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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

"Tesla under conditions where autopilot works now has around a 1/8.5 rate [which we’ll round up by 16% and call it ~1:10] of accident per mile driven as compared to all cars in all driving conditions."

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.

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Yes, I would characterize this as lying, the idea that anyone at Tesla is dumb enough to think that this is not intentionally misleading is laughable.

But Musk appears unconstrained by ethics in most things.

It honestly sounds like he was on a meme-making streak, and thought he'd throw one joke in there for people who understand that his statement means nothing

Stop giving this dude the benefit of the doubt. He knows what he's doing, he's advertising.

HN hates advertisers on the internet unless they are a weird billionaire lying about his cars

You are not the target of this corporate message, the investors are.

The tweet also mentions safety features other than autopilot. Having active safety features like pre-collision breaking or passive ones like 360 degree camera and sensors help a lot.

I think that means, for example, a Tesla autopiloted car on the highway has 1/10 the accidents that other cars have, in the same scenario.

Obviously one must ignore all the places where the autopilot is not appropriate if one wants to make comparisons.

That is specifically not what the claim is, though it’s phrased so as to encourage that mis-interpretation.

It doesn’t. Read the tweet, specifically the image. He’s comparing Autopilot enabled to all car crashes.

That’s not at all what it means. Tesla is comparing scenarios where autopilot actually works (the easy, low crash rate scenarios like highway driving) to driving everywhere (including high crash rate scenarios where autopilot specifically does not work) and saying “look how much safer it is!”. This is what we call bullshit statistics.

Comparing a luxury vehicle with ADAS features to the general NHTSA crash rates for all vehicles is also bullshit.

It doesn’t mean that - Musk is blatantly doing the incorrect comparison you mention.

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