Tesla’s Full Self-Driving Advocates And Opposition Agree That Full Self-Driving Will At Some Point Randomly Try To Kill You
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Oh, and Tesla just released it to everyone in North America.
With no fanfare, in the middle of the night before Thanksgiving day, when he knew journalists would be on holiday for the next four days, Elon Musk announced on Twitter that Tesla’s Full Self-Driving Beta software is now available to everyone in North America.
Omar Qazi (@WholeMarsBlog) is Tesla’s leading advocate for Full Self-Driving on social media. He was identified by The Wall Street Journal as the person whose tweets Elon Musk responds to most often. He frequently reports long drives using Tesla’s Full Self-Driving without any failures. He even recruited a real child to stand in front of his Tesla to test whether or not it would run them over. He routinely insults anyone on Twitter who reports safety defects in Full Self-Driving.
On 19 October 2022, Tesla Full Self-Driving user Ross Smith detailed his experiences of the software, stating that: “Beta tried to kill me by making a left hand turn against oncoming traffic“, Tesla’s most prominent and vocal Full Self-Driving supporter, Omar Qazi, who runs the pro-Tesla Full Self-Driving “WholeMarsBlog” social media accounts, replied: “That’s normal. ”
Exactly one month later, Qazi complained about Tesla Full Self-Driving, saying that “it sucks” and calling the latest update, 10.69.3.1, “A stinker“.
Three days after his public criticism of Full Self-Driving, Omar Qazi warned new users of the software : “If you’re trying Tesla Full Self-Driving Beta for the first time, it’s important to remember that it will at some point randomly try to kill you. This is a when, not an if.”
Qazi’s remarks about the latest 10.69.3.1 version of the software were made on November 22, 2022. These warnings were ignored by Elon Musk, who two days later on on November 24 2022, announced on Twitter that Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software “is now available to anyone in North America”.
Twelve days after Musk’s announcement, Omar Qazi again took to Twitter to publicly complain about problems with Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software, saying that he is “kind of sick of FSD Beta.” He stated that he was “going to spend a week going back to driving manually”, and that not using Tesla Full Self-Driving is “so much faster, more efficient, and more comfortable that it’s not even funny”. Qazi further criticized the software, saying: “FSD Beta is like having a moron with three brain cells driving your car.”
In 50 years of driving only twice have I gone the wrong way down a one-way street. Elon Musk’s Full Self-Driving drove me the wrong way down a one-way street five times in one week.
Over the last two years, “beta” testers have reported to Tesla thousands of safety defects in Full Self-Driving that haven’t been fixed.
Tesla warns all Full Self-Driving customers that the software “may do the wrong thing at the worst time.”
The Dawn Project’s testing has determined that Elon Musk’s Full Self-Driving software cannot recognize many common traffic signs, including the following critical signs: Do Not Enter, Road Closed, One Way, No Right Turn on Red, or reduce speed signs for tight turns. It drives around school busses with their red lights flashing and stop sign extended; it ignores reduced school zone speed limits when children are present; and it will mow down a small child in a school crosswalk.
Why do we tolerate hundreds of thousands of these cars on our public roads?
Maybe 10% of the population seems to be drawn into high risk activities, like jumping out of airplanes, paying $44 billion for a money losing company you don’t want to own, or riding in a unfinished engineering prototype self-driving car which its greatest advocates say “sucks” and “is a stinker”; “it’s normal” for it to try “to kill” you “while making a left hand turn against oncoming traffic”; “it may do the wrong thing at the worst time,” and it “will at some point try to kill you.”
Tesla is putting two-ton 120mph homicidal experimental robots on our public roads using real children as crash test dummies. Tesla has no license or approval from anyone to sell a Full Self-Driving car to the general public. Full Self-Driving has not passed any government or industry standard inspections or testing. Elon Musk just shipped it (in the middle of the night) without asking anyone for permission.
Everyone agrees, advocates and detractors alike, that Full Self-Driving requires a fully attentive human supervisor ready to take control immediately when the Tesla tries to kill someone. But now Full Self-Driving is available to every alcoholic, coke head, depressed, psychotic, exhausted, schizophrenic, grief stricken, or suicidal person. Many of these people are clearly not capable of stopping Full Self-Driving when it tries to kill someone. But even in an addled mental state, they can tell Full Self-Driving to take them home, hoping that it can drive better than they can. But it can’t, so most likely it won’t make it home. And who knows how much collateral damage it will do to innocent bystanders who did not sign up for this public experiment.
Shipping this product to everyone is insane and immoral. This has gone way too far and we must stop it.
Releasing a Full Self-Driving car to the general public that will try to kill people is criminal recklessness and demonstrates a callous disregard for human life. People are going to die or be maimed for life. But advocates claim that Tesla’s Full Self-Driving technology will save millions of lives in the future. They say every day’s delay in its development and deployment will cost thousands of lives. They claim the benefits will easily outweigh all the casualties that are inevitable in the development of any new technology.
Tesla’s Full Self-Driving technology is stone knives and bearskins compared to Google (Waymo), GM (Cruise), Toyota (pony.ai), Baidu, AutoX, and many others. These companies already have fully autonomous self-driving cars, with no driver or human supervisor, on the road in cities across the world offering Uber-like services. If anyone is going to save millions of lives with self-driving cars it will be one of those companies. It will not be Full Self-Driving Teslas. If Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software were to vanish from the face of the earth today it would be nothing but a boon for humanity.
Why do we let a bunch of reckless thrill-seeking nut jobs with a wanton disregard for human life threaten us and our families just to increase their profits? How high does the pile of bodies need to be before we pull a product off the market that we know will try to kill people, has no utility whatsoever, is hopelessly far behind the competition, will not save lives in the future, and is poorly engineered, designed, tested, and managed? Should we sacrifice even one innocent life for this? If we do, are we just as guilty as they are? We ran a survey of 1000 registered voters in California, and 70% of them said that even one death from Tesla’s testing of Full Self-Driving is too many.
Our surveys found that 85-93% of registered voters agreed that a Full Self-Driving car with these problems should be banned from our roads immediately. The DMV, NHTSA, FTC, SEC, Congress and every state legislature now have the facts that they need to ban this product immediately. Failure to act now will demonstrate to the criminals and the public alike that the inmates are now running the asylum.
To get any action from Tesla’s Board of Directors criminal charges must be brought against them. They know that their software will try to kill people. When it does, they are guilty of manslaughter at least. The Board of Directors has the power to withdraw their defective Full Self-Driving product from the market. But they won’t, because Elon Musk said that without Full Self-Driving, Tesla is “worth basically zero,” and the Board members are afraid that recalling Full Self-Driving could wipe out their millions of dollars of gains in Tesla stock and stock options. Probably nothing short of indictments will get them to act.
