23
votes
US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash
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- Title
- NHTSA opens probe into 2.4 mln Tesla vehicles over Full Self-Driving collisions
- Published
- Oct 18 2024
- Word count
- 121 words
Comment box
Glad the NHTSA is doing this (the "camera-only" approach is dangerous and pointless; LIDAR is an effective and reasonable addition), but it is a little preposterous that this kind of thing makes headlines while the NHTSA simultaneously fails to develop and implement many regulations on manually operated vehicles which would save many more lives.
The tech is cool. Since it's complex, it's fun to analyze and think about edge cases for. But traffic deaths are fundamentally a function of the speed of a vehicle and its mass, and to some extent the physical profile of impact zones like the vehicle hood in the context of Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs). This is true for both self-driving cars and non-self-driving cars. If a self-driving car is going to hit someone (and this will always happen sometimes with software), it would be better if the vehicle were designed such that it does not result in serious injury for the VRU.
NHTSA should really be prioritizing investigations into physical design and infrastructure first and to a much greater extent than they currently are. Vision Zero should not be some magical fairytale goal that we can maybe reach in 2050. It is achievable far sooner, but it requires aggressive regulation on what is considered road-legal and on our roads themselves.
For example, in European countries the vehicle profiles you see are fundamentally different than in the US. Bumpers are lower and more standardized. Hoods are steeper, giving better visibility), and lower (so that if pedestrians are hit, they are hit below the waist and land on the hood rather than under the wheels). Vehicles are overall narrower, less long, and shorter in height, reducing their overall weight, so that the force exerted upon a VRU in an impact is quadratically-ish lower and therefore VRUs have much higher survival rates. Not to mention all the differences in infrastructure. The NHTSA is just now (literally this year) starting to consider pedestrians in its vehicle safety regulations, but it's a striking sign of our society's apathy toward this problem that it's taken such a long time.