Elon Musk: Negative Media Coverage of Autonomous Vehicles Could be 'Killing people' (theverge.com)

On the sidelines of the Tesla announcements, CEO Elon Musk accused media of "killing people" by dissuading consumers from using an autonomous vehicle. Musk said that media is aggressively reporting on autopilot crashes, but does "virtually none" reporting of hundreds of thousands of actual accidents that involve non-self driving cars. He said, via a report on The Verge:Once you view autonomous cars sort of like an elevator in a building, does Otis take responsibility for all elevators around the world? No, they don't. What really matters here at the end of the day is "what is the absolute safety." One of the things I should mention that frankly has been quite disturbing to me is the degree of media coverage of Autopilot crashes, which are basically almost none relative to the paucity of media coverage of the 1.2 million people that die every year in manual crashes. [It is] something that I think does not reflect well upon the media. It really doesn't. Because, and really you need to think carefully about this, because if, in writing some article that's negative, you effectively dissuade people from using an autonomous vehicle, you're killing people.

Comments

Short summary

[Locke2005]

Sure, autonomous vehicles are dangerous, but they are orders of magnitude less dangerous than the assholes you already see on the road every day! Like the moron I saw trying to ride his bicycle down I-5 in downtown Portland during rush hour the other day...

The Horror

[Anonymous Coward]

So, by extension, Musk making this argument has caused more media coverage, which results in killing more people, and these Slashdot postings kill more people, around and around...

It's a bloodbath.