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Comment by snewman | Hacker News Reader

Tesla comes off extremely well in this report. For one thing, the 40% statistic cited in the headline appears to be well supported by the NHTSA report (section 5.4) and actually manages to frame the incident in a very positive light:

ODI analyzed mileage and airbag deployment data supplied by Tesla for all MY 2014 through 2016 Model S and 2016 Model X vehicles equipped with the Autopilot Technology Package, either installed in the vehicle when sold or through an OTA update, to calculate crash rates by miles travelled prior to and after Autopilot installation. Figure 11 shows the rates calculated by ODI for airbag deployment crashes in the subject Tesla vehicles before and after Autosteer installation. The data show that the Tesla vehicles crash rate dropped by almost 40 percent after Autosteer installation.

I had hoped to see more information about this specific incident. For instance, any data on whether the driver had his hands on the wheel, what steps the car had taken to prompt his attention, etc. But that doesn't seem to be included.

View on HN

Just funny that the 40% from Autosteer seem to exactly match with the general AEB safety improvement rate also mentioned in the report...

    IIHS research shows that AEB systems meeting the commitment would reduce rear-end crashes[emphasis added] by 40 percent. IIHS estimates that by 2025 – the earliest NHTSA believes it could realistically implement a regulatory requirement for AEB – the commitment will prevent 28,000 crashes and 12,000 injuries.

Here is some of that IIHS research [1] from Jan 2016 that gives lots of raw crash numbers broken down by manufacturer, type of system (AEB/FCW), injuries involved, etc. Really informative.

Some excerpts from "Effectiveness of Forward Collision Warning Systems with and without Autonomous Emergency Braking in Reducing Police-Reported Crash Rates", January 2016:

"FCW alone and FCW with AEB reduced rear-end striking crash involvement rates by 23% and 39%, respectively. "

"Among the 15,802 injury crash involvements in these states, the percentage of injury crash involvements that were rear-end striking crashes was larger among vehicles without front crash prevention (15%) than among vehicles with FCW alone (12%) or FCW with AEB (9%). Only 4% of rear- end injury crashes involved fatalities or serious (A-level) injuries."

"Approximately 700,000 U.S. police-reported rear-end crashes in 2013 and 300,000 injuries in such crashes could have been prevented if all vehicles were equipped with FCW with AEB that performs similarly as it did for study vehicles."

[1] http://orfe.princeton.edu/~alaink/SmartDrivingCars/Papers/II...

For those unaware, "AEB" stands for "Autonomous Emergency Braking". See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_avoidance_system

Did Tesla cars have AEB prior to Autopilot installation? If not, then this suggests the 40% reduction in crashes may simply be due to the installation of an AEB system. What effect Autopilot's other features may have would remain uncertain.

I don't think it suggests it as much as it can be inferred from looking at both sets of data.

Yes, Tesla cars had AEB since March 2015. Autopilot (with autosteer) came out in October 2015. Presumably Tesla's AEB gets improved a little with every firmware release.

Thanks. But the NHTSA report looks at data starting with "MY 2014" (i.e. calendar year 2013) cars.

If AEB did lead to a 40% reduction in crash rates for Tesla cars, as it did for other car models, I suspect that moving the dividing line by five months later wouldn't change the figures much: you would still have a lot more crashes prior to AEB and fewer after.

Tesla was growing rapidly in that era, and the sensors weren't even available at the start of calendar year 2013. All cars shipped with sensors starting in October 2014. It'd be nice if the NHTSA report quantified this a bit, but they didn't. I don't think your suspicion is correct: some of the AEB benefit is in the earlier figure, and the number of airbag deployments is not small.

> Tesla was growing rapidly in that era, and the sensors weren't even available at the start of calendar year 2013. All cars shipped with sensors starting in October 2014.

I don't follow the statement about sensor availability. That doesn't seem to change the fact that all the miles driven "after Autosteer" benefited from AEB, while at most a small fraction of the miles driven "before Autosteer" would have had AEB available.

Given that we know AEB systems do reduce frontal collision rates by 40% for all cars, as the NHTSA report stresses, that implies we cannot attribute the reduction in crashes "after Autosteer" to Autosteer alone.

(Which matters because articles such as the one posted are claiming a cause-and-effect relationship between the introduction of Tesla Autopilot and a reduction in crashes, but if a significant portion or even all of the reduction is due to AEB systems that other cars have also started to adopt then we're mistaking correlation for cause.)

I don't believe they counted cars without the sensors, either before or after. Your statement about "at most a small fraction" has no evidence.

Finally, who said the reduction in crashes is Autosteer alone? Not me. It appears to be a combination of AEB and autosteer. That's what "some of the AEB benefit is in the earlier figure" means.

(Edit: note that the above comment was edited without marking the edit. See below.)

> I don't believe they counted cars without the sensors, either before or after. Your statement about "at most a small fraction" has no evidence.

Thanks for explaining. The NHTSA report says:

> ODI analyzed mileage and airbag deployment data supplied by Tesla for all MY 2014 through 2016 Model S and 2016 Model X vehicles equipped with the Autopilot Technology Package, either installed in the vehicle when sold or through an OTA update, to calculate crash rates by miles travelled prior to[21] and after Autopilot installation.

> [21]: Approximately one-third of the subject vehicles accumulated mileage prior to Autopilot installation.

So yes, cars which never had Autopilot installed were not counted, but they obviously did count cars from calendar year 2013 which later had Autopilot installed or else they wouldn't have said "MY 2014".

I don't think it's safe to say that the bulk of the miles driven "before Autosteer" happened between March and October 2015 on cars which had AEB systems available.

> Finally, who said the reduction in crashes is Autosteer alone? Not me. It appears to be a combination of AEB and autosteer. That's what "some of the AEB benefit is in the earlier figure" means.

It's implied by Elon Musk's tweet and all the press articles I've seen that Autopilot/Autosteer is responsible for the 40% reduction in crashes, as I mentioned in an edit to my previous comment.

WTH. I didn't say "it's safe to say that the bulk of the miles driven "before Autosteer" happened between March and October 2015".

If you want to debate Elon Musk's tweets and not what I'm saying, respond to Elon. If you respond to me, please respond to what I'm saying. You've totally wasted my time, and all the readers of this thread.

(Edit: Oh, and thanks for not marking your edit an edit.)

> WTH. I didn't say "it's safe to say that the bulk of the miles driven "before Autosteer" happened between March and October 2015".

I didn't say you did. I suppose you could interpret "I don't think it's safe to say X" as referring to your speech, but I read it as "I don't think X".

> If you want to debate Elon Musk's tweets and not what I'm saying, respond to Elon. If you respond to me, please respond to what I'm saying. You've totally wasted my time, and all the readers of this thread.

Well, I never asked you to debate it. It's a relevant because the TechCrunch article that we're discussing does imply that Autosteer or Autopilot is principally responsible for the 40% reduction in crashes, and in my first comment I expressed my doubts on the claim.

I would agree that "a combination of AEB and autosteer" is possibly the real reason behind the reduction in crash rate, but I would point out that while we already have strong evidence that AEB alone can lead to a large reduction in crash rate we cannot prove or disprove that Autosteer's impact is comparable.

Tesla model years match the year of production. 2014 Teslas were built in 2014.

Tesla rolled out AEB in March 2015 as a software update for all cars with the appropriate hardware. All Teslas produced starting in mid-September 2014 have the appropriate hardware, so several thousand MY 2014 Teslas have AEB as of early 2015.

Exactly - this is a significant weakness of the study.

Yea, it really doesn't seem like autosteer would avoid that many crashes. All that autosteer does is keep you in your lane on a marked highway. Human errors that autosteer would correct are probably relatively rare, things like distractedly drifting into another lane or falling asleep at the wheel. AEB, on the other hand, helps avoid the most common type of crash, rear end collisions.

Autosteer can also change lanes, and would avoid crashes caused by missing a vehicle in a blind spot. Seems particularly useful on a busy highway, with vehicles in adjacent lanes leaving far too little following distance between each other.

If the car can detect something in the adjacent lane, then it'll give you a warning if you try to change lanes into it manually too.

My car has that - there are too many false positives for it to be useful. I most commonly hear get the warning when there are two left turn lanes and I'm in the right one (because I need to turn right at the next road). Sure there is a car to my left, if it doesn't turn left I'll hit it, but the other car would be at fault in that case.

I will admit that there have been a couple times it saw the car I was about to merge into before I did. It is not clear if I would have seen the car a moment latter anyway or not.

Mine has never had a false positive. I've yet to accidentally merge into anybody with it, so I don't know how it behaves in the situation it's supposed to handle.

"Number of crashes" is not as important as "crashes weighted by severity". "Distracted driver" is the number 1 root cause of accidents, and "failure to stay in lane" is the number 1 proximate cause of fatal accidents in most states.

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-cause-of-the-most-fatal-c...

OK but the cited 40% figure is just for crash rates, not for severity weighted crash rates.

A stylistic note: putting quotes in code format like that makes them unreadable on mobile browsers. It's a single-line side-scrolling element with three words in frame at a time that I can only see after lifting my thumb.

Is the base size and confidence levels reported anywhere? I get professionally suspicious when reports publish percentage figure comparisons of rare events.

What events do you consider rare? Car crashes?

Crashes of cars that were hard enough to trigger the airbag, but still not so hard that the car would not get an autopilot update later in it's life. The "before autosteer" column does not include miles or crashes of Teslas that did not survive until OTA availability.

Presumably they meant airbag deployment crashes in Teslas.

We can estimate the absolute number from Tesla's press release in December stating that 1.3 billion miles have been driven on Autopilot, while the NHTSA report states the accidents they count occur 0.8 times per million miles.

So in that case it's data from about 1000 crashes in the Autopilot case, and more in the non-Autopilot case. Which tells us that the statistics should be good enough (anything else would be a major scandal).

However, that is not what they are comparing! As the NHTSA report states in footnote 21, they're not actually comparing Autopilot miles to normal driving. They are comparing crash rates in vehicles before and after Autopilot was installed in those vehicles. That muddies the waters quite a bit in my opinion, especially when they don't tell us how significant this decrease is. I'm not saying it's wrong, but I'm also not very confident that it is a causal effect, as opposed to just a correlation.

Here is a PDF link to the NHTSA report, since TFA only links to a Scribd (thus unusable) version.

https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2016/INCLA-PE16007-7876.PDF

So they're comparing miles driven manually before a certain date to miles driven manually and automatically after a certain date? It certainly implies that Autopilot is safer, but why not separate it properly (Autopilot vs manual) and give us far more accurate information?

It just seems...odd.

Comparing all miles both before and after neatly sidesteps the problem that the autopilot only works on relatively good roads.

Even so, Tesla should be able to tell whether or not you're driving on a highway with all of the data they collect. Why not compare that data to the Autopilot data? This report wasn't made by Tesla, it was made by the NHTSA. So why not do a more meaningful comparison?

It's weird.

Actually you can argue that car crashes are rare. 1.2 deaths per 100 million miles is rare. (I'm not able to find statistics for accidents without deaths, but we can extrapolate)

A lot of people drive a lot of miles which is why there are a lot of crashes. So you can argue either side of this depending on how you want to twist the numbers.

Auto crashes are the leading cause of death in some age ranges. You have to decide what you want to normalize to... other kinds of death is a good choice.

They published that the driver took absolutely no action, and that he had 7 seconds to take some action (7 seconds from the time the truck started to turn across his path until his car struck it). The last action he had taken was to enable the cruise control at 74mph 2 minutes before the crash.

Yes, from previous reports it was already pretty clear that the driver was asleep at the wheel (literally or otherwise). The car is not supposed to allow this; it's supposed to check for hands-on-steering-wheel and other indicators of driver attention. It would have been nice to find out how that system broke down in this case.

It doesn't require continuous engagement. You can drive with hands off the wheel for several minutes at a time in many situations.

Besides, it's perfectly possible to fall asleep but with your hands still touching (even gripping!) the steering wheel.

That's also a solved problem - Mercedes cars have "attention assist" which can figure out how attentive you are by measuring how you drive. If you are literally falling asleep at the wheel, the system will get very annoying and insist that you stop for some rest.

Of course, whatever algorithm they are using won't work if the car is driving itself, you can't judge the reaction time if all the driver is doing is holding the wheel.

One of the approaches used on long-distance buses is "track head position and angle." If you're "looking" into your lap or into the ceiling while driving, that's a fairly reliable signal that something is wrong, never mind how you're holding the steering wheel.

The technology is almost certainly there to very aggressively monitor "eyes on the road" and quickly blare alarms if they aren't. It's probably fair to say that would be a very unpopular auto feature.

Didn't they make the check more aggressive after the latest accident? Or am I just mis-remembering speculation.

They've been tweaking it pretty regularly since the beginning. The initial release had no timed events at all, and only asked the driver for hands on the wheel when the system's confidence dropped below a certain level. Then they added some timers as well (I think before this crash) and have been tweaking the situations and durations. Right now, I believe at highway speeds it's either 1 or 3 minutes depending on whether you're following a car or not. (The system has more confidence when it has another car to track, so it's more lenient there.)

The car should immediately pull over and shut down if it detects any activity on the driver's Twitter or Facebook feeds: Social Media Strike Out!

...then fashion a start-up based on "Ownership" of the vehicle and code and sell devices to Tesla owners to over-ride any part of the system they don't like, then profit!

Then sell the customers list to law enforcement to make side money! What a fantastic time to live in SV!

Sell the list of those using social media in the car to existing advertisers too. Extra high levels of engagement!

Then post a joke thread about it on HN. Maximum Reddit!

[Seriously, though. I don't want to downvote everyone in a chain but there's probably a more HN/SNR-friendly way to comment on potential abuses of automaker access to social media feeds.]

>Then sell the customers list to law enforcement to make side money! What a fantastic time to live in SV!

implying that law enforcement won't work with homeland security to subpoena your data at cost under a gag order :)

Would require you to link your social media accounts to your car so easily avoided.

Oh, I think the car would be able to learn your social media accounts after a while, just looking for any geotagged posts that tend to match the car's position

How many driving seats does this car have?!

What if you have none?

"The only winning move is not to play the game." - Wargames

Entice drivers to link to their social media accounts by offering features like automatically tweeting a photo of anyone you honk your horn at, and updating an online leader board of top speeds driven along every section of road.

>top speeds driven along every section of road

If your goal is to make things safer I don't think this will help.

Yeah, when I worked for TomTom and suggested that idea, they weren't very enthusiastic about it.

And my other suggestion about a TomTomagotchi that you have to regularly drive around to different places to keep happy didn't go over very well, either. Maybe a petroleum company would be more receptive to that idea, though.

The tomagotchi idea is sort of like Waze. You get littlrle "candies" the more you drive. That one worked out for them.

Ford is doing something similar[1], by trying to take the best photos for you while driving, presumably to avoid you from using your phone.

Its such an odd patent, perhaps its a high quality signal about their ability to execute on self driving.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/18/ford-patents-a-car-camera-...

  immediately pull over and shut down

That could be more dangerous than allowing the trip to proceed in many situations (e.g. high-speed, narrow roadway). Fellow drivers assume a certain degree of predictability of other drivers' behavior when no surprise hazards are present.

Are you telling me my car should have pulled over on the highway and potentially caused an accident when my wife used my phone last week?

I didnt read the report, but is this measurement done on a a/b testing way? There is usually some data skew/bias when they are done on different time scale.

Same cars pre/post OTA. There was a ~6 month peroid where AP HW was out in the wild but not used.

Confounding factors. For example, crashes can be more likely after sunset or during inclement weather so seasonality can play a role. Or maybe the drivers who had Tesla longer got used to it.

Could this be accounted for if the sample period was large enough, ie over 12 months to cover seasonality and a few months for time of day.

this particular one, maybe, but there might be others. like the user base pre-ota and post ota (number-wise) could be different.

I think there is a good SaaS business with A/B testing robot/car software OTA. I would imagine some metrics would be: 1. car speed 2. battery consumption per mile. 3. user comfort metrics (if it's possible to measure, maybe like hearthrate, body temperature etc - i can imagine if robots were driving bad, it'd be visible in heart rate or something like that).4

The list probably goes on. It would be interesting to see how much battery consumption changed after OTA, for example.

I suspect OTA update was applied simultaneously rather than staggered over the course of the year, so probably not. You can control for seasonality using some other data as a proxy, but the more adjustments you make, the more potential there is for introducing errors. Randomized test/control split is almost always better than before/after comparison.

A lot of people are asking what was in the October 2015 Autopilot 7.0 update. That was the introduction of autosteer. Automatic emergency braking (AEB) was initially released in 6.2, see https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/tesla_model_s_soft...

6.2 was announced in March, 2015.

> data supplied by Tesla

Where else could it possibly come from? Tesla is the only one collecting this data.

bingo

I really would like to know the absolute numbers for this reduction. It's really questionable if this would hold up with millions of Teslas on the road in the hands of less wealthy(probably better educated) drivers.

Wait... are you saying that people that are less wealthy are better educated? If so, I need to see some sources. That sounds preposterous.

no. he needs more parens to make the order of operations clear. also, love the standard internet response to data. "the data in not perfect, or is incomplete, thus I will hold steadfast to my intuition"

love you, internet.

It's very reasonable, when presented with data that doesn't pass a sniff check, to mentally bitbucket that data. Unfortunately, lots of people's noses are miscalibrated - And what's worse we're not sure which ones.

Assuming by education you mean formal schooling: Consider that wealth is accumulated over time. While outliers certainly exist, the older you get, the more wealthy you are apt to be, at least to the point when you retire and start to use those reserves to live on. Also consider that in 1970s, the time when the boomers started coming of age, having 'high school or more' was reserved for just 50% of the population. Only a mere 25% for the oldest segment of the population. It has steadily climbed to more than 80% for the youngest adults. But they, statistically, haven't had time to amass a large amount of wealth yet.

I also found that confusing. I think in this case "less wealthy" is within the context of Tesla owners, which is basically upper middle class(?), which sort of makes sense. At least that's how I read it.

No, i just took education as one possible factor that might be different between Tesla and Camry or Hummer drivers. Tesla Owners have a specific selection bias, its just hard to describe what that bias actually is, so i just took a stab in a direction to get the discussion going.

Probably as the technology scales up to millions of people using it, the numbers will actually be even better for safety. There is a network effect that compounds the safety factor - as more self-driving cars are on the road, there are fewer rogue human drivers. So with millions of Teslas driving around there will be that many fewer people causing accidents by human error.

The rates dropped by 40%. The drivers remained the same. Why do you think a different driver demographic will not show a similar improvement?

Maybe other drivers are really good, or maybe this class of driver is really bad?

35,000 people die from car accidents every single year in the USA alone. Other drivers are not "really good".

Personally I believe most people are really terrible drivers. That being said, there were 210 million drivers in the US in 2009. There's probably a lot more today. That's just 0.01% of drivers. That fact makes me have to question just how bad people really are, despite my own personal opinion. Or maybe cars are just really safe. A better statistic might be number of accidents.

In 2015 2.44 million people were injured in car accidents. That's a much more telling figure of just how bad most drivers are. Apparently our cars are just really safe.

I had an econ professor assert that as cars got safer there were more accidents because people trusted the car to protect them more.... Logically, to reduce accidents due to carelessness we should put a 12" sharpened spike right in the middle of the steering wheel pointing at the drivers chest. If all accidents were deadly wouldn't drivers then exercise the utmost care?

It's a great joke, but a poor strategy. Remember the end game: minimize harm. The universal solutions that remove human error have a better long-run potential to minimize harm, since they can exceed the effectiveness of even the most attentive and cautious human driver.

There was a coach bus crash in the Alps a few years ago, and in the investigation they found out that one of the factors contributing to the crash was that the driver only had few years of experience, and only ever drove modern, top of the line buses. The problem with those is that they drive as easily as a small hatchback, despite being 20 meters long and weighing 17 tonnes. The engines are powerful, the transmissions are usually automatic, the brakes are strong - so you can easily forget that you are driving a 17-tonne fridge, and no matter how good your brakes are, you can't be braking continuously on a 15km long mountain descent, because the whole system will fail. The bus was equiped with engine and magnetic retarder for the drive, but like I said, on a modern bus that drives this easily, the driver just never had any need to use them. I think the report concluded that a driver with more experience in driving older vehicles, where you couldn't rely on assisted disc brakes, where all you had was a set of brake drums and just had to know how to use the 2 other braking systems, would have saved the bus.

Similarily, airplane pilots spend so much time in autopilot mode that they forget how to operate a plane in emergency situations.

10 accidents where everybody walks away is much better than 1 accident where someone dies.

20 years ago they redid the traffic pattern where I used to live to something many people found really confusing and many people claimed felt dangerous. A study 2 years later found that, while it was true that accidents on that part of the road had increased, the number of injuries due to accidents had plummeted. A follow up study a few years later found that accidents had dropped back to around their original level and serious injuries where still basically at zero.

The problem with this theory is that the rate of fatalities has gone sharply down as cars have become safer. There may well be some degree of compensation where people drive in a more dangerous manner, but the added safety far more than compensates for it.

I believe most people are inconsistent drivers. Usually they do a reasonable job, but some fraction of the time they're worried about a sick kid, or a job interview, or a recent breakup, or whatever, and they aren't paying attention.

There are some truly consistently horrible drivers. But in general most people do ok most of the time. I think the real challenge is cutting of that really bad end of the distribution, which autopilot seems to be doing.

Those same drivers are, unfortunately, also likely to be those least amenable to actually using it. Some people I know have expressed disgust toward the idea of autonomous driving; coincidentally, almost all are horrible drivers that I wouldn't want to be with as a passenger.

They're not really safe when compared to other forms of transportation.

Other forms of transportation have better trained pilots. :)

Precisely. Which is what self-driving cars aim to give cars.

The average driver goes about 10 years between a crash, which doesn't seem to be all that good.

Another factor is the extent to which bad driving doesn't result in an accident, either because of infrastructure, other drivers reacting, or just a lack of cars. For example, most red light runners don't cause a crash because stoplights usually have an all-red period to compensate, there often aren't other cars to crash into, and other cars might brake to avoid crashing into the culprit.

Many crashes require two bad drivers to misbehave at about the same time. For example, I couldn't tell you how many times I've had somebody change lanes into me, but it hasn't (yet) resulted in a crash because I've seen it and gotten out of the way before they hit.

So...better driving training, then, yes?

Do you think peoples ability to behave/drive responsibly vs recklessly could be at all linked to their demographic profile? I am talking statistically, not looking for anecdotes...

Yes, it's very likely that different demographic profiles have different driving behaviors.

But given that they've shown this 40% crash rate reduction in their current demographic, it's reasonable to expect to see a similar reduction in other demographics (maybe not of the same magnitude, but at least in the same direction).

If you believe a certain profile of people is more accident prone, maybe people that fit this profile will have more advantage when using autopilot?

Varying insurance rates based on age and gender seem to indicate that, yes, demographics play a role in driving responsibility.

A Tesla is not a cheap car. I kind of suspect the average Tesla driver is more responsible than the average driver. It may be the case that the average Tesla driver is very well off, and treat the cars as expensive toys though, so it's tough to say without numbers. If i had to bet right now, i'd bet on the more responsible side though.

Isn't this even better for Tesla then? People that supposedly already drive carefully now have fewer accidents.

I suspect the average Tesla driver is more irresponsible than the average driver, simply because they're rich and are used to getting their way.

If you study rich drivers I have no doubt that you would find that they cut people off more, overtake in more dangerous situations, use their indicators less, drive over the speed limit more, proceed through amber signals later, run red lights more often, and generally show less regard for the rules than other drivers.

This behaviour will also correlate to other areas of life where richer people simply care less for the rules. They're more likely to use social contacts or money (e.g.: "lawyer up") to get themselves out of any trouble they find themselves in.

Teslas are not cheap cars. Given that money is (social evidence of) power, the people buying Teslas (and other expensive cars in general) are likely to expect other drivers to respect their status as powerful people.

Do the people you are describing with such harsh prejudice have more accidents? That's the real question.

Credit rating is highly correlated with wealth, and is also highly correlated with reduced accident rates. This is evidenced by me personally, as I now get much better auto insurance rates with an 800+ credit rating than I did when I was in the 600s right out of college.

I would be willing to bet money that the insurance actuaries that actually calculate risk disagree with your extremely prejudiced opinion.

If you disagree, commenting is probably more appropriate than downvoting.

I'm still waiting to hear how your personal opinion about wealthy drivers is more accurate than auto insurance actuaries that calculate risk for a living.

> If you disagree, commenting is probably more appropriate than downvoting.

FWIW, in case you were unaware, Hacker News doesn't allow commenters to downvote direct replies. So whoever might've downvoted you wasn't the parent, and someone corrected it with an upvote or undown (your comment isn't gray as of this writing).

Credit rating is highly correlated with wealth, and is also highly correlated with reduced accident rates.

You're assuming that accident rates are directly correlated with claim rates, however. A wealthy individual is less likely claim for a minor accident, preferring to pay out of pocket for small repairs rather than take a big hit on their premiums. Someone less wealthy may not have that option.

There are other reasons why wealth may reduce your risk to insurers that are unrelated to safe driving. You're less likely to leave a car parked insecurely in a dodgy part of town, for example.

Finally, "drivers of luxury brand cars" certainly aren't the same set as "wealthy people with good credit records". Plenty of lower net worth people can still manage a lease on a BMW or Mercedes, or buy a used one.

Drivers of luxury cars cause more accidents, insurers say: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/insurance...

There have been a few studies that show generally wealthier drivers do behave more recklessly/selfishly. https://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/12/the-rich-drive-d...

In my own opinion:

This list is not strongly related to risk /of/ accident, but is correlated with severity (a small change is likely to have a small correlation with severity).

  * over the speed limit

This list is highly subjective and extremely situation dependent.

  * overtake in (more) dangerous situations
  * through amber signals later

(IMO: Most lights should have longer yellow signals, a mechanism for telling fresh and stale apart should also be standard)

All of these are very bad things that everyone should avoid doing, and signals should be given starting 5-10 seconds before the action.

  * use indicators less
  * cut people off
  * run red lights

It seems like age is a rather large driver of involvement in crashes (younger/newer drivers end up being more crash prone) according to here: https://www.aaafoundation.org/sites/default/files/2012OlderD... (page 5)

Which seems like the current driver profile is possibly safer than the overall population since it's unlikely a large percentage of young drivers own a $100k car. It seems like the effect of widespread autopilot could be greater if it included this cohort.

Car insurance, and their actuarial models, are based entirely on this being true.

Are you assuming the more wealthy owners have lower levels of education? Or have I misinterpreted your statement? I would have assumed tesla owners would fall into the more educated category. No idea which assumption is correct just wondering about your reasoning.

For my assumption I assume that due to the higher cost of a Tesla better educated people are opting for them over the alternative because of the environmental benefits.

I would have assumed due to the high cost of a Tesla that the owners would tend to be older, and thus a generation educated in much fewer numbers. Today's youth are much more educated, but they are still young, which hasn't given them much time to build wealth.

I mean, who do you think is more likely to buy a Tesla: A 20 year old fresh college graduate, or his 'uneducated' father who has been saving and investing for 30 years and just sold his lifelong home in San Francisco? My bet is on the latter. The boomers in particular are considered the wealthiest generation ever, but not the most educated generation ever.

I'm rather fascinated by how many are questioning the education thing here though. Coming from a farming community, where every (older) farmer I know is multimillions simply by virtue of having purchased farmland when they were young, it's difficult to see how education had any impact on that wealth. Some of them do have educations, some don't. It doesn't seem to make any difference.

I evidently misunderstood the original comment, when OP said less wealthy (better educated) he meant that there would be fewer wealthy (and better educated) owners. I don't agree with the sentiment and think OP didn't really explain his position well either.

You don't agree that wealthy people tend to be older? Even though time is the easiest way to increase wealth (compound interest is your friend). Or you don't agree that older people are less educated? Even thought the data suggests otherwise.

I didnt say that and I am unsure how you inferred it from what I said.

OP linked wealth with being better educated, he also inferred that better educated and wealthy meant they would be better drivers. However as others have pointed out there are studies showing that wealthier individuals make worse drivers (the studies don't appear factor in education level and wealth is determined by brand of vehicle).

I disagreed with OPs sentiment that fewer wealthy (and therefore worse educated - in OPs opinion) drivers would result in more crashes.

> OP linked wealth with being better educated

Doesn't that contradict what you said before: "Are you assuming the more wealthy owners have lower levels of education?" Although I think it is quite reasonable to assume that the wealthy do have less education, statistically speaking, give the nature of wealth and the more recent focus of educating the populace.

Heck, when I graduated high school in 2000, only 64% of us did graduate. The graduation rate for high school, less than two decades later, is now over 80%. That's substantial growth over what is a fairly short period of time, all things considered. And the rate gets worse the further back you go.

> I disagreed with OPs sentiment that fewer wealthy (and therefore worse educated - in OPs opinion) drivers would result in more crashes.

That was my misunderstanding. I thought you meant that you did not agree with the sentiment that wealthy people could be less educated. Thanks for the clarification.

Wealthy motorists drive more recklessly: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/11/4086.short

Makes sense, but its still interesting how the result would change when applied to the general population. Would VW Beetle drivers have the same reduction?

I think you pointed to the wrong link. That's a study about ethics, not safety.

If you read the abstract you will see that the studies involve driver behavior.

"Results Studies 1 and 2. Our first two studies were naturalistic field studies, and examined whether upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals while driving. In study 1, we investigated whether upper-class drivers were more likely to cut off other vehicles at a busy four-way intersection with stop signs on all sides. As vehicles are reliable indicators of a person's social rank and wealth (15), we used observers’ codes of vehicle status (make, age, and appearance) to index drivers’ social class. Observers stood near the intersection, coded the status of approaching vehicles, and recorded whether the driver cut off other vehicles by crossing the intersection before waiting their turn, a behavior that defies the California Vehicle Code. In the present study, 12.4% of drivers cut in front of other vehicles. A binary logistic regression indicated that upper-class drivers were the most likely to cut off other vehicles at the intersection, even when controlling for time of day, driver's perceived sex and age, and amount of traffic, b = 0.36, SE b = 0.18, P < 0.05"

Did they account for bias in their observers?

I agree. Here is a more direct study review proving your point. https://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/12/the-rich-drive-d...

Jerks drive Mercs

They said it was a 40 percent drop after the roll out of auto-pilot features. That means it dropped 40 percent with the same driver base. Please read the article before posting comments.

So "better" drivers saw 40% reduction; doesn't that indicate that worse drivers will see even greater reduction in accidents?

> wealthy (probably better educated) drivers.

You mean drivers like the ones behind the wheel of all the BMWs and Audis that cut me off with no turn signals, speed, make aggressive lane changes, tailgate, and generally act like giant douches because a simple traffic ticket is nothing to their pocketbook while their time == money?

Those people are going to be a hell of a lot safer behind the wheel of an autonomous (level 4) vehicle where they can be on the phone and their laptop as the vehicle obeys the speed limits and safe following distance.

He said less wealthy, better educated drivers.

Pretty certain he meant it the way I quoted it.

Ah it now makes sense, I did ask him to clarify but I just parsed in my brain when reading your reply he meant fewer wealthy (better educated drivers) as opposed to less wealthy meaning not as wealthy. Thanks for your help.

I read it as less wealthy meaning not as wealthy as well. Funny how ambiguous some sentences can be.

Well it's really that he used the wrong word. "Less wealthy drivers" can't correctly refer to the number of drivers.

Stop being so self righteous. Do you own a BMW or Audi? I do, and I'm totally polite driving mine. Also, when you have a car that handles and responds better you tend to drive it harder and you forget that everyone else is in some inferior product.

> when you have a car that handles and responds better you tend to drive it harder and you forget that everyone else is in some inferior product.

You can buy traction control, ABS, better suspension, steering, better tires, etc. None of that will make the idiot behind the wheel any better, although it may lead to overconfidence.

Thanks for making my point for me though.

Anecdotally I have a lot more near-incidents with 4WDs and little hatchback getabouts. In my experience the 4WDs have been distracted or drifting outside their lane, and the little getabouts have been tailgating and driving aggressively. Having "P" plates (1) also raises the chances massively.

Could just be the numbers of those kinds of cars in my area though.

Generally I feel that a douche can drive any type of car, and I try to drive in fear like everyone else on the road is a drunk prison escapee.

(1) provisional licence holders - new drivers (and also people who have lost their licence) have to display "P" plates for a year here (Australia).

I find that drivers who fail to keep right except when passing are the leading cause of 'aggressive' and 'unusual' passing conditions.

Because the aggressive drivers behind them aren't responsible for their own actions in rage passing left lane hogs?

Somehow I manage to consistently undertake people who are going slow in the left lane safely. Its not that hard.

I actually agree that douches drive any kind of car. I singled out BMWs and Audis because the prior post was claiming that highly educated/wealthy drivers would be 'better'.

I've seen jalopies driven like someone has been up on speed for 4 days straight.

Or the drivers in cheap sensible cars that are terrified of merging onto the freeway faster than 40 mph.

And the distracted drivers who realize they're about to miss their exit so they hammer on the brakes and put on their turn signal and completely fail to match speeds.

Ricers with after market exhaust are another kind of car that usually drives way too fast and aggressive compared to how their lowered suspension actually performs.

The people in road tanks who seem to split the difference between terrified and aggressive and expect you to just get out of their way because they're bigger.

I'm probably missing entire swaths of shitty drivers that I can't think of right now because my blood sugar is a bit low.

> because a simple traffic ticket is nothing to their pocketbook

Finland has a system where a traffic ticket is a certain percentage of your monthly income. For example, running a red light is typically fined for 25% of your monthly income.

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