Comment by jedberg
1 day ago
They key difference is that the Teslas killed their passengers, the Waymo hit someone outside the car (and it wasn't the Waymo's fault, it was hit by another car).
1 day ago
They key difference is that the Teslas killed their passengers, the Waymo hit someone outside the car (and it wasn't the Waymo's fault, it was hit by another car).
Yes. [1] That incident got considerable publicity in the San Francisco media. But not because of the Waymo.[2][3]
Someone was driving a Tesla on I-280 into SF. They'd previously been involved in a hit-and-run accident on the freeway. They exited I-280 at the 6th St. off ramp, which is a long straightaway. They entered surface streets at 98 MPH in a 25 MPH zone, ran through a red light, and reached the next intersection, where traffic was stopped at a red light. The Tesla Model Y plowed into a lane of stopped cars, killing one person and one dog, injuring seven others, and demolishing at least six vehicles. One of the vehicles waiting was a Waymo, which had no one on board at the time.
The driver of the Tesla claims their brakes failed. "Police on Monday booked Zheng on one count of felony vehicular manslaughter, reckless driving causing injury, felony vandalism and speeding."[2]
[1] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/waymo-multi-car-wr...
[2] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/crash-tesla-waymo-inj...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULalTHBQ3rI&
The question should be less who was at fault and more would a human driver have reacted better in that situation and avoided the fatality. I'm not sure why you think that whether the fatality occurred inside or outside of the car changes the calculus, but in that case only one of the two documented Tesla FSD-related fatalities killed the driver. Judging by the incident statistics of Tesla's Autopilot going back over half a decade, I'm pretty sure it's significantly safer than the average human driver and continues to improve, and the point of comparison in the original post was with human driving rather than Waymo. I have no doubt that Waymo, with its constrained operating areas and parameters, is safer in aggregate than Tesla's general-purpose FSD system.
Only one of the two, and it's not nearly enough data to draw a conclusion one way or another in any case.