The U.S. government’s road safety agency is again investigating Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” system, this time after getting reports of crashes in low-visibility conditions, including one that killed a pedestrian.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says in documents that it opened the probe on Thursday with the company reporting four crashes after Teslas entered areas of low visibility, including sun glare, fog and airborne dust.

In addition to the pedestrian’s death, another crash involved an injury, the agency said.

Investigators will look into the ability of “Full Self-Driving” to “detect and respond appropriately to reduced roadway visibility conditions, and if so, the contributing circumstances for these crashes.”

  • Konala Koala@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    Every time I hear something about pedestrian being killed by something self-driving, it begins to irk me as to why are we pushing for such and such technology.

    • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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      6 hours ago

      The bad news is people hitting and killing pedestrians is so common you don’t hear about it. Fuck Musk and all that, but some number of people are always going to get killed. Even the FSD system that was as close to perfect as possible would still occasionally kill someone in large enough numbers, because there’s too many variables to account for. If the numbers are lower than a human driving, it’s a positive.

      We should be trying to move away from cars though ideally. Fuck electric cars, FSD cars, and all other cars. A bus, train, bike, or whatever else would be safer and better for the environment.

      • fne8w2ah@lemmy.world
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        2 hours ago

        Public transport is the way to go, just need to get break the cycle of six decades of automobile addiction.

      • beanlink@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        Lets install adaptive headlights to stop blinding people or allowing manufacturers to install chrome accents on the rear of a vehicle to again stop blinding people or even just maybe make a smaller truck that isn’t lifting ego and instead actual building materials.

        NHSTA:

      • FuzzyRedPanda@lemm.ee
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        4 hours ago

        Fuck Musk and all that, but some number of people are always going to get killed.

        That’s easy to say, but do you want to be one of the people who gets killed? I don’t.

        • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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          4 hours ago

          Yeah, it’s that easy to say and yeah, I don’t want to be one of the people killed, driverless or not. Cars are fucking deadly. 20 pedestrians die every day to cars. If we can get that number down but have them die to FSD vehicles, that’s better. I don’t care who or what is driving.

          I’d rather not have cars everywhere, but if we do I want them to be as safe as possible (for everyone, not just the driver). If that includes FSD we should do it, even if the number of pedestrian deaths doesn’t hit zero (it never will) because the alternative is well above zero.

          • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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            1 hour ago

            If I’m get killed by a driver on their phone, I want them to go to prison.

            If I’m killed by a Waymo or whatever, who goes to jail then?

            If we really must have self driving cars, limit their speed to 20mph in built up areas.

            • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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              53 minutes ago

              If you’re dead, why the fuck do you care who goes to jail? Shouldn’t we care more about people dying than revenge after?

              • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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                9 minutes ago

                I wouldn’t care. I hope my wife and family would.

                “He died for a good cause: Tesla’s stock price” is not what they want to hear.

    • PeroBasta@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      Because it is generally proven to save lifes. You’ll never hear of “thanks for the auto-brake system no one got injured and everything was boring as usual” but it happened a lot (also to me in first person).

      I don’t like Musk but in general its a good thing to push self driving cars IMO. I drive 2 hours per day and the amount of time where I see retarded people doing retarded stuff at the wheel is crazy.

      • ano_ba_to@sopuli.xyz
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        48 minutes ago

        Air travel is generally safer than driving too, but every accident is studied thoroughly. Self-driving is fine, but anyone trying to implement it should be held to a high standard. Boeing slacked off and they’re facing some backlash.

      • DillyDaily@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        This is the thing. Musk and everything his company does in terms of labour and marketing, and just their whole ethos is unethical as fuck, and I can’t stand that as a society we are celebrating Tesla.

        But self driving cars are not inherently bad or dangerous to persue as a technological advancement.

        Self driving cars will kill people, they’ll will hit pedestrians and crash into things.

        So do cars driven by humans.

        Human driven cars kill a lot of people.

        Self driving cars need to be safer than human driven cars to even consider letting them on the the road, but we can’t truly expect a 0% accident rate on self driving cars in the early days of the technology when we don’t expect that of the humanity driven cars.