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Comment by travisoneill1 | Hacker News Reader

The only stats I have seen on this show that the autopilot reduces the rate of collisions. So it's not really a product that kills people, but the opposite. The stats came from Tesla, though, so I can't rule out the possibility that they are incorrect.

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Tesla stats are extremely misleading and deliberately slanted toward favoring Tesla. Unfortunately, it's not really possible to find real stats since they're hidden by individual OEMs and insurance companies. But you would need to compare comparably priced modern cars with standard ADAS features to Teslas with Autopilot to get a datapoint worth talking about for the general case. You would also need to look at where Autopilot is engaged (mostly highways where accidents are rare in general) vs. not engaged (mostly city streets where accidents are common) to draw any real conclusions about safety.

> Tesla stats are extremely misleading and deliberately slanted toward favoring Tesla. Unfortunately, it's not really possible to find real stats since they're hidden by individual OEMs and insurance companies.

You realize that those two statements are in conflict with each other right? If they're misleading and favoring Tesla then you need contrary stats to state that. However you state that they're not available, so your previous statement can only be a lie.

Sorry, that’s not a logical conclusion. Just because real stats are hard to come by does not mean that Tesla’s stats are true.

But it does mean that you don't know that your first statement is true.

But until you have evidence that they aren't true, what reason do you have to believe they aren't true? All you're really arguing here is that you personally believe Tesla is a "bad" company so you should disbelieve anything they say. You do realize that's not at all convincing and just shows you're personally biased, right?

In Tesla's most recent report, it turns out that compared to Teslas using plain-old-human drivers, Teslas using Autopilot driver assist functions were 2x more likely to get into an accident, and Teslas using FSD were 3x more likely to get into an accident.

Any way you cut it, Autopilot and FSD are statistically worse than human drivers.

This is the only data Tesla has released comparing similar cohorts of vehicles (i.e., modern luxury cars). The only stats in which Tesla beats the average driver is where they include all cars ever put on the road, including semi trucks...but under those models every other modern car is also better than average.

[EDIT: And this is the Forbes article on Tesla's report. There's also a Cleantechnica post on the same report as well. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2020/10/28/new-te...]

I’m pretty sure you misread the article. City driving is 3x more likely to result in an an accident compared to highways, not self driving. The numbers are one accident every 1.7M miles for autopilot in city conditions vs an accident every 500k miles global average (including highways, for which Teslas ratio is 1 in 5 million miles).

No, I read the report. You've inverted the numbers.

If Tesla FSD was 3x safer than human driving Musk would be bragging about it. The fact that he's not indicates that my interpretation is the correct one.

Again, I don’t know what you’re looking at. Who’s claiming it’s 3x safer now? Where are you getting these “interpretations”? Just read the article carefully.

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