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Comment by spywaregorilla | Hacker News Reader

The statistics are there to read however, and suggest your reasoning is not correct.

Case A: Non Tesla Human drives 999 easy miles and 1 hard mile

Case B: Autopilot drives 999 easy miles, and human drives 1 hard mile

If the effect size of the hard mile is so large that its skewing the statistics, you would expect the Telsa human driver to have a horrendous per mile accident rate relative to the non tesla human driver. What's most likely is that the accidents following a human handoff get correctly allocated to the Autopilot and the effect size being described is not actually that significant.

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Student drivers (with an instructor in the car, and secondary controls) have very few accidents, if any, not because of their safety record but because every mistake is saved by the instructor. A car can be considered as driving "safer than a human" when it can match the average human in any conditions the average human drives. Everything else is just squinting at the data and choosing an interpretation that fits your personal opinion.

A Tesla can relatively safely cover traffic like divided or controlled access highways. That's a very narrow slice of all possible driving situations and not one responsible for most accidents.

So as a thought experiment, if Autopilot + Human intervention reduced the rate of accidents by 50% vs. just humans after normalization; can we consider autopilot to be adding value?

Of course the Autopilot adds value, all such driver assists are there to add value and help the driver on any car. I just don't think Autopilot can drive, let alone drive safer than a human. There's a difference between "helping a human drive safer" and "driving safer than a human". This is a confusion many people make when reading these stats, to Tesla's benefit.

Also the oldest Tesla with AP is less than 10 years old (with an average of 3-4 years given the sales trends). The average age of cars on the street in the US is over 12 years old. An accident statistic that looks at reasonably new, premium cars against everything else won't paint the correct picture.

If that means the supervision actually works, then it doesn't sound like there's a problem?

> Student drivers (with an instructor in the car, and secondary controls) have very few accidents [...] because every mistake is saved by the instructor

Is that the only reason? I suspect that many (most) student drivers are also in general more alert, drive slower, and follow each rule/guideline to an extreme. If they don’t the instructor will probably end the lesson and remove a dangerous driver of the road.

All student drivers particularly at the beginning are "dangerous drivers" because they aren't drivers but they're asked to drive. In their first half of driving school most students would probably cause an accident within minutes if not for the instructor. I live on a quiet street where most driving schools take their students due to the almost non-existing traffic. I can't count how many times I see the instructor having to intervene to avoid a crash even at simple things like keeping a straight line or a right turn (too tight or too wide).

Is this data available anywhere? How do I know that non-autopilot Tesla mile per accident rates aren't horrible?

Tesla publishes their own data for the safety of autopilot, which I presume is based on their own analysis of accident records. Is this same detailed information available to other groups (insurers, NIST, etc)? Or do they just calculate an aggregate "Tesla mile per accident" rate that is a blend of the great autopilot rate and horrible human rate?

I'm not trying to be facetious here. I have no idea if this data is available to any groups other than Tesla themselves. And if so, do they publish those numbers?

Tesla releases the miles per crash rates quarterly, for autopilot and non autopilot cases. Autopilot crashes include anything within 5 seconds of disengagement. The human rate tends to be more than 2x worse than the autopilot rate. This is not normalized for factors like road context.

The human rate for tesla driven miles tends to be ~4x better than the other brands' average. To precisely answer this question you would want to see both a comparable brand's humans' performance; and probably the split of humans who used autopilot and humans who don't ever use autopilot. We don't have that, but in my personal opinion there's enough evidence to suggest it's probably not a grand conspiracy. I'm of the opinion that autopilot being ballpark on par with other drivers is more than enough to reduce accidents substantially, at scale.

https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

It’s not just that. There’s a context switch when the autodrive disengages, so the human is actually less ready for the hard mile than if they were driving the whole time. Sure m, the human is supposed to be able to take control at anytime, but I don’t think that really happens. The whole purpose of autodrive is do you don’t have to pay attention and drive.

stats for easy miles and hard miles? link please?

Humans don’t crash at every tricky situation but Tesla claims that humans are horrible drivers and their cars gives the control to the humans when when something happens.

Literally any distribution of hard miles and easy miles will produce the same outcome in this thought experiment, to varying effects, if your premise of Tesla hiding the AI's incompetence with passing off to humans when driving is challenging is accurate.

If your premise is to be believed as a significant effect, you must also accept that this outcome should be visible in the data

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