Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving linked to hundreds of crashes, dozens of deaths
Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving linked to hundreds of crashes, dozens of deaths

Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving linked to hundreds of crashes, dozens of deaths

I’ve often wondered why the FTC allows it to be marketed as “Full Self-Driving”. That’s blatant false advertising.
As is “autopilot”. There’s no automatic pilot. You’re still expected to keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road.
I am so sick and tired of this belief because it's clear people have no idea what Autopilot on a plane actually does. They always seem to assume it flies the plane and the pilot doesn't do anything apparently. Autopilot alone does not fly the damned plane by itself.
"Autopilot" in a plane keeps the wings level at a set heading, altitude, and speed. It's literally the same as cruise control with lane-centering, since there's an altitude issue on a road.
There are more advanced systems available on the market that can be installed on smaller planes and in use on larger jets that can do things like auto takeoff, auto land, following waypoints, etc. without pilot input, but basic plain old autopilot doesn't do any of that.
That expanded capability is similar to how things like "Enhanced Autopilot" on a Tesla can do extra things like change lanes, follow highway exits on a navigated route, etc. Or how "Full Self-Driving" is supposed to follow road signs and lights, etc. but those are additional functions, not part of "Autopilot" and differentiated with their own name.
Autopilot, either on a plane or a Tesla, alone doesn't do any of that extra shit. It is a very basic system.
The average person misunderstanding what a word means doesn't make it an incorrect name or description.
It’s not even the closest thing to self driving on the market, Mercedes has started selling a car that doesn’t require you to look at the road.
Only works under 40 mph. Only available in 2 states. Not available until the end of this year.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a42672470/2024-mercedes-benz-eqs-s-class-drive-pilot-autonomous-us-debut/
You can literally type in an address and the car will take you there with zero input on the driver's part. If that's not full self-driving then I don't know what is. What FSD was capable of a year ago and how it performs today is completely different.
Not only does these statistics include the way less capable older versions of it, it also includes accidents caused by autopilot which is a different system than FSD. It also fails to mention how the accident rate compares to human drivers.
If we replace every single car in the US with a self-driving one that's 10x safer driver than your average human that means you're still getting over 3000 deaths a year due to traffic accidents. That's 10 people a day. If one wants to ban these systems because they're not perfect then that means they'll rather have 100 people die every day instead of 10.
That may be because Tesla refuses to publish proper data on this, lol.
Yeah, they claim it's ten times better than a human driver, but none of their analysis methods or data points are available to independent researchers. It's just marketing.
Who is responsible if there is an accident, you or Tesla? That is the difference from true FSD and regular driver assistance features.
Regarding driving regulations -
If we had better raw data, I'm sure we could come up with better conclusions. Knowing the absolutely tremendous amount of BS that Musk spews, we can't trust anything Tesla reports. We're left to speculate.
At this point, it is probably best to compare statistics for other cars with similar technologies. For example, Volvo reported that they went 16 years without a fatal accident in their XC90 model in the UK (don't know about other places). That was a couple of years ago, I don't know if they have been able to keep that record up. With that kind of record that has lasted for so long, I think we have to ask why Tesla is so bad.