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This is the first known fatality in just over 130 million miles where Autopilot was activated. Among all vehicles in the US, there is a fatality every 94 millio
by kafkaesq 10y ago
This is the first known fatality in just over 130 million miles where Autopilot was activated. Among all vehicles in the US, there is a fatality every 94 million miles.
Given that Autopilot is generally activated under safer, more routine driving scenarios -- decent weather, regular suburban traffic and so on; for which we can naturally expect significantly lower fatality rates -- it doesn't sound like it's off to a particularly good "batting average" so far. Especially since we've been promised until now that self-driving cars will ultimately be not just incrementally safer, but categorically safer than human-piloted vehicles.
- gpm 10y agoAgreed, but to be fair it isn't exactly statistically significant yet.
- aetherson 10y agoAlso of note: Tesla often claims that their cars perform very well in an accident. It may be that a crash that would result in a fatality in the median vehicle on the road does not produce a fatality in a Tesla. So the salient number is not "fatalities per vehicle mile among all vehicles in the US," it is "fatalities per vehicle mile among non-autopilot-driven Teslas."
- ars 10y agoExactly. And on top of that, how much of the time was it the human who actually prevented the fatality, and not autopilot? I would like to see how many accidents would have happened under Autopilot, but were only prevented because of the human.