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Just what I alluded to in an earlier post - the technology, in my opinion, just isn't good enough yet. I see that the spokesperson from Tesla attempts to mitigate the situation by saying that neither the car nor the driver saw the white truck.
Well, we know for sure the car didn't see it, but how exactly do they know the driver didn't see it? He's dead, so we can't ask him can we? It's entirely possible he either saw it too late to act, because he wasn't paying full attention to the road as he believed all the hype that these cars are incapable of error, or, he simply never saw it at all, for the same reason. Had he been actually driving the car, I'm sure he'd have seen it.
I find it hard to believe that a human driver (at any level above moron) would not see a white semi pulling across their path. That's not necessarily saying the outcome would ultimately be any different, but at least a driver would brake/swerve to attempt to minimise the impact, and not simply carry on into it at full speed as it appears the Tesla did.
I saw some figures somewhere that said this was the first fatality in something like 120 million miles of autonomous driving, compared to a fatality every 90 million or so (in the USA) for humans driving. Not a fantastic improvement really is it? Especially not when you consider that the figure for humans takes account of every crap driver we all see out there on a daily basis - if you're actually a decent, skilled driver, then you can reasonably expect to beat the figure for humans by a considerable factor. I'd guess the figure for deaths amongst highly skilled drivers is somewhere between 500 million and a billion miles per death. Only a guess, of course, and I doubt such a statistic exists, but we can all agree that the figure amongst highly skilled drivers is going to be much higher than the figure for all drivers, and the figure for autonomous.
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