Photo: Heisenberg Media on Flickr
Once again, Elon Musk is very upset. On a day when he talked about a very important step in the future of his company, the Tesla Motors CEO didn't pass on the occasion to poke a sharp stick at the media who may not be on the same page with his methods.
The big announcement that was supposed to happen on Monday but was postponed for today, as suspected, was all about the Autopilot. Musk let the world know that all Tesla vehicles coming off the assembly line from now on are equipped with hardware sensors that are ready to offer Level 5 autonomous driving - the kind that would not require a steering wheel anymore.
That's, frankly, fantastic news. It means in a few weeks we will have cars on the roads that are only held back from driving completely on their own by a software limitation. Elon Musk desperately wanted to be the first to deliver that, and it looks like he succeeded.
To get here, though, he did have to cut a few corners, which is what brought all the criticism he's so upset about. Asked about the insurance coverage in case of a fully-autonomous crash in a Tesla, he delivered a quick and somewhat obscure response (comparing Tesla to a company that makes elevators, for some reason), and then he went on to get things off his chest.
“One thing I should mention here that frankly has been quite disturbing to me is the degree of media coverage of Autopilot crashes – which are basically almost none – relative to the scarcity of media coverage of the 1.2 million people that die every year manual crashes.
It’s something that I think does not reflect well upon the media. It really doesn’t. You need to thread carefully about this because if in writing some article that is negative you are effectively dissuading people from using autonomous vehicles, you are killing people."
Alright, is he talking about media criticizing the Autopilot, or autonomous cars as a whole, because if it's the latter, we really can't remember anyone saying anything bad about this technology. Of course he means the Autopilot, which raises another question: why does he bring the issue of autonomous vehicles in the same sentence as the Autopilot? Wasn't it that Autopilot was just a driver's aid system? And just because autonomous cars will one day save a lot of lives, should we ignore the ones their predecessors might end on their way there? Does the end justify the means? Because if it does, I'm sure a lot of surgeons would be happy to test a few theories on their next patients.
Musk probably feels a bit like Giordano Bruno: a man ahead of his times whose ideas are getting him the wrong kind of attention from his contemporaries. Do you see any pyre being erected? Neither do we.
That's, frankly, fantastic news. It means in a few weeks we will have cars on the roads that are only held back from driving completely on their own by a software limitation. Elon Musk desperately wanted to be the first to deliver that, and it looks like he succeeded.
To get here, though, he did have to cut a few corners, which is what brought all the criticism he's so upset about. Asked about the insurance coverage in case of a fully-autonomous crash in a Tesla, he delivered a quick and somewhat obscure response (comparing Tesla to a company that makes elevators, for some reason), and then he went on to get things off his chest.
“One thing I should mention here that frankly has been quite disturbing to me is the degree of media coverage of Autopilot crashes – which are basically almost none – relative to the scarcity of media coverage of the 1.2 million people that die every year manual crashes.
It’s something that I think does not reflect well upon the media. It really doesn’t. You need to thread carefully about this because if in writing some article that is negative you are effectively dissuading people from using autonomous vehicles, you are killing people."
Alright, is he talking about media criticizing the Autopilot, or autonomous cars as a whole, because if it's the latter, we really can't remember anyone saying anything bad about this technology. Of course he means the Autopilot, which raises another question: why does he bring the issue of autonomous vehicles in the same sentence as the Autopilot? Wasn't it that Autopilot was just a driver's aid system? And just because autonomous cars will one day save a lot of lives, should we ignore the ones their predecessors might end on their way there? Does the end justify the means? Because if it does, I'm sure a lot of surgeons would be happy to test a few theories on their next patients.
Musk probably feels a bit like Giordano Bruno: a man ahead of his times whose ideas are getting him the wrong kind of attention from his contemporaries. Do you see any pyre being erected? Neither do we.
Google News