I'm quite skeptical of Tesla's reliability claims. But for exactly that reason, I welcome a company like Lemonade betting actual money on those claims. Either way, this is bound to generate some visibility into the actual accident rates.
As an example, let's say most people use FSD on straight US Interstate driving, which is very easy. That could artificially make FSD seem safer than it really is.
My prior on this is supervised FSD ought to be safer, so the 52% number kind of surprised me, however it's computed. I would have expected more like a 90-95% reduction in accidents.
1) it let's lemonade reward you for taking safer driving routes (or living in a safer area to drive, whatever that means)
2) it (for better or worse) encourages drivers to use it more. This will improve Tesla's training data but also might negatively impact the fsd safety record (an interesting experiment!)
As a father of kids in a neighborhood with a lot of Teslas, how do I opt out of this experiment?
The first thing I was taught when I picked up a car was: if you see a ball on the road you stop immediately. This valuable lesson has saved one kid (and my sanity) with me on the wheel.
Just this week I was telling my law school contract-drafting class that part of our job as lawyers and drafters is to try to to "child-proof" our contracts, because sometimes clients' staff understandably don't fully appreciate the possible consequences of 'running into the street,' no matter how good an idea it might seem at the time.
It is often an indicator of true honesty, providing there is no government intervention. Governments intervene in insurance/risk markets when they do not like the truth.
I tried to arrange insurance for an obese western expatriate several years ago in an Asian country, and the (western) insurance company wrote a letter back saying the client was morbidly obese and statistically likely to die within 10 years, and they should lose x weight before they could consider having insurance.
You mean like forcing people to buy it ad then shaping what product can ad cant be offered with a spiderweb of complex rules?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/27/state-farm-h...
With no government intervention, the price of all fire insurance in California would increase materially to reflect the genuine risk of wildfire damage.
I'm sceptical of Robotaxi/Cybercab. I'm less sceptical that FSD, supervised, is safer than fully-manual control.
On average you include sleep deprived people, driving way over the speed limit, at night, in bad weather, while drunk, and talking to someone. FSD is very likely situationally useful.
But you can know most of those adverse conditions don’t apply when you engage FSD on a given trip. As such the standard needs to be extremely high to avoid increased risks when you’re sober, wide awake, the conditions are good, and you have no need to speed.
Are those people also able to suprevise FSD like the law and Tesla expects them to? That's also a question.
Tesla's FSD still goes full-throttle dumbfuck from time to time. Like, randomly deciding it wants to speed into an intersection despite the red light having done absolutely nothing. Or swerving because of glare that you can't see, and a Toyota Corolla could discern with its radars, but which hits the cameras and so fires up the orange cat it's simulating on its CPU.
Most notably my driveway meets the road at a blind y intersection, and my Model 3 just blasts out into the road even though you cannot see cross traffic.
FSD stresses me out. It's like I'm monitoring a teenager with their learners permit. I can probably count the number trips where I haven't had to take over on one hand.
Still not paying $8k for it. Or $100 per month. Maybe $50 per month.
My neighbor joked that I should install a stop sign at the end of my driveway to make it safer.
The fact that it does't handle some specific person's driveway well is far from a condemnation of the system. I'm far more concerned about it mishandling things on "proper" roads at speed.
You meant “I disable FSD because it does silly things”
I read “I disable FSD so I can do silly things”
I'm very skeptical that the average human driver properly supervises FSD or any other "full" self driving system.
Insurance companies can let marketing influence rates to some degree, with programs that tend to be tacked on after the initial rate is set. This self driving car program sounds an awful lot like safe driver programs like GEICO Clean Driving Record, State Farm Good Driver Discount, and Progressive Safe Driver, Progressive Snapshot, and Allstate Drivewise. The risk assessment seems to be less thorough than the general underwriting process, and to fall within some sort of risk margin, so to me it seems gimmicky and not a true innovation at this point.
That’s the difference.