While I would love for self-driving cars to be a thing, the AI to detect tired, distracted, drunk or sleeping drivers could be in every car way, way before self-driving cars will be a thing.

> Self-driving cars don't even have to be particularly good drivers to be better than the average human, given how much the human average is dragged down by recklessnes

Tell that to the jury when your self driving car runs into the side of school bus full of kids (which will happen given any reasonable adoption).

Self driving cars would have to be held to an almost insanely high standard to be “winnable lawsuit” proof.

I disagree that it's obvious. Even a mediocre driver can do things like change lanes in heavy traffic. The nut of the problem is a social one. You have to signal your intention and then figure out when someone else is going to let you in. The basic human ability to form a picture that includes the intentions of the other human beings around them is part of the "Strong AI problem" and may never be solved, ever.

Am I correct in thinking that most people use autopilot in the most boring parts of or most boring drives?

It seems to me that knowing the autopilot isn't 100% perfect is a good reason to not rely on it in more dangerous or complicated scenarios (construction, roads with poor markings, school areas).

I haven't followed too closely here though, just curious if that is a reasonable hypothesis.

Autopilot tends to be engaged on freeways / motorways where accidents are much lower than driving through town. If you do the stats properly Tesla's autopilot is probably more crash prone than just having a human drive.

There were some stats that if you compare model S deaths to other luxury cars in the same price range they are about 3x higher for the S. Death rates in luxury cars are much lower than the average vehicle.

I think self driving tech will cut roads deaths eventually but it needs more work.

That's a nice bit of advertising, but; They cheat. When the car detects an unusual or difficult situation developing it prompts the driver to take over. This means that all the really tricky bits of driving are done by the human and all the easy bits are done by the machine..

There was a competing study done against cars with similar price/age/safety equipment that didn't have the auto pilot option and Tesla caused considerably more accidents.

This is garbage analysis.

When you are comparing numbers. You compare like-to-like. Tesla specifically prohibits engaging Autopilot in difficult situations and encourages during long boring straight drives.

Those figures are not as good as you seem to suggest.

First of all. Tesla counts the number of miles for every Tesla being involved in an accident. The other figure you quote is for all miles driven by motor vehicles before getting involved in an accident. Given that accidents tend to involve two or more vehicles the number of miles traveled before an accident involving a Tesla without autopilot or safety measures would be closer to 820.000 miles.

In that figure of 479.000 miles commercial traffic is also included. Commercial traffic makes up around 60% of all accidents. We cannot translate this to miles per accident comparable to Tesla, because commercial traffic tends to drive more miles than passenger vehicles do, but there are far less of them, etc. Another big category that needs to be excluded from the general figure is motor cycles, that generous source of donor organs, to make it comparable. Passenger vehicles in general are more safe than the overal figure and thus closer to Tesla's figure.

Second point is that Teslas are hardly part of the second hand or n-hand market yet. It is even a question if Tesla will tracks that data in those markets. In those markets you will see more young people as drivers (something to do with income). They are responsible for a majority of the traffic accidents involving passenger vehicles (something to do with tendencies to discount the future and to overestimate their own capabilities).

Third point is that the really good figure comes from auto pilot, but that only works in places and under conditions that are already far less accident prone like highways under normal weather conditions.

The good news from the figures is that enabling the safety measures make Tesla drivers better drivers: From 1.6 miles to 2.1 miles roughly a 25% increase in miles traveled before an accident. That would lead us in the direction of mandating level-2 automation in all new cars for more safety rather than trying to push for level-5 for some brands.

Bacteria in a sealed container will reproduce until all resources are consumed. Then they drop to anemic levels or die out entirely. Humans live in a relatively closed system. And modern technology sits atop a very fragile foundation. All that to say past evidence does indicate technology generally gets better, but not necessarily forever.

Hardware eventual fails, software eventually works.

Look up "Ergodicity".

Autopilot doesn't need to be 2x or 10x better than a human driver -- it needs to be 100x or 1,000x better, or nobody (sane) should touch it.

The problem is not that autopilot is superior than your own driving in the vast majority of the cases! The problem is the 1 in a million times when it makes a trivial mistake that virtually no human would, and kills you instantly. Like driving under an obvious semi-trailer, and shearing your torso off.

An understandable example: You have two games of chance, both with identical 5/6 chance of winning.

One game, you'll play immediately (and as often as possible). The other, you would never play, not even once.

How is that possible? Both have identical 5/6 chances of winning? But, one is "ergotic", meaning that the odds hold over the long term as often as you play, and one is "non-ergotic", meaning that as soon as you lose, you're finished.

One is a single dice roll.

The other is Russian Roulette.

Self-driving cars are Russian Roulette. One "mistake" on the part of the system, and you're dead. The fact that the "stats" prove that it is safer, overall, don't change the fact: you and your family are dead.

Autopilot is at most evidence that human-machine systems are better than just human drivers. Throughout its history "autopilot" had many cases where the human saved its ass and quite a few where it managed to kill the human anyway.