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Comment by zaroth | Hacker News Reader

Yes, this is the retort every time someone posts these numbers, which is why I said they are not apples to apples comparisons. But in the context of the OP comment that Tesla ADAS software makes driving 1000x more dangerous it is clear evidence to the contrary.

Mostly the Tesla numbers are comparing accident rates of just Teslas. You can ignore average accident rate across all vehicles if you like.

If would be truly great if the NHTSA could publish accident rates broken down is various ways like by road type and weather conditions. I’ve never been able to find this data.

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The Tesla safety numbers are pure marketing. They make no attempt to control for obvious problems like the kind of miles. Notice how they say autopilot engaged not autopilot equipped when talking about autopilot miles. I bet gm has great numbers for cruise control engaged accident rate too but Id hardly call it a safety device, more like a convenience.

Given the telemetry the car is equipped with they absolutely have the data to control for some of these factors yet they make no attempt to do so. Why is that? My take is that after doing so autopilot doesn't look so good.

I made no such claim that the actual success rate is 99.99%. I was replying to a person who supposed a 99.99% success rate based on their observation and I was pointing out that even an absurdly generous interpretation of a 99.99% success rate would constitute the most dangerously defective product in the car industry in half a century by multiple orders of magnitude.

The point being that the failure rates society accepts for cars are actually pretty amazingly low and human drivers are surprisingly good. These things are measured with 6-7 9s as a non-negotiable minimum, so positing hypotheticals at the 99-99.99% is highly non-representative of what is actually acceptable.

Anybody discussing things at that level is making a pretty fundamental category error and any conclusion that anyone might draw from those thought experiments are largely invalid due to the multiple order of magnitude difference between such a thought experiment and reality.

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