Analysis shows Tesla FSD makes critical driving errors every 8 minutes

So this line in the report should probably concern you:

> FSD Beta v10 committed one likely collision every 36:25, or 475 per year. This is 8,506 times higher than the average accident rate for human drivers used by the auto insurance industry, which is one accident every 17.9 years.

I don't know if it's fair to compare what they consider a "likely collision" to what the insurance industry considers an "accident". Maybe the analysis is bogus on that grounds. But your statement isn't an argument, since the analysis itself doesn't expect self driving to be perfect.

Sadly I don't think this will be true. The problem is that if a person causes an accident only that driver is at fault. If a self driving car causes an accident it follows that all similar cars would have behaved the same, so they are all considered to be at fault. That will only be mitigated if they drive better than humans.

They're interested in feeling comfortable with automated driving on the street next to them.

Statistical improvements over human averages in deaths, injuries, and frequency of accidents won't sway people generally. People aren't interested in rational reality, they go with their gut and their understanding of narratives.

Tesla needs to release thousands of boring videos demonstrating cars driving well to combat the saturation of error compilations. They need to establish the border between "scary robot driver"and "not perfect, but better than humans, preventing X deaths, Y severe injuries, and Z accidents overall for every million miles driven" and then create a McDonald's style "N lives/limbs/dollars saved by driving assist and FSD."

Advertising gallons of fuel saved per Tesla miles driven and improvement to air quality would help as well.

People keep moving the goalposts because their gut and the information they perceive tells them driving software is dangerous enough that humans are preferable.

They see the media pumped by a system that follows the "if it bleeds, it leads" principle. People will watch criticisms and accident compilations at a ratio of hundreds or even thousands to 1. The only way to combat that narrative is by communicating a better one.

They should provide sufficient information, honestly, so that arguing FSD or driving assist is less safe than humans driving is like arguing that McDonald's doesn't actually sell that many burgers.

Otherwise it's the sensational and negative coverage shaping public perception and discourse.

RTFS, or "Read The Fucking Statistics" should be the final say in these criticisms of ai driving systems. Otherwise actual improvements saving actual lives and limbs will be held back because regulators will pander to the politically safe narrative and obstruct progress in the name of safety, because people are stupid - they'd rather feel comfortable than be safe.

This all, of course, depends on the numbers being in Tesla's favor, but I believe they are: here's the q4 2021 accident report:

>>In the 4th quarter, we recorded one crash for every 4.31 million miles driven in which drivers were using Autopilot technology (Autosteer and active safety features). For drivers who were not using Autopilot technology (no Autosteer and active safety features), we recorded one crash for every 1.59 million miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 484,000 miles.

That's better than average human performance. On highways, at speeds greater than 50mph, a reduction if the number of accidents by 8 or of 9 would mean a huge impact. 20k people died in 2021 on the highways - up to 17000 lives might have been saved by autopilot or driving systems. Reducing the number of crashes and accidents by 8 out of 9 is phenomenal.

Maybe I'm missing something, I didn't read the article thoroughly and I'm not familiar with the work. If I am missing something, please enlighten me.

EDIT: I took a look at the report, and, well:

21 YouTube videos, totaling over 7 hours of drive time, from customers test driving Tesla’s FSD Beta program were analyzed for driving quality and safety. The videos analyzed in this study included FSD Beta major versions v8 (released December 2020) and v10 (released September 2021). Videos with significantly positive or negative titles were avoided in an attempt to reduce bias. There was an effort to analyze videos from as many unique YouTube channels as possible. As a result, the analyzed videos contain a variety of driving conditions, with varying times of day, weather conditions, traffic patterns, and locations.

I... don't think your "corpus" of dashcam videos is similar to the corpus used by this analysis.