8 ms·

From Tesla's statement: "contrasted against worldwide accident data, customers using Autopilot are statistically safer than those not using it at all" I think

by cjensen 10y ago

From Tesla's statement: "contrasted against worldwide accident data, customers using Autopilot are statistically safer than those not using it at all" I think this is a foolish statement: fatal accidents in the US are 1.3 per 100M miles driven. Tesla reports autopilot has driven 100M miles. That's not enough data collected to draw this kind of conclusion. There's a parallel here with software testing. I've seen bugs that happen 25% of the time, for example, and take 10 minutes to run a test. Our test guys have great intentions, but if they test 5 times and see no bug, they think the bug is gone. There is no instinctive understanding that they have insufficient data to draw a conclusion.

cperciva 10y ago
I think this is a foolish statement: fatal accidents in the US are 1.3 per 100M miles driven. Tesla reports autopilot has driven 100M miles. That's not enough data collected to draw this kind of conclusion. Also, not all miles are equal. I'd hope that people are enabling Autopilot primarily while driving on straightish roads with good driving conditions -- in other words, at times when the rate of fatalities with a human driver is far less than 1.3 per 100M miles.
- usaphp 10y ago
  I thought most fatalities are on the highway during good driving conditions, where the road is so smooth and boring that humans lose attention, fall asleep or staring at their phones. Speed is much higher when driving on those roads and there is a bigger chance a car will rollover/bigger impact.
  - flohofwoe 10y ago
    At least in Germany, driving on the Autobahn is about 3x to 4x safer than driving on other road types: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobahn#Safety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobahn#Safety, not sure how it compares to the US, but "fast and boring roads" seem to be safer.
    - whazor 10y ago
      Germany is a unsuitable country for comparison, as they have many highways without speed limits. I would argue that this invalidates the boring part.
      - the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
        It's the same in all European countries.
        vladd 10y ago
        Germany is the only EU country having roads without speed limits - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit#Roads_without_speed_limits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit#Roads_without_spee... . Outside of EU, the only other European location that would qualify would be Isle of Man (as referenced in that article).
        Symbiote 10y ago
        I don't think the Isle of Man has any dual carriageways, it certainly doesn't have any motorways.
        altstar 10y ago
        And one road in the Northern Territory, Australia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_Australia
        the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
        I was referring to the highways being more safe than other road types.
      - flohofwoe 10y ago
        I think the missing speed limit isn't that big of a factor, as most traffic is still flowing at around the same not-so-high speed, maybe somewhere between 130 and 160 km/h (except for trucks on the right lane). It's the relative speed differences that matters, and there the differences on other roads where traffic is stopping and accelerating all the time, with other vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists crossing the road which makes urban roads so dangerous.
  - anon1385 10y ago
    In the UK the motorways (straight, multi-lane, higher speed limits, barriers) are the safest roads, in terms of death or serious injury per vehicle mile. The most dangerous roads are typically single carriage A roads that are twisty, contain blind junctions and so on. For those familiar with the UK road network see: http://roadsafetyfoundation.org/media/32639/rrm_britain_2015.pdf http://roadsafetyfoundation.org/media/32639/rrm_britain_2015...
  - cowsandmilk 10y ago
    On a per mile basis, they most definitely are not. Here's one set of US DOT numbers[0] from 2007 that show the rate on interstates is 0.7/100M miles while the rate is highest on collector roads at 1.99/100M miles followed closely by local roads at 1.94/100M miles. Interstates have less than half the fatalities on a per mile basis as local roads. [0] http://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/speedmgt/data_facts/docs/fataltbl2007.pdf http://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/speedmgt/data_facts/docs/fataltbl...
    - mattmanser 10y ago
      Surely per mile makes no sense, as you travel faster on a motorway? The only measure that makes sense in this context is time, bringing distance into it is statistical trickery.
      - roninb 10y ago
        Thanks for pointing this out, I was trying to figure out why my brain didn't like per mile for things moving at vastly different speeds.
        mcguire 10y ago
        When traveling, most people do so for a given distance, from hither to yon, not for a given period of time.
        mattmanser 10y ago
        Again, not true, you fundamentally misunderstand the majority of car trips. If my job is 2 hours away because there is no motorway, I will get a different job. If there is a motorway, making the commute 40mins, I will take that job. People care how long the journey is, not how far the journey is. People live by commute time, not commute distance. Same for service areas, if the roads all have low speed limits you would need more drivers, they wouldn't just drive for longer.
        10y ago
- pbreit 10y ago
  I would agree that autopilot miles are not equal to overall miles. I was not able to find data on which are most risky. My guess is that most accidents happen on surface streets but most fatalities on highways.
  - jfoutz 10y ago
    I think most accidents are within a couple miles of home. It's so familiar people stop paying attention.
    - derekp7 10y ago
      Is that most accidents, or most per mile driven? Because for many, quite a bit of driving is within a few miles from home, skewing the data.
- davej 10y ago
  Couple this with the fact that most people are still concentrating on the road while autopilot is in action. So in effect you still have a human driver, they are just not fully engaged with the cars controls. I know when I tried my friend's auto-pilot that I was concentrating 10x more on the road than I would be normally. Obviously if I got more comfortable with the tech then I would be concentrating less but I can't imagine that I would ever stop paying attention unless I knew the system was fool-proof.
  - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    >most people are still concentrating on the road while autopilot is in action // This must be harder than concentrating when you're actively engaged?
gnoway 10y ago
I was wondering about the 1.3/100m number and found this: http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx It has data from 1994 to 2014, including this plus several other statistics. In particular, it looks like they are tracking on the order of trillions of miles driven per year, so you're right, making any kind of statement after only 100 million is more shameful marketing than anything else. Edit: this is US-only, while Tesla is claiming vs. worldwide. Clearly more miles driven worldwide, and probably higher deaths per 100m miles.
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  Not only is the statistics a big issue, but the apples-to-oranges comparison is what really irks me. The NHTSA average is over all car models on the road. Even in 2014, a non-negligible fraction of those are cars without even decent airbags and crumple zones. The proper comparison would be with non-Autopilot Tesla miles. But that comparison makes Autopilot look bad.
codingdave 10y ago
Maybe a nitpick, but if your bug happens 25% of the time, then you haven't yet found the root cause. Until you do so, no amount of data will help you draw a conclusion.
- cjensen 10y ago
  If I say "I have found and understood the bug", we still have to re-test to verify that the bug is not still present. Assuming that we are looking for a bug which, based on a race condition, occurs 25% of the time...
incogitomode 10y ago
It also seems like they should control for the demographic subset of riders that own Teslas. It seems possible that affluent car owners have factors at play that affect the likelihood of a fatal accident vis-a-vis the global average.
- fattire 10y ago
  Also autopilot can only be used in certain scenarios (freeway driving). Are hours driven by autopilot in this ideal environment being compared with millions of hours spent driving in non-autopilot-eligible roads/conditions?
  - venomsnake 10y ago
    If you torture the data long enough it will confess
  - cynix 10y ago
    Autopilot _should_ only be used on divided highways. However in practice it can be activated on most roads as long as there are lane markings. It's up to the driver to assess the driving conditions and decide whether it's safe to activate Autopilot.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- treigerm 10y ago
  In fact, there is a study which suggests that affluent car owners drive more recklessly than not so wealthy ones. Here's an article about it: http://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/07/16/study-wealthier-motorists-more-likely-to-drive-like-reckless-jerks/ http://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/07/16/study-wealthier-motori... I remember reading a more detailed article about the study somewhere but I can't find it right now.
- qbrass 10y ago
  Just compare Teslas fatalities per mile with and without autopilot. Remove the mileage driven from the cars that have never used autopilot, to control for drivers too cautious to trust their lives to beta software, and you should have your demographic.
Twisell 10y ago
I still can't believe that they are using statistically safer in an official response. It now have been widely discussed everywhere that 1 occurrence is not enough to draw any reliable statistical conclusion! PS: Beside should one more fatalities occur soon, by they're own standard, Model S would become statistically more deadful. To much risk of backfire, this PR is madness...
- agildehaus 10y ago
  That they are using it in official statements should tell you exactly how intelligent Tesla is being with self-driving technology. This is also the company that thinks level 4 self-driving can be done without LIDAR. They're idiots, frankly, completely ignoring the difficulties of computer vision (both in computation and optics) that will not be overcome anytime soon. Even their fatality seems to have been rooted in their camera's inability to distinguish the color of the truck from the color of the sky. Tesla hasn't even taught a car to navigate an intersection on its own, much less all the things Google's car is capable of these days. I think what all this shows is the importance of regulators getting off their asses and establishing standards for self-driving vehicles. Perhaps the fatality was the event that will get them in gear. Poor guy.
  - _up 10y ago
    Probably because "Our cars are super safe, if in perfect weather conditions, otherwise you are on your own", wouldn't sell very well outside of California.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  That's not really true. Using a beta distribution model (i.e. treating each mile driven as a single event), we can say that with 99% probability the true accident rate is at least 1/1B miles and no more than 7/100M miles. Before the accident occurs, these numbers were 1/100B miles and 5.3/100M miles. If a second fatality occurred, those numbers would increase to 3.4/1B miles and 9.3/100M miles. However, I'm pretty sure that their claims of safety are based on more than just this calculation: "...a wealth of internal data demonstrating safer, more predictable vehicle control performance..." 100M miles of driving is easily enough time to observe things like fewer near misses, greater distance between the Tesla and other cars, etc. In math terms, what Tesla is most likely doing is working off some model relating driving behavior with accident rates and observing that 1 single accident does not invalidate this model.
ars 10y ago
It's doubly foolish because the rates for autopilot are for human plus autopilot, not autopilot alone. So at best they matched what a human alone can do. Meaning the autopilot has done nothing at all.
alexandercrohde 10y ago
It's not a fooling statement, it's a savvy political statement by a company's PR department that cares about self-interest. You raise whether there is statistical significance about which is safer, autopilot or a typical driver. However it's worth noting that in a lawsuit the burden of proof is on the plaintiff.
- adrianratnapala 10y ago
  Isn't it "balance of probabilities" for civil cases?
karyon 10y ago
from the article: "...with zero confirmed fatalities and a wealth of internal data demonstrating safer, more predictable vehicle control performance" and "That contrasted against worldwide accident data, customers using Autopilot are statistically safer than those not using it at all." (emphasis mine) i also stumbled over this statement, but i think they are using all telemetry data (e.g. what would the autopilot have done vs what the human actually did) in all accidents, not just fatalities per miles driven.
tsao 10y ago
You can use the same argument when Tesla has 10000M miles driven. Fatal accidents in the US are 130 per 10000M miles driven.
- Tinyyy 10y ago
  Not if you understand statistics.
muraiki 10y ago
RAND conducted a study that criticized the statistical analysis that most autonomous vehicle companies are doing to try and prove their safety: "Given that current traffic fatalities and injuries are rare events compared with vehicle miles traveled, we show that fully autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles to demonstrate their safety in terms of fatalities and injuries. Under even aggressive testing assumptions, existing fleets would take tens and sometimes hundreds of years to drive these miles — an impossible proposition if the aim is to demonstrate performance prior to releasing them for consumer use. Our findings demonstrate that developers of this technology and third-party testers cannot simply drive their way to safety. Instead, they will need to develop innovative methods of demonstrating safety and reliability." http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1478.html http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1478.html
- gwern 10y ago
  RAND's point is true but irrelevant. As Tesla likes to point out, when you roll out to an entire fleet (rather than a few dozen test cars), you rack up hundreds of millions of miles almost overnight. 'Hundreds of millions' may sound like a lot, but Americans drive trillions of miles per year.
  - muraiki 10y ago
    One of the points addressed in this paper is the degree of testing that already needs to be done in order to proclaim that these systems are safer than humans with statistical rigour. Tesla says that their systems are _statistically safer_ than human drivers, but there is simply not enough data to make this conclusion. I respectfully suggest that you read the paper.
    - greglindahl 10y ago
      From the paper: "Therefore, at least for fatalities and injuries, test-driving alone cannot provide sufficient evidence for demonstrating autonomous vehicle safety." Note that the number of crashes per 100 million miles is a lot bigger than the number of injuries. One would hope a statement about safety would look at all of the data.
nommm-nommm 10y ago
Not only that using worldwide data is being very disingenuous. Basically zero Teslas are driven in the places with the highest vehicle fatality rates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... >Seventy-four per cent of road traffic deaths occur in middle-income countries, which account for 70% of the world’s population, but only 53% of the world’s registered vehicles, burdens for 74% of world's road deaths. In low-income countries it is even worse. Only one percent of the world's registered cars produce 16% of world's road traffic deaths.

by cjensen 10y ago

cperciva 10y ago

I think this is a foolish statement: fatal accidents in the US are 1.3 per 100M miles driven. Tesla reports autopilot has driven 100M miles. That's not enough data collected to draw this kind of conclusion. Also, not all miles are equal. I'd hope that people are enabling Autopilot primarily while driving on straightish roads with good driving conditions -- in other words, at times when the rate of fatalities with a human driver is far less than 1.3 per 100M miles.

usaphp 10y ago
I thought most fatalities are on the highway during good driving conditions, where the road is so smooth and boring that humans lose attention, fall asleep or staring at their phones. Speed is much higher when driving on those roads and there is a bigger chance a car will rollover/bigger impact.
- flohofwoe 10y ago
  At least in Germany, driving on the Autobahn is about 3x to 4x safer than driving on other road types: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobahn#Safety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobahn#Safety, not sure how it compares to the US, but "fast and boring roads" seem to be safer.
  - whazor 10y ago
    Germany is a unsuitable country for comparison, as they have many highways without speed limits. I would argue that this invalidates the boring part.
    - the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
      It's the same in all European countries.
      - vladd 10y ago
        Germany is the only EU country having roads without speed limits - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit#Roads_without_speed_limits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit#Roads_without_spee... . Outside of EU, the only other European location that would qualify would be Isle of Man (as referenced in that article).
        Symbiote 10y ago
        I don't think the Isle of Man has any dual carriageways, it certainly doesn't have any motorways.
        altstar 10y ago
        And one road in the Northern Territory, Australia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_Australia
        the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
        I was referring to the highways being more safe than other road types.
    - flohofwoe 10y ago
      I think the missing speed limit isn't that big of a factor, as most traffic is still flowing at around the same not-so-high speed, maybe somewhere between 130 and 160 km/h (except for trucks on the right lane). It's the relative speed differences that matters, and there the differences on other roads where traffic is stopping and accelerating all the time, with other vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists crossing the road which makes urban roads so dangerous.
- anon1385 10y ago
  In the UK the motorways (straight, multi-lane, higher speed limits, barriers) are the safest roads, in terms of death or serious injury per vehicle mile. The most dangerous roads are typically single carriage A roads that are twisty, contain blind junctions and so on. For those familiar with the UK road network see: http://roadsafetyfoundation.org/media/32639/rrm_britain_2015.pdf http://roadsafetyfoundation.org/media/32639/rrm_britain_2015...
- cowsandmilk 10y ago
  On a per mile basis, they most definitely are not. Here's one set of US DOT numbers[0] from 2007 that show the rate on interstates is 0.7/100M miles while the rate is highest on collector roads at 1.99/100M miles followed closely by local roads at 1.94/100M miles. Interstates have less than half the fatalities on a per mile basis as local roads. [0] http://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/speedmgt/data_facts/docs/fataltbl2007.pdf http://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/speedmgt/data_facts/docs/fataltbl...
  - mattmanser 10y ago
    Surely per mile makes no sense, as you travel faster on a motorway? The only measure that makes sense in this context is time, bringing distance into it is statistical trickery.
    - roninb 10y ago
      Thanks for pointing this out, I was trying to figure out why my brain didn't like per mile for things moving at vastly different speeds.
      - mcguire 10y ago
        When traveling, most people do so for a given distance, from hither to yon, not for a given period of time.
        mattmanser 10y ago
        Again, not true, you fundamentally misunderstand the majority of car trips. If my job is 2 hours away because there is no motorway, I will get a different job. If there is a motorway, making the commute 40mins, I will take that job. People care how long the journey is, not how far the journey is. People live by commute time, not commute distance. Same for service areas, if the roads all have low speed limits you would need more drivers, they wouldn't just drive for longer.
        10y ago
pbreit 10y ago
I would agree that autopilot miles are not equal to overall miles. I was not able to find data on which are most risky. My guess is that most accidents happen on surface streets but most fatalities on highways.
- jfoutz 10y ago
  I think most accidents are within a couple miles of home. It's so familiar people stop paying attention.
  - derekp7 10y ago
    Is that most accidents, or most per mile driven? Because for many, quite a bit of driving is within a few miles from home, skewing the data.
davej 10y ago
Couple this with the fact that most people are still concentrating on the road while autopilot is in action. So in effect you still have a human driver, they are just not fully engaged with the cars controls. I know when I tried my friend's auto-pilot that I was concentrating 10x more on the road than I would be normally. Obviously if I got more comfortable with the tech then I would be concentrating less but I can't imagine that I would ever stop paying attention unless I knew the system was fool-proof.
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  >most people are still concentrating on the road while autopilot is in action // This must be harder than concentrating when you're actively engaged?

gnoway 10y ago

I was wondering about the 1.3/100m number and found this: http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx It has data from 1994 to 2014, including this plus several other statistics. In particular, it looks like they are tracking on the order of trillions of miles driven per year, so you're right, making any kind of statement after only 100 million is more shameful marketing than anything else. Edit: this is US-only, while Tesla is claiming vs. worldwide. Clearly more miles driven worldwide, and probably higher deaths per 100m miles.

semi-extrinsic 10y ago
Not only is the statistics a big issue, but the apples-to-oranges comparison is what really irks me. The NHTSA average is over all car models on the road. Even in 2014, a non-negligible fraction of those are cars without even decent airbags and crumple zones. The proper comparison would be with non-Autopilot Tesla miles. But that comparison makes Autopilot look bad.

codingdave 10y ago

Maybe a nitpick, but if your bug happens 25% of the time, then you haven't yet found the root cause. Until you do so, no amount of data will help you draw a conclusion.

cjensen 10y ago
If I say "I have found and understood the bug", we still have to re-test to verify that the bug is not still present. Assuming that we are looking for a bug which, based on a race condition, occurs 25% of the time...

incogitomode 10y ago

It also seems like they should control for the demographic subset of riders that own Teslas. It seems possible that affluent car owners have factors at play that affect the likelihood of a fatal accident vis-a-vis the global average.

fattire 10y ago
Also autopilot can only be used in certain scenarios (freeway driving). Are hours driven by autopilot in this ideal environment being compared with millions of hours spent driving in non-autopilot-eligible roads/conditions?
- venomsnake 10y ago
  If you torture the data long enough it will confess
- cynix 10y ago
  Autopilot _should_ only be used on divided highways. However in practice it can be activated on most roads as long as there are lane markings. It's up to the driver to assess the driving conditions and decide whether it's safe to activate Autopilot.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
treigerm 10y ago
In fact, there is a study which suggests that affluent car owners drive more recklessly than not so wealthy ones. Here's an article about it: http://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/07/16/study-wealthier-motorists-more-likely-to-drive-like-reckless-jerks/ http://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/07/16/study-wealthier-motori... I remember reading a more detailed article about the study somewhere but I can't find it right now.
qbrass 10y ago
Just compare Teslas fatalities per mile with and without autopilot. Remove the mileage driven from the cars that have never used autopilot, to control for drivers too cautious to trust their lives to beta software, and you should have your demographic.

Twisell 10y ago

I still can't believe that they are using statistically safer in an official response. It now have been widely discussed everywhere that 1 occurrence is not enough to draw any reliable statistical conclusion! PS: Beside should one more fatalities occur soon, by they're own standard, Model S would become statistically more deadful. To much risk of backfire, this PR is madness...

agildehaus 10y ago
That they are using it in official statements should tell you exactly how intelligent Tesla is being with self-driving technology. This is also the company that thinks level 4 self-driving can be done without LIDAR. They're idiots, frankly, completely ignoring the difficulties of computer vision (both in computation and optics) that will not be overcome anytime soon. Even their fatality seems to have been rooted in their camera's inability to distinguish the color of the truck from the color of the sky. Tesla hasn't even taught a car to navigate an intersection on its own, much less all the things Google's car is capable of these days. I think what all this shows is the importance of regulators getting off their asses and establishing standards for self-driving vehicles. Perhaps the fatality was the event that will get them in gear. Poor guy.
- _up 10y ago
  Probably because "Our cars are super safe, if in perfect weather conditions, otherwise you are on your own", wouldn't sell very well outside of California.
yummyfajitas 10y ago
That's not really true. Using a beta distribution model (i.e. treating each mile driven as a single event), we can say that with 99% probability the true accident rate is at least 1/1B miles and no more than 7/100M miles. Before the accident occurs, these numbers were 1/100B miles and 5.3/100M miles. If a second fatality occurred, those numbers would increase to 3.4/1B miles and 9.3/100M miles. However, I'm pretty sure that their claims of safety are based on more than just this calculation: "...a wealth of internal data demonstrating safer, more predictable vehicle control performance..." 100M miles of driving is easily enough time to observe things like fewer near misses, greater distance between the Tesla and other cars, etc. In math terms, what Tesla is most likely doing is working off some model relating driving behavior with accident rates and observing that 1 single accident does not invalidate this model.

ars 10y ago

It's doubly foolish because the rates for autopilot are for human plus autopilot, not autopilot alone. So at best they matched what a human alone can do. Meaning the autopilot has done nothing at all.

alexandercrohde 10y ago

It's not a fooling statement, it's a savvy political statement by a company's PR department that cares about self-interest. You raise whether there is statistical significance about which is safer, autopilot or a typical driver. However it's worth noting that in a lawsuit the burden of proof is on the plaintiff.

adrianratnapala 10y ago
Isn't it "balance of probabilities" for civil cases?

karyon 10y ago

from the article: "...with zero confirmed fatalities and a wealth of internal data demonstrating safer, more predictable vehicle control performance" and "That contrasted against worldwide accident data, customers using Autopilot are statistically safer than those not using it at all." (emphasis mine) i also stumbled over this statement, but i think they are using all telemetry data (e.g. what would the autopilot have done vs what the human actually did) in all accidents, not just fatalities per miles driven.

tsao 10y ago

You can use the same argument when Tesla has 10000M miles driven. Fatal accidents in the US are 130 per 10000M miles driven.

Tinyyy 10y ago
Not if you understand statistics.

muraiki 10y ago

RAND conducted a study that criticized the statistical analysis that most autonomous vehicle companies are doing to try and prove their safety: "Given that current traffic fatalities and injuries are rare events compared with vehicle miles traveled, we show that fully autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles to demonstrate their safety in terms of fatalities and injuries. Under even aggressive testing assumptions, existing fleets would take tens and sometimes hundreds of years to drive these miles — an impossible proposition if the aim is to demonstrate performance prior to releasing them for consumer use. Our findings demonstrate that developers of this technology and third-party testers cannot simply drive their way to safety. Instead, they will need to develop innovative methods of demonstrating safety and reliability." http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1478.html http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1478.html

gwern 10y ago
RAND's point is true but irrelevant. As Tesla likes to point out, when you roll out to an entire fleet (rather than a few dozen test cars), you rack up hundreds of millions of miles almost overnight. 'Hundreds of millions' may sound like a lot, but Americans drive trillions of miles per year.
- muraiki 10y ago
  One of the points addressed in this paper is the degree of testing that already needs to be done in order to proclaim that these systems are safer than humans with statistical rigour. Tesla says that their systems are _statistically safer_ than human drivers, but there is simply not enough data to make this conclusion. I respectfully suggest that you read the paper.
  - greglindahl 10y ago
    From the paper: "Therefore, at least for fatalities and injuries, test-driving alone cannot provide sufficient evidence for demonstrating autonomous vehicle safety." Note that the number of crashes per 100 million miles is a lot bigger than the number of injuries. One would hope a statement about safety would look at all of the data.

nommm-nommm 10y ago

Not only that using worldwide data is being very disingenuous. Basically zero Teslas are driven in the places with the highest vehicle fatality rates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... >Seventy-four per cent of road traffic deaths occur in middle-income countries, which account for 70% of the world’s population, but only 53% of the world’s registered vehicles, burdens for 74% of world's road deaths. In low-income countries it is even worse. Only one percent of the world's registered cars produce 16% of world's road traffic deaths.