[HN Gopher] Normalized crash data shows Autopilot is much less s...
___________________________________________________________________
Normalized crash data shows Autopilot is much less safe than Tesla
claims
Author : gnicholas
Score : 371 points
Date : 2022-02-02 18:53 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| gameswithgo wrote:
| EDIT: After reading the full paper and not just the twitter
| graphs, some of what I said is wrong. That is, they also
| controlled for age, and when controlling for age and road type,
| autpilot was just worse.
|
| On the one hand I had the same suspicion about the unadjusted
| data, on the other hand the fact that autopilot isn't _worse_ is
| pretty promising!
|
| However, average human rates include people driving drunk, tired,
| elders, teenagers etc.
|
| So at 43 when I am driving sober, I'm probably safer not using
| autopilot. When I was 19 probably safer to use autopilot.
| lbrito wrote:
| >So at 43 when I am driving sober, I'm probably safer not using
| autopilot. When I was 19 probably safer to use autopilot.
|
| That might work out for you, but if teens think like that _now_
| and avoid years of driving experience, they can't expect to be
| any better at driving at 43 than they are as teenagers, which
| kind of kills the argument.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| The skills are pretty easy to acquire, it is the maturity
| that is hard.
| gnicholas wrote:
| > _the fact that autopilot isn 't worse is pretty promising!_
|
| Presumably drivers take over when it makes mistakes, which
| tilts the stats a bit.
|
| > _When I was 19 probably safer to use autopilot._
|
| As a parent, I wonder about what safety tech I would let my
| kids use when learning to drive. I want to make sure they fully
| learn how to drive, which makes me think I shouldn't let them
| use too much semi-autonomous tech.
|
| At the same time, it seems foolish to tell them not to use
| blind spot monitors, or to even expect them to "check their
| blind spot" the old-fashioned way if their cars have monitors.
|
| Interestingly, my father (in his 70s) tells me he'll never
| trust blind spot monitors, so I'm seeing a generational
| difference even between him and me. Too bad, since older
| drivers probably could benefit the most from not having to look
| back when changing lanes. Older eyes take longer to re-focus,
| so it's more likely an older driver would miss something
| happening ahead on account of having looked rearward.
| tacLog wrote:
| > At the same time, it seems foolish to tell them not to use
| blind spot monitors, or to even expect them to "check their
| blind spot" the old-fashioned way if their cars have
| monitors.
|
| I have never owned a car with blind spot monitoring. Do
| people really just rely on them completely? Even in dense
| urban environments with bikes around? Or is it more of a
| judgement call? Different perspectives on this would be nice.
|
| I have never seen the little light on the mirrors fail to
| detect me while I am riding but I never trust a driver not to
| just turn right cutting me off anyways.
|
| I am not trying to pass judgement just understand how these
| driver aids change the way people drive.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I've never owned a car with BSM but have rented for
| extended periods of time. I would expect that after a year
| or two of using the system while also actively checking my
| blind spot the conventional way, I would become comfortable
| with understanding its reliability and limitations (if any)
| and would adjust my behavior.
|
| Some Hondas pipe through a camera feed from the side of the
| vehicle when you turn on your blinker, which wouldn't have
| the same potential weakness for cyclists that you mention
| with the binary sensor-based systems.
| sdoering wrote:
| > Different perspectives on this would be nice.
|
| Driving for ~25 years. Did quite some kilometers when I was
| between 19 and 30.
|
| My current car is the first one with a lot of assistance
| systems. I actually see them as additional safety level,
| but as a first instance still use my senses. Blind spot
| monitoring is something that I learned to value as a slice
| in the Swiss Cheese Model of Security [1].
|
| And I detect myself driving extra carefully when driving a
| car without them. Way more careful than I was driving
| before I ever had blind spot monitoring.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model?wprov
| =sfla1
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| It's practially a trope how in sci-fi movies with flying
| futuristic cars, it's a demonstration of extreme competence
| for a character to demand "manual controls" to pilot the
| vehicle...like every normal driver does today. I expect
| that will become more and more real-world. Even today, most
| drivers don't know how to drive a manual transmission
| vehicle, much less how to double-clutch one without
| synchros or how to stop on ice without ABS. Those are
| disappearing from public roads and from the capabilities of
| average drivers, I expect that driving without aids will
| follow in the same way.
|
| As part of my job, I end up renting vehicles pretty
| frequently, they're often newer models than my daily and
| have blind spot monitoring, backup cameras, radar cruise,
| vision-based lanekeeping assist, etc. It's frightening how
| in the course of a week you can get used to having to put
| less effort into centering yourself in the lane, trusting
| that cruise control will just keep a comfortable distance
| from the vehicle ahead of you. Driving becomes a lot less
| stressful. When I get back home and climb into my old
| manual-everything beater, though, it's quite an adjustment.
|
| Regarding blind spot checks, yes, the Audi I recently drove
| had alerts for that, the blinking yellow light in my
| peripheral vision when cars were passing me was a nice
| reinforcement, but I'm too conditioned to do head checks to
| skip those. Likewise, reverse cameras - I've driven many
| work vans, pickups with headache racks, Jeeps with
| scratched up plastic, pulled trailers and RVs, etc where
| the windshield-mounted rearview mirror is useless; lots of
| pros get used to backing up using the side mirrors only.
| However, I asked my sister in law (who is extremely
| competent at most things) to drive my truck for an errand
| and she asked for help backing it out of the driveway - her
| car has always had a backup camera, which is honestly lots
| easier and she was completely uncomfortable using the side
| mirrors.
|
| It's not hard to imagine that someone who only drives with
| assistive tools would adapt to become dependent on them;
| I'd argue it's more unusual to expect that they wouldn't!
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Perhaps pedantic, but also genuine curiosity, thinking
| about it:
|
| > how to stop on ice without ABS
|
| My understanding is that ABS won't do anything to help
| you stopping on ice, anyway. On ice, braking is hampered
| by lack of traction on tires, whereas ABS is trying to
| avoid the challenges of tires locking up, so you can
| maintain (some semblance of) directionality.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| No. Even as a tech geek... I use it as an aid, but not as
| the primary. Even when I'm driving a fire engine with a
| dash monitor that has seven always on, always visible
| cameras around it, I thought I'd use them a lot more than I
| do. I do use the cameras in my car supplementarily too,
| helps me dial parking perfectly, etc. But I still find
| myself doing visual checks.
|
| But I also grew up and had my formative driving learning
| years without the benefit of such aids.
| rzimmerman wrote:
| I also think it will be important for any future teenager of
| mine to learn to drive without the regenerative braking that
| Teslas default to. It's a much better driving experience IMO,
| but I worry a new driver won't learn the "oh no hit the
| brakes!" reflex if they rarely use the brake pedal. I'd
| probably force them to learn with the car set to "normal"
| ICE/idle--style for the first few months.
| Psyonic wrote:
| Is there actually a "normal" style? I've only done a test
| drive but it seemed like there were various levels of
| automatic braking, but none that actually allowed you to
| coast.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| The road and age adjusted graph shows tesla still being better,
| by a trivial amount
| weego wrote:
| "Tesla Autopilot: Marginally better than the worst drivers on
| the road" is quite the sales pitch
| justapassenger wrote:
| > So at 43 when I am driving sober, I'm probably safer not
| using autopilot. When I was 19 probably safer to use autopilot.
|
| That's very dangerous thinking. Autopilot isn't self driving
| and will actively try to kill you, from time to time, like all
| driver assist systems. 19 year old are much more likely to
| abuse autopilot and drive distracted/drunk. Only reason those
| systems aren't crashing left and right is because drivers are
| paying attention.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| It is only dangerous thinking with the most uncharitable
| interpretation of what I wrote.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I've heard Tesla owners describing autopilot as feeling like
| being a passenger with a learner driver behind the wheel.
|
| That was my first hand experience also, it feels like I'm the
| nervous dad gritting his teeth while the teenager does
| something technically legal and safe but nerve-racking.
| rurp wrote:
| I'm not too surprised by this and bet a lot of HN folks suspected
| that this was the case, but I'm really glad to see this come out
| and hope it gets a lot of visibility.
|
| Controlling for confounding variables is a complicated and often
| subtle process that many people don't have an intuitive grasp of,
| so Elon's BS claims have probably been very convincing for many.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| From the paper:
|
| (1) Statistics obtained from Hardmanet al.(2019) (2) Statistics
| obtained from Blanco et al.(2016) (3) Statistics obtained from
| Transportation Research Board of the National Academy of Sciences
| (2013)
|
| I don't understand how such chronologically disparate sets of
| data could produce reliable statistics. The Telsa demographic
| data (1) was from a "2018 demographic survey of 424 Tesla owners"
| caditinpiscinam wrote:
| How is it that Tesla (and other companies developing self-driving
| capabilities) are allowed to deploy their products in the real
| world? We make people take a test to get a drivers license -- why
| don't we have requirements for self-driving systems? We require
| that cars pass routine mechanical inspections -- why isn't the
| software controlling these cars regulated?
| bob1029 wrote:
| This is the point that bothers me the most. Everyone is so
| fixated on the things they can see and talk about (i.e.
| regulate). The complex mountain of software running on these
| cars is _the entire_ bucket of liability.
|
| How do you mandate software quality? I don't think testing
| alone is enough if you seriously care about safety. Any test
| can be gamed as tesla has aptly demonstrated so far.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| There are requirements in some places, and maybe there should
| be more.
|
| But on the other hand, even the most pessimistic examination of
| this data doesn't seem to suggest that these cars are below the
| "can get a drivers license" threshold.
| dboreham wrote:
| Because in the context of regulations, they don't claim it to
| be self-driving.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Exactly. Marketing: "Self driving!" "The driver is only in
| the seat for legal purposes. The car is driving itself."
| Legal: "Maintain control of the vehicle at all times."
|
| Same with Summon. Marketing: "Bring your vehicle to you while
| dealing with a fussy child!" Legal: "Maintain attention and
| focus on vehicle at all times. Do not use while distracted."
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Regulators are asleep at the wheel.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Its kinda amazing to see the cognitive dissonance that people
| have when it comes to "regulators".
|
| When these regulators get swayed by the car industry into
| stupid stuff like 25 year import rule, or how they still keep
| speed limits around which have nothing to do with safety as
| they are based on outdated MPG savings initiative and end up
| disproportionally affecting lower income people, they
| rightfully are criticized.
|
| However, as soon as some manufacturer pops up and does
| something that the public doesn't like, even for silly
| reasons like not protecting people from themselves, people
| immediately jump to wanting the "regulators" to do something
| about it. Kinda makes it easy to see who has irrational hate
| for Tesla/Musk versus those who actually care about
| technology.
|
| The correct thing for the "regulators" to do is to make it
| mandatory that every car has the same set of cameras and
| instruments that Tesla cars do, and that data is streamed to
| a publicly funded data warehouse where its open source and
| available for anyone to use.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Regulation hasn't caught up with the technology, and even when
| regulation exists regulators are very slow to enforce it. Uber
| and Lyft were various degrees of blatantly illegal in many
| places they operated, but it took regulators years to actually
| do anything about it and at that point they were so well-
| established that it rarely made sense to actually punish them.
| It's a reliable bet to make if you've got investor millions to
| spend on lawyers and lobbyists.
| jsight wrote:
| Because based upon this data it is at least as safe as not
| deploying it. This data actually suggests that it is marginally
| safer.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Underlying study is here. [1] Full disclosure, I co-wrote the
| piece for The Daily Beast [2] that originally suggested that
| Tesla's methodology was seriously flawed. I am not a Tesla-hater
| though -- I just thought it was odd that the company was playing
| quite so fast and loose with their safety claims.
|
| 1: https://engrxiv.org/preprint/view/1973/3986
|
| 2: https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-tesla-and-elon-musk-
| exagge...
| julianz wrote:
| So that Daily Beast article has been up for more than 5 years
| with nobody fixing the horrible typo in the headline? Wow.
| rosndo wrote:
| Daily Beast, not the Economist.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > I just thought it was odd that the company was playing quite
| so fast and loose with their safety claims.
|
| That's because it's marketing, not science.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| And because it's Tesla, not Honda.
|
| Every car company does marketing. Few make over-the-top
| safety claims about their products. This is the company that
| decided to have its cars not stop at stop signs. Normal rules
| don't apply to Tesla.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60230072
|
| "In recall documents, the electric vehicle maker notes that
| if certain conditions are met, the "rolling stop" feature is
| designed to allow the vehicle to travel through all-way-stop
| intersections at up to 5.6mph without coming to a complete
| stop."
| yumraj wrote:
| > And because it's Tesla, not Honda.
|
| And because it's Elon Musk, not some ethical CEO
| aurelianito wrote:
| Ethical CEO is an oximoron.
| yumraj wrote:
| I feel sad that you believe that.
| rhino369 wrote:
| The Silicon Valley Stop is the new Hollywood Stop, huh.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| It's not like Honda doesn't engage in puffery.
|
| Most retailers make over-the-top claims regarding their
| products, including safety.
|
| https://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-honda-
| fine-2015...
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I mean... I _am_ "Tesla Hater" in that I don't like the
| direction they're proceeding in; but every human being I
| ever met in real actual life does rolling stops under some
| conditions. Last time I can confidently state that "I never
| rolled through a stop at very slow speed" is when I was 17,
| and only NOW do I realize how much of an annoying bum I was
| :P. So if a car does a rolling stop through a stop sign
| when there are no other cars obstacles or people, my
| thought is 1. yes that's a breach of law as written 2. It's
| what everybody else safely does.
|
| Kind of like in many jurisdictions, police will gently talk
| to you if you drive 60kph on the freeway, or even if you're
| doing 90kph in the left lane. Yes it's legal, no it isn't
| safe.
| enlyth wrote:
| When I was a kid and we were living in Vancouver, my mum
| told me how she did a 'rolling stop' through a stop sign
| at 4am in the morning with empty streets, and a cop car
| noticed it and gave her a massive fine. She was in tears
| because my family wasn't earning much money at the time.
|
| For some reason I still remember this story decades later
| and always come to a full stop at stop signs, that's how
| I was taught in driving school and that's how I will
| always do it. I'm a calm driver and I don't care if
| people are annoyed by me, I will drive the speed limit
| and I will not rush anywhere, it's not my problem that
| someone else needs to speed because they woke up late,
| safety should be the number one priority when you're
| operating a vehicle.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Sounds like a ticket to fight as the cop working at 4am
| would have a hard time showing up to court.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| In my area, cops have specific court dates; all their
| tickets are set to be handled on the same day that's
| already part of the cop's schedule.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| A) Cops don't work such shifts for the weeks/months it
| takes to get a court date. B) Cops don't normally "show
| up" in traffic courts. They can often appear via
| electronic means. C) Cops have great respect for courts.
| If called, they show up.
|
| D) If your only defense is the faint hope that the cop
| doesn't show, the judge is going to rain hellfire on you
| for wasting everyone's time. Court costs. Amended
| tickets. Contempt. Unless you are about to lose your
| license, you don't want to roll that dice. If you go to
| court to fight a traffic ticket you better have an actual
| defense.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I've shown up to contest all but one traffic ticket I've
| ever received*. It's up to the state to prove what I'm
| being accused of; I am not required to admit to it or
| passively pay the fine without appearing if I choose.
|
| I've won many (outright or gotten reductions to non-
| moving violations) and lost some, but I've never had a
| judge "rain hellfire on [me]" or anything even remotely
| similar to that, even in cases where I pled "not guilty",
| listened to the state's case, and presented no argument
| in my defense.
|
| * I got a camera ticket in Switzerland on a business trip
| that I did just pay rather than traveling back to appear
| and undoubtedly lose.
| Grustaf wrote:
| That's a very odd reason to contest a fine. Clearly it
| was justified.
| ipaddr wrote:
| It may not have been. Can the case be made, is there
| proof, will anyone show up? Contesting a fine takes time
| but the judge can reduce the amount if it was unusually
| high.
| hangonhn wrote:
| I wonder if that might be a function of how roads near
| you are designed. I live in the Bay Area and there are
| definitely certain roads and intersections where I don't
| feel safe not coming to a full stop and looking both
| ways. It might be because of hills or that the other
| direction has no stop sign, etc. Maybe where you live
| roads have better visibility but at least in my
| experience in my part of the Bay Area, I often find
| myself needing to be very careful at some stop signs and
| has consequently been doing complete stops.
| bambax wrote:
| > _Yes it 's legal_
|
| IDK about the US, but in France the speed limit is a
| target speed; if conditions are good (weather,
| visibility, traffic) you're supposed to drive at or near
| maximum speed. It's illegal to drive too slow, and
| there's a specific fine for this.
|
| https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI0
| 000... [in French]
| FireBeyond wrote:
| In Australia (I left 15 years ago) it was stated that you
| were required to drive at the _maximum_ speed that met
| the conditions:
|
| - not exceeding posted speed limit
|
| - appropriate for environmental conditions
|
| - your ability to safely control the vehicle
|
| And failure to do so could be fined.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| In the US it's legally a max. I have seen -- although
| rarely -- entire lines of cars pulled over and ticketed
| for speeding on an interstate (limited access, multilane
| divided highway, max speed 65-70 mph (104-112 kph))
| Driving too fast for conditions, is a different fine, so
| if it's foggy and you're going the posted limit, you
| could also get fined.
|
| You can get ticketed for driving too slow, but I've never
| seen it. I've only seen a minimum speed posted on an
| interstate (45 mph (72 mph)), but conceivably you can get
| ticked anywhere for impeding the flow of traffic.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > You can get ticketed for driving too slow, but I've
| never seen it.
|
| I have (very gently) forced a car off the road once in
| Germany with the police on 112, a very elderly gentleman
| was doing 30 Kph on the autobahn and caused one near miss
| after another. Police came and helped him to get home, we
| talked for a while and it turned out that it was his
| first trip in a long time to go and see his sister in
| another town, he'd gotten lost and was frightened out of
| his wits by all the traffic zooming by.
|
| I don't know how it ended, he probably kept his license
| because clearly there was no officer around to witness
| the event but I'm pretty sure he avoided the autobahn
| after that.
| pinkorchid wrote:
| The law that you linked says that drivers aren't allowed
| to drive at an unreasonably slow speed, and defines that
| to be (for highways, with good weather, and just on the
| leftmost lane) 80 km/h.
|
| It doesn't say that the speed limit is a target, or that
| you're supposed to drive at or near it.
| bambax wrote:
| Yes, but it's how we're taught at driving school. I think
| it's written down somewhere but can't find it at the
| moment, so the article I linked to is the closest I could
| find.
| cgriswald wrote:
| > ...but it's how we're taught at driving school.
|
| It doesn't matter. People have all kinds of things they
| are taught about driving from their parents, instructors,
| and even official documents that don't carry legal weight
| ( _e.g._ , a highway patrol website).
|
| Even when these types of ideas are good ideas, they
| aren't binding and you can't count on others to follow
| those rules. The only true rules of the road are the
| subset of the laws that are enforced; where enforcement
| might be done by law enforcement officers, civil judges,
| or insurance company adjudication processes.
| rtikulit wrote:
| On a public road I almost always come to a full stop, and
| if I don't I recognize it as an error. That's the law and
| there are very good reasons for it. It's an unambiguous
| standard of performance, for example. Arguments for
| rolling stops based on personal utility are selfish,
| IMHO, and arguments pleading utility to others are
| disingenuous--the rolling stoppers say that it's safer to
| rolling stop because of the rolling stoppers? Please.
| Think it through. :-)
|
| (Part of the reason I do it is because as I age I would
| like to ingrain habits that will make me a safer driver
| even as my cognitive ability declines.)
|
| Near me there is an intersection where the same cars
| drive through on a daily basis and where the drivers have
| habituated themselves to rolling stops. Yes, it's almost
| always fine. But I have been almost T-boned twice, and
| was hit once, fortunately with minimal damage. And even
| though they do not have the right of way, their habit of
| rolling stops regularly pre-empts the actual rules of the
| road, and they cut off drivers who have the right of way.
|
| That this is due to the normalization of deviance is
| abundantly obvious.
| jacquesm wrote:
| They way to deal with declining cognitive ability is to
| stop driving, not to perform rituals. That said, you
| should still follow the rules, but mostly because they
| are the rules. Not because you are following arguments
| based on personal utility, because they are selfish,
| IMHO.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| Safety rituals are extremely useful exactly because
| accidents happen when you have reduced capacity without
| realising it.
|
| Doesn't matter if it's because of lack of sleep, work
| stress, cognitive decline, etc.
| rtikulit wrote:
| I'm struggling to respond constructively to your comment.
| Think about all the phenomena that make up "cognitive
| ability" and all of the possible dimensions and
| properties of "cognitive decline".
|
| It should be obvious that your advice is not in any way
| useful or actionable. And rituals are a very well
| accepted strategy for dealing with situations which
| demand consistent and good attention, where human
| cognitive variability causes problems.
|
| A couple of famous examples--checklists used by aircraft
| pilots, or the pointing rituals used on Japanese
| railways.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| It is one thing to note that humans regularly break the
| law. It is another thing to task people with programing a
| robot to break that law. I'm very sure that many people
| break the speed limit regularly. But I would never expect
| to get away with programing a car to break that limit. No
| sane person would ever tell an employee or customer that
| rolling stops are OK, not in writing.
|
| And 5.6mph isn't rolling. That's beyond a walking pace.
| That's jogging territory. Any cop watching an
| intersection would ticket this.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I fully support the noble notions and idealistic ideas.
|
| But let's make it real, and let's ask a question about
| the real world:
|
| Does that mean that expectation is all automated cars
| will go exactly the speed limit on the left lane of North
| American superhighways?
|
| If so, those cars will inherently be a danger to life and
| limb. I don't care about any self-righteous driver who
| indicates houghtily " _I_ drive speed limit on left lane
| of American super highway ", I've spoken to advanced
| driver safety instructors, highway police officers and
| city councilors who all agree those people need to bloody
| well move it along - it's just not _safe_.
| cgriswald wrote:
| > Does that mean that expectation is all automated cars
| will go exactly the speed limit on the left lane of North
| American superhighways?
|
| In the vast majority of states this would also be
| illegal. If Tesla decides it safe, they should be able to
| just rewrite the rules, though, right?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Yes. For a company to program illegality into a product
| opens them up to untold liability. Normal car companies
| program their speedometers to read slightly high (5%
| ish). This keeps them from being into lawsuits by people
| who claim that an inaccurate speedometer contributed to
| the severity of a crash. Any car company who programs a
| car to drive faster than the limit _will_ be either
| liable or have to pay lawyers in every crash involving
| such cars. Even if their car doesn 't cause the crash,
| the fact that it was speeding will contribute to the
| severity of the accident. It would be like programing a
| robotic bartender to serve kids who are underage but look
| old enough to pass for 21. Corporate lunacy.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| >Yes. For a company to program illegality into a product
| opens them up to untold liability.
|
| People have been saying this for years yet Tesla is not
| being sued into nonexistence. Presumably their contracts
| are written well enough that if the user tells the car to
| go above the speed limit that's on them.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Because incidents involving these programs are very
| small. At the moment there are very few Teslas on the
| road in comparison to other car companies. There would
| statistically only be a handful at most of such
| accidents. But give it a few years until there are 10x or
| 20x as many teslas on the road. Then the class actions
| will start. That is if, like here, Tesla hasn't already
| recalled all such vehicles.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| There's a difference between the driver setting the
| cruise control above the speed limit, and a computer
| unilaterally deciding that it should run a stop sign.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| > Does that mean that expectation is all automated cars
| will go exactly the speed limit on the left lane of North
| American superhighways?
|
| It's already against road rules to stay in the passing
| lane when cars behind wish to pass, regardless of the
| speed limit, or if you're already driving at it. If cars
| behind desire to overtake, give way. This is already
| codified. No need to blame the cars or the self-driving
| tech. It's the human driver who bears responsibility for
| what the car does or doesn't do, as are the only ones
| able to countermand the autopilot. Blaming Tesla for any
| of that seems like dogpiling and behind the point.
| [deleted]
| sokoloff wrote:
| That depends on the jurisdiction. In my state (MA), I can
| use the left lane while passing other traffic even if
| there is traffic behind me who wishes to go faster than I
| am.
| hedora wrote:
| Not in California. Left lane fast, right lane slow isn't
| the law, and you can pass in whatever lane you'd like.
|
| Studies show that, adjusted for congestion and weather,
| SF Bay Area drivers have some of the highest accidents
| per mile in the country.
| Calavar wrote:
| > And 5.6mph isn't rolling
|
| Most cars idle at 5 to 6 mph, so _any_ roll through a
| stop sign is likely to break the 5 mph mark.
|
| > Any cop watching an intersection would ticket this.
|
| Not sure where you live, but this is absolutely not the
| case where I am. I have only ever once heard of a traffic
| officer ticketing for this. On the other hand, I see cops
| watch on as people ignore "no turn on red" signs and let
| them get away with it pretty much every day. Let alone
| rolling through an intersection at 5 mph.
| jmisavage wrote:
| I've gotten a ticket before for a rolling stop. It
| happens.
| jlmorton wrote:
| > This is the company that decided to have its cars not
| stop at stop signs. Normal rules don't apply to Tesla.
|
| It's a driving profile which must be turned on that
| implements behavior extremely common among the driving
| public. My Honda with Traffic Sign Recognition and adaptive
| cruise control lets me set the speed above the speed limit,
| too.
|
| Our traffic laws are in many ways ambiguous, such that even
| the police officers enforcing the laws will readily admit
| you're allowed to drive above the posted speed limit. When
| traffic rules are interpreted ambiguously, it's not that
| strange for a driving profile to do the same.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The driving public knows when it _can 't_ take such
| calculated risks. Does the ML classifier know what it
| isn't seeing?
| somethoughts wrote:
| It could also be that being slightly controversial and
| possibly factually incorrect is by design in the "any press
| is good press"/"it's better to ask forgiveness than
| permission" kind of way. When you are a relative newcomer
| going against legacy incumbents with much larger ad budgets
| and fighting to live another day such guerrilla marketing
| style tactics can be advantageous.
|
| The trick is to realize when you've jumped the shark and
| are now the established brand and wean yourself of the
| "fast and loose" approach.
| [deleted]
| contravariant wrote:
| So to summarize:
|
| - Freeways account for 93% of distance travelled with Autopilot
|
| - Freeways account for 28% of the distance travelled by regular
| drivers.
|
| - "vehicles on non-freeways crashed 2.01 times more often per
| mile"
|
| a quick back of the envelop calculation suggests merely driving
| on the freeway lowers accidents per mile by ~40%, which
| accounts for most of the difference between Autopilot and
| regular drivers.
| avs733 wrote:
| so in sum, Thomas Bayes just kicked Tesla square in the ass?
| [deleted]
| RyEgswuCsn wrote:
| So it sounds like it's Simpson's paradox [1] at work. I had
| always wondered why many people are slow to accept self-driving
| cars despite the claims of them being statistically safer. I
| think that explains it --- to make consumers confident about
| the self-driving technologies, it is not enough for them to be
| able to handle the "easy" kind of driving (e.g. on highway and
| under relatively good visibility conditions) better than
| humans; they need to demonstrate that they can drive better
| than humans in the most challenging driving environments too.
|
| I guess this is the classic scenario where human intuition is
| defeated by carefully presented statistics.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
| chaxor wrote:
| Can you explain how Simpsons paradox applies here?
| chemengds wrote:
| It's more traditional sampling bias than Simpsons paradox
| RyEgswuCsn wrote:
| The performance appears to be superior due to a large
| proportion of the driving is done on easy environment.
| oblio wrote:
| The thing is, you don't even need Tesla "self driving" for
| that.
|
| Adaptive cruise control, tech we've had for what, 20+ years?
| is more than enough for most highways, it takes out ~80% of
| the stress/boredom of driving, especially since lane changes
| are minimal and curves are gentle.
|
| The hard parts of driving (aka not highways) are the real
| problem, as expected. We solved the easy parts in 2000 and
| who knows if we'll solve the hard parts by 2050.
| CSSer wrote:
| I have a car with adaptive cruise control and lane assist,
| and most of my morning commute (on days when I go into the
| office) is driven on the highway. Most of the time I don't
| turn it on because I'm in a self-perceived hurry to get to
| work, so I forget.
|
| You know what would be really nice? Something that detects
| when it's safe and reasonable to suggest turning on
| adaptive cruise control so I use it more. Maybe something
| like detecting I've driven a few miles at a consistent rate
| of speed above a certain threshold.
|
| The hard parts are definitely the problem, but there are
| lots of easy wins left on the table too.
| oblio wrote:
| Isn't it just 1 button on the steering wheel to turn it
| on?
|
| I definitely hope your car doesn't put it in some hidden
| menus on the central screen.
| Melatonic wrote:
| I would personally hate for that to be on but I can see
| your point. Maybe a simple hardware switch for on / off
| and adaptive cruise control turns on once you are over
| 65mph for more than 1 minute and will only adapt +-15mph
| total?
| RyEgswuCsn wrote:
| For sure. Though even non-tech people are well aware that
| adaptive cruise control cannot get us to true self driving
| but "AI" allegedly can.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| > it is not enough for them to be able to handle the "easy"
| kind of driving (e.g. on highway and under relatively good
| visibility conditions) better than humans
|
| Is there any evidence that they do the easy stuff better than
| humans? I would want to see it compared with cars of similar
| age and cost driving on similar roads. I'm pretty skeptical
| that such a comparison would in fact be favourable to Tesla.
| nradov wrote:
| People are slow to "accept" self-driving cars because they
| don't exist in a form that anyone can actually buy.
| Regardless of safety or lack thereof, I can't purchase a real
| SAE level 4+ vehicle today at any price.
| [deleted]
| wilde wrote:
| I think traditional auto makers have done a much better job
| of communicating to consumers what the tech can actually do.
| We don't have self driving cars (which implies that they can
| drive in those harder conditions). We have cars that are good
| at lane keeping on freeways.
|
| I wish Tesla would celebrate that victory rather than double
| down on lies.
| andrepd wrote:
| >I am not a Tesla-hater though -- I just thought it was odd
| that the company was playing quite so fast and loose with their
| safety claims.
|
| If you're still surprised by this you've not been paying
| attention to how Telsa operates.
| maxdo wrote:
| That's a stupid projection of a paid media.
|
| Most of the car brands underperform compare to them in terms
| of safety. But because other brands release millions of
| boring cars with 0 innovation they are not criticized.
|
| If cheap Ford model rollout a car that has 3 of 5 in term of
| safety, or drag until last legally allowed moment to
| introduce a mandatory safety feature, no one is going to
| write "Ford/Car brand X is horrible". It's just a boring CarX
| brand car.
|
| In fact there are so many cars with mediocre crash test
| results on the road. There are so many car brands that
| implement in a cheap way safety measures. Like mandatory
| backup camera. In half car on the market you can barely see
| an image during the sunny day. No one is posting scary
| articles like " Toyota screen is killing people while driver
| is backing up"
|
| Facts: Tesla was the first to introduce such wide range of
| safety features in every car they sold. They don't make
| safety a premium feature. They invest in own crash test
| facilities. Only Volvo is kind of on par.
|
| You can calculate a lot and argue a lot but you can't deny
| facts:
|
| - every tesla car has an exceptionally good crash test
| results
|
| - drivers are more distracted nowadays mostly due to phones
|
| - Any car that has similar to tesla safety features is more
| safe on the road. These are stop on a traffic light ,
| emergency stop if there is a person, collision avoidance
| system, slow down near police car, signal if there is car in
| a blind zone
|
| - Tesla is a major contributor of this AI driven safety
| features mass adoption
|
| - Tesla has lots of measures to return distracted customer
| back to the driving as opposed to any car on the road 10
| years ago
|
| - Tesla was first to introduce over the air updates of
| software and firmware. Brands like GM is still planning to
| bring in 2023. They were able to deliver number of safety
| features instantly over the air. Infamous cops cars crash is
| a good example of it.
|
| It is really hard to understand how you can make conclusion
| that safety is not a priority for tesla despite so much
| resources this brand invest in safety.
|
| Autopilot is a tool. You can miss use it, sure. But if you
| care about safety it's hard to match with what they offer.
|
| You compare 0 with some number. A 10 y.o. car with cruise
| control 10 has 0 smart safety features. Tesla now has Y
| features with X amount of effectiveness. You can debate what
| is X. But it is stupid to compare 0 vs ( Y * X ). It's just
| safer. Period.
|
| Other car brands don't even dare to release such numbers.
| ummonk wrote:
| It wasn't much of an accomplishment for Tesla to introduce
| safety features across its lineup, when its lineup
| consisted of luxury cars.
|
| Today, other car manufacturers are standardizing safety
| features across their model lineups while manufacturing
| cars that are a third the price of the cheapest Tesla.
| jliptzin wrote:
| A third the price but still pouring disgusting fumes into
| our neighborhoods
| ummonk wrote:
| The disgusting fumes are almost exclusively from diesel
| trucks and very old cars. Manufacturing affordable (no,
| the Model 3 is not affordable) new cars helps take old
| cars off the streets and make our neighborhoods cleaner.
| maxdo wrote:
| BMW is a luxury Car, you still have to pay for safety
| extra. That's the difference. One car brand make it
| mandatory, other ask you extra dollars for every safety
| camera to install.
| ummonk wrote:
| BMW is hated for a reason, and most car manufacturers
| (not just Tesla) would compare favorably to it.
|
| Pretty much every major manufacturer makes safety
| features standard on the base models across their lineup
| today.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Autopilot is a tool. You can miss use it, sure. But if
| you care about safety it's hard to match with what they
| offer.
|
| 1. It's not autopilot, by any measurable criteria
|
| 2. As the adjusted data clearl shows, it's not that hard to
| match it. And since you mention Volvo, they definitely
| match it. They are honest enough though not to call it
| "autopilot", or "full safe driving" or pin the plame for
| its failures on the driver.
| maxdo wrote:
| The author is projecting his assumptions based on 400
| people questioned. Is it fair.
|
| Most Cars volvo produced is not as safe simply because
| Volvo is still making most of the money on Gasoline car,
| and they are less safe vs electric. Do we need to create
| a screaming article "Vovlo is deliberately making money
| on old tech that kills people"? Again volvo is a premium
| brand, so they don't want to invest more in EV to make
| your car more safe. They also promote hybrid Cars that
| has highest chances to catch on fire compares to EV and
| regular ICE cars.
|
| But yeah, naming of an optional feature is so much more
| important compares to real tech, crash tests etc. That's
| a logic media is trying to put in our head. Don't think.
| ummonk wrote:
| What makes you say gasoline cars are much less safe than
| electric?
| oblio wrote:
| > Again volvo is a premium brand, so they don't want to
| invest more in EV to make your car more safe.
|
| Dude, really?
|
| https://group.volvocars.com/company/innovation/electrific
| ati...
| maxdo wrote:
| Volvo's plans all in the future, it's just a commitment.
| today is there in 2025, tomorrow web designer put another
| beautiful article with 2030. Gasoline cars is less safe
| to the same car with the same set of airbags just because
| of It's physics e.g. lower center of gravity, no engine
| in the front that can kill you during forward collision,
| battery at the bottom serve as a protection layer during
| other type of crashes.
|
| In fact tesla is about to release structural batteries
| cars, that will use battery as part of the cars body,
| makes it even more safe. Model Y with structural pack
| will be out in March 2022.
|
| Volvo at this moment promoting hybrids and ICE that
| doesn't have this features, because it's bloody business.
| And money is money.
|
| Just compare real actions of Volvo who claim one of the
| safest brand and Tesla.
| oblio wrote:
| Did you even read the article I linked? I have friends
| that have the XC40 Recharge...
|
| > In fact tesla is about to release structural batteries
| cars, that will use battery as part of the cars body,
| makes it even more safe. Model Y with structural pack
| will be out in March 2022.
|
| I'll believe that when I see it. How's the Tesla Semi
| release going? Especially since structural batteries are
| still an active research topic that actual researchers
| think will be in mass production in 5 years or more.
| [deleted]
| ummonk wrote:
| Yup. Autopilot on aircraft is very different because
| pilots don't have to be ready to take over on a moment's
| notice.
|
| Of course they have to be monitoring the flight but they
| can be generally assured that the autopilot won't decide
| to just fly into a mountain with only fractions of a
| second for the pilots to intervene.
| laen wrote:
| There are moments a pilot has seconds to react and
| disengage autopilot.
|
| Example: Traffic Resolution advisories require a 5 second
| reaction time and 2.5 seconds for any follow-on
| reactions. This reaction time includes the time to
| disengage autopilot and also put the aircraft into a
| climb-or-dive. Studies show that a situationally aware
| pilot takes at least 2 seconds to start the reaction, and
| another second to achieve the proper climb/descent. There
| are other times on e.g. approach, or ground collision
| warnings with even narrower margins for disengaging
| autopilot.
|
| Pilots generally know when they need to be hyper-aware
| with autopilot and so do competent Tesla drivers. If
| there are issues with the name "autopilot" for Tesla, the
| same argument needs to be made for aircraft
| manufacturers.
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| > If there are issues with the name "autopilot" for
| Tesla, the same argument needs to be made for aircraft
| manufacturers.
|
| If a drivers license required as much training as a
| pilots license then you might have a point.
| dzader wrote:
| "Boeing instructed pilots to take corrective action in
| case of a malfunction, when the airplane would enter a
| series of automated nosedives. "
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings
| ummonk wrote:
| Indeed, Tesla's autopilot behaves a lot more like MCAS
| than like an airplane autopilot.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > It's not autopilot, by any measurable criteria
|
| It does seem quite comparable in capabilities to the
| actual autopilot in aircraft. And that's what's confusing
| to people; most don't realize that an autopilot is a
| control used by a driver or pilot to reduce their
| workload. (As a pilot, I am still logging flight time as
| the "sole manipulator of controls" during the time the
| autopilot is engaged.)
| watwut wrote:
| And that "confusion" was created intentionally by Tesla.
| So that it is easy to pretend it was not deliberately
| pretending higher capabilities while giving yourself
| option to pretend you are not.
|
| You know like that claim about human being there just
| because of pesky regulations and laws. Not because human
| would be needed.
| ummonk wrote:
| The kind of environment that a car is in (and the kind of
| monitoring required by the driver) is much more akin to
| autoland than autopilot.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > But because other brands release millions of boring cars
| with 0 innovation they are not criticized.
|
| That's not actually why.
|
| It's because carmakers are _huge_ advertisers. You get on
| their bad side, they pull their advertising.
|
| Tesla's advertising consists of Elon Musk's Twitter
| account, so Tesla gets the reporting the others would get
| if the authors weren't reliant on the subjects of those
| stories for their paychecks.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > Facts: Tesla was the first to introduce such wide range
| of safety features in every car they sold.
|
| Please itemize these "wide range of safety features" for us
| that other manufacturers do not have or did not have until
| Tesla innovated them.
|
| > They invest in own crash test facilities. Only Volvo is
| kind of on par.
|
| Audi owns one, for just one.
| [deleted]
| maxdo wrote:
| Sure, https://www.tesla.com/safety
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KR2N_Q8ep8
|
| Tesla roll out cars in generations. So just take a $40k
| Model 3/Y platform was introduced in 2017 and compare it
| with any car been introduced that year. My friend bought
| a BMW in 2019 for similar money, it doesn't have half of
| that. Maybe you can have them but you have to buy extra
| packages for extra money.
|
| Tesla don't sell safety features for extra price. The
| only extra feature is Autopilot. But hardware, camera's ,
| lane departure avoidance, blind spot collision warning
| etc in every car.
|
| You can even take such a simple feature as forward
| collision warning system. When you drive it is super
| accurate it uses the same data and models from Autopilot
| to predict when there is a crash. If your slowing down
| dynamic is not good or the car in front/back change it
| dynamics it will warn you immediately. Only this feature
| saved me several times from collision. I'm not a good
| driver.
|
| As I said in 2022 there are many car brands that catching
| up in some cases they doing better. And this is good.
|
| Human is a bad, constantly distracted driver. Technology
| is the only way to make our life safer.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Automatic emergency braking is a required standard
| feature in the US.
|
| Forward collision warning became standard in 2016 by at
| least ten manufacturers: Audi, BMW, Ford, General Motors,
| Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Tesla, Toyota, Volkswagen, and
| Volvo.
|
| Without speaking to Blind Spot, my Audi does similar
| intelligent things. If you change lanes next to a vehicle
| or just in front of it, but you have a positive speed
| differential, it won't activate. If there is a vehicle in
| your blind spot approaching you but their speed
| differential to you is low, it will activate later. If
| there's a much higher speed differential (say they're in
| a HOV lane, and you're in a much slower regular lane), it
| will activate much earlier.
| macintux wrote:
| > Automatic emergency braking is a required standard
| feature in the US.
|
| Not currently; I just bought a 2022 Jeep Wrangler that
| doesn't have anything of the sort.
| gambiting wrote:
| >> My friend bought a BMW in 2019 for similar money, it
| doesn't have half of that.
|
| That's an incredibly bad example, because in German
| brands you have to pay extra for basic safety
| features(famously in the new Polo you have to pay extra
| to have more than the basic 3 airbags, I don't even know
| how that's allowed). Look at a brand new
| Peugeot/Citroen/Kia/Hyundai and you will pay less than
| what a Model 3 costs and get just as many safety
| features. Yes, all the stuff that is optional in a BMW -
| but look outside of Audi/Merc/BMW/Volkswagen and you will
| find that this stuff is also completely standard.
| oblio wrote:
| > My friend bought a BMW in 2019 for similar money, it
| doesn't have half of that. Maybe you can have them but
| you have to buy extra packages for extra money.
|
| #1 lesson of buying cars is:
|
| 1. Don't buy German cars if you don't have to (or if you
| buy them, never complain about the price of their
| optional equipment).
|
| The corollary is:
|
| 1". Buy Korean or Japanese cars.
| mdoms wrote:
| He never said he was surprised.
| Natsu wrote:
| The study says this:
|
| > An estimated 15% of injury crashes and 24% of property
| damage-only crashes are never reported to police (M. Davis and
| Company, Inc., 2015), while9% of injury crashes and 24% of
| property damage-only crashes are reported but not logged
| (Blincoe et al., 2015). Even with robust data, establishing the
| statistical significance of automated vehicle safety can be
| expensive. Kalra and Paddock (2016)demonstrated that
| establishing that an AV has a fatal crash rate equivalent to
| the national average with 95% confidence would require driving
| a fleet of 100 vehicles continuously for 12.5 years.
|
| I presume there's an adjustment for this in the figures you
| compare to, but I am having trouble finding it, though that may
| be my own failure so I wanted to ask if you could help me find
| how that's adjusted for?
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Why would injury crashes go unreported?
| vanattab wrote:
| I got hit a few weeks ago while walking my dog (dog was
| fine). I thought I had just bruised my tailbone so I waved
| the driver on after a short chat and never reported it. In
| hindsight I wish I had as it seems like my tailbone was
| fractured and not just bruised but it definitely happens.
| tempnow987 wrote:
| After college I lived with roommates for a while. One went
| on a joyride of sorts and damaged a bunch of parking
| meters, crashed and injured themselves. They had a friend
| drive them home and repaired the vehicle with no reporting.
|
| In some cities currently even if you want to have police
| respond to a traffic accident, you'd need to wait a VERY
| long time - they will tell you that unless you need EMS to
| try and get a safe spot and call for a tow. Some folks
| aren't willing to wait hours for police to show up to do
| what, take a report?
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Police responding to the actual crash scene, useful. Police
| report filed after the fact, only if there's some need for
| said report. And not all injuries are immediately apparent.
| 3 1/2 years ago I got a first-person view of what it would
| be like to be on the receiving end of a PIT maneuver
| courtesy of a woman who didn't look adequately. (Yes, when
| you looked left the road was empty--I saw that also and
| turned into that empty spot the block before you!) At the
| time the only injury I was aware of was a very minor
| scrape, not even worthy of a bandaid. Later I discovered a
| pulled muscle--it only hurt when I did certain things.
|
| I also used to know a woman who thought it was nothing more
| than a fender-bender, went to the doc a couple of days
| later because her neck was bothering her. Doc sent her
| straight to the hospital--incomplete cervical fracture, one
| wrong move and she could have dropped dead.
| sokoloff wrote:
| If I had a single-car crash with minor injuries, why would
| I report it? It seems like there's limited upside to me as
| the (obviously at-fault) driver. Go get medical care and go
| get my car fixed. (I drive cars cheap enough to replace and
| so do not insure them against collisions that are my
| fault.)
|
| Drivers driving without a valid license, without insurance,
| under the influence, wanted by the law, etc would have all
| kinds of reasons to not report a crash.
| pjkundert wrote:
| An even _more_ serious problem with Tesla 's claims regarding the
| safety of its Autopilot is this:
|
| Autopilot failure statistics are _non-ergodic_. You don 't get to
| "play again" after a catastrophic Autopilot failure.
|
| So, Autopilot must not be 5x or 10x better than your own driving
| -- it has to be, like 100x or 1000x better, in order to warrant
| you risking your life on it.
|
| Trusting an autopilot that is just 10x better than you are?
|
| Insane. It randomly drives under a semi-trailer that you would
| have easily seen and avoided, and you're dead.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Are there stats that even show that any self driving system is
| safer than the median driver?
|
| Basically accidents involve two people. Said accidents have
| responsibility divided between both individuals.
|
| A hypothetically perfect driver could still be involved in fatal
| accidents by virtue of the other driver.
|
| The worse drivers obviously will cause these accidents.
|
| The questions are three fold:
|
| 1. Are self driving vehicles safer than the median driver?
|
| 2. What's the ratio between at fault and not at fault for any
| accidents the median driver gets in?
|
| 3. What's the same ratio for self driving cars?
|
| Normalizes for location, of course.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| The median driver is a difficult thing to study. 77% of people
| have experienced an accident, but I think fewer than 50% of
| people have been at fault for one. That's not to say they
| wouldn't be at fault if they drove more, but the median has a
| clean record. Hard to know who to exclude.
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| >Basically accidents involve two people.
|
| Not always, no. It's perfectly possible to crash a car with
| nobody else around.
| bagels wrote:
| Or for one car to crash in to many cars.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| > Crash rates can be adjusted to account for differences in
| environment and demographics in different data sets. A sample
| dataset with acrash rateris exposed to some variableiat a
| different proportion p than the comparison dataset. In the case
| study, for example, vehicles running Autopilot were driven on
| freeways (i) 93% of the time, resulting in pi= 0.93. In the SHRP
| 2 NDS, only 28% ofvehicle mileage was recorded on freeways, i.e
| pi= 0.28. In the SHRP 2 NDS data, vehicles on non-freeways
| crashed 2.01 times more often per mile than vehicles on freeways.
| The observed Autopilot crash rate can be adjusted to reflect
| national driving ratesto reflect the crash rate that might be
| observed if 28% of Autopilot mileage was on freeways and 72% were
| on non-freeways, assuming that the 2.01 ratio holds for
| Autopilot.
|
| So if humans are 2 times more likely to crash on non-highways
| than highways, the argument presented here is that the added
| danger of non-freeways affects autopilot in the same way,
| degrading its performance. Seems like a far reaching assumption.
|
| If there is no data on autopilot performance on rural roads, then
| you cannot make a claim either way.
| yrral wrote:
| How about the predominately male ownership of teslas causing
| higher accident rates. I see the paper adjusts for age and road
| type but missing gender is a pretty big slip-up?
|
| I didn't read the paper fully but grepped for "gender" and "sex"
| and couldn't find anything.
| hervature wrote:
| Don't forget to adjust for the 50% greater distance driven by
| men [1]. In reality, per mile drive, the difference in genders
| is negligible and maybe even counter to what most people
| believe. Of course though, men will pay more in insurance
| because driving is inherently dangerous and driving that much
| more frequently is problematic.
|
| [1] - https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm
| akira2501 wrote:
| Men are also more likely to drive drunk, under the influence
| and are more likely to buy a car with more than 250hp.
| There's a _lot_ of confounding variables when examining
| crashes.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Good question! According to one study in LA, [1] men cause 60%
| of accidents. I do wonder, however, the extent to which this
| gap fades with age. Given that most Tesla owners are not super
| young, it might not make as much of a difference as the 60%
| number (assuming it is nationally representative) would
| indicate.
|
| 1: https://xtown.la/2019/12/12/women-drivers-maybe-we-need-
| more...
| user123abc wrote:
| Men also drive 63% more miles than women.
| https://www.carinsurance.com/Articles/average-miles-
| driven-p...
| yrral wrote:
| Note when looking at 40% vs 60% of accidents (assuming males
| and females drive the same amount) the % difference seems
| small, only 20%, but actually this means males cause 50% more
| accidents than females do (60/40=1.5).
| nlowell wrote:
| I don't know if we can assume males and females drive the
| same amount.
| user123abc wrote:
| smnrchrds wrote:
| Keep in mind that men drive 16,500 miles per year on average,
| while women drive 10,100 miles. There is a noticeable gender
| gap in "accidents per year", but not in "accidents per mile".
| The paper compares accidents per mile, so there should be
| little gender effect in the results.
|
| https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm
| [deleted]
| freediver wrote:
| As a Tesla driver, I do not trust the autopilot yet and think it
| is years away (if ever achievable) from level 5...
|
| The reason this study has this outcome can be because of the
| survivorship bias - people are letting autopilot drive only in
| easiest road conditions where chance for something to go wrong is
| smaller to begin with.
|
| I would have hard time imagining people are letting autopilot
| drive regularly in a tight, windy road (at night) or in snow,
| thus completely preventing those (frequent types of?) accidents
| from happening under autopilot.
| garbageT wrote:
| Pre-print research based off of unpublished paper/dataset and
| "personal correspondence" makes this questionable. Why are we
| sharing this before knowledgeable and relevant reviewers get a
| hold it?
|
| I'll wait for the peer-reviewed version.
| kevingadd wrote:
| So Tesla marketing gets the benefit of the doubt, but research
| doesn't?
| hunterb123 wrote:
| That was never said. GP could doubt both.
|
| I don't think his request is out of the ordinary here:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.
| ..
| nja wrote:
| I was just watching this video of a Tesla trying and miserably
| failing to drive itself through the streets of Boston:
| https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1488555256162172928
|
| A number of these near-crashes seem to be pretty odd errors (a
| couple of times it just decided to drive on the wrong side of the
| street?) -- albeit ones that one _could_ see drivers unfamiliar
| with the area making.
|
| If a human driver started driving on the wrong side of a street,
| etc -- at least in Boston -- they would be greeted by a chorus of
| horns and rude gestures from those around, which would hopefully
| indicate to them that they were in error. Brings up an
| interesting question: does anyone know if Teslas are monitoring
| for surrounding horns/etc?
|
| Another common problem in Boston is being blocked by geese
| crossing the road. Are Teslas able to detect such low, slow-
| moving obstacles?
|
| It seems like it's not super feasible to rely on self-driving
| vehicles in a dense city like Boston, but maybe such features
| could be geofenced to areas like highways?
| JoshTko wrote:
| To be fair Boston city roads are like horse carriage routes
| that were converted to streets and will probably one of the
| last places FSD optimizes for.
| nja wrote:
| Interestingly, the routes in that video are in one of the few
| parts of Boston with a street grid (Southie:
| https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1488555262655045637 )
| -- so I wonder how much _worse_ it is on the cowpath roads
| elsewhere...
| petee wrote:
| Good point, Boston is a great real-world fuzzer. If they
| spent their time making it work there they'd have less issues
| elsewhere
| mijamo wrote:
| Those roads seem much easier to drive on than basically any
| city I've been in Europe. Paris is 10x more complex than that
| for instance. If FSD can't handle that there's really not of
| a use case apart from highways in Europe.
|
| To give you an idea of the incredible features in some
| cities, I have recently driven in Rennes where they found a
| good idea to makes roads with one single central lane for
| cars with wide bicycle path on each side. You are supposed to
| drive in the center and if a car comes in the other direction
| each car needs to go on the bicycle lane on their respective
| side of the road while giving priority to bicycles. I wonder
| how FSD would handle that...
| masklinn wrote:
| Iirc that concept actually comes from the netherlands. I've
| seen videos on Dutch road design showing that, i had no
| idea they'd been implemented in france.
| mdoms wrote:
| If FSD is expected to perform poorly on those roads then it
| shouldn't be available on said roads and it certainly
| shouldn't be legal to use it there.
| croes wrote:
| So the feature is useless in most european cities?
| sakopov wrote:
| This is interesting. I have seen similar videos of Tesla self-
| driving successfully on similar type of streets in Seattle. I
| wonder if the quality of FSD changes from city to city based on
| how much data Tesla receives from other drives in that city. I
| guess I'm suggesting that Seattle could have more Tesla drivers
| than Boston. I have no idea if any of this is true. Just a
| thought.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I like the guy who jumps in on the comments with "you're doing
| it wrong".
|
| https://twitter.com/ButchSurewood/status/1488602615407681541
|
| Isn't the whole idea that you're _not_ doing anything?
| borski wrote:
| We need a startup that can test and correct dubious statistical
| claims, or verify good ones. I would definitely pay for that.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| That would be cool, but companies are often not forthcoming
| with the raw data needed to do such analysis independently
| (particularly if it could make them look bad).
| borski wrote:
| Sure, but would they be if they could be "independently
| verified" by a startup like this? It might be a PR win.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Is it eggregiously worse than normal human pilots? If not, then
| that's an accomplishment in itself.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| It's marginally better
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Right! A few years ago, claiming that a robot car would drive
| as safely as a human driver would have been an incredible
| claim. Just saying.
| thomaskcr wrote:
| It would have been, Musk didn't think so and felt the need
| to embellish/exaggerate - his habit of exaggerating/lying I
| think is more on trial than the actual Tesla vehicles here.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Wow, adjusted for driver age the difference vanishes.
|
| That's quite an interesting observation, and it shows the
| importance of proper statistics. It also raises questions about
| companies producing their own stats, it's often only when someone
| takes the time to dig into it that we discover this kind of
| thing.
|
| I am not holding my breath waiting for the common consumer to
| understand statistical critical thinking though. I sometimes
| catch myself forgetting the due diligence even after many years
| of forcing myself to think about stats.
|
| Perhaps some sort of ombudsman could do this, pointing out when
| stats are lying to people.
| ProAm wrote:
| If you have taken a course in statistics you'll know its always
| possible to make the numbers looks favorable to your cause. It
| would take several unrelated blind third parties to do this
| correctly and no public company will ever let that happen,
| especially Tesla.
| kadoban wrote:
| They should be forced to let that happen. It's crucial for
| public safety.
| IanDrake wrote:
| ProAm wrote:
| Public knowledge of safety affects stock price and brand
| recognition. Will never happen.
| gretch wrote:
| This is an arrogant amount of speculation based on
| nothing more than personal intuition.
|
| In fact, there are plenty of examples where public
| knowledge of safety is published by mandate of the
| government. Here is an example of FAA flight data and you
| can see details about incidents across airlines:
| https://www.faa.gov/data_research/accident_incident/
|
| I'm not going to spend time digging it up, but I'm pretty
| sure there are just as many sources of data on other
| important things such as pharmaceuticals e.g. the covid
| vaccine.
|
| So no, just because 'stock price go down' doesn't mean a
| thing will never happen
| tantalor wrote:
| You could easily have a Simpsons paradox, e.g., it's safer
| overall, but for any single age group its neutral or even
| _less_ safe.
| djanogo wrote:
| They should adjust for car-age and price.
| kfor wrote:
| I highly recommend How to Lie with Statistics (1954) to learn
| more about these sorts of misleading stats:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics
| contravariant wrote:
| Driver age isn't the factor that explains the difference,
| accident rate adjusted for age shifts up a similar amount for
| both Autopilot and regular drivers.
|
| What _truly_ makes a difference is the kind of road they 're
| driving on. The accompanying paper provides a figure showing
| Autopilot is essentially only used on freeways which are
| inherently safer. Adjusting for that seems to explain most of
| the difference.
|
| Though personally I'd prefer to have just compared the accident
| rate on freeways for both types rather than this weird
| weighting method they try to use.
| rurp wrote:
| > It also raises questions about companies producing their own
| stats
|
| Companies saying "trust us, we have the data to prove it" while
| keeping that data secret should be ignored. _Especially_ if
| their CEO has a long history of blatant dishonesty! I 'm most
| annoyed that people gave any weight to Tesla's safety
| statistics claims in the first place.
| pengaru wrote:
| > I'm most annoyed that people gave any weight to Tesla's
| safety statistics claims in the first place.
|
| TSLA stock consistently made gains for a lot of people who
| otherwise wouldn't be paying attention let alone putting
| their weight in anything Tesla related.
| dahfizz wrote:
| > Companies saying "trust us, we have the data to prove it"
| while keeping that data secret should be ignored.
|
| While true, I do not think this is a great heuristic. How
| would the average person know whether the "data" is
| available? Most people don't even know what "data" really is.
| They have never heard of CSVs or SQL. We need a better signal
| for consumers to know what they can and can't trust.
| rurp wrote:
| A good journalist will include that context in a story. I
| know I read at least one article that included these safety
| claims while also noting that the data was private and
| unverifiable.
|
| I think it's a good default to assume any self-beneficial
| corporate message is false, absent evidence to the
| contrary.
| captain_price7 wrote:
| An average person doesn't need to directly access the data.
| As long as journalists or researchers can, an avg person
| could rely on their analysis/opinion instead.
| dahfizz wrote:
| I would certainly not rely on journalists' to actually
| have a look at the data, let alone to have the technical
| skills to analyze and report on it. As it is, reporters
| don't bother mentioning / linking to the data, or
| mentioning the lack of publicly available data.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It's OK to expect better from _both_ journalists and
| companies.
| jobu wrote:
| Data-journalism is actually a thing, and bigger
| organizations like the New York Times have done some
| pretty impressive work building tools and training
| programs for their reporters.
|
| https://open.nytimes.com/how-we-helped-our-reporters-
| learn-t...
| Out_of_Characte wrote:
| Companies dont validate their claims, only provide data and
| statistics to back up marketing angles. There's no point to
| it either since it would still be a conflict of interest when
| you've researched your own product and found no errors in it.
| ajross wrote:
| This isn't "proper statistics", this is P-hacking. Tesla's data
| is incomplete and bad. But going out and finding confounding
| variables to confirm your priors isn't the treatment.
| hartator wrote:
| Also feel they compare Tesla with autopilot vs. other cars.
| Instead of Tesla with autopilot vs. Tesla without autopilot. As
| Teslas have way better crash tests but doesn't mean autopilot is
| safer.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Being safer in a crash doesn't make it okay to crash.
| brk wrote:
| Nobody working in machine vision is surprised by this. We are a
| LONG way from having self-driving vehicles as a general thing,
| particularly when Tesla wants to rely on MV as their source of
| environment analysis.
| paxys wrote:
| I have felt since day 1 that "autopilot is better than the
| average driver!" is the most misleading fact/statistic in the
| industry.
|
| The "average driver" involved in an accident includes drunk
| drivers, road ragers, habitual speeders, teenagers, people
| driving in bad conditions (rain, snow), people driving without
| sleep and several other risky groups that most people buying
| Teslas aren't part of. To be worth it, the car has to reduce _my
| personal_ accident risk under the conditions I usually drive,
| otherwise I prefer to keep my own hands behind the wheel over
| handing over control to an algorithm.
| [deleted]
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| So basically everyone in a car? :)
| mrtksn wrote:
| If I remember correctly, they also cover the easy part of the
| road and make the human take over at tricky situations.
|
| So at the end of the day, you have spotless records for the
| autopilot that was driving many many miles on the straight line
| and humans having accidents at short intersections or
| construction sites. This translates into very favorable numbers
| for autopilot when presented as accidents per miles driven.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| If it were the case that autopilot was benefiting from
| dumping all of the difficult parts on the humans, you would
| expect to see much higher than average rates of accidents per
| mile on the human driven parts, because they're only getting
| the hard parts. This tends not to be true, so I'm doubting
| it's a real effect.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Your conclusion relies on the - quite faulty - assumption
| that "situations that inherently difficult for FSD to
| handle" are automatically "also more dangerous for human
| drivers". In snowy conditions, humans do just fine,
| generally, at following "lanes", be they the actual lane,
| or the safest route that everyone else is following. Humans
| are also capable of deducting lane direction, orientation,
| even when there are contradictory/old lane markings on the
| road, a situation FSD regularly causes danger in.
|
| Or that that negative effect is lost in the orders of
| magnitude of "all human drivers across all miles" versus
| FSD.
| tshaddox wrote:
| You don't think that human driver accident rates in snowy
| conditions are much higher than in fair weather
| conditions?
| mrtksn wrote:
| Humans don't disengage and let the machines handle the
| situation but machines do it all the time. Do the machines
| disengage at tricky situations or straight lines?
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| The statistics are there to read however, and suggest
| your reasoning is not correct.
|
| Case A: Non Tesla Human drives 999 easy miles and 1 hard
| mile
|
| Case B: Autopilot drives 999 easy miles, and human drives
| 1 hard mile
|
| If the effect size of the hard mile is so large that its
| skewing the statistics, you would expect the Telsa human
| driver to have a horrendous per mile accident rate
| relative to the non tesla human driver. What's most
| likely is that the accidents following a human handoff
| get correctly allocated to the Autopilot and the effect
| size being described is not actually that significant.
| buran77 wrote:
| Student drivers (with an instructor in the car, and
| secondary controls) have very few accidents, if any, not
| because of _their_ safety record but because every
| mistake is saved by the instructor. A car can be
| considered as driving "safer than a human" when it can
| match the average human in _any_ conditions the average
| human drives. Everything else is just squinting at the
| data and _choosing_ an interpretation that fits your
| personal opinion.
|
| A Tesla can relatively safely cover traffic like divided
| or controlled access highways. That's a very narrow slice
| of all possible driving situations and not one
| responsible for most accidents.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| So as a thought experiment, if Autopilot + Human
| intervention reduced the rate of accidents by 50% vs.
| just humans after normalization; can we consider
| autopilot to be adding value?
| buran77 wrote:
| Of course the Autopilot adds value, all such driver
| assists are there to add value and help the driver on any
| car. I just don't think Autopilot can _drive_ , let alone
| _drive safer than a human_. There 's a difference between
| "helping a human drive safer" and "driving safer than a
| human". This is a confusion many people make when reading
| these stats, to Tesla's benefit.
|
| Also the oldest Tesla with AP is less than 10 years old
| (with an average of 3-4 years given the sales trends).
| The average age of cars on the street in the US is over
| 12 years old. An accident statistic that looks at
| reasonably new, premium cars against everything else
| won't paint the correct picture.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| If that means the supervision actually works, then it
| doesn't sound like there's a problem?
| runarberg wrote:
| > Student drivers (with an instructor in the car, and
| secondary controls) have very few accidents [...] because
| every mistake is saved by the instructor
|
| Is that the only reason? I suspect that many (most)
| student drivers are also in general more alert, drive
| slower, and follow each rule/guideline to an extreme. If
| they don't the instructor will probably end the lesson
| and remove a dangerous driver of the road.
| mrtksn wrote:
| stats for easy miles and hard miles? link please?
|
| Humans don't crash at every tricky situation but Tesla
| claims that humans are horrible drivers and their cars
| gives the control to the humans when when something
| happens.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Literally any distribution of hard miles and easy miles
| will produce the same outcome in this thought experiment,
| to varying effects, if your premise of Tesla hiding the
| AI's incompetence with passing off to humans when driving
| is challenging is accurate.
|
| If your premise is to be believed as a significant
| effect, you must also accept that this outcome should be
| visible in the data
| jonathankoren wrote:
| It's not just that. There's a context switch when the
| autodrive disengages, so the human is actually less ready
| for the hard mile than if they were driving the whole
| time. Sure m, the human is supposed to be able to take
| control at anytime, but I don't think that really
| happens. The whole purpose of autodrive is do you don't
| have to pay attention and drive.
| mkipper wrote:
| Is this data available anywhere? How do I know that non-
| autopilot Tesla mile per accident rates aren't horrible?
|
| Tesla publishes their own data for the safety of
| autopilot, which I presume is based on their own analysis
| of accident records. Is this same detailed information
| available to other groups (insurers, NIST, etc)? Or do
| they just calculate an aggregate "Tesla mile per
| accident" rate that is a blend of the great autopilot
| rate and horrible human rate?
|
| I'm not trying to be facetious here. I have no idea if
| this data is available to any groups other than Tesla
| themselves. And if so, do they publish those numbers?
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Tesla releases the miles per crash rates quarterly, for
| autopilot and non autopilot cases. Autopilot crashes
| include anything within 5 seconds of disengagement. The
| human rate tends to be more than 2x worse than the
| autopilot rate. This is not normalized for factors like
| road context.
|
| The human rate for tesla driven miles tends to be ~4x
| better than the other brands' average. To precisely
| answer this question you would want to see both a
| comparable brand's humans' performance; and probably the
| split of humans who used autopilot and humans who don't
| ever use autopilot. We don't have that, but in my
| personal opinion there's enough evidence to suggest it's
| probably not a grand conspiracy. I'm of the opinion that
| autopilot being ballpark on par with other drivers is
| more than enough to reduce accidents substantially, at
| scale.
|
| https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
| jcranberry wrote:
| Could you provide a source? That sounds fairly interesting.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Just some reasoning really. Statistics and proper
| normalization are hard.
|
| Tesla tends to say that autopilot crashes occur 1/2 as
| often as non autopilot crashes. That's likely not
| normalized to road conditions. But if you assume that
| Tesla is secretly just putting all the hard miles on the
| humans, then that would imply humans are driving many
| more hard miles and should have higher accident rates.
| The autopilots meanwhile must be performing worse on the
| easy miles and racking up additional accidents that
| wouldn't have otherwise happened.
|
| If you combine those two, the overall rate of accidents
| should be higher than average, but it's actually lower by
| a fair margin. Again, normalization is hard.
|
| Ideally you would be able to compare human drivers of
| another comparable car brand to the human drivers of
| Tesla to confirm the Tesla drivers don't seem to be being
| judged on unreasonably difficult conditions.
| mrtksn wrote:
| There was a sourse but I could not find it ATM. It's
| fairly simple, people don't disengage and their driving
| safety is judged over all the miles they drive + all the
| situations where Autopilot disengages.
|
| Tesla Autopilot is judged only by the miles driven
| without disengagement, which is quite limited actually.
| You can watch Youtube videos to see at what kind of
| situations Tesla autopilot gives up.
|
| There's no situation where the Autopilot takes over from
| the human saying "That's a tricky road, let me handle
| it".
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| You seem to be missing the point though. If this were
| significant, then human tesla drivers should be shown as
| performing much worse than other car drivers, because
| you're claiming they have a disproportionately large
| riding time in "tricky roads".
|
| A non tesla driver should be doing way better because
| they get to pad their score with the easy roads the
| autopilot supposedly gets.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| As mentioned elsewhere, just because a situation is
| difficult for FSD to parse and process doesn't inherently
| make it a dangerous situation for a human driver.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Maybe that's the case, Tesla data isn't public. They
| don't publish data but conclusions and their conclusions
| are questionable.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Actually its more an issue that other car companies don't
| publish their data for comparison.
|
| On a dumb average tesla is way better, but it'd be more
| compelling if we could compare to new luxury brands with
| similar target markets
| mrtksn wrote:
| How it's other car companies fault that Tesla isn't
| publishing data so we can check if Autopilot miles are
| mostly on straight lines and human miles are at tricky
| situations?
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| So how much better than the median randomly assigned uber
| driver does it need to be?
| [deleted]
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Huh. Citation needed that drivers who buy, say, a Model S,
| particularly one with Ludicrous mode are less likely to be
| "habitual speeders" than the average driver.
|
| This has come up before. When the new FSD beta started, people
| started claiming that safe driving was a function of vehicle
| price, and therefore Tesla drivers, especially those who had
| paid for FSD, were more likely to be safer. When I noted that
| my current vehicle costs more than a Model S, based on the
| logic, Tesla should be recruiting me to beta test FSD, well it
| was hard to find a refutation.
| tshaddox wrote:
| But that's not really contradictory, is it? If you believe that
| you're a better driver than autopilot, just don't use it, or
| buy another car. It's not at all dishonest or deceptive
| marketing (if the claim is factually accurate, of course).
| ajross wrote:
| > several other risky groups that most people buying Teslas
| aren't part of.
|
| This is a fallacy. Ask any demographic you like if they're road
| ragers, drunk drivers, etc... and they'll deny it. Everyone is
| sure that rare and terrible outcomes will never happen to them
| because of their own behavior, _including_ the people to whom
| it happens!
|
| It's _probably_ true that middle aged premium car owners are
| safer on average, but you don 't get to rule that stuff out by
| fiat. In fact there have been a few "Autopilot Saves Passed Out
| Driver" stories over the past few months, where Tesla drivers
| were clearly impaired.
|
| As for this particular paper: this is just P-hacking folks. You
| can't take a vague dataset[1] and then "correct" it like this
| without absolutely huge error bars. Why correct based only
| these variables? Why did they all push the results in one
| direction? Why not gender? Why not income? Why not compare vs.
| like cars?
|
| This isn't good statistics, it's just more statistics. If we
| want the real answers we should get a better data set (which,
| I'll agree, would likely involve some regulatory pressure on
| manufacturers).
|
| [1] And, to be fair: Tesla's safety report is hardly
| comprehensive and provides no data other than the aggregate
| numbers.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| I just think a lot of Tesla drivers see themselves as elite
| drivers or something when we all know that's not true if you
| step back away from the situation.
| Majromax wrote:
| > You can't take a vague dataset and then "correct" it like
| this without absolutely huge error bars.
|
| That ship has already sailed; Tesla makes active safety
| claims based on that dataset. To hold research to your
| standard here would be to say that Tesla can make its claims,
| but nobody can challenge those claims.
|
| > Why did they all push the results in one direction?
|
| If you have two correction steps, then a priori you'd expect
| a 25% chance that they both act in the same direction. I
| don't think this is very remarkable.
|
| > Why not gender?
|
| This probably would be a reasonable addition. I doubt it
| would change the results much, but we have the well-known
| fact that insurance rates differ for men and women, so it may
| be relevant.
|
| > Why not income?
|
| First, is this data even generally available? If the data
| doesn't exist, then we can't control for it.
|
| Second, should we expect crash rates per mile driven to
| differ greatly by owner/driver income? A priori, I wouldn't
| think this demographic quality to have a strong impact.
|
| > Why not compare vs. like cars?
|
| I think "personal vehicle" is a reasonable comparative
| category. Would we expect collision rates to differ greatly
| between more specific categorizations? For the sake of the
| overall conclusion, would we expect Tesla-equivalents to be
| particularly crash prone in the broad dataset?
|
| Any statistical analysis will have its limitations, but when
| we're talking about life-safety claims from a manufacturer I
| think we should have wide latitude to look at critical
| evaluations of the original data.
| [deleted]
| beambot wrote:
| Confounding factors matter.
|
| E.g. I would not be at all surprised if drivers of high-end
| BMWs have lower deaths per mile due to older population, more
| affluent, etc.
| jjulius wrote:
| I don't disagree with your broader statement about autopilot's
| safety relative to other drivers, but...
|
| >The "average driver" involved in an accident includes drunk
| drivers, road ragers, habitual speeders, teenagers, people
| driving in bad conditions (rain, snow), people driving without
| sleep and several other risky groups that most people buying
| Teslas aren't part of.
|
| ... _what_? Tesla owners absolutely can be habitual speeders,
| people who drive without sleep, road ragers, and drunk drivers.
| Can you please explain your thought process behind this claim?
| I really don 't understand why anyone would assume that Tesla
| owners are less likely to have those traits than non-Tesla
| owners.
| w-j-w wrote:
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Because they are buying an expensive, new car, meaning higher
| income, meaning that those things are less likely :
| https://academic.oup.com/alcalc/article/46/6/721/129644
| capableweb wrote:
| In my person experience, the "drunk drivers", "road
| ragers", "habitual speeders" groups seems to be over-
| represented in expensive cars rather than cheaper cars.
| Poor people cannot afford to crash their car while rich
| people can.
| paxys wrote:
| Data released by the DOL and insurance companies does not
| match with your personal experience. There's a reason 18
| year olds driving shitty cars pay through their nose for
| liability coverage.
| huubuub wrote:
| I do not think a car crash is normally the result of a
| decision people make based on whether they can afford it
| or not.
| aeternum wrote:
| Keep in mind that this study could just mean that people in
| expensive cars with higher incomes are less likely to be
| arrested/stopped by police.
| lelandfe wrote:
| Hmm.. The underlying studies (Baum, 2000; Eensoo et al.,
| 2005) that found links between socioeconomic status and
| DUI/DWI did so by comparing those arrested against a
| control group - which I believe should deal with that
| concern?
| paxys wrote:
| For your specific question, actuarial tables for car
| accidents/deaths are available publicly, and the profile for
| the typical Tesla owner (middle aged, high income, driving
| expensive sedan/SUV) is considered much safer than average.
|
| Moreover it is true in general that most people driving
| aren't drunk or high, aren't reckless etc., and so most Tesla
| drivers aren't either. The number of accidents isn't
| uniformly distributed among the public.
|
| More broadly though, I never said that zero Tesla owners (or
| any other specific car drivers) do any of these things, but
| that using autopilot with an above average safety record can
| still mean that the personal safety of an individual or group
| of individuals goes down. For the system to be a net benefit
| it has to be pushed to the below average drivers.
| vletal wrote:
| Yeah, seems like a typo a GPT-3 would do.
|
| The claim seems to be that Teslas do not drink before
| driving, not Tesla owners, right?
| jahewson wrote:
| I read it that way at first too but I think the reasoning is
| actually correct. The population of Tesla drivers will of
| course resemble the overall population of drivers but most
| drivers are not sleepy/raging/drunks and by extension "most
| people buying Teslas aren't part of" that group either.
|
| To use an analogy: the average person has 1.9 legs but a
| product which results in its user having 1.95 legs is not an
| improvement for most people.
| ketzo wrote:
| Wow. Excellent analogy.
| jasonhansel wrote:
| For an individual person to be willing to adopt autopilot on
| safety grounds, autopilot has to be safer than _that
| individual person 's_ driving, not just safer than the
| _average person 's_ driving.
|
| If your driving skill is above the mean (because you're never
| a road rager, speeder, etc.), then you're worse off using
| Autopilot, even if Autopilot is as safe as the average
| driver.
|
| Since most people probably consider themselves above average
| drivers (and in fact most people may _be_ above the mean if
| the bad drivers are outliers), this limits the number of
| people who will believe that Autopilot makes them safer.
| Xylakant wrote:
| I think it's fair to compare to the average driver. You may be
| not average by virtue of not being a teenager and not driving
| drunk, but you're not magically immune to being run over or
| crashed into by one of those. So even if a hypothetical FSD
| capable car would not drive one yota better than you do, it
| cwould still make you safer by virtue of making the surrounding
| environment safer.
| paxys wrote:
| Sure the worst drivers out there utilizing assist tech like
| autopilot would benefit everyone, but data shows that they
| aren't the ones spending money on fancy cars. My comment was
| about me making a decision for myself.
|
| Plus in your hypothetical the autopilot can drive at least as
| well as me, which is also a big assumption and not something
| I believe with what I have seen so far.
| djanogo wrote:
| It can't be just any "average driver", they should be
| compared against "average driver" who just bought $40-50K NEW
| car.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> "average driver" who just bought $40-50K NEW car.
|
| Driver and buyer/owner are different things. Few teenagers
| ever buy a Tesla, but they certainly drive them. A car
| cannot only be safe in the hands of the rich initial buyer
| who lives in a nice climate. It must be safe in all the
| other people who that owner may let drive. It must also be
| safe for subsequent second and third owners, people who
| might not be wealthy enough to stay home when it rains or
| when the autopilot thinks conditions are too rough. (It was
| -35c on my drive to work this morning. Dark. Ice fog then
| blowing snow.)
| IshKebab wrote:
| Uhm, I don't know what insanely rich middle eastern
| country you're from but in most of the world teenagers do
| not generally drive Teslas!!
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Have you been to LA, SF, Vancouver or Denver? These are
| Teslas, not Ferraris. Lots of teenagers are driving their
| parent's tesla. Go look at any university parking lot and
| you will find plenty of 50,000$ cars.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Exactly right. The population has to be compared to people
| driving new Volvo S90 or M-B C300, cars that have IIHS
| fatality rates of zero.
| obmelvin wrote:
| If you are speaking about the safety features in a new car,
| then I won't disagree. However, if you are implying that
| those with a nice new car are somehow better drivers, more
| attentive drivers, or care more about their car then I
| would highly disagree. As someone who purchased a new car
| last year, and does greatly care about it, I'm routinely
| shocked by people and their clear disregard for their own
| vehicle. Reckless driving, texting while not even
| attempting to look, and the way people park their cars so
| close to you that they can't even get out* have all shocked
| me now that I'm paying more attention.
|
| * I have even stared at this guy struggling to get out of
| his fancy Jeep who opened his door into my car. I know this
| anecdotal, but all it takes is a few counter examples to
| show that car price etc does not have a super high
| correlation to how careful & considerate you are.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Look at the accident and fatality rates for drivers of
| luxury cars. They are much, much lower than the same
| rates for less expensive cars. In fact, if you break it
| down by vehicle model, there are several models with 0
| fatalities at all.
| rightbyte wrote:
| No.
|
| I'm not going to boast about how good of a driver I am (I
| am!!), but lets say I am a median driver. I would want a FSD
| to be _better_ than a median driver. Not the average crash
| /mile stats that include all kinds of long tail idiots doing
| the most damage. * ... alcohol-impaired
| driving crashes, accounting for 28% of all traffic-related
| deaths in the United States. * Drugs other
| than alcohol (legal and illegal) are involved in about 16% of
| motor vehicle crashes.
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/impaired_driving/im.
| ..
|
| So 44% intoxicated to some degree (unless the stats overlap).
| That number is not even including reckless drivers not
| driving under influence, teenagers that just got the license,
| bad health elderly etc.
| cma wrote:
| Tesla's claim relied on inclusion of motorcycles one time,
| which seems super misleading and unfair.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Misleading, from a company that once (several days ago)
| claimed that they sold more cars in Australia than Camry's
| last year.
|
| Until someone pointed out that vehicle registration...
| disagreed. By nearly 30%.
|
| Then "Oops. We made a mistake and counted 3,000+ deliveries
| which haven't actually been, well, delivered."
|
| I hope they get spanked hard for that. Australia has very
| onerous "truth in advertising" laws.
| yumraj wrote:
| Given what I've been hearing/reading about _autopilot_ I'm
| more worried about being hit by one of them than a human
| driver.
| larksimian wrote:
| My problem is that the median driver is much much better than
| the mean driver and tesla os comparing against means.
|
| The damage done in a car distribution is heavily skewed
| towards people that get in fatal crashes or total a car. I'd
| randomly guess like 20-30% of drivers are below mean. Most
| people won't total a car, vast majority will never kill
| anyone.
|
| If you get median people into an autopilot car that's got a
| mean safety record we end up pulling the average down, the
| road becomes less safe. And luxury sedan buyers tend to be
| one of the safest demos on the road, which makes the problem
| even worse.
| xapata wrote:
| Median vs mean of what measure?
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| But is it safer than human drivers?
|
| This is the real question, because a "perfect" autopilot may be
| impossible because of cases where it must choose between
| sacrificing something outside the car vs its occupants and there
| will be disagreement.
|
| Setting the bar at "perfect" is pretty unrealistic given that
| humans are already pretty bad.
| amelius wrote:
| Can we have Self-driving Formula 1 before we get these cars on
| the street please?
| pengaru wrote:
| Cruise-control (including Autopilot) is only applicable to a
| subset of ideal driving conditions anyways.
|
| You'd make the comparison of cruise-control crash rates vs.
| general driving in all conditions if you were trying to abuse
| statistics for marketing your gimmick cruise-control feature.
|
| It's unclear to me how you'd even attempt to normalize the data
| when you don't have national crash rates for cruise-control only
| miles in non-Tesla vehicles.
|
| I saw mention that one of the TLA's investigating Teslas crashing
| into emergency vehicles subpoenaed _all_ manufacturers of
| vehicles sold w /L2 cruise-control features for their safety
| data. Maybe that will produce some normalized-enough data for
| making a meaningful comparison.
| YaBomm wrote:
| [deleted]
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I find this headline to be pretty misleading.
|
| * It doesn't find anything to suggest Autopilot is less safe than
| claimed. It finds reasons to believe Autopilot's improvement on
| safety relative to humans is less than claimed
|
| * Under both the road adjusted model; and the road+age adjusted
| model, Autopilot outperforms the average driver on average. Not
| by much, but its there.
|
| * Everyone here seems to be assuming that the takeaway is that
| Autopilot is less safe than humans, but there's no evidence for
| that. If the numbers here are to be believed, I would take it as
| a good sign for tesla, and by definition an advantage to people
| who are otherwise poor drivers?
|
| * Question: Why do crashes per million miles have such large
| swings in the baseline? It's weird that it varies so heavily by
| quarter without any obvious seasonal patterns to me.
|
| edit: mildly annoyed at getting downvoted for seeming to be the
| only person here noting that the blue line is on average below
| the red line on every chart shown.
| dboreham wrote:
| Perhaps the downvotes are because most people would be
| apprehensive about putting their life in the hands of an
| "average" safe driver that's built from software? I probably
| wouldn't allow any other average safe human to drive me, if the
| alternative of me driving myself is available.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| You never take ubers on the grounds of safety? Because that
| is, on average, an average human.
|
| Either way, I'm not too impressed. I wouldn't purchase
| Autopilot personally for similar safety reasons. But let's
| not twist the stats to suggest they're actually much worse
| than they are.
| leobg wrote:
| You've been commenting on a tweet by Edward Niedermeyer. The
| guy who created a site called "Tesla Death Watch" back in 2008.
|
| These downvotes have got nothing to do with you or with what
| you pointed out. Just some people here with sour grapes.
| maxdo wrote:
| >Although the ages of drivers in Tesla's crash rate data are
| unknown, their ages could be estimated from a 2018 demographic
| survey of 424 Tesla owners (Hardman et al., 2019).
|
| Seriously? you trying to claim your method is more fair using 424
| people in 2019, when Tesla has demographics of millions cars
| across the globe?
|
| My conclusion:
|
| Author is saying it's not fair to compare with some old car.
| Tesla was one of the first brands to mass adopt this safety
| features in every Telsa. This is the only brand that include
| camera, collision warnings in every, even cheapest modification.
| And they were the first to introduce many of these features. The
| rest are catching up. Why Tesla can't be proud of that? They give
| safety to every customer, no matter if it's the cheapest option
| or $150k+ car. Only volvo invest on par with tesla in testing
| facilities, in house extended crash tests ets.
|
| Autopilot and similar system is safer compares to any car on the
| highway with old cruise control because they have features that
| force you to be focused. They can stop you on a traffic light,
| they can react faster on animal running across the road etc. And
| Yes all measures like collision warnings, notifications, makes
| your driving safe. Yes, you can use it without autopilot, but I
| as a consumer don't care. If I'm buying a car, fact that this car
| is much safer compares to 10 years old ford makes me more
| confident in purchase.
|
| You can debate a lot on how easy is to avoid some of this safety
| measures. But if you an idiot you can fall asleep in cruise
| controlled car as well. Tesla will at least try to wake you up.
| And will stop on a traffic light.
|
| FSD is a good example of an extension of this rational vs
| emotional thinking. FSD Beta has a very strict focus control. You
| look not on a road few times you're blocked. You don't hold a
| wheel few times you blocked. Etc.
|
| So even FSD beta in it's current state is a complete garbage that
| quite often literally drives you into accident the way they
| enforce your attention fixes everything.
|
| FSD beta with this limitations has 60k cars on a road. And 0
| major incidents that lead to a major injury or death. Not
| counting few scratched rims and one time driver got off the road
| because he over reacted on some maneuver.
|
| It's bizarre how much money legacy auto is poring into efforts to
| make tesla look bad. Before it was infamous data of burning EV's.
| But if you look at data a single car brand BMW has so 100 times
| more risk of fire compares to tesla. You don't see paid articles
| on Times square how dangerous is BMW.
|
| Right now all major brands invest in EV and suddenly all this
| fire incidents disappear. And they switched to Autopilot and FSD.
|
| Is there a room for improvement yes. Is the car that can stop on
| a traffic light, after some fixes for a cop's car, notify about
| potential collision, avoid automatically some collisions safer.
| Definitely yes. The rest is just hype, speculations and quite
| often corruption and paid articles.
| laomai wrote:
| Regarding some of the conversations about programming something
| to obey the law or obey human convention:
|
| - it's tricky because the people on the roads expect human
| convention and drive for that
|
| - as long as there is a mix of humans that drive by convention,
| it's probably best to err on the side of following human
| convention to some degree
|
| Case in point: center lane
|
| When I first started using autopilot on two lane roads the car
| would stay dead center in the lane. If a car was coming towards
| my in the opposite lane, it began to notice humans would veer
| away from center to provide more buffer between themselves and
| the oncoming car.
|
| Because I didn't want to piss other drivers off, I would often
| disengage and drift to the right of my lane while the oncoming
| car approached me. If I didn't do that, there was always a last
| minute extra drift away from me by the other car.. the
| conventionally expected buffer distance wasn't enough to make
| them feel comfortable due to unexpected (lack of) behavior.
|
| It's not a law / no law issue above. But I have similar
| experiences navigation into roundabouts with crosswalks in front
| of them (autopilot stops at empty crosswalk where normal driver
| would cruise through until the stop line to check for cars in the
| roundabout -- and if none were there might pass through with a
| rolling stop/check.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| Tesla should release demographic info if they have it. IIRC,
| luxury vehicles tend to have lower accident/fatality rates
| because their buyers tend to be more experienced, mature, and
| wealthier.
|
| I'm also wondering about the assumptions the pre-print makes.
|
| https://engrxiv.org/preprint/view/1973/3986
|
| For example, it's assumed that Tesla's data has the same
| characteristics as the SHRP 2 NDS data, and that the demographic
| survey data from Hardman et al is accurate WRT the SHRP 2 NDS
| data.
|
| > The analysis in this paper relies on the assumption that the
| freeway-to-non-freeway and age group crash ratios found in the
| SHRP 2 NDS are consistent with the manufacturer's data, as there
| are no roadway specific nor age-related factors in the
| manufacturer safety report.
|
| > Although the ages of drivers in Tesla's crash rate data are
| unknown, their ages could be estimated from a 2018 demographic
| survey of 424 Tesla owners (Hardman et al., 2019).
|
| But... It seems like Hardman et al are using California specific
| data.
|
| https://escholarship.org/content/qt58t7674n/qt58t7674n_noSpl...
|
| > In this study, we used a cohort survey of Plug-in Electric
| Vehicles (PEV) owners in California administered by the authors
| in November 2019. Respondents had been previously surveyed by the
| UC Davis Plug-in and Hybrid & Electric Vehicle (PH&EV) Research
| Center between 2015 and 2018 as part of four surveys in the eVMT
| project when they originally bought their PEV. Respondents for
| the four phases of the eVMT survey were sampled from the pool of
| PEV buyers who had applied for the state rebate from the
| California Vehicle Rebate Program (CVRP). More than 25,000 PEV
| owners were surveyed between 2015 and 2018. A total of 15,000 of
| these respondents gave consent to be re-contacted and were
| invited for the repeat survey in 2019. In all, 4,925 PEV owners
| responded to the repeat survey.
|
| And... The newer data indicates that age could be positively with
| more Autopilot use and long-distance travel (also correlated with
| more Autopilot use), which seems like a confound WRT to the pre-
| print's conclusions and so on.
|
| > Age is negatively correlated, indicating that the lower the
| driver's age the higher the odds of reporting more long-distance
| travel. This suggests Autopilot induces travel among younger
| Tesla owners. As with the model with all Level 2 automation,
| users' income is negatively correlated.
| savant_penguin wrote:
| So tesla owners belong to some specific age group and that makes
| it safer?
| croes wrote:
| I doubt that full self driving is possible in the near future
| without changes to the cars and the infrastructure to help the
| autonomous systems.
| petilon wrote:
| It is available today in a limited area:
| https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/03/cruise-launches-driverless...
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| How is this still front page? Somebody sleeping?
|
| In case you missed them, there have been 5 tesla stories nuked
| from the front page today: 'Self driving' Tesla
| fails miserably on the streets of South Boston
|
| 30 points 22 comments
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30173566
| Tesla Australia admits its sales figures were wrong
|
| 39 points 14 comments
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30176635
| Tesla drivers report a surge in 'phantom braking'
|
| 42 points 79 comments
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30179681
| Self-driving Tesla does 'the craziest things you can imagine'
|
| 96 points 172 comments
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30178168
| [deleted]
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| There are valid criticisms of Tesla, this normalized data story
| is probably one of them, but the fans and anti-fans of Tesla
| are so equally rabid that it is nearly impossible to have a
| rational conversation about it.
|
| Expressing a view in either direction results in an instant
| pile-on of trolls and flames.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| There are valid criticisms, and there is being...overly
| enthusiastic.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=camjohnson26
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| So Tesla news can be discussed anywhere except HN?
|
| The reason HN is exceptional is that it has a lot of readers
| working on or near AI, who will quickly call out the B.S. in
| Tesla PR. They know this, so all Tesla stories get nuked.
| contravariant wrote:
| Lack of the word 'Tesla' in the title probably does it. As well
| as not tripping the flame war detector probably. We'll see how
| this thread fares.
| [deleted]
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