A 2025 Tesla Model 3 in Full-Self Driving mode drives off of a rural road, clips a tree, loses a tire, flips over, and comes to rest on its roof. Luckily, the driver is alive and well, able to post about it on social media.
I just don’t see how this technology could possibly be ready to power an autonomous taxi service by the end of next week.
Well, because 99% of the time, it’s fairly decent. That 1%'ll getchya tho.
That’s probably not the failure rate odds but a 1% failure rate is several thousand times higher than what NASA would consider an abort risk condition.
Let’s say that it’s only 0.01% risk, that’s still several thousand crashes per year. Even if we could guarantee that all of them would be non-fatal and would not involve any bystanders such as pedestrians the cost of replacing all of those vehicles every time they crashed plus fixing damage of things they crashed into, lamp posts, shop Windows etc would be so high as it would exceed any benefit to the technology.
It wouldn’t be as bad if this was prototype technology that was constantly improving, but Tesla has made it very clear they’re never going to add lidar scanners so is literally never going to get any better it’s always going to be this bad.
Hey now! That’s unfair. It is constantly changing. Software updates introduce new reversions all the time. So it will be this bad, or significantly worse, and you won’t know which until it tries to kill you in new and unexpected ways :j
To put your number into perspective, if it only failed 1 time in every hundred miles, it would kill you multiple times a week with the average commute distance.
Someone who doesn’t understand math downvoted you. This is the right framework to understand autonomy, the failure rate needs to be astonishingly low for the product to have any non-negative value. So far, Tesla has not demonstrated non-negative value in a credible way.
Even with the distances I drive and I barely drive my car anywhere since covid, I’d probably only last about a month before the damn thing killed me.
Even ignoring fatalities and injuries, I would still have to deal with the fact that my car randomly wrecked itself, which has to be a financial headache.