Slashdot Mirror
Third Tesla Crashes Amid Report of SEC Investigation (usatoday.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Tesla hasn't had the best month so far as not one, not two, but a total of three crashes have been reported with the car's Autopilot self-driving system engaged at the time -- two of which resulted in fatalities. In addition, The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether Tesla violated securities law by failing to disclose more quickly a fatal accident in Florida in May involving a Tesla Model S that was in self-driving mode. The SEC didn't comment on the report, and Tesla issued a statement saying it has "not received any communication from the SEC regarding this issue." As for the Autopilot crash that was reported today, the driver said he activated Autopilot mode at the beginning of his trip. Tesla is looking into the crash and has yet to confirm whether or not Autopilot was a factor. Tesla CEO Elon Musk teased a "Top Secret Tesla Masterplan, Part 2" via Twitter that he is "Hoping to publish later this week."
Tesla marketing department needs a better term -- "Autopilot" implies something that the car is incapable of. Just call it "cruise control" and shield themselves from liability.
Tesla hasn't had the best month so far as not one, not two, but a total of three crashes have been reported with the car's Autopilot self-driving system engaged at the time -- two of which resulted in fatalities.
The article about the most recent crash contradicts the summary poster's statement that two of the crashes resulted in fatalities. Only one of the crashes has resulted in fatalities.
When one attempts to make something idiot-proof, nature builds a better idiot. Not necessarily true, but we live in world where innovators are hampered by the chance of being sued by idiots who just-don't-listen.
"Fire is hot", "peanuts may contain peanuts", "online play not rated", "cruise control is not auto-pilot", "autopilot is experimental", etc.
Beta-testing is work.
What I wonder is whether the automated steering fights the driver if said driver takes over to correct a computational error.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
Because I like you guys, I'm gonna do you a solid and save you all kinds of tsuris later on. There will not be self-driving cars in any of our lifetimes. Yes, we will have something like super cruise control and driver assist, but no, you will never be able to call for your robot Uber to pick you up and drive you to your part-time job. It's just not going to happen. And finally, the people who know most about "driverless" cars are starting to come clean:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07...
Yes, you read that right. The project director for "self-driving cars" at Google just added 25 more years to his projection on when you're going to see them. And as the writer points out, most of us know that any tech prediction for 30 years down the road always ends in tears. If you go back 30 years, they were predicting tech that never showed up and mostly totally missed on the most important tech advances that did show up.
Now I don't have a particular interest one way or the other regarding self-driving cars, except this: I don't want to see one dollar in public funds spent to develop this technology or to create infrastructure for a self-driving fleet until we've made actual public transportation affordable and viable, the way it was early to middle last century before Standard Oil and GM conspired to destroy public transportation in the United States (and yes, they were even convicted of doing so in court). So go ahead, Google and Elon and Tim Cook and all the visionaries. Make your self-driving golf carts all you want. Just don't ask for a dollar of taxpayer money, especially not until you start paying your taxes.
http://www.whale.to/b/street_c...
http://www.baycrossings.com/Ar...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Or maybe co-pilot to make clear the driver is the captain of the car?
Seriously, can't we just have a nice electric car without all this self-driving crap screwing it up?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
3000 people per day who die in car accidents just in the USA alone
So your claim is over one million car deaths per year in the USA? I have to call [citation needed] on that.
Because in 2014, USA deaths in cars, motor cycles, bicycles, and pedestrians all together were 32675.
yep screwed .. that should have been 3000 per month
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
How many lives has Tesla saved now? Is anyone keeping count??
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Sigh. One of the crashes resulted in one fatality. The other two crashes, no fatalities. (And it is not yet known whether Autopilot was engaged at the time of those two incidents.)
Getting distracted with Autopilot engaged is like removing your seatbelt because you have airbags. You may be able to occasionally get away with it, but it's still an incredibly dumb thing to do. (And the former endangers other drivers, not just yourself.) The silver lining of these incidents is that maybe more drivers will start paying more attention while using AP, though it should have been up to Tesla to properly instill this sense of caution to begin with.
And side skirts/guards should really be mandated for trailers nationwide. (They're already mandated in California.) It may not physically prevent an underride at high speed, but it doesn't have to; the radar is much more likely to detect them and trigger collision-avoidance braking. It's only a small patch for a small part of the problem, but better than not patching it at all.
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
Tesla hasn't had the best month so far as not one, not two, but a total of three crashes have been reported with the car's Autopilot self-driving system engaged at the time -- two of which resulted in fatalities
The first one was the guy watching the DVD who went under the truck. Or at least, all of him below the neck did. Fatality!
The second one was in Michigan, and the driver "survived a rollover crash."
This is the third one, and "the driver said he activated Autopilot mode at the beginning of his trip."
That's one fatality, Subby. These are your own links and summary. We expect you to read them, even if none of the posters or editors here do.
When life gives you melons, you may have dyslexia.
Thirty four characters live here.
Software this important to peoples' lives can't be written like Windows95. I'd say for Tesla, it isn't.
The trouble is, the auto-pilot feature isn't an auto-pilot. It's not autonomous. It's supose to be used as a safety device. It's being misadvertised, misrepresneted, and even if it was correctly portrayed as a beta safety feature - crashes like this show it reduces the awareness of the driver when they trust the features of the car and reduce their attention.
I was also part of the SpaceX certification process. I remember you, you were the guy named Chester. I was sitting next to you in meetings and I had a bag of Cheetos, and for some reason you were always really trying hard to get my bag of Cheetos and I wouldn't let you. Neither would anyone else. You did this for like 3 weeks. I don't know why a guy dressed like a cheetah wanted Cheetos so bad and didn't just go get his own out of the vending machine, but when I said "It ain't easy bein' cheesy" you got super pissed and stormed out of the room and said "Fuck you and fuck your dangerously cheesy snacks too."
I always knew that would come back to haunt us, and here it is. Damn.
A dividend means a company has run out of ideas, and can think of nothing better to do with capital than return it to investors.
That's one interpretation but in reality it's more nuanced than that. Companies have basically 4 things they can do with excess free cash flow. They can reinvest in the company, they can buy another company or asset, they can repurchase stock or they can pay a dividend. Paying a dividend does not necessarily mean the company lacks ideas. It can mean that the shareholders simply prefer to use the excess cash that way. Repurchasing stock for example reduces the supply of stock an in theory can push the stock price up but since stock prices are decoupled from actual earnings it's a bit of a gamble. So is buying another company. Some companies are in slow growth industries and nobody would buy the stock if it didn't pay a dividend. Utilities are a good example of this. Dividends also can be used as a management tool. There is a ton of evidence showing that management teams with too much cash available to them tend to get lazy and sloppy. They make dumb acquisitions, engage in empire building, buy unnecessary assets, etc. Companies tend to perform better when cash is tighter (up to a point).
So no, paying a dividend does not necessarily mean the company has run out of ideas.
I can sell the stock, take the money to the store and use it to buy groceries. That is real enough for me.
You can do that but you are familiar with the parable of killing the goose that laid the golden egg? There is an opportunity cost to selling a stock. You forego any future benefits of an ownership stake in the company. That's not necessarily a bad thing but with a dividend you get cash out of the company without the opportunity cost of losing your ownership stake in the company.