Deer aren’t edge cases. If you are in a rural community or the suburbs, deer are a daily way of life.
As more and more of their forests are destroyed, deer are a daily part of city life. I live in the middle of a large midwestern city; in neighborhood with houses crowded together. I see deer in my lawn regularly.
But I agree with your point that the overpopulation is impossible to miss. I'm also in the suburbs of a major Midwestern city and the deer are everywhere. My city tags them so, oddly, you kind of get to know them.
Last year #100 and #161 both had fawns in my back yard (for a total of 3 babies). This year, #161 dropped 2 more back there. I still see #100 around, but I don't think she had offspring this year. She might have been sterilized, but I heard that the city stopped doing that because some of our tagged deer were tracked to 2 states away. Now we just cull them.
Two days ago I saw a buck (rare for the 'burbs) chasing a few of this year's fawns around. I thought "you dummy, those girls are too young to breed," but then I looked it up, and apparently sexual maturity in deer is determined by weight, not age. Does can participate in their first-year rut if they've had enough to eat. And those little shits have had plenty of flowers out of my garden.
I see buck all the time I’m my neighborhood! I was on a walk earlier this summer and turned a corner to be face to face with a small herd that was hopping fences to graze. The buck was across the street and just stared at me.
At first I was afraid because they can get big, but now I’ve seen them a few times and I’m thinking they are used to people. I’m still not getting close if I can help it. They are much bigger than you would expect.
I like seeing them but I feel bad that they are stuck in the city.
People are acting like drivers don't hit deers at full speed while they're in control of the car. Unless we get numbers comparing self driving vs human driven cars then this is just a non story with the only goal being discrediting Musk when there's so many other shit that can be used to discredit him.
To quote OP "How many kids will we let Elon kill before we shut him down?", by this logic, how many kids will we let drivers kill before we take all cars off the road then?
People are acting like drivers don’t hit deers at full speed while they’re in control of the car.
I should be very surprised if people don't generally try to brake or avoid hitting an animal (with some exceptions), if only so that they don't break the car. Whether they succeed at that is another question entirely.
People drive drunk, people drive while checking their phone, people panic and freeze, deers often just jump in front of you from out of nowhere.
People hit fucking humans without braking because they're not paying attention to what the fuck they're doing!
But for some reason if it's a car with assistance well now that's scandalous! No idea if they're safer in general and cause less accidents, one is too many! Unless it's a human behind the wheel then who gives a fuck how many accidents they cause?
No, I'm saying that one video of a Tesla hitting a deer doesn't prove that they're less safe or just as likely as human to hit things when using assisted driving.
Show actual stats of accidents per miles driven compared to cars without assisted driving and then we'll be able to talk.
If we had videos of every Toyotas or Hyundai or Ford that hit deers while being driven by a human, this video of a Tesla doing it would just be a drop in a pool of water, but because it happened with an assistant behind the wheel people are acting like it means assisted driving doesn't make cars safer.
TL;DR: It's an anecdote, without actual stats it's just noise to influence people's opinion
Problem is the data is rigged. It's road miles driven that autopilot deigned to activate for with cars that rarely need their friction brakes that are less than 10 years old versus total population of cars with more age and more brake wear and when autopilot says 'nope, too dangerous for me', the human still drives.
The other problem is people are thinking they can ignore their cars operation, because of all the rhetoric. A human might have still hit the deer, but he would have at least applied brakes.
Finally, we shouldn't settle for 'no worse than human' when we have more advanced sensors available, and we should call out Tesla for explicitly declaring 'vision only' when we already know other sensors can see things cameras cannot.
A human might have still hit the deer, but he would have at least applied brakes.
You're making quite the assumption there.
I'm not saying we need to settle, I'm saying it's useless to share that example if we don't have actual numbers to compare the stats between human driven miles and miles in cars with assistance available and insurance companies would have that.
Nope and I'll be the first to say that Musk is a fucking moron, but there's tons of shit to attack him on, pretending that Tesla cars are more deadly than human driven cars with anecdotal evidence is just stupid.
Tesla FSD doesn't exist. Musk lies and says it does to pump Tesla stock. Tesla drivers think they have FSD so they pay less attention and are then more likely to have an accident.
Bravo, you're the first person to bring actual fucking statistics to the discussion! Per driven miles would be better than per driver but hey, at least it's not just a clickbait article.
People drive drunk, people drive while checking their phone,
And those people are breaking the law.
people panic and freeze
I don't think I've ever seen someone panic so much they just act as if they didn't even hit a deer.
deers often just jump in front of you from out of nowhere.
In this case, the deer was just sitting there, so not applicable.
People hit fucking humans without braking because they’re not paying attention to what the fuck they’re doing!
If it was this much negligence, they'd be facing vehicular manslaughter charges.
But for some reason if it’s a car with assistance well now that’s scandalous!
It's scandalous when a human does it too. We should do better than human anyway, and we can identify a number of deliberate decisions that exacerbate this problem that could be addressed, e.g. mitigation through LIDAR, which Tesla has famously rejected.