I mean... there are two million of these cars on the street now, and all but a tiny handful of early Roadsters and S's have full featured autopilot. If there was a significant safety signal in all that data somewhere it would be very clear against the noise background now, and it isn't.

That's not true at all, and you know it. Consider the extremes: if autopilot got in zero accidents over these however many million miles of travel, you'd have to admit it was safe to use, right? If it got in 10x as many accidents as the median vehicle, we'd all agree it was a deathtrap. There's value in those numbers. Well, the truth is somewhere in between, it gets in 4x fewer accidents (I think) than the median car. That still sounds good to me.

You're just nitpicking. You're taking a genuine truth (that the variables aren't independent because "miles travelled with AP" aren't randomly sampled) and trying to use it to throw out the whole data set. Probably because you don't like what it says.

But you can't do that. The antidote to incomplete or confounded analysis is better analysis. And no one has that. And I argue that if there was a signal there that says what you want ("Tesla AP is unsafe") that it would be visible given the number of cars on the road. And it's not.

Stop nitpicking and get data, basically. The time for nitpicking is when you don't have data.

Meanwhile, I do have this one datum about how OTA updates caused a couple of accidents (see OP's story.) You cannot just dismiss it because it doesn't agree with a larger trend, if that larger trend is undetectable in the data.

It's a 9x reduction relative to median vehicle and 4x vs. non-AP Teslas! I mean, go read it: https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

You're just making stuff up. That's not a weak signal at all, and you know it. The argument you should be making is that it's a confounded signal. But that requires a level of sophistication that you aren't supplying (nor is anyone else). Which is exactly why I mentioned way upthread that these digressions were so tiresome.

There's literally no data in the world that will satisfy you, just admit it. Yours is an argument from priors only, to the extent that one anecdote ("A Tesla hit me!") is enough to outweigh a report like that.

This is false, or at very best misleading, considering that Tesla's Autopilot is responsible for more than 10 fatalities. Or in other words, Tesla's AP has killed more people than the entire rest of the domestic auto industry's smart cruise control features. Combined. (And Tesla's "safety" data conspicuously fails to mention any of these fatalities.)

And that doesn't even include all the times that AP ran into stationary emergency vehicles, or the many slow-moving accidents in parking lots, or the many near-misses that were avoided because the other driver was able to avoid the suicidal Tesla in time.

Who's being misleading here?

Unless you're now claiming that FSD is just a version of smart cruise control?

But if you mean vanilla cruise control, people die using that every day.

The fact that Tesla fans can't grasp the concept that Tesla is (a) not perfect and (b) deliberately endangering people's lives for profit is unfortunately not shocking any more, but it doesn't mean the rest of us have to put up with that schadenfreude.

> Except there's no evidence that it does.

It sounds like you two are talking past one another.

I don't believe op is presenting evidence that it does. Instead, they are saying that there is at least one antidote (TFA) and that someone (presumably a government agency) should investigate it.

Second: I think you're being too charitable. I think it's abundantly clear that grandparent believes that there is a "significant risk to other road users", and that this single data point confirms it. And clearly it doesn't.