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Comment by wmichelin

1 day ago

I legitimately would have bought it if they made it look more like a regular pickup truck, and if Elon didn't go full crazy.

I did buy a Model-Y shortly before his Trump endorsement, and then sold it for technical reasons.

On a cold January morning, I was pulling up to a stop-sign, didn't have any autopilot turned on, and the car accelerated.

I think there is just too much software between gas pedal and the machinery of the car. They're honestly kind of dangerous vehicles. The average person can't handle the responsibility of a self-driving vehicle.

I told all of my friends and family that I would not recommend the vehicle yet to a non-technical person, even when I was myself driving it and loving it.

Setting your experience aside, my national transport agency in Denmark recently approved Tesla full self driving because the data confirmed that it’s safer than the average driver. I think it’s both true that these cars can fault, and that they’re safer on average than humans. To be clear, Denmark is not alone. Many European countries have approved it for the same reason, and many more are evaluating. Holland is the toughest to pass, and they passed.

  • Self-driving cars have fat-tailed risk.

    Some outside factor might cause a signal failure, causing cascading destruction.

  • "Safer than the average driver" is great if all the below-average drivers start buying Teslas. But if you're converting drivers on the other end of the spectrum then the roads become less safe overall.

    • I wish someone who had access to the data would address this.

      I do know that there is not much better than average driver! There is much worse than average: people who drive drunk, and a few other classes of people who shouldn't drive at all. However the vast majority are all about equal: in reasonable mental health and limited to the same eye and reaction times. A few people have and follow better training and so are slightly safer - but this is slight. Most people think they are better than average because they excuse their mistakes as a "one time mistake", while confusing "the other guy's" mistakes with the other guy must be a bad driver.

    • Denmark compared FSD data to national incident rates for regular passenger vehicles. So it’s a true average across all passenger vehicles.

    • Why would you assume that the group of people would be anything other than the average driver?

    • That's if you ignore the ability to look everywhere all at once which even the best human driver has trouble doing.

      It will be interesting to see if the substantial safety margin decreases as more people buy in.

Yeah same. It was too strange looking for me and Elon’s turn to the far right kind of ruined Tesla for me. I ended up getting a F-150 lightning instead and it’s been a great experience. Unfortunately they stopped making those too.

> I think there is just too much software between gas pedal and the machinery of the car.

There's a shit ton of software between the gas pedal and the machinery of just about every car on the road today whether that be an ICE, hybrid, or EV. We're a long ways away from the go-go pedal directly pulling a cable opening the throttle plate.