Comment by leptons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by leptons | Hacker News Reader

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_crashe...

>As of October 2024, there have been hundreds of nonfatal incidents involving Autopilot[2] and fifty-one reported fatalities, forty-four of which NHTSA investigations or expert testimony later verified and two that NHTSA's Office of Defect Investigations verified as happening during the engagement of Full Self-Driving (FSD)

Nothing weird about calling out the lackluster performance of an AI that was rushed to market when it's killing people.

>and even I think the Musk hate is just getting weird

The only weird thing is that Musk is allowed to operate in this country with such unproven and lethal tech. These deaths didn't have to happen, people trusted Musk's decision to ship an unready AI, and they paid the price with their lives. I avoid driving near Teslas, I don't need Musk's greed risking my life too.

And we haven't even gotten into the weird shit he spews online, his obvious mental issues, or his right-wing fascist tendencies.

I dislike Elon as much (or maybe more) than the majority of this site, but I am actually not able to adequately express how small a percentage of total highway deaths 51 people is. But let me try. Over 40,000 people die in US road deaths EVERY YEAR. I was using full self driving in 2018 on a Model 3. So between then and October 2024, there were something like 250,000 people who died on the highway, and something like 249,949 were not using full self driving.

Every single one of those people were tragedies, no doubt about it. And there will always be fatalities while people use FSD. You cannot prevent it, because the world is big and full of unforeseen situations and no software will be able to deal with them all. I am convinced, though, that using FSD judiciously will save far more lives than removing it will.

The most damning thing that can be said about full self driving is that it requires good judgement from the general population, and that's asking a lot. But on the whole, I still feel it's a good trade.

The problem is it's called "full self driving" and it runs red lights.

Just like the rest of the drivers out there you mean. Just think logically for a second. If they ran red lights all the time there would be nonstop press about just that and people returning the cars. Theres not though, which is enough evidence for you to conclude these are edge cases. Plenty of drivers are drunk and or high too, maybe autopilot prevents those drivers from killing others

We evolved to intuit other humans intentions and potential actions. Not so with robuts, which makes public trust much more difficult despite the statistics. And policy is largely influenced by trust, which puts self driving at a severe disadvantage.

You think you can out intuit a drunk driver? That’s some serious hubris.

I happened upon a swerving drunk-driving police car once. A tesla would have continued on, following the rules of the road, trying to pass the swerving drunk-driving police car, likely getting in an accident with it. I was smarter, and I stayed the fuck away, far far back from it and changed my course to avoid it.

Yours is a bit of a strawman, considering drunk driving is illegal. So the appropriate comparison is to unregulated (illegal) buggy software operation. Do I feel more comfortable intuiting the intention of a drunk driver compared to buggy software? Yes. Similarly, as the other poster said, if I see a weaving car I tend to stay away from them because I can infer additional erratic behavior.

That’s also why people tend to shy away from people with mental health issues. We don’t have a good theory of mind to intuit their behavior.

Its not a strawman. Having a conversation can also distract you. Being elderly can be a risk. Being tired can be a huge risk. Yet none of these things are illegal. I could have just as easily used one of these examples instead of drunk driving and my point would stand against your criticism.

Fact is, humans in general are imperfect operators. The ai driver only has to be an alright driver, not a perfect one, to route around the long tail of drivers that cause most all the fatalities.

If those are the stronger examples, then you should have went with them. It’s more inline with the HN guidelines than taking the weaker interpretation.

I think you missed my point. Because software is more opaque, it has a much higher threshold before the public feels comfortable with it. My claim is it will have to be an outstanding driver, not just an “alright” one before autonomous driving is given the reins en masse. In addition, I don’t think we know much about the true distribution of risk, so claims about the long-tail are undefined and somewhat meaningless. We don’t have a codified “edge” that defines what you call edge cases. Both software and people are imperfect. Given the opaqueness of software, I still maintain people are more comfortable with human drivers due to the evolved theory of mind. Do you think more people would prefer their non-seatbelted toddler to be in a an average autonomous vehicle by themselves or with a human driver give the current state of the art?

But more to my point, humans are also irrational so statistical arguments don’t translate well to policy. Just look at how many people (and professionals) trade unleveraged stocks when an index fund is a better statistical bet. Your point hinges on humans being modeled as rational actors and my point is that is a bad assumption. It’s a sociological problem as much as an engineering one.

> it runs red lights

Fixing that would require "full self stopping". Coming soon[1].

[1] ... for some value of "soon", that is.

> I am actually not able to adequately express how small a percentage of total highway deaths 51 people is

This is some kind of logical fallacy, a false equivalence or maybe a red herring. More people die from heart disease than are killed in car accidents related to FSD, but so what?

> I am convinced, though, that using FSD judiciously will save far more lives than removing it will.

This might be true, I even think it probably is, but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence to support it. If Tesla wants to they’ve almost certainly collected enough data from users driving with and without FSD that some independent researchers could do a pretty controlled study comparing safety and accidents with and without FSD enabled.

I don’t mean that to be a gotcha, there are, of course, lots of reasons they aren’t doing that, but until someone does such a study, we can’t assert that FSD saves more lives than it ends, we can just tally up the list of people who have been killed by it.

But Tesla isn’t the only game in town, and eg Waymo seems to have a far better safety record. They’re doing “engineering” as it should be done, not “move fast and break people”, which is fine for websites but not great on the road.

That’s similar to how I feel about LLM’s. Amazing as an input to a system but you need real engineering guardrails around them.

Have the safety statistics been standardized, though? I vaguely remember articles about Waymo doing their own after-action reports and sanitizing their accident data to only keep those accidents that they felt a human would have avoided. This creates all sorts of data quality problems related to subjectivity and bad incentives. We wouldn't accept throwing out drunk-driving stats under the guise that a sober driver wouldn't have made that mistake. This says nothing of the differences in environments that can be used to game safety stats.

Not sure, and they’re dealing with fewer issues than Tesla which self drives all over the place. But their stance is more conservative, and Musk has more than a whiff of cowboy, over claiming etc. Less compatible with safety. I was a fan but less so over time. That’s my bias stated :)

> I am convinced, though, that using FSD judiciously will save far more lives than removing it will.

This is a statement of faith.

IMO cars are dangerous, whether they have a level headed experienced driver or an all seeing all knowing AI, sometimes a car pulls out from a blind drive or a tire fails and swerves into oncoming traffic. It's not clear to me why people think having a computer drive 95% of the time so they don't have to will make them better able to avoid accidents in exceptional cases.

In the case of pilots, even tho a computer can handle all manner of weather, pilots are still required to put in manual flying time so they actually know how the craft handles under their control, so that they can be ready to take over in case of exceptional events. I think we will see the same regulation in cars eventually, requiring drivers to have minimum hours per year in order to continue piloting craft, even if AI is good enough to do it most of the time.

In the case of the blind driveway situation, there's a safe, marked speed for roads with blind driveways on them. A driver (human or AI) going that speed can avoid a car pulling out from it. The assumption for higher safety is that the impatient emotional human that's late for work who's husband just left them is speeding excessively, while the AI isn't.

agreed, but in that case isn't the solution to simply require that all cars are manufactured with speed limiters that comply with the database of speed limits on a per road basis? if the goal is safety.

That's not out of the question. The Nissan GT-R in Japan is geofenced to only allow excessive speeding on racetracks.

You're expressing your opinions in this context, because Tesla didn't reveal the data that would let us tell whether its FSD system is objectively safer than an average human driver in the same driving conditions. You're leading a discussion that distracts from the core issue that Tesla is unwilling to release data that would enable independent researchers evaluate its FSD systems. In other words, you're doing marketing for Tesla for free.

You would think that Tesla’s full self driving feature would be more relevant than autopilot here, since the latter is just a smarter cruise control that doesn’t use much AI at all, and the former is full AI that doesn’t live up to expectations.

Dude come on, saying FSD "routinely" kills people is just delusional (and provably wrong). No idea why Musk just lives rent-free in folks' heads like this. He's just a random douchebag billionaire, there's scores of 'em.

Would it be wrong to say that people routinely die in car accidents in general? Not really, it's quite a common cause of death. And Tesla's systems have statistically similar death rates. They're reasonably safe when compared to people. But honestly, for a computer that never gets tired or distracted, that's pretty shit performance.

Just like how computerized airplanes don’t crash or computerized boats don’t sink, huh.

I don't know much about boats, but automated flight controls absolutely do have statistically relevant lower rates of death, by far.

I was just pushing against the sentiment that because something is computerized it works perfectly every time. Which for anyone who has exited their home and looked at this world, would also conclude is a false sentiment.

I don’t think anyone was suggesting otherwise.

They don't have similar death rates compared to cars in general they have a very mediocre pole position in safety compared to all autos and a remarkably bad position compared to cars in their age and price bracket.

https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a62919131/tesla-has-highes...

That article cites a Hyundai model as having the top fatality rate. And several Tesla models as not far behind. That is statistical similarity.

They are not way off in some other safety category like motorcycles or airplanes.

The worst model is a Hyundai. They are the worst manufacturer overall by dint of having a plethora of bad hardware. The strange thing is high end cars normally have as part of their appeal higher end safety features.

Either Tesla is just a pos which is unsafe at any speed or its self driving features are so good at offing people it more than makes up for any other factor.

The Model Y was 6th behind that Hyundai and 5 other passenger vehicles from other manufacturers. They were all well within an order of magnitude of each other. This is the similarity I was referring to above.

Everything tesla makes is among the worst as far as safety whilst being among the most expensive common vehicles. If you average the scores of all models Tesla is worst because they don't make anything other than lemons safetywise.

1950s cars without seatbelts were probably in the same order of magnitude as is riding a mothercycle its a weird stadard.

In actuality you are more than twice as likely to die if you drive a Tesla. 4x if you pick the model by.

You're talking past me here, dude. My point is that their observed safety compares similarly to other vehicles in the context of transportation safety as a whole, not how specific models compare on a single year basis compared to other current-year new cars sold in the US.

Full sedans as a whole across vehicles old and new is 2 deaths per billion vehicle miles.

Tesla is as high as 10

Motorcycles are something crazy like 267

Yes driving a Tesla is far safer than driving a crotch rocket but far more dangerous than a 10 year old Carolla which is concerning.

Either it is incredibly poorly designed as far as crash safety which doesn't appear to be so or its software kills enough people to more than make up the difference.

Which is it? I'm guessing if we are relying on Tesla to investigate the state of the software that auto pilot is only being implicated when it is engaged till the end whereas most crashes probably see the human take over unsuccessfully prior to the endpoint.

"Fullsize sedans driven in the US" isn't the same as "passenger cars", but whatever, regardless: they're within the same order of magnitude of other passenger cars.

This small difference you're observing is likely because people drive like idiots in them. You'll see that other vehicles which encourage bad behavior have similar death rates.

My point was, their safety systems don't put them in a significantly safer category, like a bus, train, or a plane, all of which are orders of magnitude safer.

Its not a small difference its up to 5x worse and there is no reason to believe Tesla drivers are worse in fact as with all expensive vehicles its population is liable to have fewer younger more dangerous drivers.

The logical conclusion is that the car is more dangerous with the obvious suspect being autopilot

No, I think 0.5 orders of magnitude is quite factually small compared to 6 orders of magnitude.

> there is no reason to believe Tesla drivers are worse in fact as with all expensive vehicles its population is liable to have fewer younger more dangerous drivers

Ah yes, just like all drivers of expensive hellcats are known for their safe driving?

No, Teslas are not driven by the same demographics as Toyota Siennas. Have you taken a rideshare in a city before?

> The logical conclusion is that the car is more dangerous with the obvious suspect being autopilot

The last I checked, the data showed that people wreck them at about the same rates with or without the driver assistance features engaged.

I have no idea why you latched on to the utterly useless orders of magnitude when the correct comparison is a simple rate of deaths over vehicle miles.

If you drive lifetime 800,000 miles which is damn easy to do in America in a car that has 6-10 fatalities per billion miles your lifetime risk of dying or killing someone are up to 0.6% absolute not relative.

To be crystal clear its the difference between rolling a 500 sided die vs a 125 sided die where if you roll a one your brains end up on the dash.

Its a big difference and ascribing a difference in mortality to the drivers is equally poor. Its not just unfounded its counterfactual young drivers which largely can't afford Teslas are disproportionately involved in such crashes.

https://www.nhtsa.gov/book/countermeasures-that-work/young-d....

Purely based on driver demographics one would expect fewer fatal crashes.

Please explain an absolutely massive increase in fatal crashes.

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