The name "Jet Propulsion Laboratory" dates to 1943. They do rockets. At least 2 years prior to that name change they had worked on JATO, which is "jet-assisted takeoff". The company Aerojet was founded in 1942, making solid-fuel rockets.
Like many terms in the English language, the word "jet" has more than one meaning. In the context of flight above the surface of the Earth, it refers to an oxygen-breathing device.
Sure. Every modern car, Tesla or not, has been designed to maximise crumple zone utilisation at the exact speeds prescribed in standardised tests. Crash a little slower or faster and a different structural design would yield better survivability.
As for what constitutes "modern" in this context, the first FEM simulations for iterating car crumple zone designs have been run in the 1980ies.
Optimizing for the test, in a way that does not necessarily have any relevance for real-world performance, is much more of a possibility for software than it is for physical things. This is because of the fractal/chaotic nature of software: small differences can result in wildly different outcomes.
NHTSA testing has been developed over a long time, and in conjunction with studying both real-world and laboratory crashes, so I imagine they are quite realistic and representative. The one way that they equivocate the tests that I am aware of is to divide vehicles into weight classes, but this would be difficult to take advantage of.
According to this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18167535) it is possible. It's not that Tesla is optimising for performance in these tests, it's more that the tests look at the failure modes of internal combustion engine chassis.
They are only talking about slow, conservative, stop-the-world collectors there.
They have to scan the full heap. You shouldn't compare apples with oranges.
I find the methodology of the research to be solid, the collectors to be representative of the different approaches in the field and the conclusions to be consistent with the gut feeling from experience:
"With only three times as much memory, the collector runs on average 17% slower than explicit memory management. However, with only twice as much memory, garbage collection degrades performance by nearly 70%."
