It’s the news media’s fault, says Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Jarring, bold-face headlines about deaths involving self-driving cars are misleading the public about the safety of the nascent technology, says Musk, whose company is among those developing it. The firms’ work has encountered heightened scrutiny this year after two fatal crashes involving vehicles from both Tesla and ride-hailing firm Uber in the Southwestern U.S.
“The thing that’s tricky with autonomous vehicles is that autonomy doesn’t reduce the accident rate or fatality rate to zero,” Musk said. “It improves it substantially.”
That improvement, and how it could curb the 35,000-plus deaths on U.S. highways each year, is where the CEO says reporters should focus their attention. Media organizations cover “basically none” of the thousands of fatalities, but “if it’s an autonomous situation, it’s headline news,” he said on an earnings call.
“They shouldn’t really be writing the story, they should be writing the story about how autonomous cars are really safe, but that’s not the story that people want to click on,” Musk said. “So they write inflammatory headlines that are fundamentally misleading to the readers. It’s really outrageous.”
Such coverage, and its effect on regulators, makes predicting the timing of approval for the vehicles a challenge, he added.
In the first of this year’s deaths, under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board, 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg was struck by a self-driving Uber vehicle as she attempted to walk a bicycle across a Tempe, Ariz., street at about 10 p.m. on Sunday, March 18, according to local police.
Five days later, 38-year-old Apple engineer Walter Huang died when his Tesla Model X caught fire after striking a barrier in Mountain View, Calif., and being hit by two other cars.
The automaker subsequently said that the car’s Autopilot technology had been activated just moments before the collision, with its adaptive cruise control follow-distance set to minimum, and that the system gave several audible and visual warnings before impact.
In the aftermath, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, who previously supported the vehicles, ordered Uber to halt its tests in that state, and Senate Democrats started probing a legal loophole that could block consumers from suing autonomous-vehicle companies.
Still, self-driving car supporters in both the Obama and Trump administrations have said the technology has the potential to dramatically reduce deaths and injuries caused by distracted drivers. In 2015 alone, about 3,450 people were killed on U.S. roads and another 391,000 injured in accidents where one or more drivers weren’t paying sufficient attention, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
But even if autonomous cars prove to be 90 percent safer than human-driven vehicles, there would be still be people filing lawsuits after a crash that claim, “Hey, you’re responsible for the death here,” Musk said. “The 90 percent of people who didn’t die are not suing. They’re still alive, they just don’t know it.”
The potential safety benefits make it “incredibly irresponsible” for the news media to publish articles “that would lead people to believe that autonomy is less safe,” Musk added. “Because people might actually turn it off, and then die.”
