IIHS: Model S has higher collision claim frequencies than comparable luxury cars
iihs.org
iihs.org
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QCF8tVqM3I
This could also be bad for Tesla if this is what occurred. Interestingly in this video the chevron lines exist, something people have been claiming would have averted the accident, also interesting that no warning alarm sounded at any stage.
(a) Even though the driver was getting a warning to put his hands on the wheel, the car should NOT continue driving forward and piloting itself at all with no driver response and insufficient certainty to continue navigating itself.
(b) There was a very obvious hard barrier right in front of the car. Why didn't the collision avoidance detect it and halt the car?
(c) The car was clearly "pulled" to the left by the bright exit lane stripe and missing highway-side stripe.
Simply following stripes seems an absurdly primitive and unreliable technique to me. The fact that the car could be "distracted" this way suggests to me that it isn't getting (or making good use of) a lot of information that should be available to it-- like the behavior of other traffic, the presence of other obstacles and roadside geometry (like the ignored barrier, which was on a collision path), the trajectory on previous trips (and any conclusions drawn then under better conditions), the road sign which indicated a fork (and which was also itself on a direct collision path), the crosswise striping in between the two forks which the car was driving over, and the striping on the other edge of the lane, and the lanes beyond, which followed the correct trajectory.
Each of those things is a significant clue as to the real path of the lane, and are all machine-detectable and processable pieces of information. Even with nontrivial uncertainty about each of them, the totality of information, IMO, should be more than enough to clearly discern the correct lane, especially if efficiently used-- Kalman filter-like information synthesis can take a lot of very uncertain information and synthesize a very certain picture.
Instead the machine ignored the holistic picture and "target fixated" on the stripe. This apparently has a disappointingly long way to go before it is a reliable system.
That seems pretty damning.
On typical sports of city streets, they are much better at detecting stationary objects.
Do you have a link about the radars that are actually installed on this cars can and can't do?
Yes. You know why? Because they can. That's why...
https://www.tesla.com/blog/upgrading-autopilot-seeing-world-...
There are just "assistants", and they can't and should not drive on their own.
They also seemingly purposely make it very vague as to what is actually available when you pay for it today (nothing), what might be available during your lifetime (it will try to kill you) and when it might be actually ready (never)... /s
The FSD option doesn't actually do anything right now or even add any extra hardware.
According to their Q4'17 update letter,[0] "In October 2016, we began equipping all Tesla vehicles with hardware needed for full self-driving capability, including cameras that provide 360 degree visibility, updated ultrasonic sensors for object detection, a forward-facing radar with enhanced processing, and a powerful new onboard computer." All new Teslas manufactured since then include the same Hardware II (or the incremental "II.5" version), which includes the eight cameras referenced under the "Full Self-Driving Capability" option in their configurator. Enhanced AutoPilot activates certain software functionality (what people generally understand to be "AutoPilot"), while the "Full Self-Driving Capability" package doesn't actually do anything right now. You're just purchasing the right to unlock a future FSD update for a $1,000 discount today that may or may not come out before you sell the car.
Basically, Tesla is betting that they'll be able to develop and deploy FSD in a reasonable (for consumers; from a developer and regulatory standpoint, it's incredibly aggressive) timeframe using the hardware already present on its cars. In the interim, FSD orders just sit on Tesla's books as deferred revenue because "FSD" hasn't actually been delivered yet.
As an aside, it's actually kind of impressive that ~40% of buyers[1] have opted for the FSD option despite the fact that it doesn't exist yet. Offering the option today involves some pretty significant risk if there are significant delays or Tesla runs into unexpected development hurdles it can't easily get around. It could easily turn into a class action nightmare.
0. http://ir.tesla.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1564590-18-2956
1. https://www.inc.com/kevin-j-ryan/35000-people-have-paid-for-...
But it sure does make Tesla look progressive alright. And upon a cursory, or even second reading, the option does certainly read like you're getting something. That's probably where those 40% come from. Basically, this is a behavior I would expect from some shady operation on Kickstarter, not from a major corporation...
At some point there really needs to be a legal discussion about whether Tesla's argument that the driver must always be alert and responsible for the car is a realistic standard in which to hold people when semi-autonomous systems are engaged.
It seems completely predictable that it wouldn't be, especially when they call it "autopilot."
>To be fair this is mostly a problem with the general public's understanding of the term autopilot and not with the actual systems that have used that name before. Aeronautical autopilots would probably only be classified as level 1 or maybe level 2 [autonomy] when that term was first coined and used to describe them. Even now I am not sure if we would classify the average autopilots you find on a commercial airliner as being fully at level 4.
I don't think Tesla's naming it autopilot should have any impact on any legal discussions. I am not sure the driver should be responsible for everything that happens to the car while autopilot is engaged. However I think it is a completely fair and reasonable expectation that a driver understands what autopilot is capable of doing before they engage it. I don't think Tesla (at least through their marketing, I have heard some questionable things about their salespeople) has been misleading about that in any way. I don't have a lot of faith in people handling a Tesla responsibly if the only thing they know about autopilot is that it is named autopilot.
Personally I think Tesla should bear some responsibility for the name. People don't know what aeronautical autopilots do and don't do. Laypeople think autopilot does the driving for you.
Pilots can do that because there are no other planes in the sky on their route because some outside human is taking care of that.
This should have been done before these things were ever allowed to put on roads.
Zuck is right. We naively trust the world at large to work for our benefit automatically. We truly are "dumb fucks".
Edit: it's in Chicago not Indiana, see replies
This occurring in multiple locations isn't a comfort, it means the issue is more widespread than a single location.
Compare some from the UK.
Bumpy paint, so the wheels vibrate and so they show up in the wet. Red reflectors, and barriers that would push the car back onto the road rather than into the bridge support.
https://goo.gl/maps/TUf1xzLUN5N2
This is normal, though they're aren't many roads like this within cities, so there's usually space for a long, grassy strip.
Maybe you aren't used to concentrating while driving? (I'm only half joking, an American friend one made a similar remark when he visited me.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... (I ignored microstates when counting.)
I can really see why Tesla would try to deny this so hard, seeing it happen yourself is frightening.
I've read both of their press releases on the incident [1] [2] and I didn't see any attempts at denial in them.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/es_ES/blog/what-we-know-about-last-wee...
[2] https://www.tesla.com/es_ES/blog/update-last-week%E2%80%99s-...
It seems like Tesla is trying to explain-away that particular incident as a one-off statistical outlier, and not the fault of the autopilot system. Appealing to statistics like that seems like an attempt to deny responsibility to me.
But unless the person doing the video faked it, there's no question what happened: the car is driving down I-94 and veers out of its lane towards a concrete median until it's stopped by the operator.
Anything less would be denial and warrant some head honcho at some regulator with teeth, and probably the FBI, turn up at Musk's house and drag him away.
From your second link, in Tesla's own words:
"The driver had about five seconds and 150 meters of unobstructed view of the concrete divider with the crushed crash attenuator, but the vehicle logs show that no action was taken."
What they didn't write is that the car also had an unobstructed view of the crash attenuator.
Stop calling Autopilot. It's adaptive cruise control, so call it that.
I'd also be curious about the radar absorbsion of that rubber impact barrier.
This, in part, is why Musk's assertion that this hardware would be sufficient for level 4 autonomy was so ridiculous. It really wasn't the kind of lanuage that a responsible engineer would use.
And I think that given Tesla's known propensity of logging _everything_, they would ave video footage of those camera's saved somewhere. I wonder if this is submitted as evidence, so we can understand what the car "saw" and "understood", both from optical as well as non-optical sensors...
Also, the warning to put hands on the wheel was a joke. It's incredibly subtle and would only be noticed by someone looking for it, which is probably not the people that most need to respond to the warning.
You can see from the dashboard icons that he disengaged the Autopilot (by taking control). If it had detected an imminent crash it would have made warning sounds.
(I don’t use my phone while driving, so my experience is based on looking at the road. Maybe it’s easier to miss when looking downward rather than forward.)
Can't wait to see Tesla close the issue in Jira with a "Cannot reproduce."
That said, someone purposefully doing this and stopping in the middle of the highway stupidly dangerous.
That said, someone purposefully doing this and stopping in the middle of the highway stupidly dangerous.
As the saying goes, "it had to be done" --- to show the defect, before someone else gets killed, and the driver was clearly paying attention here. It stopped pointed right at the divider, a position no car would normally be in anyway, and there weren't many other cars around.
That said, self-driving cars have to be able to handle poor markings like this.
But what is equally damning is that I can't tell that the Tesla has done anything wrong until it's moments away from hitting that barrier. Who the hell decided that was a sensible way to mark the road?
I would strongly prefer no markings to that confidence-inducing single white line, which I have been trained to through years of driving to stay sensibly adjacent to, and which will lead me like a lemming to my death.
At 19 seconds, you can see that the dashboard says to put hands on the wheel. Does that not trigger an audible alarm by default in a Tesla?
No. That's a standard warning that triggers every few minutes if the car can't sense your hands on the wheel. If you don't place your hands on the wheel at that point, then there will be an audible alarm. If you ignore that, the car will slowly reduce speed and come to a halt.
*every few seconds (12 seconds, I believe)
It probably would've been fine if there was another white line at the split, like this (marked in red here):
That's not an unusual road condition at all; also: you'd think there'd be some logic reconciling the line it thinks it has to follow with the fact that an entire lane of traffic on the Ryan (the left-most I-94 lane) doesn't abruptly end.
This does bring up a theory: the lane keeping is biased towards holding itself to the left edge of lanes, on the basis that most exits are right exits and therefore the right edge will tend to diverge a ways before making a new lane. I'm curious how it would handle the split at the mixing bowl in Springfield, VA: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.7735345,-77.1816237,3a,19.8y... (functionally a left exit, although signed as if it were a right exit). The solid white line doesn't actually denote any lane exit boundaries there...
Waymo is on a whole other level.
But I really would love to see more collaboration rather than competition in this area where safety is critical. Pardon the pun - why does everyone need to reinvent the wheel? And also encumber each other with patents?
Open source beats proprietary competitive stuff like this.
Is Waymo really "there"? It seems like everywhere I turn I'm seeing things that suggest that all of this technology has been hyped far beyond its actual capabilities.
For Uber this number was 13
5600 miles starts becoming "I need to use the wheel only 4 times a year" territory.
It sounds like you're saying I will very likely die 4 times a year.
If anything, perhaps the better performing algorithms will lead to more complacency (inattention) on the part of the driver...
Sort of a Catch-22? (Or is there a better analogy I'm not thinking of.)
Call me a Luddite, but I think I would prefer to steer the car myself, thank you. When someone says, self-driving car, I assume they mean a taxi, bus or train: all well-proven technologies.
I agree that this isn't enough for full autonomy. And that partial autonomy can lead to false security. But I bet there are a lot of drivers who have more than 1 incident every 5k miles.
It's a great brand for a L4 - L5 system, not for Tesla's realistic capabilities as a L2 (1) - it sets a dangerous precedent in the consumer's mind.
Their tepid response to this incident outlining that the driver was not fully engaged so Tesla is not at fault, is EXACTLY how the system is used by the average consumer due to the way it's branded and marketed.
(1) https://www.caranddriver.com/features/path-to-autonomy-self-...
If Tesla had called this something like "lane-assist adaptive cruise control" I think your average Joe would have had much more realistic expectations around how the technology actually functions.
Which would be foolish on their part, since it would equate their system with that found on other cars. The systems found on other cars are garbage to the point of being unusable. The system that Tesla has is in a different class.
Tesla's system is exactly the same thing, except that it is marketed as some fancy "autopilot" with "self-driving hardware" or whatever BS Musk is pushing to fanboys blinded by the whole "look, ma, no emissions" thing.
But of course Tesla can't call it that, and not something fancy like "autopilot" because otherwise what could they market? A glorified golf cart (granted, a pretty fast golf cart) that combines a luxury car price with a Yugo quality? That's not a winning combo.
Also, it is a very expensive golf cart, although less comfortable than some.
Or maybe it's just the sensors being the same...
Indeed! The Tesla system appears to have a much higher probability of killing you! I don't see headlines about "$carbrand cruise control out of control, kills driver"
"Tesla is, by a wide margin, the No. 1 short stock in terms of money at risk and exposure within the global auto industry"
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/teslas-roaring-start-to-20...
Hell, cruise control in a Hyundai actually alarms and brakes if you try to drive into a stationary object. But they don't have Saint Elon at the helm...
Pretty sure there are no car models out there with 0 fatalities that have been released for more than a year.
How much are you getting paid to spread this FUD? I genuinely want to know. If the gig is sweet enough, I might want to get in on the racket =)
Wouldn't it be sad if you had invested your life's savings in TSLA upon hearing Saint Musk preaching his BS, and now need to defend that investment against all facts?
(yeah, there is some sarcasm above, but your accusations of FUD and being paid for it strongly smell of spiked Kool-Aid)
3 year period, 6 years ago. Zero citations, just a blank statement.
Not only that, it's not believable. The Honda Odyssey sells in the hundreds of thousands per year. Nevermind the other cars.
There are over 30,000 vehicle fatalities per year in the US, but those models that have been around for years and are extremely popular with consumers ... have had zero fatalities?
Let me guess, it's because they're not Teslas. Who's really drinking the Kool-Aid?
> your accusations of FUD and being paid for it strongly smell of spiked Kool-Aid
I'm happy to admit when I'm wrong, but I'm getting tired of the lying.
To go straight to the source, http://www.iihs.org/iihs/sr/statusreport/article/50/1/1
And we are talking about older cars that might not even have all the supposed safety features a "luxury" (not that it really were one) golf cart like Tesla supposedly has.
Sorry, but you really should lay off the Kool-Aid. Not to say that Tesla were a death trap, but it is fart from being a safest car on the road, no matter what electric fanboys might want to believe.
OK...
>And in a plane you don't drive into a barrier or off the road if you don't pay attention for a few seconds like you can do in a car, unless you're flying very close to the ground. A plane can be said to be flying itself if it's just keeping it's course but to drive a car you need to pay more attention to the surroundings.
I think you just proved your first point here.
For most of the flight, pilots have enough time (and are often required) to go over paper checklists. With the Tesla Autopilot, taking your eyes for 5 second off the road gets you killed.
You can tell a drone autopilot to circle at 600ft and go to lunch. It will be there when you get back. The equivalent for a Tesla might be circling the block for an hour unattended.
The Tesla is far more advanced, but it achieves less, because the environment requires more.
That should be sufficient reason to not call it Autopilot.
We aren't flying here, it's a ground vehicle.
The flight-management systems of modern commercial aircraft can, for example, receive a flight plan expressed as a set of waypoints and information about the destination airport, and then fly the plane along that route and conduct a fully automated landing at the destination.
In other words, it's the customer's fault. And it's arguable that Tesla benefited from this misunderstanding.
But if we all engineered products based on how customers should behave, the human race would be extinct.
This is what happens when no one can fix your car but Tesla and Tesla doesn’t repair what most body shops would fix in a day.
So, I'm not sure whether to feel bad that the Tesla's claims are higher on average, or take pride that I'm getting more for my dollar from the insurer when I get it fixed?
The only way to fix a Tesla is essentially via salvage and there are plenty of people who buy scrapped Tesla’s and make a frankencar some might opt to recertify it with Tesla so they can’t get updates and service but you don’t have to do so for the car to drive and even charge from the network.
Repair centers can certainly buy brand new official parts from Tesla. When my nose cone was fixed, the entire front bumper assembly (including new Autopilot sensors) was ordered from Tesla. This is pretty much the rule, not the exception, and Tesla seems to operate no differently than other car manufacturers when it comes to the repair process, from what I've seen.
I don't see much about the Tesla that would make it more likely to salvage other than the battery pack though. Structural repair to a Tesla seems about the same as any other aluminum bodied car, and while there are shops that will do it (and get all the certified parts from Tesla), it just often doesn't make sense to spend $20-30k to fix a car whose used market value with a salvage title will be maybe double that?
A colleague had to have his towed 300 miles and wait forever, for a rear end fender bender which necessitates a claim as the cost was a few thousand bucks. With a normal car, he’d probably just lay out of pocket to avoid the insurance bullshittery.
Interesting. I think this is, or will soon be, illegal in the EU - we have legislation around driving more openness from manufacturers to 3rd party repairs. I have to admit to not knowing the details, but I do recall reading about this.
EDIT - here you go:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_Exemption_Regulation
http://ec.europa.eu/competition/sectors/motor_vehicles/legis... (PDF, Sorry)
Looks like Tesla's behaviour in this sense is on the wrong side of EU law.
And as such, has a very limited number of "approved" body shops that can source the parts for repairs.
There was only one such shop in my state at the time and the backlog was pretty significant. It made more sense to ship the car out even further.
You can ry to repair it on your own and recertify it with Tesla but it takes quite a bit of time and it ain’t free.
I recently had body work done through the Tesla service center. I dropped my car off, got a loaner, and they took mine to a nearby body shop. (They told me up front they would be doing it this way.) Picked it up a couple days later where I dropped it off.
Mind you, that doesn't affect the claims-per-mile statistic.
* Acura RLX
* Audi A6
* Audi A7 (not rated)
* Audi A8 (not rated) (aluminum body)
* Bentley Continental GT (not rated) (aluminum body)
* BMW 5 Series
* BMW 6 series (not rated)
* BMW 7 series (not rated)
* Cadillac CTS
* Cadillac XTS
* Genesis G80
* Genesis G90
* Infiniti Q70
* Jaguar XJ (not rated) (aluminum body)
* Lexus GS
* Lexus LS (aluminum body)
* Lincoln Continental
* Maserati Ghibli
* Maserati Quattroporte (not rated) (aluminum body)
* Mercedes-Benz CLS-Class (not rated)
* Mercedes-Benz E-Class (partial aluminum body)
* Mercedes-Benz S-Class (not rated) (partial aluminum body)
* Porsche Panamera (not rated) (aluminum body)
* Volvo S80
* Volvo S90
-----
The main issue is the IIHS doesn't test many vehicles that can exceed a $100,000 MSRP, as they're a small portion of the overall market.
Oh, no shit. A really fun to drive car, that can do ~300 miles per charge, is driven more than the Nissan Leaf @ ~150 MPC
This seems pretty important metric to me.
> Injury related coverages were also not included due to the small numbers of claims associated with the electric vehicles.
I would like to see more of this with the comparison.
I can see why nobody thought it possible, but it isn't tremendous
1: https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-last-week%E2%80%99s-accide...
Edit: Which PR department isn't? Didn't Edward Bernays invent PR as a form of commercial propaganda for use in times of peace?
Elon Musk; Is full of shit.
Little by little more and more people ll come to understand that.
Distracted driving is a bigger issue than all of these, but is very hard to actually detect as a first-order effect with current cabin sensors.
Personally, I see a lot of Tesla's on the road every day, and the people who were used to driving a Prius or minivan, seem to drive their Tesla in pretty much the same manner.
But really, if we are talking about people driving 100K cars, we have to compare them with people driving other expensive cars, not a driver of a second-hand Leaf.
If memory serves the average model S is more like 5 seconds 0-60, which is quick but there's a _world_ of difference separating 2.5s from 5s 0-60.
Apparently I also don't care about claim FREQUENCY because the article notes that the frequency difference goes down (but does NOT go away) when controlling for miles travelled. What? How on earth does 'frequency' not have miles as a denominator? Okay, fine, they must consider it on a per-day or per-year basis, but as a consumer, again, I don't care.
As the consumer, I really care about whether passengers fare worse in the average collision, or are more likely to be in a collision.
Again, parts costs will come into line over the long term. This is a game the established manufacturers are already good at, Tesla will have to step up to catch up.
Would like to know what is 3 miles in percentage terms. Could account for higher collision claim frequencies.
Correlation does not imply causation. It can be true that Teslas cost more to insure without Tesla being "at fault" for the discrepancy. When they compared electric vehicles with their ICE counterparts, they found that "the seven electric vehicles with exact conventional counterparts had lower claim frequencies and higher claim severities than their comparison vehicles". Electric vehicles had less claims, but when there was a claim they tended to be more severe. I assume this is because if there is damage to the battery pack replacing that part is extremely expensive. So it's not surprising that when Teslas crash they can be expensive to fix given that "crash severity" tends to be higher with electric cars, and that Tesla is a small luxury car maker.
The other thing you have to think about is selection bias. All the groups you're sampling are not equal. Because Tesla's are known for being extremely fast, they might tend to attract people who want to... drive their car fast. To make a scientific comparison you'd want to randomly assign people to a Tesla or Non-Tesla to get a comparable sample population.
The other thing they mention is that "Teslas also are on the road more than comparable large luxury cars. On average, Teslas travel three more miles per day than other large luxury cars, HLDI found." Obviously, if a car drives three times as much as another car it's going to be roughly three times as likely to crash given a consistent probability of collision per mile, right? Since Teslas don't need gas, the more miles you drive the more money you save -- and the more financial sense they make. Therefore it's not surprising that Tesla owners tend to drive their cars much more as the financial incentives would tend to favor people who drive more -- especially with free unlimited supercharging in early Model S and X. Even someone who might not have driven a lot before will be more likely to drive more if the price of doing so is reduced -- that's just the basic law of demand. Plus, if you had a Tesla wouldn't you want to drive it all the time? People are leaving their Bolt in the garage while they drive their Telas three times as much as comparable luxury cars, and yet what we take away from the data is "AutoPilot is causing crashes".
I know this won't make a difference in how the media and public perceive this, and this line of thinking will just be seen as a defense of Tesla, but I don't think that higher claim frequencies for Model S means Tesla has necessarily done anything wrong, just on a purely statistical basis.
I bet the higher frequency of claims is either because people who buy electrics are worse drivers or simply more litigious. Probably both.
I think you should re-read what you are quoting. My reading is that the electric cars that were not made by Tesla had fewer claims than their ICE counterparts.