Self-driving cars are often marketed as safer than human drivers, but new data suggests that may not always be the case.
Citing data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), Electrek reports that Tesla disclosed five new crashes involving its robotaxi fleet in Austin. The new data raises concerns about how safe Tesla’s systems really are compared to the average driver.
The incidents included a collision with a fixed object at 17 miles per hour, a crash with a bus while the Tesla vehicle was stopped, a crash with a truck at four miles per hour, and two cases where Tesla vehicles backed into fixed objects at low speeds.
Wow, thank goodness nobody gutted the authority in charge of making sure that wouldn’t happen…
https://www.theverge.com/news/646797/nhtsa-staffers-office-vehicle-automation-safety-firing-doge-tesla
The AI companies put out a presser a few years back that said “Um, aktuly, its the humans who are bad drivers” and everyone ate that shit up with a spoon.
So now you’ve got Waymos blowing through red lights and getting stuck on train tracks, because “fuck you fuck you stop fighting the innovation we’re creatively disruptive we do what we want”.
That doesn’t mean that waymo is more error prone than human drivers.
Humans are awful at driving and do stuff like stop on train tracks and blow through red lights all the time.