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Comment by NickM | Hacker News Reader

As these accidents demonstrate drivers can’t be relied upon to ‘monitor’ the autopilot and react if something goes wrong.

We don't know how many other accidents have been prevented by autopilot. A safety system should not be judged by whether it's perfect, but by whether having it is better than not having it.

The NHTSA did a study on exactly this issue by looking at accident rates in cars with autopilot hardware before and after autopilot was actually enabled via a software update. They found that accident rates went down by about 40% after autosteer was enabled.

This seems to suggest that either people are fine with monitoring and taking over when needed, or else autosteer was already so good in 2016 that it made fewer mistakes than humans.

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

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>else autosteer was already so good in 2016 that it made fewer mistakes than humans.

No no no no no! The NHTSA report says nothing about whether Tesla's system is safer than humans. In that study there are two buckets, one which is total Tesla miles in TACC-enabled cars and then after the update total Tesla miles in cars with TACC + Autosteer and they calculated on airbag deployments. Human driven miles are going to dominate both of those buckets and there's a reason the NHTSA report makes zero claims about Tesla's safety relative to human drivers. It's totally outside the scope of the study. Then add in that some researchers who are skeptical of the methodology and have been asking for the raw data from NHTSA/Tesla have yet to receive it.

I didn't say it was safer than humans. I said that the study results suggest that either humans are fine with taking over and driving manually when required or if humans are not taking over when they should then autosteer might just be safer than humans. I don't claim to know exactly why autosteer would reduce accident rates, and neither does the study, but there must be some explanation and the last bit of my comment was simply speculating as to what that explanation might be.

Or it could show that Autosteer was so unsafe that people became scared and stopped using it entirely, engaging in the much safer method of driving manually and lowering the accident rate of Teslas after Autosteer. Or it could show that drivers new to Teslas have initial higher accident rates because of the driving differences between traditional gas cars and EVs. Or it could show that Tesla changed the sensitivity of the airbags in the same update.[1] Or it could shows that autosteer is actually less safe than TACC alone but AEB and collision warnings more than make up the safety difference. The point is that we don't even know that autosteer is actually reducing accident rates. No matter if you're a fan of Tesla or not you should support the release of the data the NHTSA worked with so we can do an independent analysis.

[1] It can do this, see: https://electrek.co/2017/06/07/tesla-software-update-airbag-...

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