There have been a total of six deaths related to Autopilot misuse over 3 billion Autopilot driven miles by the fleet. Humans are terrible at risk management.
Or, humans rightly assessed that despite marketing to the contrary autopilot only really works on the easiest part of driving (highway miles) and still managed to kill 6 people.
Is that not what Autopilot is sold as? Does it not make you read and accept a disclaimer stating exactly this?
A click wrap legal disclaimer after you already purchased the thing is in no way what something is sold as. It literally can’t be - because you have already bought it.
I don't doubt your point, just looking for magnitude here.
Parent probably should have quoted the figures, but they're frequently cited (so somewhat assumed, I guess) in such discussions, and very easy to find on the net.
From [0] I see:
"1.13 deaths per 100 million miles traveled."
Naive scaling to 3 billion, that'd be ~34 deaths in non-Tesla Autopilot driving.
Parent is correct that humans are poor at risk management.
Another common refrain when talking about auto-driving technology is that it doesn't need to be perfect -- just better than humans. And that's a much lower bar.
[0] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...
Anecdotally tesla put a lot of effort into making a car with great crash protection, so if we are evaluating only the autopilot then comparing tesla's death rate to a 1990s fiat or a car people buy to drive badly like an impreza doesn't seem right.
With that said, leading causes of freeway accidents are, falling asleep, bad lane following, and drivers failing to realise the traffic ahead has stopped. These are all about human inability to stay focused. So we shouldn't assume that in a simplified environment like a freeway, autopilot is going to lose up humans.
Raw numbers are 34 / 3b in non-Autopilot, and 6 / 3b in Autopilot - so that's 5.7:1 ratio.
I'm not 100% clear on how you're arriving at 10:1 ?
> Anecdotally tesla put a lot of effort into making a car with great crash protection, so if we are evaluating only the autopilot then comparing tesla's death rate to a 1990s fiat or a car people buy to drive badly like an impreza doesn't seem right.
I guess we'd have to review numbers of 1990's fiats, and indeed every other car on the road, the crash safety profile, and compare -- but this seems onerous.
The fact that the Tesla vehicles are sold as a whole package - autopilot engineered around capabilities of the car, including withstanding crash scenarios - could in good faith be compared with every other car (without analysing them all in detail) using vanilla statistics on crash events, yes?
Joe Schmuck who didn't replace his tires and was driving home after a 12 hour shift when his brakes failed and he died counts as much as a guy in a luxury vehicle that drives under a semi.
Thanks - this kind of friendly and helpful advice is the only way I'll learn.
> Joe Schmuck who didn't replace his tires and was driving home after a 12 hour shift when his brakes failed and he died counts as much as a guy in a luxury vehicle that drives under a semi.
I can't work out what point you're trying to make here, other than perhaps implying that the statistics I cited, from the source I cited, don't accurately represent your opinion about some subset of the driving population.
GP wanted, but could not look for, comparative figures. These were provided. If you want to argue the legitimacy of them, let's do that - show me (other) numbers.
Joe Schmuck should get the same safety features. To do so, you must drive down per unit costs through scale. I bought our Teslas because expensive cars need to get sold to pay for cheaper cars.
Unfortunately with the way things are, outside of public research, the only way to fund a project of this nature is with large amounts of hype.
Made me go from hating driving to loving it