Eventually being better than humans seems like it's obviously going to happen. Not driving drunk, not getting distracted, and not sleeping at the wheel alone are advantages enough that I would be amazed if the balance doesn't eventually fall in favor of the self-driving car. Self-driving cars don't even have to be particularly good drivers to be better than the average human, given how much the human average is dragged down by recklessness.
Tell that to the jury when your self driving car runs into the side of school bus full of kids (which will happen given any reasonable adoption).
Self driving cars would have to be held to an almost insanely high standard to be “winnable lawsuit” proof.
A car manufacturer can already be sued for things that go wrong, in a car, but the world keeps spinning.
> In the 4th quarter, we registered one accident for every 3.07 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.10 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot and without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 1.64 million miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 479,000 miles.
It's pretty unsurprising that at least augmenting human attention and input with machine attention and input reduces accidents. I agree that the cross-over point in time for full automation being safer than human drivers is a total unknown though.
There were some stats that if you compare model S deaths to other luxury cars in the same price range they are about 3x higher for the S. Death rates in luxury cars are much lower than the average vehicle.
I think self driving tech will cut roads deaths eventually but it needs more work.
So even if it's just on highways, Autopilot is still out-performing humans by 2-3x, if not more.
On average, ignoring better luxury car rates mentioned elsewhere, and that I have no clue if this is representative. I would be surprised if broader data was so much worse that it would reverse the relationship though.
[1] https://www.dot.ny.gov/divisions/operating/osss/highway/acci...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/2019/06/09/tesla-aut...
The pool of "all vehicles" traveling on the road, comprises very old cars and pickup/trucks/vans, and all kind of drivers, including teens (or however inexperienced drivers) and older people that may be more likely to have slower response times or some other condition, like (say) poorer vision.
Besides the fact that Tesla's are at the most a few years old and being on the pricy end (which should imply that they are properly maintained), they are "sport cars" (in the sense that they have very good handling and breaking) and they are driven (I believe) by a certain subset of drivers, relatively young but with no or very few inexperienced drivers.
So even if it's not as good as the healthy-and-wealthy bracket that might be safer, if it's better than the average then it'd be potentially significantly better than the non-healthy-and-wealthy. In that light this seems like a massive win.
And - to be fair - think "Sabrina" (the movie with Audrey Hepburn), really rich people traditionally had professional drivers (chauffers) which maybe had an even lower rate of accidents.
First of all. Tesla counts the number of miles for every Tesla being involved in an accident. The other figure you quote is for all miles driven by motor vehicles before getting involved in an accident. Given that accidents tend to involve two or more vehicles the number of miles traveled before an accident involving a Tesla without autopilot or safety measures would be closer to 820.000 miles.
In that figure of 479.000 miles commercial traffic is also included. Commercial traffic makes up around 60% of all accidents. We cannot translate this to miles per accident comparable to Tesla, because commercial traffic tends to drive more miles than passenger vehicles do, but there are far less of them, etc. Another big category that needs to be excluded from the general figure is motor cycles, that generous source of donor organs, to make it comparable. Passenger vehicles in general are more safe than the overal figure and thus closer to Tesla's figure.
Second point is that Teslas are hardly part of the second hand or n-hand market yet. It is even a question if Tesla will tracks that data in those markets. In those markets you will see more young people as drivers (something to do with income). They are responsible for a majority of the traffic accidents involving passenger vehicles (something to do with tendencies to discount the future and to overestimate their own capabilities).
Third point is that the really good figure comes from auto pilot, but that only works in places and under conditions that are already far less accident prone like highways under normal weather conditions.
The good news from the figures is that enabling the safety measures make Tesla drivers better drivers: From 1.6 miles to 2.1 miles roughly a 25% increase in miles traveled before an accident. That would lead us in the direction of mandating level-2 automation in all new cars for more safety rather than trying to push for level-5 for some brands.
You're doing that the wrong way, aren't you?
If 479k is total miles across an average of two cars, then the single-car equivalent, the number you'd compare to the Tesla numbers, is 240k.
It doesn't really make sense to adjust the Tesla numbers to do the comparison, but if you did you'd be doubling them, not halving them.
> We cannot translate this to miles per accident comparable to Tesla, because commercial traffic tends to drive more miles than passenger vehicles do, but there are far less of them, etc.
Neither of those reasons makes them incomparable.
- Only Telsa: distance_travelled / num_accidents = v t / 1
- Two cars involved, but counted as one accident : distance_travelled / num_accidents = 2 v t / 1There was a competing study done against cars with similar price/age/safety equipment that didn't have the auto pilot option and Tesla caused considerably more accidents.
It seems to me that knowing the autopilot isn't 100% perfect is a good reason to not rely on it in more dangerous or complicated scenarios (construction, roads with poor markings, school areas).
I haven't followed too closely here though, just curious if that is a reasonable hypothesis.
When you are comparing numbers. You compare like-to-like. Tesla specifically prohibits engaging Autopilot in difficult situations and encourages during long boring straight drives.
It's far too soon to claim we've hit peak performance.
We live on a planet around a midlife star. The amount of resources available to us over the next 10,000 years is staggering.
Autopilot doesn't need to be 2x or 10x better than a human driver -- it needs to be 100x or 1,000x better, or nobody (sane) should touch it.
The problem is not that autopilot is superior than your own driving in the vast majority of the cases! The problem is the 1 in a million times when it makes a trivial mistake that virtually no human would, and kills you instantly. Like driving under an obvious semi-trailer, and shearing your torso off.
An understandable example: You have two games of chance, both with identical 5/6 chance of winning.
One game, you'll play immediately (and as often as possible). The other, you would never play, not even once.
How is that possible? Both have identical 5/6 chances of winning? But, one is "ergotic", meaning that the odds hold over the long term as often as you play, and one is "non-ergotic", meaning that as soon as you lose, you're finished.
One is a single dice roll.
The other is Russian Roulette.
Self-driving cars are Russian Roulette. One "mistake" on the part of the system, and you're dead. The fact that the "stats" prove that it is safer, overall, don't change the fact: you and your family are dead.
Non-ergotic stats are not comparable to ergotic (group) stats.
Given a population of a million all would prefer a 1 in a million chance of death under a semi to a 1 in 10k chance of being smeared in a more average fashion.
Your argument is the same one used against seat belts with people advocating a strictly inferior survival strategy to prevent a rare misadventure.
Let's say those driver-hours would have resulted in 3 deaths of others (in vehicles or pedestrians) but your autodrive results in 1 different death (which wouldn't have occurred with the human drivers).
Your stats are no comfort at all to the loved ones of your victim.
It's like the Trolley Problem but the humans are unidentifiable.
I would always pick the most valuable to me side and pull the switch or leave it be to bring about the better end result. Given the availability of self driving vehicles that reduce mortality choosing to drive oneself and kill more people is an unethical choice that will be as little comfort to the 3 victims as the one.
I would always pick the most valuable to me side
Real life is complicated.
Why did you include the fact that they were killers fleeing police? Are, you supposing that I will somehow infer this in the 2 seconds I have to react or you just positing completele nonsense to muddy the waters with emotions?
Pedanticaly one would virtually never choose to hit pedestrians instead of cars because pedestrians don't have crumple zones or air bags.
The big question is should cars prioritize the owners health or the greater good and If the latter what is the greater good.
I don't think people will turn on a product that might decide to kill them to save a school bus so it's simplified to minimizing chance of fatalities while protecting the owner absolutely even if this risks others.
The only thing that matters is the overall odds there is no inherent mathematical difference between the 2 scenarios.
There is no difference to prefer more likely death in common scenario to less likely death in a stupider scenario.
If you believe otherwise you ought to explicate with numbers.
The 1000x better demand is more a stupid human illusion of control thing like fearing flying more than a road trip of equal distance.
However, unless HN implements K-Means clustering, a single-axis downvote mechanism will inevitably lead to echo-chamber bullying, I believe.
Especially if no-one fights back, encouraging the people who vote “sensible” vs “nonsense”, and discouraging the “like” vs “don’t like” voters who ruin debate.