If I were to argue about manual driving from my personal driving, I'd be way off. I haven't had an accident in decades. Not even any close calls. If I extrapolating my accident rate out to the world, I would assume that human-driven cars are a perfectly safe technology.
In the real world, all accidents are a long-tail phenomenon. They happen pretty rarely, often under conditions that are unusual or unexpected. So somebody saying "in these last few months I hardly ever have to intervene anymore to not die", a standard that would cause a driving instructor to fail a teen driver, not only doesn't give me confidence that this technology is a-ok for road use, but suggests to me they haven't really thought about what is required for safety at global scale.
Accidents might be long-tail phenomenon but driving habits are observable. Autopilot has a consistent, safe, alert demeanor on the road. It reacts to vehicles I as a driver can't as quickly see, changing situations that it would take me an extra half second or more to react to.
Compare that to the average human driver on the road - a third or more of whom you can expect to see holding a phone - and I think it's a reasonable conclusion to say it's already at least marginally better. And if we are talking about accidents, you can't deny that people are generally terrible at choosing the best possible reaction to an emergency situation that happens in the space of a few seconds.
For example, I might note that a couple weeks ago a Tesla almost crashed into a train: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/ap-fsd-related-crash...
The dashcam vids are sobering: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/vxlz4vk3rck114145nbp8/AAukGDt...
It's remarkable how many comments on "hacker news" are basically "I like it, trust me it works great". Line noise.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/07/tesla-must-provide-nhtsa-wit...
Maybe it’s better in terms of customer satisfaction or reliability, but in terms of the SAR J3016 standard, it hasn’t improved at all.
And to be clear, my sense is the same: FSD microdriving at this point is better than mine, interventions are about planning and intersection recognition. It'll be slow to take turns sometimes, it'll be in the wrong lane to prepare for a turn, stuff like that.
Teslas are not "self driving", they don't allow you in any way to rely on the car alone, for any length of time, to drive itself: it's the drivers who are preventing accidents, not Tesla's FSD. When drivers of these vehicles lose attention, accidents do happen and people have died.
This is in contrast to Waymo and Mercedes, where the car actually drives itself, using both vision and other sensors, and the driver can actually disengage.
What I'm saying is the official line from Tesla: they don't even claim to have achieved level 3, nevermind the level 4 driving you seem to think they have.
More realistically, if Tesla believed their car is safe without human intervention, they could, you know, put them out on the streets without drivers, like Waymo did. Or at least tell their customers that it's actually safe to not pay full attention and that Tesla would accept liability if accidents happen, like Mercedes did. Or something in between. Since they are not doing any of these things, I think your opinion that is just obviously wrong.
This is disingenuous. And the reason is you clearly refuse to take testimony from those of us who do this every day. I'll tell you right now that it's been well over a year since I had any kind of safety-related disengagement. So, you'll change your mind?
Of course not. You're going to say that that's not enough data, and then go and cherry pick a single accident or testimony to the contrary to invalidate the data that you just said was a valid test.
Like I said, non-falsifiable.
I don't get why people cheer on it and even compare it with Tesla, which goes for ... actual self driving
In contrast, Tesla only has promises. In practice, you can't do anything with FSD that you couldn't do without it, because you have to pay exactly as much attention when it's engaged as when it's disengaged, and you can't take your hands off the wheel or it full-on disengages.
Mercedes has an excellent base to build up from. Tesla has next to nothing.