Soon it will be undeniable that FSD is the most advanced and safest self-driving system on the planet and the haters just need to accept it. It’s a good thing because it’s literally saving human lives.
You might not like Teslas as a vehicle nor the company itself due to the CEO but the fact is that no other manufacturer offers equally capable self-driving system and this is unlikely to change anytime soon. If you’ve not been following this technology closely they just switched from human code to 100% neural nets and the difference between V11 and V12 cannot be overstated. It’s still not perfect and probably never will be but it’s really good and there’s a good chance it’s already safer driver than the average human. This is all done using only cameras. No radar, no LiDAR.
There’s also rumors going around that Ford is about to licence the FSD software in their own vehicles and others are likely to follow so it will not be just Tesla’s that are using it.
Do you know how many traffic fatalities there are every day in the United States? FSD-related fatalities are rare, but they make the news every time. Someone dies roughly every 15min from a traffic accident, meaning about 10 people died in a car accident since you wrote this post.
I don’t know about the efficacy of FSD or whatever, but many, many more people are killed by human driven cars than self-driving vehicles. Self-driving vehicles don’t need to be perfect, they simply need to be better than humans, and, unfortunately, that’s not a very high bar to clear.
I’m ambivalent about Tesla. I really, really dislike Musk. But I actually have a tremendous amount of respect for the ENGINEERS at Tesla that are making some of the safest cars on the road based on crash testing–including ICE vehicles. There’s a lot of smart, hard-working people being underpaid and overworked to produce safe electric vehicles. I think they deserve praise.
“Self-driving” vehicles are so new to the market that this is a preposterous argument. They’re surely less than 1% of the cars on the road and I’m being generous with that estimate.
I mean, again, I don’t care about this argument that much, but per mile driven, Tesla cars are significantly safer when automated than when not. And even when not utilizing FSD, the other safety controls built into the vehicles make them safer for other drivers.
You can review the data yourself here: https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
I’m not going to sit here and pump Tesla, because who cares. But they’re safe cars and make roads safer. Humans suck at driving. Oh look, someone died in a human-caused accident in the time it took me to write this post. You just didn’t hear about it because it was human caused.
Hate on whatever you want, I don’t really care. But automated driving will save a lot of lives.
And rightly so.
Normal traffic accidents are single events, but these are systematic failures. Programmed kills that can be repeated an infinite number of times.