Quote:
Originally Posted by Eleazar
I think the autopilot feature, if it was in use, makes the story newsworthy. The concept of self-driving cars and Tesla's autopilot specifically has been the subject of plenty of discussion in other accidents, some involving fatalities. The question of whether cars should have the feature in the first place is a valid question.
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But the problem is that the question has basically already been answered without much room for debate. You can Google around all you want, and you'll find that every single study that has examined the safety of Autopilot has found that people get in far fewer accidents when it is turned on than when it's not. Here's one just as an example.
http://bgr.com/2017/01/19/tesla-auto...-report-nhtsa/
As I said before, I agree that it is newsworthy when there is an accident where autopilot clearly IS at fault. My criticism is that pretty much every time a Tesla (or other self-driving car) is in an accident, it makes the news regardless of whether autopilot was involved or not. It's news orgs reaching for sensationalist headlines that give the impression that self-driving cars aren't safe, when the reality is quite the opposite.
When it comes down to it, the "debate" about whether self-driving cars are safer than human drivers is already closed. The question moving forward is more about HOW MUCH safer they are and UNDER WHAT CIRCUMSTANCES self-driving cars might struggle.