Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

Re:Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never ... by tim333 on Saturday January 18, 2020 @07:18PM (#22088418)

Autopilot tends to be engaged on freeways / motorways where accidents are much lower than driving through town. If you do the stats properly Tesla's autopilot is probably more crash prone than just having a human drive.

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.

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Re:Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never ... by Groxx on Saturday January 18, 2020 @07:57PM (#22088583)

The vast majority of the data I'm able to find on road types covers only fatalities, not accidents... but New York has accident rates per road type (and junctions!) for several years[1], and their rates are very roughly 1 accident per 300k-500k for rural roads, and 1 per 500k-1m for "[fully] controlled access" (which I read as highways, with divided being by far the lowest rate).

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...

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Re:Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never ... by llukas on Saturday January 18, 2020 @08:46PM (#22088777)

It is not. Or maybe it is. We don't know:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/2019/06/09/tesla-aut...

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Re:Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never ... by jaclaz on Sunday January 19, 2020 @07:12AM (#22090978)

Still, there is IMHO a sampling error that makes the comparison not fully accurate.

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.

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Re:Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never ... by Groxx on Monday January 20, 2020 @12:30AM (#22096549)

To play devil's advocate slightly, you could pretty easily argue that self-driving tech is most useful to apply to the lower-safety brackets, which pull down that average.

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.

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Re:Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never ... by jaclaz on Monday January 20, 2020 @05:52AM (#22097953)

Yep, only that the lower-safety bracket cannot afford it, not today nor - presumably - in a near future.

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.

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