Should The Media Cover Tesla Accidents? (chicagotribune.com)

Long-time Slashdot reader rufey writes: Last weekend a Tesla vehicle was involved in a crash near Salt Lake City Utah while its Autopilot feature was enabled. The Tesla, a Model S, crashed into the rear end of a fire department utility truck, which was stopped at a red light, at an estimated speed of 60 MPH. "The car appeared not to brake before impact, police said. The driver, whom police have not named, was taken to a hospital with a broken foot," according to the Associated Press. "The driver of the fire truck suffered whiplash and was not taken to a hospital."
Elon Musk tweeted about the accident:

It's super messed up that a Tesla crash resulting in a broken ankle is front page news and the ~40,000 people who died in US auto accidents alone in past year get almost no coverage. What's actually amazing about this accident is that a Model S hit a fire truck at 60mph and the driver only broke an ankle. An impact at that speed usually results in severe injury or death.

The Associated Press defended their news coverage Friday, arguing that the facts show that "not all Tesla crashes end the same way." They also fact-check Elon Musk's claim that "probability of fatality is much lower in a Tesla," reporting that it's impossible to verify since Tesla won't release the number of miles driven by their cars or the number of fatalities. "There have been at least three already this year and a check of 2016 NHTSA fatal crash data -- the most recent year available -- shows five deaths in Tesla vehicles."

Slashdot reader Reygle argues the real issue is with the drivers in the Autopilot cars. "Someone unwilling to pay attention to the road shouldn't be allowed anywhere near that road ever again."

Comments

Re:of course

[Anonymous Coward]

The question that the article asks is why cover a handful of accidents because they involve Tesla, while ignoring the bulk of accidents, which involve human drivers

of course you have no intention of addressing that, shill

Dear Uncle Elon...let it go already

[triffid_98]

It's super messed up that a Tesla crash resulting in a broken ankle is front page news and the ~40,000 people who died in US auto accidents alone in past year get almost no coverage.

A. It really wasn't front page news unless you count maybe the local paper

B. There is this thing called statistics. The United States has over 263 Million registered cars not including the 3 warehouses worth of them that Jay Leno owns. You have yet to make 200 Thousand. It's also expected that your brand new luxury cars will be marginally safer than my 1974 AMC Gremlin.

Re:Dear Uncle Elon...let it go already

[triffid_98]

The question is whether Teslas are more likely to be involved in an accident than other cars

They are incredibly less likely to be involved in an accident than other cars because you can hardly find one outside of the San Francisco Bay Area. This isn't necessarily because they are safer but because nobody can afford them and Tesla is incapable of building them in any kind of volume, and what is safer than a car you can't even buy?

you choose to drive a classic car and the model you choose is a Gremlin? Really?

I was kidding about the Gremlin but I do legitimately own an early 50's Studebaker and a mid 60's Dodge. While I respect your choice of a tractor engined MGA that leaks more fluids daily than a jock on prom night my main point was that whole statistics thing.

When your car is under 1% of the market and you get any kind of press at all why are you complaining? Is it interfering with the hilarious pump and dump gameplan you have for producing the Model 3 due to your burn rate of $6,500 per minute? (the answer is yes).

Tesla also got butt-hurt and sued over Top Gear for (very legitimately) pointing out that when you track their car it in no way went 211 miles. Admittedly they were doing it for laughs but when your 211 mile rated car based on a track ready Lotus only does 55 miles while costing over twice as much, that's probably worth mentioning don't you think?

Re:No

[Z00L00K]

Liberal: "willing to respect or accept behaviour or opinions different from one's own; open to new ideas."
Socialism: "any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods"

Pick what you really mean.

You can't have it both ways.

[Anonymous Coward]

Musk LOVES it that every little thing he says and does is in the news.

IT's FREE publicity and it HELPS him raise capital every time he needs to bail Tesla out.

And he'll NEED it again soon.

But that ALSO includes BAD publicity.

I can't believe this guy! THAT guy is a billionaire?!

Re:of course

[Rei]

Tesla has not been calling AP "self-driving" - you're thinking of Mercedes, describing their awful Autopilot-wannabe. Tesla goes through huge lengths to point out that it's not self driving - to the point that they sell two separate packages, "Enhanced Autopilot" and "Full Self Driving", and the latter tells you that it is not available yet - so that it's physically impossible to think that your car is "full self driving", because either you didn't choose that option, or you didn't receive it.

Contrary to popular myth, AP accidents are rarely from "newbies who mistakenly thought their car was self driving". They're overwhelmingly from experienced users who've had AP for a long time. They get overconfindent in their car's abilities and stop paying attention, just doing things like using their cell phone and only stopping to occasionally grab the wheel so the car won't harass them. Newbies are generally paranoid and hypervigilant.

Musk has not clarified exactly what it was about eye tracking that he thought was not ready for prime time, but I hope it gets remedied and implemented (Model 3 already has the requisite driver-facing camera). If the driver's attention can be ensured, I think it's pretty indisputable that "vehicular sensors and constant attention" plus "human senses and reasoning" is going to be by far the safest option. But you need to ensure that the human is actually paying attention to the road. Requiring torque on the steering wheel is good (better than just a pressure sensor), but not enough.

IMHO.

Welcome to public life

[DaMattster]

If you want to lead a public-facing life, you better be prepared for the positive and negative publicity. The media is a business and the MBA-types know that if a story contains death, despair, or destruction, it will attract more viewership/readership allowing the network to charge a premium for advertising. Is this messed up? Yes, it is. But Elon Musk chose this life for himself so he has to take the good with the bad like everybody else. He does not get a free pass because he's wealthy. He's not better than you or I.

Can't have it both ways Elon

[nehumanuscrede]

You want to promote your darling as the next evolutionary step that will replace all existing automobiles. You're especially proud of your " autonomous driving " feature. This accident is news because Tesla supposedly rolled out a safety update that enabled automatic emergency braking but appears to have been limited to vehicles operating under 50mph. ( Whoops, guess we should have upped that a bit )

See, when you promote your vehicle with said safety features and it still ends up crashing just like the " dumb " cars out there, it doesn't shine a positive light on your over-hyped / over-priced* product. ( *Compared to the typical ICE vehicle )

Moral of the story: When in the spotlight, you don't get to pick and choose what people see.

Re:No

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Liberal: "willing to respect or accept behaviour or opinions different from one's own; open to new ideas."

That's a rather weird definition. In fact, one I've never heard before. I've always called this "open-minded".

Re:of course

[nukenerd]

I think it's pretty indisputable that "vehicular sensors and constant attention" plus "human senses and reasoning" is going to be by far the safest option.

I would dispute it. If humans think that driving control can be left to automation, then most of them are not going to pay much attention. So if the safety does depend partly on the driver it is likely to fall between two stools. Automated driving needs to be all or nothing.

Re:And?

[dgatwood]

90k Teslas on average with 5 deaths means 1 in 18000 Teslas.

Useless statistic. Yes, that's ostensibly lower than the average (one per 13,000 cars) for all registered vehicles in the U.S., but without knowing how many miles the Teslas were driven, we can't know if that's actually low or high.

Typically, the number of accidents (and, thus, fatal accidents) is proportional to the number of miles driven, not the number of cars. Some cars sit in somebody's front yard rusting, and never even see the road except when another car isn't working. And people who are wealthy enough to afford Teslas are more likely to live close to work, and thus have shorter commutes, so they are exposed to fewer opportunities for wrecks. They're also less likely to be driving home for an hour or more after a long day of work, and thus less likely to suffer from fatigue-related crashes.

And even if you assume all of those confounding factors don't exist, there's still the elephant in the room, which is that most folks use AP only on streets where it has worked well for them in the past. Thus, the potential for AP-caused accidents is artificially reduced. If some other driver used it differently, that other driver could have very different results, making a general "this makes driving safer" conclusion impossible to reach without much more fine-grained data in which you compare the crash rates for various types of driving (city streets versus highways, urban versus rural, straight versus windy) independently with AutoPilot off versus on.

And realistically, you also need to separately compare AP unavailable versus AP off, because drivers may behave differently when they have deliberately disabled AP versus drivers who do not have AP. (This can determine to what extent regular use of AP makes drivers less situationally aware over time.)

In short, comparing the number of crashes to the number of vehicles is so prone to being skewed by other variables that it is almost useless as a metric for the safety of the vehicles. You might as well throw darts at a dartboard.

Personally, I think that AutoPilot reduces driver fatigue, which likely improves safety on the whole. But I'm not willing to state that definitively without actual data, which Tesla has thus far refused to provide. That's unfortunate, and it makes me wonder if they have something to hide. After all, if the data really were in their favor, you would expect them to be quick to release it. Unless, of course, they just haven't bothered to do any analysis, in which case I wonder about their competence.

In other words, I would say to Tesla, "Data or GTFO."