Tesla vs. Titanic: Is History Going To Repeat Itself In The Technology Blitz?

NEW YORK, NY - AUGUST 27: Tesla vehicles stand outside of a Brooklyn showroom and service center on August 27, 2018 in New York City. The electric automaker saw its stock drop on Monday after its Chief Executive Elon Musk reversed his plans to make the Silicon Valley company private. Tesla shares lost 4% in early trading on Monday. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) /

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Tesla, Self-Driving, and Fatalities

The ultimate goal is to promote road safety to the utmost possible degree. The current fatality rates are sobering, to say the least.

NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Saftey Administration) reported 37,133 people were killed in motor vehicle accidents in 2016. (NHTSA). Motor Trend reported in February of 2019 that traffic deaths topped 40,000 in 2018!

"This essentially kills off as many Americans in an eight-year period as were killed in U.S. Army and Army Air Force operations in all of World War II! (National WWII Museum.)"

Those statistics may seem far-removed from your cozy morning commute, as you sip your 7-Eleven coffee and check your Instagram feed at a stop light, but it’s an unacceptable fatality rate that must be reduced.

Self-driving cars do pose a promising solution to this problem, but is Tesla jumping the gun a little bit with assertions that we’ll see mainstream technology, in production form, hitting dealerships by January of 2020?

Indeed, he’s loading up on the talk, and the eyes of the world are now fixated on his every move. He’s made monumental claims that, although are very likely, add an extreme pressure for him to live up to (or risk a major blow to his credibility).

This type of pressure is very dangerous and can cause fatal judgment errors to be made in an effort to perform. Where have we seen this happen before?

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