1: https://engrxiv.org/preprint/view/1973/3986
2: https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-tesla-and-elon-musk-exagge...
- Freeways account for 93% of distance travelled with Autopilot
- Freeways account for 28% of the distance travelled by regular drivers.
- "vehicles on non-freeways crashed 2.01 times more often per mile"
a quick back of the envelop calculation suggests merely driving on the freeway lowers accidents per mile by ~40%, which accounts for most of the difference between Autopilot and regular drivers.
- Age of driver
- Specific highways used (congestion, road conditions)
- What is classified as a highway
As in one I can hopefully sleep at the wheel on a late night trip between midwestern US cities.
John Henryism can navigate the suburbs, stroads, and drivethrus. If they achieve a backup safety system that monitors the humans, well, ok great.
But right now, I want long distance automation, and I can handle the messy last mile. Highways are much easier to get uniform infrastructure convergence: some sensors, PSA warnings, better signs + markings + construction notices, etc.
I think Uber making as big a splash at it did sidetracked this low hanging fruit. IMO that was where the bootstrap bucks were, because you would have gotten freight/shipping to pay the cost of the next gen software, and would have provided the impetus for the convergent infrastructure.
Alas, they are obsessed with robotaxis.
Me too, and my Tesla handles daytime good-weather non-construction highway driving pretty well with just the standard autosteer. I finish a long road trip much less fatigued in a Tesla than I have in any other car. (Part of that is the seats. Tesla really sweats the details of making seats comfortable.)
But FSD is kind of a sad joke. Off-highway navigation only works in particular major cities, the car stops at green lights, tries to turn right from the left lane, etc. And Elon thinks that's worth an extra $15k. Nope. It really isn't, at least for me.
But until they get built freeway autopilot is nice.
(I live in Europe which has relatively good railway network, still I prefer my Tesla as transport method.)
Would you rather do this for a business trip to a 400-500 mile away city:
- fixed time to depart (and fixed for leaving your destination!)
- have to book ticket weeks in advance for a reasonable flight
- no flexiblity if plans change
- pack a small bag
- transit to an airport (parking or cab or whatever)
- arrive a sufficient amount of time in advance
- check in
- go through security
- get on plane, stuck in seat, no/crappy food
- get off plane, go to car rental place
- rent car (not yours, sucks)
- cost: 100-200$, and if you want to bring anyone it's a multiple of that.
- no cell phone, restricted to plane wifi if they have it
- door-to-door is what, 4 hours? Man I hope there isn't a delay....
Or, with self-driving:
- pack your car or minivan to the brim with stuff you need
- leave when you want
- sleep / stop to eat / stop to bathroom when you need it
- full cell coverage / hotspot
- take additional people
- EV cost is like... 20-40$ for the trip if you include wear and tear?
- door to door is... 5-6 hours
If the car is driving for you, it is far less stressful, flexible, much cheaper, especially if you want to take your family.
Trains are a ... bit ... better than airplanes, but still inflexible, surprisingly expensive, won't have your car at the other end, have to haul around your luggage rather than chuck it into YOUR CAR.
When good highway self-driving comes, I will probably never fly anything less than 1000 miles. If I get a self-driving RV that's EV self-recharging at charge stations? Hell I might get rid of my apartment.
You are saying this in a thread about a company that regularly sells features as a subscription and revokes them upon resell, as well as voids warranty if you get it repaired anywhere that's not a Tesla shop. Tesla have entrenched themselves as rent seekers from the beginning.
Meanwhile, I don't see many people going somewhere 400-500 miles away regularly. Most places seem either much closer or much further.
If money is a concern, you can always take the bus.
I get you a perfect Sample around age, income, sex, nationality, times of day and others. Prove to you 98% of people in this Town love Romantic Comedies.
The only thing I am not telling you, is that I am running the Inquiry at the exit atrium door of a Romantic Comedy movie...
Teslas are on average substantially newer than the average US passenger car fleet and thus have significantly more safety features and driver assistance tech, are better maintained, etc.
If Tesla compared only to vehicles of similar age and class (Audi/BMW/Mercedes etc) their stats would be much less favorable.
Recent statistics released by TüV^1 show that among relatively new cars Tesla competes with Dacia for the highest failure rate among all cars that go through Germanies mandatory road worthiness tests.
^1 https://www.pcwelt.de/news/TUeV-warnt-vor-typischer-Schwachs...
In short: big car brands' cars go through a preliminary check at manufacturers' licensed dealerships, and only after that get sent to the government's checks. It enables manufacturers to fix cars before independent verification so their safety numbers look great. Tesla doesn't have this kind of extensive network for "pre-checks".
Not publishing open stats on test failures? Why is that something the customer would want to pay for?
It also lets Tesla play with the numbers of shipped cars, because cars returned by dealers don't count as shipped.
But look at the recent HN story about the Tesla without a brake pad.
Ok, so this is a check done after the car has been used for 3 years.
So, it's not QC before the car leaves the factory, it's fixing things before the government checks them and puts them into the public stats for test "failures".
If it's just the results of regular dealer maintenance, it's fuzzier.
Some dealers are qualified to perform the checks and also offer to perform a pre check for free. However cars checked by a dealer would not end up on a statistic of cars checked by TüV.
Please don't compare it to high end german cars.
This is what matters. If/when it becomes less often, the case will be made (i.e. driverless doesn't have to be perfect to be better).
> An estimated 15% of injury crashes and 24% of property damage-only crashes are never reported to police (M. Davis and Company, Inc., 2015), while9% of injury crashes and 24% of property damage-only crashes are reported but not logged (Blincoe et al., 2015). Even with robust data, establishing the statistical significance of automated vehicle safety can be expensive. Kalra and Paddock (2016)demonstrated that establishing that an AV has a fatal crash rate equivalent to the national average with 95% confidence would require driving a fleet of 100 vehicles continuously for 12.5 years.
I presume there's an adjustment for this in the figures you compare to, but I am having trouble finding it, though that may be my own failure so I wanted to ask if you could help me find how that's adjusted for?
Drivers driving without a valid license, without insurance, under the influence, wanted by the law, etc would have all kinds of reasons to not report a crash.
I also used to know a woman who thought it was nothing more than a fender-bender, went to the doc a couple of days later because her neck was bothering her. Doc sent her straight to the hospital--incomplete cervical fracture, one wrong move and she could have dropped dead.
In some cities currently even if you want to have police respond to a traffic accident, you'd need to wait a VERY long time - they will tell you that unless you need EMS to try and get a safe spot and call for a tow. Some folks aren't willing to wait hours for police to show up to do what, take a report?
It never got accepted for publication because the reviewers didn't think it was significant enough, but I wrote a paper presenting an alternative way to analyse autonomous vehicle reliability data (you'll have to take my word for it, but the reviewers didn't quibble about the results presented, just whether it was important):
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.08901.pdf
The major technical contribution was demonstrating that a class of mathematical models called software reliability growth models are a reasonable way to estimate the "anomalous behaviour" rates of an AV system as bugs are found and fixed.
My second point was that using fatal accidents as a way to measure safety is not necessary; you can use more common events such as non-fatal accidents, or in the case of AV systems in development, even the number of occasions the safety driver overrode the automatic control.
> In this study, all disengagement events listed in the company reports were included in the analysis. It is likely that in some cases, disengagements occurred as a precaution by the safety driver, and no adverse event would have resulted if the AV continued in autonomous mode.
Take a look at [1]. It says that:
> Waymo has developed a robust process to collect, analyze and evaluate disengages for this report. We set disengagement thresholds conservatively for our public road testing. The vast majority of disengagements are not related to safety. Our test drivers routinely transition into and out of autonomous mode many times throughout the day, and the self-driving vehicle’s computer hands over control to the driver in many situations that do not involve a failure of the autonomous technology and do not require an immediate takeover of control by the driver.
> To help evaluate the safety significance of disengagements, Waymo employs a powerful simulator program. In Waymo’s simulation, our team can “replay” each incident and predict the behavior of our self-driving car if the driver had not taken control of it, as well as the behavior and positions of other road users in the vicinity (such as pedestrians, cyclists, and other vehicles). Our engineers use this data to refine and improve the software to ensure the self-driving car performs safely.
So effectively, Waymo has secret process, which may change all the time, to decide which disengagements to report and which not to report. There is no way to tell whether the car would have slightly bumped into another car, or killed a child if not disengaged.
Their reports to the DMV do not constitute data, they are PR.
Not trying to single out Waymo, they all do that.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190531071448/https://www.dmv.c...
I guess this is the classic scenario where human intuition is defeated by carefully presented statistics.
I wish Tesla would celebrate that victory rather than double down on lies.
Adaptive cruise control, tech we've had for what, 20+ years? is more than enough for most highways, it takes out ~80% of the stress/boredom of driving, especially since lane changes are minimal and curves are gentle.
The hard parts of driving (aka not highways) are the real problem, as expected. We solved the easy parts in 2000 and who knows if we'll solve the hard parts by 2050.
You know what would be really nice? Something that detects when it's safe and reasonable to suggest turning on adaptive cruise control so I use it more. Maybe something like detecting I've driven a few miles at a consistent rate of speed above a certain threshold.
The hard parts are definitely the problem, but there are lots of easy wins left on the table too.
I definitely hope your car doesn't put it in some hidden menus on the central screen.
The hard parts are the whole point of autonomy.. the parts so hard that humans still fuck up and kill people. that's the ideal of autonomy imo and short of that its missing the point.
In this case, the effect when the data is separated out is that AP is only marginally safer. When they are combined, it appears to be significantly safer.
I'd say this isn't a case of simpsons paradox at all.
Is there any evidence that they actually do the easy stuff better than humans? I would want to see it compared with cars of similar age and cost driving on similar roads with similar aged people in control of the vehicle. I'm pretty skeptical that such a comparison would in fact be favourable to Tesla.
I don't know what else to advise people who want evidence. The cars are real things you can experience...
If you're still surprised by this you've not been paying attention to how Telsa operates.
The study seems to extrapolate from this. Tesla has something like 10 billion miles total driven on Autopilot, on a fleet of a million cars.
It covers 5.4 million trips in 3,400 vehicles with digitally collected records and vehicle data and has been independently validated by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute and Department of Transportation.
I actually wonder if there's another effect: Drivers only eligible for beta FSD if they meet a super high safety score (which isn't a perfect metric, but probably better than nothing). That incentivizes good driving even when FSD not engaged. Of course, that's a recent thing and hasn't shown up in data.
That's because it's marketing, not science.
Every car company does marketing. Few make over-the-top safety claims about their products. This is the company that decided to have its cars not stop at stop signs. Normal rules don't apply to Tesla.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60230072
"In recall documents, the electric vehicle maker notes that if certain conditions are met, the "rolling stop" feature is designed to allow the vehicle to travel through all-way-stop intersections at up to 5.6mph without coming to a complete stop."
Most retailers make over-the-top claims regarding their products, including safety.
https://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-honda-fine-2015...
Kind of like in many jurisdictions, police will gently talk to you if you drive 60kph on the freeway, or even if you're doing 90kph in the left lane. Yes it's legal, no it isn't safe.
And 5.6mph isn't rolling. That's beyond a walking pace. That's jogging territory. Any cop watching an intersection would ticket this.
But let's make it real, and let's ask a question about the real world:
Does that mean that expectation is all automated cars will go exactly the speed limit on the left lane of North American superhighways?
If so, those cars will inherently be a danger to life and limb. I don't care about any self-righteous driver who indicates houghtily "I drive speed limit on left lane of American super highway", I've spoken to advanced driver safety instructors, highway police officers and city councilors who all agree those people need to bloody well move it along - it's just not safe.
People have been saying this for years yet Tesla is not being sued into nonexistence. Presumably their contracts are written well enough that if the user tells the car to go above the speed limit that's on them.
It’s already against road rules to stay in the passing lane when cars behind wish to pass, regardless of the speed limit, or if you’re already driving at it. If cars behind desire to overtake, give way. This is already codified. No need to blame the cars or the self-driving tech. It’s the human driver who bears responsibility for what the car does or doesn’t do, as are the only ones able to countermand the autopilot. Blaming Tesla for any of that seems like dogpiling and behind the point.
Studies show that, adjusted for congestion and weather, SF Bay Area drivers have some of the highest accidents per mile in the country.
That sounds really unsafe and surely must make driving much more stressful than it needs to be.
In the vast majority of states this would also be illegal. If Tesla decides it safe, they should be able to just rewrite the rules, though, right?
Most cars idle at 5 to 6 mph, so any roll through a stop sign is likely to break the 5 mph mark.
> Any cop watching an intersection would ticket this.
Not sure where you live, but this is absolutely not the case where I am. I have only ever once heard of a traffic officer ticketing for this. On the other hand, I see cops watch on as people ignore "no turn on red" signs and let them get away with it pretty much every day. Let alone rolling through an intersection at 5 mph.
For some reason I still remember this story decades later and always come to a full stop at stop signs, that's how I was taught in driving school and that's how I will always do it. I'm a calm driver and I don't care if people are annoyed by me, I will drive the speed limit and I will not rush anywhere, it's not my problem that someone else needs to speed because they woke up late, safety should be the number one priority when you're operating a vehicle.
Or they switch between night and day shifts, like lots of nurses do.
They’ll make it work.
D) If your only defense is the faint hope that the cop doesn't show, the judge is going to rain hellfire on you for wasting everyone's time. Court costs. Amended tickets. Contempt. Unless you are about to lose your license, you don't want to roll that dice. If you go to court to fight a traffic ticket you better have an actual defense.
I’ve won many (outright or gotten reductions to non-moving violations) and lost some, but I’ve never had a judge “rain hellfire on [me]” or anything even remotely similar to that, even in cases where I pled “not guilty”, listened to the state’s case, and presented no argument in my defense.
* I got a camera ticket in Switzerland on a business trip that I did just pay rather than traveling back to appear and undoubtedly lose.
I wouldn't hesitate to break traffic rules at 4 o'clock in the morning if there was zero risk of harm - especially while bicycling I'm very flexible, but I also wouldn't complain if I got fined breaking the law. The law must be upheld even at night.
IDK about the US, but in France the speed limit is a target speed; if conditions are good (weather, visibility, traffic) you're supposed to drive at or near maximum speed. It's illegal to drive too slow, and there's a specific fine for this.
https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI0000... [in French]
It doesn't say that the speed limit is a target, or that you're supposed to drive at or near it.
It doesn't matter. People have all kinds of things they are taught about driving from their parents, instructors, and even official documents that don't carry legal weight (e.g., a highway patrol website).
Even when these types of ideas are good ideas, they aren't binding and you can't count on others to follow those rules. The only true rules of the road are the subset of the laws that are enforced; where enforcement might be done by law enforcement officers, civil judges, or insurance company adjudication processes.
- not exceeding posted speed limit
- appropriate for environmental conditions
- your ability to safely control the vehicle
And failure to do so could be fined.
Anyone can claim their ability to safely control the vehicle would have been impaired at $cited_speed + 1 km/h.
Citations:
NRMA: https://www.mynrma.com.au/cars-and-driving/driver-training-a...
Australian road rules: http://www5.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/sa/consol_reg/arr210/s12... -- key paragraph: "a driver does not unreasonably obstruct the path of another driver or a pedestrian only because [...] (b) the driver is driving more slowly than other vehicles (unless the driver is driving abnormally slowly in the circumstances)." (Note that these rules form guidance for the States, so there will be per-state differences -- see below)
Western Australia is the only state which explicitly defines "too slowly", it's 20km/h below the limit, and it only applies to freeways. https://www.whichcar.com.au/car-advice/is-driving-slow-illeg...
You can get ticketed for driving too slow, but I’ve never seen it. I’ve only seen a minimum speed posted on an interstate (45 mph (72 mph)), but conceivably you can get ticked anywhere for impeding the flow of traffic.
I have (very gently) forced a car off the road once in Germany with the police on 112, a very elderly gentleman was doing 30 Kph on the autobahn and caused one near miss after another. Police came and helped him to get home, we talked for a while and it turned out that it was his first trip in a long time to go and see his sister in another town, he'd gotten lost and was frightened out of his wits by all the traffic zooming by.
I don't know how it ended, he probably kept his license because clearly there was no officer around to witness the event but I'm pretty sure he avoided the autobahn after that.
(Part of the reason I do it is because as I age I would like to ingrain habits that will make me a safer driver even as my cognitive ability declines.)
Near me there is an intersection where the same cars drive through on a daily basis and where the drivers have habituated themselves to rolling stops. Yes, it's almost always fine. But I have been almost T-boned twice, and was hit once, fortunately with minimal damage. And even though they do not have the right of way, their habit of rolling stops regularly pre-empts the actual rules of the road, and they cut off drivers who have the right of way.
That this is due to the normalization of deviance is abundantly obvious.
The trick is to realize when you've jumped the shark and are now the established brand and wean yourself of the "fast and loose" approach.
And because it’s Elon Musk, not some ethical CEO
It's a driving profile which must be turned on that implements behavior extremely common among the driving public. My Honda with Traffic Sign Recognition and adaptive cruise control lets me set the speed above the speed limit, too.
Our traffic laws are in many ways ambiguous, such that even the police officers enforcing the laws will readily admit you're allowed to drive above the posted speed limit. When traffic rules are interpreted ambiguously, it's not that strange for a driving profile to do the same.
Famous last words
There are definitely places where it isn't safe to roll through a stop sign, unfortunately in the US the system uses stop signs as a kind of traffic calming measure so then there isn't a clear way to mark the places where stopping is absolutely needed for safety. Of course in theory drivers should be able to notice the lack of visibility and drive accordingly but in practice the hazards can be somewhat subtle and many drivers have poor judgement.