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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

> But what is the benefit right now if you strictly follow the rule of remaining alert enough to intervene at a second's notice?

You have an extra failsafe for those moments where you fail to remain alert. People keep treating these incidents in isolation and failing to account for the fact that human drivers make exactly this kind of fuckup every hour of every day, and lives are lost. Every day.

You get that right? Cars. Kill. People. Every day.

Tesla is shipping systems in the absolute infancy of this technology that are already statistically indistinguishable from human drivers as far as safety goes. And the luddites here want to throw all that in the garbage because of "what is the benefit right now".

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Tesla is shipping systems in the absolute infancy of this technology that are already statistically indistinguishable from human drivers as far as safety goes.

That’s a hell of a claim, I’d love to see some serious citations on it.

There is no conclusive study either way. The only real data we have is the two confirmed deaths in Autopilot accidents in over a billion miles driven with Autopilot. That is not enough data to draw a definitive conclusion, but it at the very least shows that there is not a huge problem that makes it dramatically more dangerous.

For comparison the overall casualty rate for the average car in the US is somewhere near 12 deaths per 1 billion miles driven.

I wouldn't say that Tesla's have proven safer, but I think saying they are "statistically indistinguishable" from human drivers is relatively fair at this point.

> over a billion miles driven with Autopilot

No, it's over a billion miles driven by Tesla cars that have the sensor hardware that Autopilot uses. The number of miles driven with Autopilot actually engaged is about 300 million, at least according to the data Tesla has released.

https://electrek.co/2016/11/13/tesla-autopilot-billion-miles...

Look at the date on that article. It is from 2016. Tesla has sold a lot of cars and those cars have driven a lot of miles in the last year and a half. Tesla is certainly over a billion miles in Autopilot driving by now.

EDIT: Here is a Tweet from April 2016 saying 47m miles. [1] Your linked article is from November 2016 and shows 300m miles. That is 250m miles in 7 months. Projecting that forward with zero growth, Tesla would have accumulated roughly 950m miles in Autopilot usage. That isn't including the over 100,000 cars Tesla has sold since November of 2016 or the miles those cars have accumulated in that time. I stand by my statement that Teslas have recorded over a billion miles while using Autopilot.

[1] - https://twitter.com/Tesla/status/718845153318834176

There are other factors that influence fatalities in automobile accidents. You can't legitimately use deaths per miles driven as a proxy for how good a driver Tesla's autopilot feature is.

Sure, which is why I said we had no conclusive data. However, at the very least no red flags have popped up in the statistics. Think of it like flipping a coin 3 times and we got heads all three times. That is not nearly enough to judge whether the coin is fair, but we are probably getting close to concluding that the coin isn't weighted heavily in favor of tails. The sample size is still small but nothing in the statistics is screaming out that Autopilot is a big danger when compared with driving manually.

But we don't need statistics to know that Autopilot isn't as good a driver as a human. By Tesla's own statements Autopilot can't autonomously operate a car, it requires a person to be at the wheel and engaged with driving. By definition this means that autopilot is a worse driver than a human driver as it cannot drive at all.

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