Have you ever looked at other drivers on the highway? You see people texting, emailing, eating, shaving, doing their makeup, reading a book, the list goes on and on. If there is an activity you can do while seated, odds are people are doing it while driving.
That is one of the flaws with a lot of the complaints about Autopilot. The question isn't whether Autopilot is safer than an attentive driver. It is whether it is safer than the average driver and the average driver is not attentive 100% of the time. And there simply isn't enough data available in the public to say whether a Tesla with Autopilot is or is not safer than the average driver.
How do aircraft pilots manage it?
For example, in a car, several seconds of following distance is normal and following another car that closely is common. In a plane, which can move in 3 dimensions, horizontal separation is measured in minutes and it's not that common to be following immediately behind another plane at the same speed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_(aeronautics)#Horiz...
Takeoff, initial climb, descent, and approach to landing are high workload times, easily holding the attention of the crew.
Cruise is much more relaxed and much less need for hair-trigger responses. My aircraft has audio and visual cues if an aircraft breeches a 2nm (or thereabouts) and is within 1000' vertically. Other than that, it's systems monitoring, weather monitoring, keeping up on the nav progress vs fuel remaining, and making sure the automation isn't trying to kill you, either subtly or acutely.
Also, my understanding is that aircraft autopilot systems are designed to allow for pilot response to take up to three seconds. Three seconds on the highway is a lifetime.
tl;dr: aircraft pilots generally must be attentive. Tesla drivers on "auto pilot" - not so much.
A 0% accident rate is unrealistic and unfair.
“Yes, this autonomous vehicle killed your son who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but someone else’s son would have died in an unrelated accident somewhere else were it not for autonomy.”
I've lost a handful of close friends to car accidents. If survivorship grants standing, then I'm for doing almost anything to reduce the tens of thousands of US road deaths each year.
Survivors have been angry at safety tech before, but we generally ignore them. I've known people who insisted they would rather be thrown from an accident; they wouldn't wear a belt. One friend came to that conclusion because his uncle died trapped in a burning vehicle. I respect the incredibly complex and deep emotional reasons that he came to his conclusion, but he was still wrong, and he shouldn't set seatbelt policy.
ON THE OTHER HAND...
We sometimes throw around this baseline of the natural accident rate of drivers, and that's slightly lying with statistics. Accidents are not evenly distributed across all drivers.
You have a lot of impaired drivers in that pack. You have a bunch of insolvent, uninsurable drivers who cause a disproportionate share of accidents.
If the worst 10% have most of the accidents, then even a car that makes us safer than the mean driver could still make 90% of us less safe. We really want a car that makes us safer than our percentile of drivers.
Maybe driverless cars are already better than the mean. Are they better than the 90th %ile? I don't know that anyone has enough data to say.
The most cautious drivers really will have an at-fault accident rate statistically indistinguishable from zero. We should absolutely be shooting for that.
It’s harder to emotionally cope with, I speculate, when someone you love is killed by a software bug, or by machine learning where no one can precisely explain why it made a certain choice.
I’m not saying I’m against autonomy. I just don’t know how to prevent it being caught in a backlash when people who didn’t have to die, do.
Sure, I understand how a poorly designed steel guardrail can ride up the front of a vehicle and crush the chest of someone I had hugged a week earlier.
My sense is that understanding does not lessen the pain.
You seem to basically be trying to explain how hypothetical people that you are imagining could be experiencing pain that is more salient than mine.
I don't see how this takes us anywhere good.
Not only drivers, but also roads. I would imagine most people using Autopilot use it more on highways than on city streets. The rate of accidents per kilometer is obviously much higher in the city where you have more complex situations and slower speeds. So when comparing autopilot failures we need to take into account not only miles driven, but where they are driven.
The standard shouldn't really vary per-person.
If it's as good as a 50th percentile driver, it's good enough.
If it's as good as a 20th percentile driver, that's also probably fine.
You're right not to touch the mean at all, though.
The problem is if there's any correlation with safe driving and early adoption, a median solution could also lower overall road safety.
For example, teenagers are generally more dangerous drivers than most, safety actually peaks per mile around 60 years old. 60 year olds are more likely to be at peak earning, more able to afford the latest car features.
You're probably right at 20℅ though? This all depends on the curve.
And there's a herd immunity, once most people are driverless, you can probably be less strict as roads become less hazardous overall.
We'd honestly probably make the biggest dent tomorrow by just finding the worst ten percent of drivers and giving them free uber/lyft for life. That would probably save us money as a society, money we could use on driverless tech.
Those aren't teenagers. Judging anecdotally from my time as an attorney, those are serially unemployed middle aged males with revoked licenses who somehow still own an old heavy truck and drive it on the sly with a bottle of something in the glove box.
If you read through case law that profile is weirdly common.
Should ambulances be banned? Subsidized? I can imagine different ways of analyzing the question, but asking "what would you say to the families of those who die" is a nonstarter. There's nothing you can say that will be satisfying, or ease their pain.
Statistics may be cold, but they're the only tool that actually lets us answer the questions like "would fewer people die with or without this change"?
I’m just pointing out there’s a PR problem that may prove tough to manage.
Your argument applies there. "Yes your son became autistic, but someone else's son somewhere else didn't get measles and die."
I understand there are human emotions involved, but my opinion is that significantly reducing death count is still a better outcome. If we can't accept that noticeably better systems will still have faults, and that those faults will result in a different, but smaller number of deaths, then we're content asking for more deaths than necessary.
Eh, Tesla likes to point to this statistic every time the safety of Autopilot comes into question, but it is an apples-to-oranges comparison because AP is only used on highways where traffic incidents are already far less common per mile driven.
Detailed data is hard to come by, but more nuanced studies have been far from conclusive in favor of the "Autopilot is safer than human drivers" thesis.
True, and that kind of flawed argument bugs me. However, there is also data that showed that accident rates went down significantly on the same cars after Tesla first enabled autopilot via a software update. This is much more compelling to me; if the same people driving the same cars in the same areas became less likely to get into an accident as soon as autopilot became available, then I don't see how you can really argue that the feature is not beneficial to safety.
That study was later shown to have employed sketchy data and egregiously flawed methodology. A deeper dive showed that the crash rates may have actually gone up with Autopilot. HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127613
What's the point of comparing Telsa Autopilot related crashes to crashes involving at least one motorcycle?
I think it's obvious the answer is: deception*.
But when the argument is "using the vehicle this way is a lot safer than the minimum requirements to be on the road", it's a relevant and fair statistic.
A more fair comparison would be: other drivers of similar demography driving other vehicles of similar age and specifications.
I could buy a car with 3 star crash ratings, and people would be fine with that. I could get in a taxi with a mediocre driver, and people would be fine with that.
Why does the comparison have to be to me driving, in a car like this?
When I'm shopping for a car, it makes sense.
But for public policy discussions, what matters is how the safety ranks against the general population.
You can't determine whether Autopilot makes driving safer by comparing miles driven only on highways by Teslas to miles driven across the whole vehicle fleet.
That assume almost everyone using autopilot will replace that with manual driving in the same car. Some of them might get cheaper cars or take uber and end up less safe.
And even then, there's lots of stuff you can do to a car that makes it less safe that we don't ban, as long as it's still sufficiently safe.
If anything, increase safety standards. If you want to do something that won't cost extra money then do something to ban oversized cars at the same time...
What I mean to say is, when car considering the safety data of any vehicle, it is insufficient to know that the vehicle performs better than whole-fleet.
It’s also necessary to know whether any particular vehicle outperforms others in its class.
One of those without the other is necessary but not sufficient.
The driver that's above average but could be more above average isn't where we need to be fixing things. Not when there are millions of drivers that are either hyper-aggressive or senile still on the roads.
Saying “we told the users that they must pay attention while they are not driving”, or “we told them that the system called ‘auto-pilot’ is not actually able to autopilot the car”, and “we advertised the car’s self driving ability but had documentation saying it doesn’t actually have that ability” then you are responsible for that system driver behaving exactly as you would predict.
Their have been numerous studies that show that people stop paying attention when they are given menial or non-focus dependent tasks. Saying that the only safe way to use autopilot is by not being a human is fundamentally the same as saying “the brakes in the car only work if you press them continuously for 5s or apply 300lbs of force”.
Yes, so people ending up focusing on things like cellphones and email.
It is unacceptable for Tesla to enable this reckless driving. Tesla has the ability to affect the scale of this problem most readily and relying on individual consumers is not in the best interests of public health.
Let's hold people responsible for their actions, not objects. It's one thing to say "autopilot makes it hard to focus", it's another thing to say "autopilot made me pick up the phone while driving, and lie about it".
"With the new Tesla Vision cameras, sensors and computing power, your Tesla will navigate tighter, more complex roads."
There is a lot implied in the short phrasing of "navigate tighter, more complex roads". It also begs the question that Tesla's capabilities were sufficient in the first place.
"All new Tesla cars have the hardware needed in the future for full self-driving in almost all circumstances. The system is designed to be able to conduct short and long distance trips with no action required by the person in the driver’s seat."
Why make potentially misleading and untested future-looking statements when consumer safety should be the focus of a system like this? https://www.tesla.com/autopilot
The problem is the natural outcome is that people will then simply just stop using the system, and end up less safe because of it, causing more accidents and possibly costing lives.
In the interest of public health, the system has to be better than the average driver, and also not annoyingly unusable.
So there is a balancing act. Tesla will already disable AP if you keep your hands off the wheel for too long. It even locks you out for the rest of the drive as a “penalty box” so you can’t just turn it back on.
As I drive down the highway on AP, the number of cars drifting in their lanes, crossing the lines, changing lanes without signaling, not maintaining proper speed, driving aggressively, driving for an exit at the last minute, panic breaking, etc. is actually somewhat mind blowing. It’s amazing there aren’t more accidents.
Versus the Model 3 which maintains speed and centers in its lane more precisely than I even do manually, for mile after mile.
What’s also remarkable is the constant progression of new features, better feature detection, more complex navigation and route planning which has happened over just the last 12 months. Tesla AP now in 2019 is significantly improved from what it looked like even July 2018, and v10 will just continue the progression.
Tesla safety stats are hard to compare to the general public, but what I can say definitely is a Tesla on AP on the highway is way more consistent and predictable of a driver than any human. It’s better to be in the Tesla in AP on the highway, but I imagine it’s also better to be driving behind or beside the Tesla in that same situation because it’s not driving distracted like almost everyone else on the road.
And companies selling the systems need to stop calling them "Autopilot".
>The more accidents like this will cause lawmakers to create laws that can potentially slow down automated driving development.
You'll actually hear this from people working on self-driving at most companies. That they have deliberately been conservative about their roll out and claims because they don't want to destroy the concept of self-driving before they can achieve it. Tesla has done a great job of damaging the reputation of self-driving cars for everyone.
The physical act of turning a wheel isn't the hard part of driving. Paying attention is.
As an avid user of Tesla Autopilot I'll disagree with this. On a long road trip, monitoring my surroundings and making sure everything is generally ok is far less fatiguing than making constant microadjustments to steering, speed and following distance.
Even while paying close attention to the ride, long trips (especially in stop-and-go traffic) become significantly less stressful and exhausting.
It’s whether you actually are - and that’s very different from what you perceive. For example i would be curious to see how eye movement of regular autopilot users differs when they are using autopilot vs when they aren’t.
Based on all prior studies of attentiveness I suspect you’d find dramatic reduction in active scanning, etc.
Part of the reason for the many curves in I280 in the sf peninsula was apparently to ensure drivers had to actually do something while driving. I’m tempted to investigate whether that’s a myth or fact, but the nature of the internet means I’ll probably just find that i280 gave me cancer :)
Car and Driver tested AEB in several vehicles (Tesla, Toyota, Subaru) and they are all pretty equally bad at it. Figuring out if matter in front of you, while traveling at speed, poses a life critical hazard is hard! It’s better than no AEB, but don’t rely on it entirely or you’re going to end up maimed or dead. As the driver, you are still the final responsible party.
https://twitter.com/vogon/status/1169358625220882432
Visual indicator after 2 minutes of no detected driver-applied torque to the steering wheel (apparently because they only detect torque - i.e. turning/steering motions - and not pressure?)
Since January 2018 there have been software updates that reduce the time that the car will allow you to not signal to it that you are paying attention. You now have to apply a little turning force to the wheel much more often than before.
The safety system is robust IMHO. If I push the accelerator pedal while autopilot is running, immediate nag. Running at 89 mph (max speed before Autopilot locks you out for the duration of the drive due to too high of a speed)? Nags every 5-10 seconds.
It’s not perfect by any means, but it also expects a responsible, aware driver behind the wheel.
Adaptive cruise control and lane assist, available in every modern car under the sun will make microadjustments to steering, speed, and following distance all day long.
What exactly does autopilot bring to the table?
(Update: to be clear, I’m not inherently opposed to a car changing lanes if I need it to, but it seems easier to deal with a potential emergency, and easier to persuade myself to pay more attention, if I know definitively it won’t do something that sophisticated.)