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Elon may have killed another customer [1]

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Date: 2023-02-18  

An easy road to navigate.

Another Tesla driver was killed in San Jose today. The Tesla ran into a fire truck with flashing lights blocking a lane on a freeway. The story is here. No one knows whether the Tesla was in self driving mode, but most aware drivers would have seen that fire truck well in advance.

For most of my career, I worked in development of scientific instruments, most of which were operated by software written by programmers I worked closely with. And I learned that there is no such thing as software that can cover every eventuality. These were well defined systems, where each analysis had very well defined parameters, and yet, situations came up that the software engineer had not anticipated, and when end-users like me pointed out the problems, we were told that was a very rare occurrence, and the solution would be difficult. And yet, once the software was released, users had the same problem.

Driving a car Is a couple of orders of magnitude worse as a problem to program for. A normal driver, subconsciously or not, makes dozens of decisions every mile. Software must account for every one of those decisions, which means that the software engineers must anticipate every possibility and program a response to every one of those possibilities, with no errors in the code. Flying a rocket to the Moon is a well defined situation. Driving two miles to the grocery store, with pedestrians and bicycles also on the road, is not a well defined situation. And that’s why “self driving cars” will continue to be a scam, because the software cannot handle every possible situation that comes up.

Elon Musk is selling snake oil, which is a problem because it’s associated with electric cars (EVs). I own two electric cars (not Teslas) and would very much like to see more adoption of the technology. But the Full Self Driving approach will ultimately, in my view, harm the image of EVs, and of course, due to its failures, kill more people, for which Mr. Musk will take no responsibility.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/18/2153778/-Elon-may-have-killed-another-customer

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