls? And it won't be considered a national security risk to allow a foreign manufacturer to be able to potentially gridlock the entire traffic pattern(s) of a nation?
>All they have is a small cone of vision/hearing, a bit of sensor augmentation, and little else.
Which literally no amount of compute power has been able to replicate or surpass to date.
Right....
For instance, we all use the metric system… we all use Nema plugs into the wall… we all speak English… we definitely all eat beef… ok, I’m confident we all at least use the same ammunition in our weapons several hundred years later? No?
There are a few Tesla crashes on camera, and they look like something even a fairly bad driver could avoid. See for example the SF tunnel crash: https://abc7news.com/tesla-sf-bay-bridge-crash-8-car-self-dr...
Besides, other vehicles have now active safety functions that seem to work extremly well. There are car models out there with ZERO fatalities so far thanks to this technology. So FSD being an improvement compared to really bad drivers is not really an improvement.
"... Tesla Model S was in "full self-driving mode" when it suddenly deployed the brakes. A total of eight vehicles crashed, nine people injured, including a 2-year-old boy."
From the video it looks like there would be ample time to do just that, even before the first crash.
If I were given a choice between one in five chance of death by cancer, or a one in six chance of death by Russian roulette, I'm going to take the Russian roulette it doesn't matter that it's a dumb game. What matters are my better odds.
This isn't to say that we should accept people playing Russian roulette it's just that if Russian roulette is a cure for cancer then we got to accept those stats.
Now if we're going to compare active safety functions to Russian roulette with rubber bullets, then maybe the FDA should mandate Russian roulette with rubber bullets.
Most people don't drive like crazy and taking a ride in my car is statistically not as dangerous as playing Russian roulette.
True
> and that computers will eventually make roads safer than ever
Nothing suggests this is true, so far. Computers are much less able than even humans to devise the right reactions to the complex environment of the road.
This has "Tesla" in the headline.
In the laws that assign liability to the at-fault driver and in the most heinous cases charge them with vehicular manslaughter. I'll accept autonomous driving on public streets when the vehicle manufacturers accept liability for accidents caused while their self-driving functions are active. My understanding is that currently Tesla always says "actually the driver is at fault because our Terms Of Service say they should have intervened when the computer didn't know what to do." That's not autonomous driving and they don't get credit for vehicle-miles driven as long as the system is allowed to throw up its hands and say "your problem now, human."