But of course nobody's excoriating them for advancing driving technology to the next level, because...
Other than the things already noted, it's worth pointing out that the only one of those companies of particular focus for this thread is Tesla. It's entirely fine to bring those other companies for comparison and contrasting, but if one is going to toss out the "Everyone's just picking on X" card (yet again), that just won't work.
To go a bit further, personally, I both consider myself a below average quality driver and feel like travel time is just about equivalent to wasted time. For selfish reasons, I quite look forward to the day when I can use a good, self-driving car. Further, if accidents can be reduced to virtually none with ubiquitous use of self-driving cars, that would be great. I have no objection to self-driving cars as a concept or usage. Why would I excoriate ANY of those companies, including Tesla, for working to advance us towards that future?
Now, with that said, there is something to be said for ethical and responsible research practices and design and the concerns surrounding that. That is the realm where most of the direct concerns about Tesla have been here. One could point at, say,
Tesla's statement that -
In the 3rd quarter, we recorded one crash for every 6.26 million miles driven in which drivers were using Autopilot technology. For drivers who were not using Autopilot technology, we recorded one crash for every 1.71 million miles driven.
And bring up the potentially persuasive point about statistical reductions in total accidents into the discussion. There is further discussion that could then be had about how representative the sample actually is of the general public (likely not very at all, but even with that it's plausible that the autopilot could help statistically reduce accidents even now) and so on, so that would hardly be some definitive end to the matter. That would all be in reasonable discussion territory. Instead, you chose to whine about a straw man. Perhaps it's worth engaging in a bit of self-reflection about why you did that?
In a different direction, there's the angle about how this is very likely being pushed as a questionably ethical marketing technique for a rather high priced product with safety concerns that have only partially been addressed regarding the public, with research purposes almost certainly only being a potential side bonus, rather than why the trial is being arbitrarily given. It's a related discussion to the previous, but very much not the same.
In a third direction, theprestige and I both expressed concerns about how we would handle things with the current state of the technology. That's not picking on Tesla in the first place, yet it also has a very real place in the discussion about self-driving technology.
