Having had a front-row seat to the data, what's your take? Do you think Tesla's Autosteer helps, hinders, or keep accident rates unchanged?
I think the biggest benefit, safety wise, is it gives the ability to put less mental focus in staying in the lane, and gives me the ability to spend more time focusing on my surroundings. Its easier for me to focus on keeping up with the traffic behind me (like if a car has creeped up into my blind spot) and any potential traffic that is about to cross my path (like a possible red light running coming in hot). In heavy traffic, its super helpful; the auto cruise control is very human-like and will build a gap when someone cuts you off instead of suddenly making one with a slam on the brakes.
There are AP users who prefer to use their time checking on that text message. Those people don't help the statistics / human gene pool.
But what we should compare to is a supervised steer to a assisted human. So autosteer with Lane keeping assist. If Tesla offered such a service, we should be able to compare. Till then everybody is just comparing unreasonably in my opinion
The question is why is the data secret, I mean I understand why Tesla does not want to share the training data but I am referring to the safety records and related statistics.
>Having had a front-row seat to the data, what's your take? Do you think Tesla's Autosteer helps, hinders, or keep accident rates unchanged?
From my subjective view point of the data - Tesla's autosteer overall helps to reduce accidents. But only when the operator is fully aware of the systems functions and alerts.
Driver assistance systems are wonderful technology and should be standardized like seatbelts, airbags and ABS are. The underlying issue is related to its slow adoption and use, and not a lack of functionality. How the alerts and information of impending caution/take-over required/accidents are presented to the driver is the main hurdle to its lack of wide spread adoption.
Tesla autosteer has a "Delightfully Counter-Intuitive" (as Musk might say) manner in which drivers are taught to learn how this system functions and what its abilities and limits are, therefore reducing the accident rates - in my naive (data) opinion.
Main point being, driver assistance systems could help reduce accident rates....as long as drivers know how to use them, how they function, and what all their literal bells and whistles mean, to the point where you're always supervising the system (whether you realize it or not).
You can't just throw that second qualifier on there. Whether Autopilot helps reduce accidents is 100% dependent on whether users take it as an excuse to let their attention wander from the road. If the behavior of many Tesla fans on Twitter is any indication, they already think it's fine to treat it like a full self-driving system: https://twitter.com/Scobleizer/status/1092477048482717696
And that's to say nothing of the fact that Elon Musk himself was shown on 60 Minutes letting Autopilot drive, in traffic, with his hands off the wheel and Lesley Stahl in the passenger seat. The user's manual may say to keep your hands on the wheel, and in court when faced with an Autopilot-related lawsuit Tesla always argues that drivers are 100% responsible for the car at all times, but Musk & Tesla are nonetheless happy to irresponsibly encourage the false perception that their cars are self-driving.
IMO constant in-car monitoring of driver attention (i.e. a camera focused directly on the driver's face) is the only way these "kinda-self-driving-but-not-really-when-it-counts" systems can be deployed safely.