Crashing into fire trucks, police cars, and private cars, should Tesla be blamed for the autonomous driving accidents?

　　    Musk has been having a headache recently because Tesla has had many car accidents.

　　    According to incomplete statistics, there were at least three Tesla-related accidents in the first half of 2018, most of which were related to Autopilot autonomous driving technology. There were even cases of Tesla cars colliding with fire trucks and police cars.

This is indeed not good news for Tesla, which has been losing money year after year and whose new car production capacity fails to meet standards. So Musk not only expressed his anger, he also planned to set up a media credibility rating website to score related news reports in order to justify his own products.

It should be said that the final cause of the accident should still be based on the investigation of the transportation department. It is indeed inappropriate to hastily attribute the problem to autonomous driving before that. However, if Musk wants people to shut up about the accident, it may be difficult.

01

Tesla car accidents do occur frequently and frequently appear on the front pages of major media outlets. Otherwise, Musk would not be so anxious. After all, these are all negative news, and from Tesla's point of view, many reports will have a negative impact on readers.

Whenever autonomous driving accidents are mentioned, the vast majority are related to Tesla. This is actually related to the attitude of the integrated automotive industry towards autonomous driving. Whether it is a traditional car company or a new car manufacturer, no manufacturer has commercialized autonomous driving like Tesla has.

At present, traditional car companies are basically waiting and watching, and you can't buy a car; the new forces in car manufacturing have just started delivery, and it will take time before they appear on the consumer market on a large scale; as for third-party autonomous driving solution providers, such as Baidu Apollo and Roadster.AI, although they are also actively conducting road tests, it will take longer for them to be adopted by automotive industry partners.

Furthermore, Tesla began to introduce Autopilot technology in October 2015. Today, it covers more and more new car models and has total sales of more than 300,000 units. As the proportion of Autopilot activation increases, the probability of accidents will naturally increase.

To sum up in one sentence, all the self-driving cars that consumers can drive come from Tesla. As a star brand, it will naturally receive extremely high attention if an accident occurs.

02

Although there is no accurate data, considering the market share of traditional cars, the overall accident rate should be much higher than that of self-driving cars. However, accidents involving self-driving cars have attracted more attention, which also reflects the doubts and hesitations of consumers, even though this technology is not new to the industry.

When an accident occurs involving autonomous driving, personal safety is involved, so it is inevitable that consumers will be confused. Otherwise, many people will not consider safety as one of the reference indicators when buying a car. Therefore, as a car company, Tesla should understand this confusion from the perspective of consumers.

On the other hand, although Tesla has revised Autopilot from autonomous driving to assisted driving, problems continue to occur, and it should also consider from its own perspective how to upgrade and iterate from a technical perspective to minimize the probability of accidents, or even approach a perfect "0".

Judging from the current situation, Tesla is still emphasizing that the driver was distracted while driving and did not actively intervene in the driving trajectory. Fundamentally, this is an act of passing the buck. Of course, this is understandable from the perspective of the company.

The self-driving cars on the market do give people a very powerful feeling, whether from the concept or from the actual road test videos, but the actual traffic road conditions are complex and changeable, and the traffic environment in different countries and regions is also fundamentally different. There is no accurate and unified statement on whether the self-driving technology can adapt to these environments.

In this regard, Tesla's description of its Autopilot on its official website is "full autonomous driving capability", which means that there is no need for driver intervention from getting in the car to getting out of the car to parking.

03

There have indeed been quite a few accidents involving Tesla’s autonomous driving, some of which are even quite serious, and there are many cases of drivers unfortunately dying. However, it would be a lack of tolerance to close the door to new technologies because of this.

In 1886, Gottlieb Daimler and his partners built what is recognized as the world's first automobile, but due to poor performance, it often stalled and broke down. If cars were rejected simply because they stalled and broke down, there would not be a mature automobile industry like today. The same principle applies to autonomous driving technology.

In fact, in addition to Tesla, as the proportion of autonomous driving technology put into use increases, the probability of related accidents will also increase. The recent case of Uber's autonomous driving car causing death is a typical example. In a sense, the negative issues of new technologies like autonomous driving can be unacceptable, but they cannot be avoided.

Therefore, it is very important for car companies to iterate autonomous driving to adapt to complex environments. For consumers, confidence in autonomous driving is also very important. Even if there is no confidence, we should not simply close the door and kill it with one blow.

The trend of technological development is irreversible. Tesla Autopilot has been upgraded from 1.0 to the current version, introducing a large number of high-performance cameras and upgrading visual processing tools and computing algorithms. This evolution is technological progress. In the future, with the deepening and application of the concept of the Internet of Things, networked devices will be able to exchange and share information, and the data synchronization capabilities between self-driving cars and with the outside world will be enhanced, which may also become a way to improve safety. However, it seems very difficult now and it is still too early.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.