Remember when the argument for self driving cars was that they don’t need to be perfect, just better than humans?
@JackbyDev@programming.dev @return2ozma@lemmy.world well that’s still Waymo’s argument I think. Elon is a bit different in many ways…
I think that’s still a valid argument since perfection will probably never happen.
For me it’s more like, remember when the expectation was that Tesla would ever produce a version that didn’t suck ass?
If only there was an entity that could make rules about who and what can be driven on public roads.
I know it sounds impossible, but what if this entity could have stepped in before companies tread public roads and other drivers as beta testers for their half finished commercial products? They could have forced companies to either make this stuff work, or keep it off the roads.
Real talk for a moment: The world, but especially the USA has been on fire over the last decade. Sometimes I wonder how different the introduction of certain technologies could have been if everyone wasn’t distracted by all the craziness and governments had actually done their job. I’m not just talking about self-driving or AI, as another example, but also crypto and social media in general. Would things be much different, if this stuff appeared during “boring times”?
Sorry, I’m just rambling here …
I don’t think the blank cheque handed to these emergent technologies is a function of the times in which they emerged. Rather it’s the fact that technology advances much faster than the wheels of government turn; it’s nearly inevitable that new technologies will be largely unregulated until government can catch up.
perhaps the governance of the united states was never really meant to be effective, but good enough for now, before they could usher in the new era, of His dominion upon earth. hyper-techno-christian-fascism is gonna taste so good in the chips aisle
One thing that really gets me is comparing robotaxis with regular driving. How about comparing robotaxis to… taxis? Would not that be much more sane?
Professional taxi drivers do get into accidents. But their per-distance metric is much better than of an average Joe driving home after 10 hours work shift and a one-too-many pint after work.
Why anyone would ever compare robotaxi to anything else but a regular taxi?
Pretty sure that would make them as bad as or worse than drunk drivers.
Yet $TSLA stock just keeps going up. Remember when news like this would actually mean something in the stock market? America’s economy is like 🤏 this close to collapse because everything is fake and nothing matters.
The US Economy after the inevitable, next global depression:
Human: pffft hold my beer… Wait no, I’ll keep it.
I will never take any auto autonomous Tesla. Waymo maybe, but always a taxi or Uber and better yet a bus or train.
I can’t remember how many safety features Tesla has foregone in the name of profit, but my perception of them is that they’re death machines for both riders and pedestrians. No thank you
It’s not even about profit any more, Elon’s ego just won’t let him admit that he was wrong about a camera-only system, when the entire rest of the industry is using LIDAR. Genius businessman doesn’t understand the concept of sunk cost.
Some things are just super obvious that even if we can, we should not
They still drive better than Elon who is in a k hole right now 👍
This is based on a sample size of 8
That’s not how you measure sample size. There were 8 Tesla crashes. The crash is the outcome, not the sample.
8 Robotaxis crashed, having collectively driven the same distance that human-driven cars average two-thirds of a crash on. That’s statistically significant and then some.
it’s correct that 8 is not the sample size, but they didn’t give the sample size, it would be how many cars there are and the number of miles, not just the number of miles, they also didn’t establish fault and this was with a human in the loop, i’m all for hating elon but this isn’t worth reporting without more info.
They gave you all the numbers you need to calculate the sample size for the Robotaxis, and it’s safe to assume the sample size for regular cars will be much higher.
Tesla Robotaxis are involved in a crash for every 40,000 miles they drive. For comparison, the publication reported, cars driven by humans crash about once every 500,000 miles, meaning the Robotaxis so far have crashed 12.5 times more frequently than human-driven cars.
I don’t see how this gives sample size, are you considering every mile a sample?
i’m not worried about the sample size for regular cars but there’s like 10 of these driving right now.
Basically yes. You can’t usefully put a car into one of “crashes” or “doesn’t crash” categories the way you can with e.g. what colour an M&M is, or whether Drug X did or didn’t lower blood pressure in a patient, so miles travelled is a reasonable metric.
It’s possible you might be getting hung up on notions of sample size having to be above a particular fixed number and therefore miles sounding like a cheat, but actually there never has been a universal “correct” minimum sample size; it all depends on the data. A billion of one thing might not be enough, but 4 of another might be plenty.
Let’s put it this way. If you knew a person, and that person just had their fourth crash in 8 years having driven 160k miles, would you think “this person is a bad driver” or would you think “they only crashed 4 times, let’s see where this goes”.
Especially if you’ve seen this driver drive in the wrong lane, go straight in a turn only lane, and other dodgy maneuvers regularly.
One would expect such a small sample size to lower the crash rates. But tesla is subverting expectations yet again.
no you wouldn’t, it would just make it less accurate
A small sample size would just make the prediction highly uncertain, could be way better or way worse.
However others have made the observation that it’s reasonable to consider the miles driven as the sample size, and at over 300,000 miles, it is a bit more credible sounding.
Do they have different personalities, are the tolerances so great unit to unit? What do you even mean?
I mean 8 crashes is not a lot to work with statistically to the point where this is nearly meaningless.
i’ve seen a car crash as soon as it came off the lot and if I cherrypicked that and 7 other crashed cars I’d probably consider that brand very unsafe.
i prefer human taxis
its most likely a regular tesla with all the sensors stripped out, and the software dumbed down.
There was a news story two weeks ago about Waymo taxis in Texas driving through 20 bus stops over a few days.
The only response was, “company officials treat this very seriously and are working on a fix.”
It’s bizarre how if you drove through twenty bus stops in three days, you would not only lose your license but be in jail on multiple charges.
But if a corporation does it it is, “Oops, we will do better next time.”
Utterly insane.
No wonder Sovereign Citizens think they can get away with anything with the right paperwork.
It’s bizarre how if you drove through twenty bus stops in three days, you would not only lose your license but be in jail on multiple charges.
This is a relatively unique Texas law that requires cars to stop when school buses are loading or unloading passengers, including on the opposite side of the road going the other direction. The self driving companies didn’t program for that special use case, so it actually is a relatively easy fix in software.
And the human drivers who move to Texas often get tripped up by this law, because many aren’t aware of the requirement.
It isn’t a unique Texas Law. It’s law everywhere in the US and Canada.
“mostly all in North America, require all surrounding vehicles to stop when a school bus is stopped with its red lights flashing.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_bus_traffic_stop_laws
“And the human drivers who move to Texas often get tripped up by this law, because many aren’t aware of the requirement.”
Only if you are from a different country.
Which is beside the point that if anyone else drove through 20 bus stops, they couldn’t use the excuse, “I’m from another country so I don’t know your laws.” to get out of jail.
That it’s a software fix is also beside the point. “Oh I drove illegally 20 times. I know better and won’t do it again.”
The default in most other states is that opposite direction traffic on a divided highway don’t have to stop. The states differ in what constitutes a divided highway, but generally at least 5 feet of space or a physical barrier between the lanes would qualify. In Texas, however, there is no exception for divided highways, and the key definition is “controlled-access highway,” which requires on/off ramps and physical barriers between traffic directions, or “different roadways,”
So for a 5-lane road where there are 2 lanes going in each direction with a center lane for left turns, Texas requires opposite direction traffic to stop, while most other states do not.
Yeah, a lot of school bus stops on five lane highways… /s
My commute to work includes a main city road with two lanes each way and a turning lane, and sometimes there is a school bus that stops.
2 lanes in each direction with a middle lane? That’s a big chunk of Texas, especially when weighted for population.
The incidents had nothing to do with divided highways. You can see the video is at residential streets.
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It’s not just Texas. It’s a requirement to stop for a school bus with its flashing lights on and stop sign out pretty much everywhere in the US.
They wrote the legislation that allowed themselves to operate self driving vehicles. Every one of these vehicles is a symbol of the oligarchy at work.
Sounds like they Sovereign Citizens could. They just have the wrong paperwork
Takes roughly a billion $1 pieces of paper.
Then send a ridiculously small number of those to your state representatives.
Oh! Driving past stopped school busses you mean. Had to look up “driving through bus stops”. :)
I found this part to be even more alarming:
All of the Robotaxi crashes so far have occurred with human safety monitors—who have been trained to take control of the car in the event of a software error—present in the vehicles.
This is significant because, as TechCrunch reported on Monday, Tesla is starting to send out its Robotaxi fleet without safety monitors.
So despite a pitiful record with people trying to correct the cars mistakes, they’re now ready to move on to running them without assistance?!? I am furious at the idea that our safety on the roads is this negotiable.
It’s insane how shit the US is at managing its cars considering how aggressively they’ve forced them as the only truly viable mode of transport. It sucks horribly to drive in North America but it’s the only option given to people. Like, if you’re gunna do the worst option at least do it right and have some pride in the system.
The US doesn’t give a fuck about its people.
Feel like some sort of trap. Being able to drive anywhere feels like it gives you so much freedom, the ability to go anywhere but the reality is there so much opportunity cost and financial cost to live in a car dominated society, even all the small things like convenience and safety all adds up.
An “convenience” is such a lie. I own a car and have a metro system and I almost never use the car. If I didn’t have parking in the back where I could just keave it it’d be even worse.
Regulatory capture is a hell of a drug.
The US has absolutely mad road to traffic laws. Zero concept of lane discipline, you driving whatever lane you feel like. Don’t understand roundabouts even though it’s just a curved road, it’s really not that hard. Still don’t have standardised pedestrian crossings even when other countries had them back in the 1920s. A red traffic light only means stop sometimes, but sometimes you can go if you’re turning right. No one obeys the speed limit, people regularly exceed it, and see no problem with that. And of course no one has separate indicator lights and brake lights because when would you ever slow down and go around a corner, definitely no need to engineer for that eventuality.
A red traffic light only means stop sometimes, but sometimes you can go if you’re turning right.
It always means stop. You can turn right on red (in most places) but only after you stop first and you must yield to crossing traffic. Unfortunately, not everyone knows this - I’ve met many people who think “right on red” means you can treat it like a green light as long as you’re turning right.
What really gets me pissed is the signs that say “right turn on red after complete stop” which implies that isn’t the case fucking everywhere, when it is the case.
Kind of a tangent, but what really scares me about the “turn on red” rule is that it’s not the same around the globe.
There are so many international drivers here in Japan that turn left at a red light without realizing that’s completely illegal. It catches pedestrians completely off guard. I think on Montreal Island you couldn’t do this either.
Stopping at a red light when wanting to turn isn’t some rare, obscure situation, so people who are travelling have to BE ABSOLUTELY SURE about this rule before they make use of their international lisence.
Proof of concept fails in a spectacular fireball?
Fuck it, owners are too invested, ship it anyway.
Feels like I work for the same company.
Why repair the plane on the ground…if it’s a real problem, we can fix it mid-flight.
Not trying to defend Tesla on this because fuck Musk and everything he touches but are there stats on how, when, and why the human took over? Did they just not take over? Did they take over to late? Did they take over and make the situation worse?
You raise an excellent point, one which i was hoping to find out more about as well. It turns out Tesla has been working hard to keep pretty much any pertinent information to answer your questions firmly under lock and key.
From this Electrek article https://electrek.co/2025/11/17/tesla-robotaxi-had-3-more-crashes-now-7-total/
Unlike other companies reporting to NHTSA, Tesla abuses the right to redact data reported through the system. The automaker redacts the “narrative” for each reported crash, preventing the public from knowing how the crashes happened and who is responsible.
Based on the limited information in Tesla’s reports, we know that one of the new crashes involved a Robotaxi driving into a car backing up, another involved a cyclist, and the last one involved an unknown animal.
So he’s basically fudging the numbers and anytime he’s questioned he points at the fudged numbers and says everything’s great, he’s great, now get out of the way while he deploys a fleet of these un-manned deathtraps to “half the US population” according to a properly ultra-super-inflated kind of claim only a douchebag like Leon can make. No, seriously–he actually claimed that by the end of 2025 he’ll have these things serving half the population of the US.
🫠
Wow, good thing the owner didn’t fire a load of people in the government department who could prevent this.
He fired them because he knew his system sucked, and would never be roadworthy, and that was the department that would stop him. So he fired them, and here we are.
I’m actually looking forward to a lot of good crashes, that they’ll explain away as Sleepy Joe’s fault, or it’s not that bad that a school bus full of children blew up on a fire crash with a Tesla, it happens all the time, or perhaps they’ll just deny it, and MAGA will cover it up. Let them kill a whole bunch of American citizens, and then be all dismissive of any criticism.
This is the year to let MAGA fully flower, and do their worst. The Dems should just stay out of the way, and do nothing to stop them from themselves, and work the media to point out every disaster. I can’t wait for the Midterms.
He fired them because he was under 17 active NTHSA investigations.
Whatever, poeple who buy Teslas or get into a Tesla cab or buy TSLA deserve everything coming to them.
Sounds like Obstruction of Justice, and a Cover-up. He didn’t have the legal authority to do that, just because another Sociopathic Oligarch told him it was okay. He needs to serve a few decades in prison.
You still believe in rule of law? Santa Claus is coming!
Yep, I do. We aren’t going to let MAGA take that away.
