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Comment by Xylakant | Hacker News Reader

I think it's fair to compare to the average driver. You may be not average by virtue of not being a teenager and not driving drunk, but you're not magically immune to being run over or crashed into by one of those. So even if a hypothetical FSD capable car would not drive one yota better than you do, it cwould still make you safer by virtue of making the surrounding environment safer.

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No.

I'm not going to boast about how good of a driver I am (I am!!), but lets say I am a median driver. I would want a FSD to be better than a median driver. Not the average crash/mile stats that include all kinds of long tail idiots doing the most damage.

    * ... alcohol-impaired driving crashes, accounting for 28% of all traffic-related deaths in the United States.
    
    * Drugs other than alcohol (legal and illegal) are involved in about 16% of motor vehicle crashes.

https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/impaired_driving/im...

So 44% intoxicated to some degree (unless the stats overlap). That number is not even including reckless drivers not driving under influence, teenagers that just got the license, bad health elderly etc.

It can't be just any "average driver", they should be compared against "average driver" who just bought $40-50K NEW car.

If you are speaking about the safety features in a new car, then I won't disagree. However, if you are implying that those with a nice new car are somehow better drivers, more attentive drivers, or care more about their car then I would highly disagree. As someone who purchased a new car last year, and does greatly care about it, I'm routinely shocked by people and their clear disregard for their own vehicle. Reckless driving, texting while not even attempting to look, and the way people park their cars so close to you that they can't even get out* have all shocked me now that I'm paying more attention.

* I have even stared at this guy struggling to get out of his fancy Jeep who opened his door into my car. I know this anecdotal, but all it takes is a few counter examples to show that car price etc does not have a super high correlation to how careful & considerate you are.

Look at the accident and fatality rates for drivers of luxury cars. They are much, much lower than the same rates for less expensive cars. In fact, if you break it down by vehicle model, there are several models with 0 fatalities at all.

I'd be curious to see where you are able to find good data for that. To be honest, I haven't found data that shows a clear difference between luxury and non-luxury cars

i.e. https://quotewizard.com/news/posts/most-accident-prone-cars lists some luxury brands as having high rates - "Luxury sport car brands Infiniti, Lexus and Acura are among most accident-prone cars on the road."

and if you look through this data from IIHS https://www.iihs.org/ratings/driver-death-rates-by-make-and-... there are plenty of luxury cars with high death rates.

>> "average driver" who just bought $40-50K NEW car.

Driver and buyer/owner are different things. Few teenagers ever buy a Tesla, but they certainly drive them. A car cannot only be safe in the hands of the rich initial buyer who lives in a nice climate. It must be safe in all the other people who that owner may let drive. It must also be safe for subsequent second and third owners, people who might not be wealthy enough to stay home when it rains or when the autopilot thinks conditions are too rough. (It was -35c on my drive to work this morning. Dark. Ice fog then blowing snow.)

Uhm, I don't know what insanely rich middle eastern country you're from but in most of the world teenagers do not generally drive Teslas!!

Have you been to LA, SF, Vancouver or Denver? These are Teslas, not Ferraris. Lots of teenagers are driving their parent's tesla. Go look at any university parking lot and you will find plenty of 50,000$ cars.

Exactly right. The population has to be compared to people driving new Volvo S90 or M-B C300, cars that have IIHS fatality rates of zero.

Tesla's claim relied on inclusion of motorcycles one time, which seems super misleading and unfair.

Misleading, from a company that once (several days ago) claimed that they sold more cars in Australia than Camry's last year.

Until someone pointed out that vehicle registration... disagreed. By nearly 30%.

Then "Oops. We made a mistake and counted 3,000+ deliveries which haven't actually been, well, delivered."

I hope they get spanked hard for that. Australia has very onerous "truth in advertising" laws.

Given what I’ve been hearing/reading about autopilot I’m more worried about being hit by one of them than a human driver.

Sure the worst drivers out there utilizing assist tech like autopilot would benefit everyone, but data shows that they aren't the ones spending money on fancy cars. My comment was about me making a decision for myself.

Plus in your hypothetical the autopilot can drive at least as well as me, which is also a big assumption and not something I believe with what I have seen so far.

My problem is that the median driver is much much better than the mean driver and tesla os comparing against means.

The damage done in a car distribution is heavily skewed towards people that get in fatal crashes or total a car. I'd randomly guess like 20-30% of drivers are below mean. Most people won't total a car, vast majority will never kill anyone.

If you get median people into an autopilot car that's got a mean safety record we end up pulling the average down, the road becomes less safe. And luxury sedan buyers tend to be one of the safest demos on the road, which makes the problem even worse.

Median vs mean of what measure?

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