Former Uber self-driving chief: Tesla FSD crashed with my kids inside
by Ellsworth Toohey · Boing BoingRaffi Krikorian ran Uber's self-driving car division, trained safety drivers in intervention protocols, and went two years without a single injury. Then Tesla's Full Self-Driving totaled his Model X with his kids in the back seat, Electrek reports. He published an essay in The Atlantic about it.
His hands were on the wheel. He was doing everything Tesla asks. But his core argument isn't about the crash itself — it's about the system's design. Tesla asks humans to supervise software that's specifically engineered to make supervision feel pointless. "An unreliable machine keeps you alert, a perfect machine needs no oversight, but one that works almost perfectly creates a trap," he wrote.
Psychologists call it "vigilance decrement." Drivers need 5 to 8 seconds to reengage with a situation, but emergencies unfold faster than that. An IIHS study found that after one month of adaptive cruise control, drivers were six times more likely to look at their phones. Walter Huang had six seconds of warning in his 2018 fatal Tesla crash and never touched the wheel. The Uber Tempe safety driver had 5.6 seconds of sensor data and looked up with less than one second left.
Accountability is lopsided. Tesla logs everything about driver behavior but hands over fragments when drivers request their own data — in a Florida case that ended in a $243 million verdict, plaintiffs had to hire a hacker to pull evidence from the car. Meanwhile, BYD is taking the opposite approach: the Chinese automaker recently announced it would cover crash costs from its autonomous parking feature.
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