Elon Musk: Tesla's Autopilot Software Could Save Half a Million Lives Every Year (fortune.com)

An anonymous reader writes: In the wake of a deadly crash involving a Model S that was driving with its Autopilot software turned on, Tesla CEO Elon Musk issued a few interesting remarks on the technology to Fortune. Notably, the publication recently ran a piece attempting to portray Tesla in a bad light by noting that Musk sold more than $2 billion worth of Tesla stock just 11 days after the aforementioned May, 2016 accident. And all the while, shareholders were kept in the dark up until recently. "Indeed, if anyone bothered to do the math (obviously, you did not) they would realize that of the over 1M auto deaths per year worldwide, approximately half a million people would have been saved if the Tesla autopilot was universally available. Please, take 5 mins and do the bloody math before you write an article that misleads the public.

Comments

Re:Only if it's affordable

[Anonymous Coward]

The marginal cost is very low. It is mostly software, which has a marginal cost of zero.

So what? The cost of producing the FIRST copy of the software is sky-fucking-high. And every time you change your hardware platform, you have to spend a vast amount to certify, test, bug-fix, and fully integrate your software with that new, revised hardware. This isn't a fart app that "oh well, if it crashes now and then, no big deal." The requirements for mission-critical realtime software systems on which lives depend are (and *should be*) incredibly high.

And you can't just do what AOL did, and carpet-bomb some generic installation media to 7 billion people around the world, with the promise that it'll work on every vehicle out there.

You're behaving like the idiots who assert that military gear is overpriced simply because of corruption, with no comprehension of the fact that the integration, reliability, and service life required of that gear is orders of magnitude higher than the little motor assemblies you're going to cobble together out of parts from Radio Shack.

Re:Ideal vs. All Driving Conditions

[beelsebob]

Not true. The current US death rate for highway driving is 1.08 deaths per 100 million miles driven. Tesla's average at the moment is 0.769 deaths per 100 million miles driven on autopilot.

Re:Only if it's affordable

[fluffernutter]

You mean as opposed to US companies with a 'no telecommuting' rule for US citizens but having no issues with cheaper labor working remotely from India? An equal footing would be nice.