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Comment by kevin_thibedeau | Hacker News Reader

They have a habit of running into things.

How do the number of accidents compare to Waymo when fleet size is taken into account?

Talking of FSD beta here, I don't think there has been any death or even major accident to date. But that's mostly because (especially until a few months ago) it was bad enough that nobody would trust it, so people were always alert to intervene.

If you were to let FSD beta just drive by itself enough time, and intentionally never intervene, it would eventually crash, no doubt about it. Before v10.69 it was hard to get a 20 minute drive with no interventions (unless it was mostly straight roads).

Relevant HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33984922

Comparing disengagement and driver intervention data might be useful to compare Tesla FSD vs others.

The stats don't matter much when it's clear they can't handle collision avoidance with anything outside their limited training set like airplanes. You have to ask what else can't they detect in front of the car if they're 100% dependent on ML to decide there's an obstruction. That is an irresponsible threat to public safety no matter how lucky they are scraping by on their current architecture.

Except the stats *do* matter. It’s how we measure things that operate in the real world. The blind baby stroller benchmark might be academically interesting, but if distracted drivers are smashing kids on public roads for another decade while Waymo perfects it’s craft the net result is just more flat people.

Waymo crashes a lot more. From 2 years ago:

"In its first report on its autonomous vehicle operations in Phoenix, Arizona, Waymo said that it was involved in 18 crashes" (in 6.1 million miles).

For comparison, in the latest Tesla safety report:

"we recorded one crash for every 4.31 million miles driven", which is roughly what they had 2 years ago.

So Tesla is objectively safer. And Teslas are diven anywhere, whereas Waymo only drove in Phoenix, which is extremely sunny and dry.

I don't know the answer, but are these numbers comparable? I would assume that Waymo is talking about crashes while in self-driving mode, is that true for Tesla as well or are they just talking about all miles driven, self driving mode and manual?

I really doubt you're comparing apples to apples here. How many of those 4.31 million miles per crash had FSD enabled?

Plus the Tesla owner will save the his/her $80k Tesla rather than prove FSD can actually handle or fail a situation.

This is FSD only data.

Autopilot is not FSD, only runs on freeways, and is apparently so bad that Tesla refuses to release statistics that allow for an apples to apples comparison against having it off.

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