Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

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Here's some actual data I just pulled from the report, showing number of incidents when using a level 3-5 system, sorted in descending order and then alphabetically by reporting entity. Despite having the greatest number of FSD users, Tesla has only a single reported accident when FSD was engaged. Other level 3-5 systems with much smaller installed bases are doing far worse. The data for level 2 is further below.

  # of incidents, levels 3-5:
  Waymo        62
  Transdev     34
  Cruise       23
  GM           16
  Zoox         12
  Argo         10
  Ford          7
  May Mobility  3
  Mercedes Benz 3
  Pony.ai       3
  Easymile      2
  Toyota        2
  WeRide        2
  Apple         1
  Beep          1
  Chrysler      1
  Hyundai       1
  Local Motors  1
  NVYA          1
  Navistar      1
  Porsche       1
  Robert Bosch  1
  Robotic Rsrch 1
  Tesla         1
  TuSimple      1

Here's the level 2 data -- number of incidents, again sorted in descending order and then alphabetically by reporting entity. The biggest caveat with these figures is that the NHTSA does NOT know how the rate of adoption & usage of level 2 technologies varies by reporting entity. It's likely that Tesla and Honda have the greatest rate of adoption & usage of level 2 technologies, but we don't really know:

  # of incidents, level 2:
  Tesla       273  <-- figure quoted by the OP
  Honda        90
  Subaru       10
  Ford          5
  Toyota        4
  BMW           3
  APTIV         1
  Hyundai       1
  Lucid         1
  Porsche       1
  VW            1

Sources: https://www.nhtsa.gov/laws-regulations/standing-general-orde... -- click on "Reporting Entity (ADS)" for the level 3-5 data, and on "Reporting Entity (ADAS)" for the level 2 data.

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EDIT: After a quick look at the report and the data, my take is that it's way too early to reach conclusions other than non-Tesla level 3-5 systems appear to have more accidents despite being used in many fewer vehicles. Shame on the Washington Post for publishing such an unjustifiably alarmist piece!

Waymo/Transdev (same thing): in over 50% of accidents car was stationary. 0 serious injuries or fatalities.

Tesla: 3 of 550 accidents the car was stationary. 9 fatalities, 6 serious injuries.

To drive home the point about how unsafe Tesla' Autopilot is, Nissan has sold more than 560,000 vehicles with an L2 system...and had zero reportable accidents, which makes Tesla infinitely more dangerous than a Nissan.

Even viewing the data in the light most charitable for Tesla, Autopilot is 3x more dangerous than the next most dangerous L2 system, and 54x more dangerous than the companies that sell the most vehicles in the world.

Also, FSD is not an L3 system. It's an L2 system, so Tesla should not have any data in the L3-L5 section.

EDIT: Ars notes that Tesla's 273 crashes are only for the past year, since the NHTSA required automakers to report crashes, but the numbers for all other automakers are total numbers (meaning, since they started selling L2 systems). This makes the Tesla data even worse.

Exactly.

Im not sure how the Cult can justify this.

I get that Tesla are aspiring to lofty goals, but if your L1000 system (which is called L2 due to the need for driver supervision) can't compete with an L2 Nissan.... you may as well pack up and go home.

Tesla should have just stuck to what they're fantastic at. Driving the cultural and technological adoption of electric vehicles.

Anything else, from FSD to basic build quality is something I wouldn't touch with your barge pole.

And that's even before considering its man-child branding problem.

I know there were multiple incidents where FSD disengaged less than a second before impact, so this may not be the most meaningful cut of the data.

Yup. A lot, relatively. "On Thursday, NHTSA said it had discovered in 16 separate instances when this occurred that Autopilot “aborted vehicle control less than one second prior to the first impact,” suggesting the driver was not prepared to assume full control over the vehicle. "

Exactly - they need to measure was FSD engaged at any point during the 30s prior to the crash. Tesla's approach of seeing that a crash is imminent and so then disabling FSD just before impact to hide their crash numbers is extremely scummy.

I'm sure Tesla are testing L3 systems, but I didn't think any currently offered to the public provided any more than L2? Even so-called "FSD" is still only a L2 system and requires the driver to maintain attention and be prepared to take control with no notice.

The NHTSA categorized the systems as level 2 and levels 3-5. You can read their rationale in the report.

It would be interesting to see per 1000 vehicle owners or normalized in some ways.

Actually, it would be interesting to see the data per mile driven while using the driver assistance system, both for level 2 and levels 3-5, because to compare these systems apples-to-apples we would want to exclude all miles driven by human beings without any assistance. And ideally, I'd want to see data per mile driven in each road class (highway vs city, rural vs urban, etc.).

Agreed, your suggestion is a much better way to look at this.

Split out with and without driver assistance is fine, but I only care about the combined total. If there's higher accidents in X make/model vs Y make/model, that's a more useful data point. I don't need every detail on extenuating or contributing circumstances split out to decide the overall risk of the car itself versus the driver. Plus I don't trust any of the manufacturers to categorize accidents either fairly or consistently among each other.

Of course -- that's what the overall stats and safety ratings are meant do. But here we're talking about research comparing level 2 and level 3-5 systems.

The number of incident per brand doesn't matter if you don't take into account how many cars they have on the road...

And Tesla could probably tell you how many crash per driving hour among other things

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