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Comment by shoto_io | Hacker News Reader

Are there stats on incidents per kilometer/mile?

Thirty sounds a lot but then again, it might be a very tiny number compared to the mileage.

You have to control for the demographics of typical Tesla owners (richer and older - less prone to accident if they weren't using Autopilot), as well as the type of driving that Autopilot is typically used for (tilt towards highway/freeway) when you make that comparison.

https://www.tesladeaths.com/miles.html

Is this looking accurate?

Although it also needs to look at when it decides to hand back control. Its all well and good saying its 'safer' because it makes less mistakes than a human driver would doing the same amount of miles but if it only is activatable in locations/conditions that are considerably easier to control then its somewhat incomparable.

This is often quoted that tesla has a lower accident rate than other vehicles.

Comparatively, how often do those vehicles cause deaths while directly taking control of the vehicle.

> This is often quoted that tesla has a lower accident rate than other vehicles.

In general Teslas have higher accident rates than comparable cars, partly because EVs have higher accidents rates in general, but even among EVs Teslas have the highest. This goes back to data from an insurance company in Norway if I remember correctly. It's very hard to get reliable data though, as Tesla has no incentive to share this kind of data. Obviously you can't draw any conclusion from this to Autopilot-related accidents.

Source, please! Would be very interested in the original data. Thx.

I don't think the original data is available.

Re Norwegian data: https://www.elbil24.no/nyheter/elbiler-bulker-mest/71498210

https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/04/electric-car-insurance-...

Critical article re autopilot claims: https://jalopnik.com/feds-tesla-autosteer-safety-investigati...

The reason, at least in the Norwegian article is "big fast car that Norwegians are not used to" and not auto pilot at least.

As a comparison my former car, a Toyota Avensis, was 175 cm wide. My model X is 220 wide or something. That's almost half a meter more. Have yet to crash it though :)

EVs in general have higher crash rate, most likely due to the instant torque.

100 people are killed on the road in the US every single day of the year.

30 sounds tiny to me.

Why? Is it okay for the automated system to make objectively bad decisions until it reaches the magic threshold of however many incidents the non-automated system had? In a rewrite, do we not look at bugs until they exceed the number of the original system?

I don't get this radical zero-covid-like mentality. At unbounded cost we can diminish all risk. How do people get to this radical/dystopian point of view that no trade-off should exist?

The point is that you are deliberately misinterpreting the original article and then trying to turn that stupidity into silencing the problem entirely. The original article doesn't relate this to other statistics at all, that was a fabrication of the grandparent.

Of course NHTSA needs to investigate each and every one of these crashes. These are automated systems failing and so the issue could be systemic. It's the same reason every rail or airplane crash is investigated.

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