Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident
What is happening was clear to many since the start: Tesla incarnates the behavior of his founder, exaggerating the technology that is <i>really</i> available right now, and selling it as a product without the premise for it to be safe. A product that kinda drives your car but sometimes fails, and requires you to pay attention, is simply a crash that we are waiting to happen. And don&#x27;t get trapped by the &quot;data driven&quot; analysis, like &quot;yeah but it&#x27;s a lot safer than humans&quot; because there are at least three problems with this statement:<p>1. Ethical. One thing is that you do a stupid thing and die. Another is that a technology fails in trivial circumstances that in theory are avoidable. A doctor can make also errors, but a medical device is required to be very safe and reliable in what it does.<p>2. Of wrong comparisons: you should check the autopilot against a rested and concentrated driver that drives slowly and with a lot of care. Since in the statistics otherwise you do not account for the fact that when you drive, you are in control, and you can decide your level of safety. Such a diligent driver that goes to crash because of an immature software is terrible.<p>3. And lack of data: AFAIK there is not even enough data publicly available that tells us what is the crash rate of Teslas with auto-pilot enabled vs Teslas without auto pilot enabled, per kilometer <i>in the same street conditions</i>. That is, you need to compare only in the same streets where the auto pilot is able to drive.<p>Autopilot will rule the world eventually and we will be free of using the time differently (even if this was possible 100 years ago already stressing on public transportation instead of spending the money to have a car each one... this is sad. Fortunately in central Europe this happened to a degree, check for instance North Italy, France, ...). But till it is not ready, to plug it as a feature in a so immature way just to have an advantage over competitors, is terrible business practice.