It's 5 seconds, not 30 seconds. From Tesla safety report [1]:

> To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds before impact, and we count all crashes in which the incident alert indicated an airbag or other active restraint deployed.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

The whole point is "my new system reduces crashes", if it doesn't, in the bottom line, then it doesn't.

If I said to you "following the introduction of a new drug there have been 1000 heart attacks in the USA this year so far", you may think, shit, 1000 people have had heart attacks, but when you realise that there are 800,000 heart attacks per year in the USA, making it about 400,000 pro-rata for June, reducing that down to 1000 would be amazing.

So, 273 crashes. But what would that figure be without the system?

We need the data to compare this to groups of drivers who don't use these systems. Otherwise, it's meaningless. The numbers are meaningless. Like values without units.

But we DO have the data for "groups of drivers who don't use these systems" ...

The one interesting bit is where the damage happened on the cars and the hitting of stationary objects. Those seem like unforced autopilot errors.

Also,

>I'm no Tesla fan, but ...

Sounds like he's vouching for them.

Anyway, the argument is not against @bradfa, it is about whether AP makes driving safer or not.

In these kinds of cases, then yes, Autopilot is definitely partly at fault, but also the human is because Autopilot is only a level 2 system, the human is still responsible.

True.

> In these kinds of cases, then yes, Autopilot is definitely partly at fault,

Partly? Now that's called shilling.

Citation needed, certainly for the case at hand, where you’re suddenly required to drive a car in an emergency situation.

(Edited to add the claim I responded to, because it looks like a few replies didn’t look at that context)

Human error/poor decisions, mechanical/electronic failures, acts of god could all reasonably be labelled as reasons.

Regardless of time.

10 seconds before impending collision, and it's hard to imagine the case where there's no time to react in some way that avoids the accident.

Remember, people fall asleep while driving cars pretty regularly. I know people who have fallen asleep driving on the freeway, woken up in the median, and just guided the car back on the road to continue.

Are they stupid for not taking breaks, etc? Yeah. But is it unreasonable to think 10s for taking over control from sleep is doable? No, it’s doable for people with the right mental state. The most common mistake is overcorrection on waking up.

In level two, it's not about "handing back control" -- the driver is assumed to be in control at all times, with the car assisting. If the car assists too much then people will start treating it as if it were an L3 system, but it's really not.

To me a situation in which autopilot would have crashed, gave control to the driver, who couldn't "save" the bad situation, is just an autopilot crash.

2. Even if it was, it’s sort of irrelevant. When considering the safety of the feature, the whole process, including allowing the driver to become distracted, must be considered. This isn’t a clean room where you can just focus on the performance of the models, this is a real life car interacting with other unpredictable cars, being driven by an imperfect human. If the nature of these systems is that it makes the drivers complacent, that’s absolutely something that needs to be taken into account when thinking about the overall experience of a self driving system.

"On Thursday, NHTSA said it had discovered in 16 separate instances when this occurred that Autopilot “aborted vehicle control less than one second prior to the first impact,” suggesting the driver was not prepared to assume full control over the vehicle.

CEO Elon Musk has often claimed that accidents cannot be the fault of the company, as data it extracted invariably showed Autopilot was not active in the moment of the collision. "

* https://fortune.com/2022/06/10/elon-musk-tesla-nhtsa-investi...

I'm not blaming Tesla or the NHTSA for this, I'm blaming the WP as their reporting on this lacks any information and seems rather to just paint the data in such a way to make Tesla look bad. There's no room for interpretation by the reader because no actual useful data is presented.

Edited to correct my naming of the article source.

I'm not informed enough about this to say whether it falls under that threshold or even what that threshold is. But the limits being clear technical ones does not change the degree to which they are limits.