Lessons From The Tesla Crash Summary

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The editorial board from the NY Times published an editorial titled “Lessons From the Tesla Crash” on July 11, 2016 which talks about the state of assisted driving features on newer models of cars. The board comes to a conclusion that having assisted driving features can make cars “more dangerous” and there must be rules set in place from The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. According to the editorial these new rules would be set upon the manufacturer's teams to make sure that the systems are outfitted with “better testing and regulations”. The editorial prompts the agency to “take lessons from the history of airbags and the lack of strong regulations” and apply these past mistakes to better prepare society for this new technology. …show more content…

This crash caused someone to die and is a strong, representative tie to how assisted driving has not matured yet. Tesla, the company who makes the car involved in the crash even commented saying that it was a failure from the assisted driving which “did not detect a white tractor-trailer”. Another piece of evidence that Google even pulled back on their assisted driving research in favor of driverless cars due to systems causing drivers to become “dangerously distracted”. The huge tech conglomerate pulls back its research on the latest driving tech? That would seem odd but according to the tech giant it is not worth it so they are pushing even further into the future. A third piece of evidence the editorial provides is the history it pulls back from when airbags were dangerous. It parallels the new to the old and shows the reader that the airbags foretell the future of assisted drivers, but instead of being dangerous to “women and children” it will be dangerous to everyone in an even bigger way without …show more content…

Their method of inductive reasoning starts when they mention the car crash, the crash could have been prevented by the systems but it could also be prevented by the driver who might have been “possibly...distracted”. This line of reasoning that the authors use when describing their situations is inductive because they can not wholly confirm that the systems are truly dangerous and can cause the driver to become distracted or if it is because drivers are more easily distracted altogether due to an outside reason such as the explosion of the smartphone. A fallacy I saw in the editorial was an argument from analogy. This stems from the analogy made with assisted driving and airbags. Due to both leading to the possibility of injuring people and being a technology that had a rocky start in car innovation the two are similar. This does not mean that somehow the assisted driving is going to cause a widespread impact of injuries that airbags may once have done and it does not mean that assisted driving will not improve simply because their is no legislation driving companies to improve

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