Tesla with Autopilot now approaching 10x lower chance of accident than average
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Should it come as any kind of surprise when phrased that way?
Parking lots and snow-covered roads are high crash-rate per mile driven scenarios to which autopilot is (largely) not exposed.
But Musk appears unconstrained by ethics in most things.
HN hates advertisers on the internet unless they are a weird billionaire lying about his cars
Obviously one must ignore all the places where the autopilot is not appropriate if one wants to make comparisons.
Comparing a luxury vehicle with ADAS features to the general NHTSA crash rates for all vehicles is also bullshit.
There is plenty of people on YouTube showing fsd in action with all its quirks and features.
Here take a look a whole channel with fsd drives:
If they instead considered drivers who never use Autopilot vs those who sometimes use Autopilot, it would make more sense, but then it might be biased in other ways due to self-selection.
The only reasonable way to do this test is to randomly deny the use of Autopilot to some drivers who would otherwise use it and compare accident rates between those two groups (this still only applies to people who would want to use Autopilot, but it would be unethical to force people to use it since it's dangerous).
They continue to be just a brokerage in a handful of states so they don't even underwrite policies. If the margins were actually good they would have gone national and began underwriting policies themselves by now. Insurance is literally free money when you have a risk that competitors assess incorrectly.
I have been away from the insurance sector for a couple years now, but before the electric car market was evaluated as its own class. This creates a huge problem because you can't distribute the claims optimally. If I simplify it you get (electric car insurance claims/electric cars that have insurance) + operation costs + profit %. Whereas in normal cars, your premium is decided based on the drivers age, previous accidents, car's age, car's color, the horse power, where the person lives, how much they drive etc. In the company I worked for we optimized the premium with over 200 data points.
You can't use the same optimization regarding electric cars because the market is so small and the data isn't there yet. Moreover insurers increase premiums to be on the safe side.
Even if the average Tesla driver is like you and rarely turns it off, and even if the average Tesla driver is equivalent to the average driver and drives under equivalent conditions, the choice of when it is turned off can have a huge bias on the result.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/insideevs.com/news/501712/tesla...
I wonder if this is related to people driving much faster due to fewer vehicles on the road.
I didn't read the actual report. Are the changes even across types of accident? Specifically, does it count and report a 90% reduction in the number of pedestrians and bicyclist run over?
The car is dumb, but always on. Humans are smart (well, relatively) but easily distracted. Both sides compliment the other.
This is so misleading... it's huckstery. Such bad faith should totally kill everyone's trust in Tesla and Musk.
https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2021/04/18/2-men-de...
Obviously if there was no human in the driver's seat, these guys were "looking for trouble". And failing to negotiate a curve at an excessively high speed isn't something the autopilot should be expected to deal with (unless it has precise location data and precise map data which informs the reasonable limits of performance... but I don't think it has these).
It's absurd if people want to blame Tesla for this.
Tesla needs to stop calling it autopilot and FSD, this is complete and utter bullshit.
How many of these do fanboys need to see before they give up the mental gymnastics.
>It's absurd if people want to blame Tesla for this.
Are you fucking kidding me? That's some Olympic-level mental backflips right there. =)
How many products and services on the market in the US use bold names and labels to suggest or even directly state a feature that in actuality doesn't come close to the expectation?
But on the autopilot topic, I would say it is you and the general public that has deemed "autopilot" to mean something that it historically does not mean. The most common use of autopilot is in aircraft, and in that domain it can be very crude and simple or highly automated. But with the exception of advanced autopilot systems in modern commercial jets, typical autopilot system merely hold a set heading, pitch, and level.
Even the FAA says this: "While the autopilot relieves you from manually manipulating the flight controls, you must maintain vigilance over the system to ensure that it performs the intended functions and the aircraft remains within acceptable parameters of altitudes, airspeeds, and airspace limits."
There are a lot of modern devices which can be very dangerous to use without some education. I would think someone willing to trust their car to drive them with no supervision is just dangerously foolish, and is possibly the same kind of person who might accidentally kill their buddy by flying a drone too fast and hitting him with it.
You can't dummy-proof everything. I doubt that the Tesla owner's manual says, "This autopilot system does absolutely everything. You can't crash it!" Instead I believe it tells you all the rules that you need to follow when using the autopilot. If you don't follow the instructions, that's on you.
FWIW this was what happened when there was a Tesla accident in my area. But for sure, these are only anecdotes. We have to compare the data with how often non-Tesla cars burn
Per [1], there are 22.5 billion miles driven in Teslas. Per [2], there have been 171 fatalities in Teslas. This comes to 0.76 deaths per 100 million miles driven. Wiki says US deaths per 100 million miles is about 1.1.
Tesla drivers are wealthier, and they're driving new cars in safer places. So this comparison is not one to one. But evidence does not support the claim that Teslas are less safe than anything else.
[1] https://lexfridman.com/tesla-autopilot-miles-and-vehicles/
[2] https://www.tesladeaths.com/
*tinfoil hat: there is a _lot_ of money that would prefer Teslas be thought of as unsafe.
"Autopilot" and "Full Self Driving mode" are just dangerous marketing gimmicks that give people a false sense of what they actually do.
If we made them accountable for this bullshit tbose words would disappear with a quickness.
I'm sure S-Class has lower accident rate than VW Golf. But that doesn't mean anything.