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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.
There does seem to be some logic in that argument. However, the question is about this particular feature. Has it killed more people by existing (or never having existed). We don't actually have any autonomous offerings out there, so there isn't really anything to dissuade.
Autopilot was billed as this revolutionary technology that got idiots to think "hey we don't have to drive anymore the car will do it." Musk is basically beta testing with his customers as the beta group.
Autonomous driving will be great when it gets here, but he is trying to oversell the current tech as revolutionary autonomous driving tech.
The fact of the matter is, every day, millions of commuters drive to and from work while distracted. If I'm going to be driving anywhere near somebody who's surfing the net on his phone while driving, I'd sure as HELL prefer that his car have some kind of autopilot capabilities paying attention to the road when he's not. At the very least, cars with limited autonomous driving have the potential to eliminate most rear-end collisions and accidents caused by drifting out of a lane.
Maybe South Florida is unique, but I've noticed an EXPONENTIAL increase in both gridlock, phone use while driving, and rear-end collisions over the past few years. The moment traffic slows down to 5mph or less, you can literally see every driver around you reaching for his or her phone (or already using it). Even a PRIMITIVE system that's only capable of "stay in the current lane, follow the car in front of you if the lane becomes ambiguous, and maintain speed while braking if necessary to avoid a rear-end collision" on limited-access roads would be a net improvement over what we have today.
Aside from this, anyone who watches local TV news sees frequent stories along the lines of "Entire family wiped out in car crash."
That isn't quite the same. People drive cars everyday. So when they see a story about a car crash, they can weigh it against their personal experience. People are also familiar with men and dogs, so they can dismiss a story about a man biting a dog as an anomaly. But people don't have personal experience with terrorism or self-driving cars, so when the media reports on rare events involving them, they should provide some context.