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> People are some of the worst drivers around

1 fatality per 100 million miles driven is relatively good, to be honest.

This seems to me like a good argument for the public funding of electric rail lines instead of self-driving cars that perpetuate all of the problems personal vehicles are responsible for.

Sure and covid only kills a miniscule proportion of the people who contract it. Over a million people die on the roads every year around the world. It's been a 100 year covid.

Handwringing about someone carefully testing a car and not hitting a cyclist in the process is really pretty rich. I'll happily take actual data and statistics but for every one of these I can also post a video of a driver doing something stupid that a computer would not.

> Sure and covid only kills a miniscule proportion of the people who contract it.

A 1 out of 100 to 1 out of 1,000 fatality rate for COVID depending on demographics is quite literally several orders of magnitude higher than a 1 out of 100,000,000 fatality rate for driving. You're comparing apples to atoms.

No I'm not because not everyone goes out and gets covid most days for their whole lives. It's also much much less than 1 in 1,000 for young people in the range of 0-30 where auto wrecks are the number one killer in a lot of places.

So no, it's more like apples to watermelons. The watermelons being bigger, the ones which have killed far more people and will continue to kill far more people.

Friendly reminder that yesterday, COVID-19 killed over 2000 people in a single day. It’s been keeping that grim pace for weeks. For every person who dies, at least a dozen will suffer from long Covid. Even still, no dangerous shortcuts were taken trying to get the vaccines out (in the West), other than doing steps in parallel rather than in sequence (at great $cost).

So even COVID-19 wasn’t enough to “move fast and break things” (though I remember hearing many such calls to “move fast and break things” from the same contrarian-sphere community that is now Very Concerned about vaccine injuries). If COVID-19 wasn’t bad enough to completely remove our safety guardrails, certainly the never ending promise of FSD (watch any Musk video compilation where he promises FSD is just around the corner, going on five years now) isn’t enough.

Yesterday auto deaths killed 4000 people and horrifically maimed many more. As has been the case for the past century and as will continue to happen long after covid is background noise.

4000 in the USA? No it did not. Apples and oranges.

Edit: I just looked up the numbers and it’s 102 deaths/day average in the USA. I think it’s a horrific problem and support many initiatives that will take cars off the road and calm traffic.

4000 people died, what I said is true.

102 deaths every day in the USA alone is staggering, and many children and young people! Are you trying to it's not? How many people has self driving cars and their research and development killed? Vanishingly few by comparison.

The situation is very analogous to covid and vaccines.

What vaccine guardrails are you under the impression were removed? AFAIK none were removed, it's just steps were done in parallel at great $expense. It appears you are trying to imply that it's fine if Tesla skips safety testing and pops a few skulls like watermelons in pursuit of $FSD. I'm not saying perfection is possible, but certainly Tesla can do better than it's doing. If anything, Tesla threatens to set everything back with its sloppiness. One bad accident could create enough bad PR to set self-driving cars back for years.

> What vaccine guardrails are you under the impression were removed?

The guardrails that the typical trial process has, see e.g.,:

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/vaccines/timeline

https://www.ncirs.org.au/phases-clinical-trials

> AFAIK none were removed, it's just steps were done in parallel at great $expense.

No, the far greater expense is the typical 5-10 years that clinical trials require.

> It appears you are trying to imply that it's fine if Tesla skips safety testing and pops a few skulls like watermelons in pursuit of $FSD. I'm not saying perfection is possible, but certainly Tesla can do better than it's doing. If anything, Tesla threatens to set everything back with its sloppiness. One bad accident could create enough bad PR to set self-driving cars back for years.

It doesn't appear that I'm trying to imply that at all, it appears you're just making things up.

That timeline you linked matched up with the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine timelines. mRNA pre-clinical data had been being researched for over a decade. I don’t see anything that conflicts with what I said. Are you under the mistaken impression that mRNA vaccine research began in 2019?

Again, you’re claiming vaccine guardrails were removed but posting no evidence. Do they do 5-10 year trials on the annual flu vaccine? Please show me an authoritative medical source concerned about major shortcuts taken bringing the mRNA vaccine to market. Should be a piece of cake.

I don't know what your first paragraph means, what matched up?

I don't know what you mean by guardrail either. Vaccine trials were significantly accelerated from typical vaccines, long term data was foregone and emergency use authorizations were used to deploy them. I don't know what you're trying to argue or whether you're actually trying to deny that reality.

The number of times most people will catch COVID is way, way fewer than the number of miles that they'll drive.

> I also think there is a certain fear or outrage around this stuff which is fueled by "technology" or the unknown.

From other communities I could buy the "fear of the unknown" bit. But here, most of us are involved in the production of software in some form. It's not the unknown that we fear, it's the known. We fully understand what modern software is actually capable of, and we know that it's not ready for prime time in these kinds of environments.

Further, many of us have been in a chaotic public beta before, and seeing those patterns play out during a beta test of lethal machinery is really scary. Rapid chaotic iteration is fine when it's a simple SaaS product. Not so much with Tesla.

Most here have no idea what's involved in automotive control systems or these autonomous driving systems, let's be honest.

> People are some of the worst drivers around

Compared to which other species?

We don't need moonshots to solve the car pandemic. Strong Towns and others have shown that we already have plenty of common-sense, effective tools that we've simply chosen not to roll out on a wider basis.

We don't need new technology, we need new leaders.

Of course we do. If you can get "Strong Towns and others", whatever exactly that is, to end the car pandemic, that would be a a moonshot wouldn't it? Maybe not technologically but politically and socially.

You're not the first one to have thought it's a good idea or that we should try to do something about it. It's not like it's easy and people have just decided not to.