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Even ignoring the FSD aspects of these electric vehicles (which are problematic enough at their current level of technology) the fact that they are allowed to do things like hide away the mechanical release handles (required to get out if power is lost, which is very likely in a crash) in weird barely accessible spots inside the door well seems just absolutely fucking bonkers to me.

And this is common, some of Tesla's are actually harder to locate than the ones in this Xiaomi

There's two main systems in use globally:

1. The US system, where regulators define a set of tests and manufacturers self certify compliance

2. homologation based systems like China and the EU where those tests are performed by an accredited third party to receive type approval.

But testing is ultimately reactive, not proactive. It's hard to write appropriate tests for areas of new technology that don't impose unnecessary or silly constraints. These aren't the kinds of regulations that are easy to put out or roll back either. It takes upwards of a year in the US to go through the NPRM process, and several years for gradual rollout into force.

As someone involved in this space, I'm also extremely skeptical that there's any way to develop these kinds of systems without significant testing on public roads. That testing should be monitored and come with explicitly strict development guidelines, but alternative approaches have been tried many times and have not panned out when deployed in practice.

1 incident, how many drunk human drivers, watching their phones on the road.

these systems able to solve this problem once and forever, ban human from driving. Humans are extreemly bad at driving.

Unless they produce more fatal incidents compared to human it's ok to have such crashes.

>How come these things are "scrutinized" afterwards instead of before? Governments are severely dragging their feet behind their backs and should clearly outlaw and force certification of these "smart" systems before they're deployed, not afterwards.

What makes you think this wasn't scrutinized by Chinese government before release?

> Bananas how we're letting these companies use public roads with real humans as testing grounds for driver assistance software.

Do you know a word called Cronyism?

Xi was in a meeting with few Chinese tech leaders just few weeks ago (https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-xi-attends-sympos...), including Xiaomi's leader, probably trying to establish bi-directional support and connections.

Under current desperate climate in China, i.e. unemployment number is creeping up, marriage and childbirth are down..., as well as the fact that Xi likes flashy and fancy stuff, I don't think there is any incentive for the gov to put a limit on how those companies develop. I mean... it's not like the leftist undemocratic communist should have any incentive to do things appropriately for people of different orientations anyways.

In fact, right now in China, criticize such "high-tech" company may lead to serious trouble for the criticizer, given how easy it is for powerful companies to send criticizers to prison for reasons such as "disturb public peace", "hacking" and/or "spread rumor and lies".

Also, let's don't forget Telsa also crash and burns. So it is really tricky to explain to the communist why they must do better.

Yes. Waymo is safer than other drivers and makes the roads safer for everyone. https://waymo.com/blog/2024/09/safety-data-hub

No other company is even close (i.e. 5-10 years behind) to where Waymo is on self driving maturity.

It is not easy to compare as there are lots of confounding variables - self-driving is not activated at random or all the time, but typically on highways, which are less accident-prone.

They are also deactivated in difficult conditions such as bad weather which are also hard for human drivers. You can imagine a future with all cars are equipped with a self-driving system that always "passes the buck" to a human when conditions degrade - of course the system will have less accidents than humans! The statistics will even show human drivers being worse than before the advent of self-driving!

idk but tesla has the highest fatality rate despite bragging about all their "smart" safety features: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebanker/2025/02/11/tesla-ag...

No, the statistics I've seen haven't really been useful.

It's typically comparing cars in whatever autonomous modes vs all cars operating within a country/state. But the autonomous modes don't operate in all conditions, so it's not a good comparison.

There's concern about making sure the control group is appropriate too, comparing against a representative subset of the population is important.

I think there's some reasonable data for automatic emergency braking, in that I think I've seen it compared as just cars with aeb equipped vs cars without, number/severity of injuries for all collisions and there's enough data to show a difference.

The best you can do is try and limit accident/deaths of similar events in the same areas during the same weather. But we don't collect proper stats on this stuff in order to make true apples to apples comparisons. They arent driving in the same scenarios as the many people yet.

There's a few I'm not going to link, but warn about them instead. They're often in the "lies, damned lies" category.

For example comparing self driving to average accidents often misses: non self driving cars having worse equipment (lack of collision warning, adaptive cruise control, etc.), comparison to all roads (self driving is activated mostly on known, well mapped areas and open highways), unknown accounting for self driving status (Teslas try to give back control just before the crash), and many other issues.

Unless some actually independent third party runs the numbers with a lot of explanations about the methodology, I'm ignoring them.

I was _taught_ to do this in driving school.

There was one second between the driver taking over and the collision, so it was likely a panic reaction to an imminent crash.

Which is fundamentally the problem with self driving technologies. If it isn't 100%, it might just increase the danger: It lures the driver into distraction, because enough kilometres on straight roads and who is going to keep paying attention when a car drives itself...and then boom exception you have 1 second to focus and ingest the situation perfectly or you die.

Not that physical reality has ever gotten in the way of low effort internet comments but the driver isn't wrong, you can avoid an obstacle in much less forward distance by turning than braking.

There were two seconds between the alert and the crash. I'm not sure why the driver didn't at least get the car out of the barrier lane, perhaps there was other traffic (though the brake pedal percentages don't seem to indicate they committed to braking, odd, but I wasn't there so IDK). Obviously paying attention beforehand would have been the better move from the get go.

Apple never clearly decided whether it was building a full car (like Tesla)? A self-driving system (like Waymo)? A tech stack to license (like Mobileye). This lack of focus created internal turmoil and killed momentum. The car team reportedly had over half a dozen leadership changes.

Apple lacked a tangible car ecosystem: no charging network, no manufacturing experience, and no clear place in the market for another premium EV.

The project was burning $1B+/year without ROI. Ultimately, it chose to cut losses. Apple failed because it was indecisive, risk-averse, and out of its industrial depth—while Tesla, Waymo, and Xiaomi had clarity, speed, and alignment between ambition and execution.

Also manufacturing a car is vastly different from manufacturing small electronic devices (not that that competence lives entirely with in Apple but they're experienced in designing them for manufacture). If Apple wanted to do car manufacturing that's a completely different area of expertise they'd need to spend a decade or more building up to.

Look at Tesla's journey, it took them years to get things like panel gaps even close to right on their cars and they're having massive problems with the Cybertruck's manufacturing (car washes can completely destroy their electronics, whole pieces of 'trim' falling off because they used the wrong glue, etc).

>that even call their driver's assistance system "God's Eyes", just so that your insurance can get away with classing every crash it gets into as an "Act of God".

Not sure if serious.