Why do you say that? Student drivers certainly do get into accidents, despite the fact that some driver's ed cars allow the instructor to take partial control. When my partner was in a program, the student driving the car they were in rear-ended another car.

Maybe you mean that it doesn't go on their driving record, but is that really true? The one reference I could quickly find of this happening says that the student was issued an infraction: https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2018/04/04/Student-driver-crash...

You're missing the point: if you don't have a good sample size, then you don't have good data.

Data which also excludes situations (i.e. autopilot throwing control back to the human and counting that time as "autopilot not in use") is bad data.

I think you replied to the wrong comment, I'm talking about student drivers, not Teslas.

You're getting really into the weeds on a broader point. Suppose we give a new driver their license - but they've never driven before. Technically they have a perfect driving record. Even 1 or 2 hours in on road, still a perfect driving record.

Most student drivers in fact will have in fact, completely perfect driving records. That accidents happen is irrelevant - just think - those stats for the first couple of months probably look spectacular compared to the normal population.

The original comparison is all about this use of a biased dataset to draw an invalid conclusion. Except with student drivers we know that actually we shouldn't trust that conclusion, because in practice they have an insufficient amount of experience and have not likely dealt with many challenging road situations.

With Tesla, it's the same sort of problem.

> That accidents happen is irrelevant - just think - those stats for the first couple of months probably look spectacular compared to the normal population.

This is exactly the point I'm disagreeing on. I have no reason to think that student drivers do better (in, say, number of crashes per thousand hours driven) than other drivers. In fact they probably do worse. The person I replied to suggested that student drivers all have perfect records, and I'm genuinely perplexed about how that could possibly be the case... my question is genuine - I simply don't understand what they meant.

> student drivers have the best driving record out there. No fines, no accidents.

> I'm genuinely perplexed about how that could possibly be the case

I live in Europe where student drivers must be accompanied at all times while driving by a professional instructor with secondary controls at their disposal. There's no "just have an adult with a driver license dozing off in the passenger seat and you're good to go".

The instructor holds a lot of responsibility, they are responsible for everything that happens in/with the car, so they make sure to be very conservative with that brake pedal and instructions. "No accidents" may have been a small exaggeration, surely a couple of them will eventually have one. But statistically students are by far safer than regular drivers because their mistakes rarely if ever turn into an incident. The special conditions (constant supervision, lower speeds, controlled route, etc.) make sure of this.

But this just makes my point in a way my comment above couldn't: when you're lacking data even reality can be genuinely perplexing.

Tesla's statistics are misleading because this serves them. Comparing the number of accidents between a fleet of modern cars to one where the average age is 12 years, excluding city driving because nobody does that anyway, and not counting every driver made adjustment as a failure of the AP is specifically meant to give the wrong impression.

Any car can drive itself on the highway if you just tweak the steering wheel one in a while to keep it on the road. That's what, 0.1s every 10s? But saying it drives itself 99% of the time is misleading at best.

I'm sure driver assists help reduce accidents and they're the way to the future. But Tesla's "conclusion" that AP is safer than a human driver based on their misleading statistics is a flat out marketing lie.

> I live in Europe where student drivers must be accompanied at all times while driving by a professional instructor with secondary controls at their disposal.

I don't know if you're familiar with Asterix comics, but this is one of those "All of Gaul?" type situations. Belgium allows parents to teach children on a probationary license. Nowadays, the requirement is the parent has held a license for 8 years and hasn't been in an accident in I believe the last 3. The student driver also isn't allowed to drive between 10pm and 6am during weekends and the nights preceding and following official holidays.

It also allows people to drive fully autonomously up to 18 months with a probationary license before they take their official test - which they fail once on average. During Covid, those 18 months might have become 24 or more, because test centres were closed.

Mea culpa, I wasn't aware of countries in Europe where this is allowed and I generalized because I'd rather not share specifics. Is this a years or decades old thing?

Maybe it was just my bias making me assume it's the kind of field where you'd want professional training in a car with dual controls, not a regular car with an instructor who might have never driven after getting their license 8 years ago, or one that has an abysmal driving record but took a break for 3 years and it's "clean". And even a great driver would have difficulties avoiding an accident when the controls are on the other side of the car.

In Belgium? This system's been around since the late 90s at least.

That's a pretty weak argument regardless of your stance on self driving cars. Student driver records aren't meaningful because we don't have enough data to make a judgement. We have lots of data on self driving cars. There are other ways to cast doubt on self driving car records but this isn't one of them.

Tesla's self driving cars are students that are under constant supervision of their teachers.

This shouldn't be downvoted to light grey. The analogy is excellent.

I presume this comment is talking about student drivers where the teacher has an override steering wheel. So the student gets into accidents at a lower than average rate because every time they get close to doing so the teacher takes over.

1) Most student hours aren't in override steering wheel cars

2) For this analogy to make sense, it needs to be an average driver, not a driving teacher

3) Unless you're claiming AI and human drivers are uniquely suited to solving different types of driving, if the effect you're claiming is true, you would expect the rate of human/teacher driving hours to be much worse than average because they miss out on all of the "easy" miles. So far, no evidence of this.

That's just a bad analogy though. If a student driver accumulates a million miles of driving with no accidents, they're probably a fine driver even if the teacher was in there the whole time. Conversely, you're not a safer driver if tomorrow a driving instructor decides to sit in the back seat of your car tomorrow.

Not if the student gives control back to the teacher every time there is a problem the student can't handle. The real metric is "dangerous/complicated driving situations mastered" and "miles driven" is only a stand-in. A bad one if the student can deselect the few miles which had the dangerous bits.

If we're really pushing this analogy however, then you would expect the teacher to have a much higher accident rate than the average driver because you're claiming the teacher only does the hard stuff, or, in the very least, misses out on the majority of the easy stuff (assuming, for comparability, that the teacher is an average competence driver).

Specifically, if you're claiming only 99/100 miles are easy and have no chance of crashes, then if a human only drives for the 1/100 miles that are hard, they should have a 100x higher crash rate than the human that drives all 100. They should probably have an even worse crash rate because of the switching cost of suddenly taking control, unless you want to make the weird argument that suddenly taking control of an autopilot car is safer.

The tesla report says autopilot experiences a crash every 4 million miles. With autopilot disengaged, it's every 2 million miles. The baseline national average is every 0.5 million miles.

I can't find the perfect statistics, but one study suggest uneducated people are 4x more likely to die in a car crash, so let's give some generous rounding and say, normalized to wealth, tesla drivers not actively using autopilot are at comparable levels to the average driver (1 per 2 million miles).

Unless telsa drivers are phenomenal emergency handlers, its difficult to explain how the non-autopilot crash rate could be so low, while also claiming tesla is hiding the true crash rate of its autopilot features by pushing difficult miles to human drivers, because the human drivers are receiving normal crash rates on what you claim is a much more difficult set of miles.

Its possible (probable) that the autopilot would experience a higher crash rate if it were not allowed to call in a human. But to ask generally if autopilot is reducing the total number of accidents that the drivers would experience otherwise, I'd say 'probably'.

It means they are probably fine to drive the courses they have been driving. However, we know with self-driving that it isn't necessarily representative of what they will be asked to drive. It is also not a particularly relevant comparison to human drivers, unless we normalize a bit for road/driving conditions.

You are artificially adding in a detail that the student is only driving in limited courses to imply there might be unfamiliar conditions to a self driving car where we shouldn't trust its performance.

That is a better point, but also just a different point from the one originally made.

Do you mean that any individual student driver is likely to have a perfect record because they haven't driven much? That seems like it wouldn't apply here, because Teslas have, in fact, driven a large number of miles.

Or are you claiming that supervised student drivers are much safer because they, like self driving cars today, are supervised?

Maybe I'm totally missing the point of your analogy, but it seems like it doesn't clarify much.

A student driver ran into my neighbors yard on our non-busy street.