Thread by @Tweetermeyer

OK, we need to talk about this clip.

Let's start with the easy stuff: @Lebeaucarnews got a basic fact wrong, his own outlet (@CNBC) has reported that NHTSA has opened at least 28 investigations into Tesla crashes and 24 of those are STILL OPEN TODAY. cnbc.com/2021/04/19/tes…

https://twitter.com/SquawkCNBC/status/1384468038712496128

Obviously the fact that most of NHTSA's Tesla crash investigations are still open casts doubt on @Lebeaucarnews' opinion that they exonerated Tesla and blamed the driver.

But the biggest issue I have here is Phil's framing: this is not a choice between blaming driver or system.

By far the most in-depth investigations of Autopilot-involved crashes were by the @NTSB, and in every case they found that the design of the system contributed to misuse and the crash/death. Not one or the other, but both.

Has anyone actually read these?

https://twitter.com/Tweetermeyer/status/1382468041523417089?s=20

In Phil's defense, there has been one NHTSA investigation into Autopilot that exonerated Tesla. Following Josh Brown's death, NHTSA produced a report saying Autopilot not only wasn't at fault, but actually reduced crashes by 40%.

It was comically wrong.
thedrive.com/tech/26455/nht…

At first glance the report had obvious problems. When an auto safety expert made FOIA requests to obtain more information about how they had come to the finding NHTSA blocked him. He had to sue to get it, and when he did it was clear why: it was a bad joke thedrive.com/tech/26455/nht…

NHTSA's inaction on the very specific issues that the NTSB's investigations found in three separate cases, the lack of ODD limits and camera driver monitoring, has left the NTSB extremely frustrated. I encourage you to watch their latest (Feb '20) hearing:

Why has the @NTSB identified the problems in the complex interaction between human and machine when @NHTSAgov could not? Easy: NTSB investigates crashes of all kinds and thus has deep human factors knowledge/experience, NHTSA is largely a defect investigating body and doesn't.

That's why NHTSA's only published investigation turned out to be an embarrassment and why nobody, from Elon Musk himself on down, has been able to explain why or how NTSB's findings were wrong... not once, but three times.

It's because they aren't wrong. They got it right.

Sadly, we live in a time when expertise is secondary to tribal loyalty, where simplistic false dichotomies resonate stronger than complex, nuanced problems, and where people see the internet as a tool to bend reality to their will and not as the ultimate learning tool.

But don't discount the possibility that the complex, nuanced answers provided by NTSB will never cross over into NHTSA. The agency has actually said that systems contributing to foreseeable misuse can be determined defective. The tools are there. federalregister.gov/documents/2016…

But in the meantime, people in the media and public discourse need to wrap their heads around the fact that partial automation like Autopilot can lead to situations where both the design of the system and the user are to blame for bad outcomes. It's not black and white.