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Tesla comes off extremely well in this report. For one thing, the 40% statistic cited in the headline appears to be well supported by the NHTSA report (section

• Roritharr 10y ago
  I really would like to know the absolute numbers for this reduction. It's really questionable if this would hold up with millions of Teslas on the road in the hands of less wealthy(probably better educated) drivers.
  • dkonofalski 10y ago
    Wait... are you saying that people that are less wealthy are better educated? If so, I need to see some sources. That sounds preposterous.
    • jackmott 10y ago
      no. he needs more parens to make the order of operations clear. also, love the standard internet response to data. "the data in not perfect, or is incomplete, thus I will hold steadfast to my intuition" love you, internet.
      • GauntletWizard 10y ago
        It's very reasonable, when presented with data that doesn't pass a sniff check, to mentally bitbucket that data. Unfortunately, lots of people's noses are miscalibrated - And what's worse we're not sure which ones.
    • randomdata 10y ago
      Assuming by education you mean formal schooling: Consider that wealth is accumulated over time. While outliers certainly exist, the older you get, the more wealthy you are apt to be, at least to the point when you retire and start to use those reserves to live on. Also consider that in 1970s, the time when the boomers started coming of age, having 'high school or more' was reserved for just 50% of the population. Only a mere 25% for the oldest segment of the population. It has steadily climbed to more than 80% for the youngest adults. But they, statistically, haven't had time to amass a large amount of wealth yet.
    • avenoir 10y ago
      I also found that confusing. I think in this case "less wealthy" is within the context of Tesla owners, which is basically upper middle class(?), which sort of makes sense. At least that's how I read it.
    • Roritharr 10y ago
      No, i just took education as one possible factor that might be different between Tesla and Camry or Hummer drivers. Tesla Owners have a specific selection bias, its just hard to describe what that bias actually is, so i just took a stab in a direction to get the discussion going.
  • cryptoz 10y ago
    Probably as the technology scales up to millions of people using it, the numbers will actually be even better for safety. There is a network effect that compounds the safety factor - as more self-driving cars are on the road, there are fewer rogue human drivers. So with millions of Teslas driving around there will be that many fewer people causing accidents by human error.
  • Tepix 10y ago
    The rates dropped by 40%. The drivers remained the same. Why do you think a different driver demographic will not show a similar improvement?
    • wccrawford 10y ago
      Maybe other drivers are really good, or maybe this class of driver is really bad?
      • cryptoz 10y ago
        35,000 people die from car accidents every single year in the USA alone. Other drivers are not "really good".
        • ebbv 10y ago
          Personally I believe most people are really terrible drivers. That being said, there were 210 million drivers in the US in 2009. There's probably a lot more today. That's just 0.01% of drivers. That fact makes me have to question just how bad people really are, despite my own personal opinion. Or maybe cars are just really safe. A better statistic might be number of accidents. In 2015 2.44 million people were injured in car accidents. That's a much more telling figure of just how bad most drivers are. Apparently our cars are just really safe.
          • camiller 10y ago
            I had an econ professor assert that as cars got safer there were more accidents because people trusted the car to protect them more.... Logically, to reduce accidents due to carelessness we should put a 12" sharpened spike right in the middle of the steering wheel pointing at the drivers chest. If all accidents were deadly wouldn't drivers then exercise the utmost care?
            • OrwellianChild 10y ago
              It's a great joke, but a poor strategy. Remember the end game: minimize harm. The universal solutions that remove human error have a better long-run potential to minimize harm, since they can exceed the effectiveness of even the most attentive and cautious human driver.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • celticninja 10y ago
    Are you assuming the more wealthy owners have lower levels of education? Or have I misinterpreted your statement? I would have assumed tesla owners would fall into the more educated category. No idea which assumption is correct just wondering about your reasoning. For my assumption I assume that due to the higher cost of a Tesla better educated people are opting for them over the alternative because of the environmental benefits.
    • randomdata 10y ago
      I would have assumed due to the high cost of a Tesla that the owners would tend to be older, and thus a generation educated in much fewer numbers. Today's youth are much more educated, but they are still young, which hasn't given them much time to build wealth. I mean, who do you think is more likely to buy a Tesla: A 20 year old fresh college graduate, or his 'uneducated' father who has been saving and investing for 30 years and just sold his lifelong home in San Francisco? My bet is on the latter. The boomers in particular are considered the wealthiest generation ever, but not the most educated generation ever. I'm rather fascinated by how many are questioning the education thing here though. Coming from a farming community, where every (older) farmer I know is multimillions simply by virtue of having purchased farmland when they were young, it's difficult to see how education had any impact on that wealth. Some of them do have educations, some don't. It doesn't seem to make any difference.
      • celticninja 10y ago
        I evidently misunderstood the original comment, when OP said less wealthy (better educated) he meant that there would be fewer wealthy (and better educated) owners. I don't agree with the sentiment and think OP didn't really explain his position well either.
        • randomdata 10y ago
          You don't agree that wealthy people tend to be older? Even though time is the easiest way to increase wealth (compound interest is your friend). Or you don't agree that older people are less educated? Even thought the data suggests otherwise.
  • atonalfreerider 10y ago
    Wealthy motorists drive more recklessly: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/11/4086.short http://www.pnas.org/content/109/11/4086.short
    • Roritharr 10y ago
      Makes sense, but its still interesting how the result would change when applied to the general population. Would VW Beetle drivers have the same reduction?
    • mozumder 10y ago
      I think you pointed to the wrong link. That's a study about ethics, not safety.
      • atonalfreerider 10y ago
        If you read the abstract you will see that the studies involve driver behavior. "Results Studies 1 and 2. Our first two studies were naturalistic field studies, and examined whether upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals while driving. In study 1, we investigated whether upper-class drivers were more likely to cut off other vehicles at a busy four-way intersection with stop signs on all sides. As vehicles are reliable indicators of a person's social rank and wealth (15), we used observers’ codes of vehicle status (make, age, and appearance) to index drivers’ social class. Observers stood near the intersection, coded the status of approaching vehicles, and recorded whether the driver cut off other vehicles by crossing the intersection before waiting their turn, a behavior that defies the California Vehicle Code. In the present study, 12.4% of drivers cut in front of other vehicles. A binary logistic regression indicated that upper-class drivers were the most likely to cut off other vehicles at the intersection, even when controlling for time of day, driver's perceived sex and age, and amount of traffic, b = 0.36, SE b = 0.18, P < 0.05"
        • nitrogen 10y ago
          Did they account for bias in their observers?
  • onmobiletemp 10y ago
    They said it was a 40 percent drop after the roll out of auto-pilot features. That means it dropped 40 percent with the same driver base. Please read the article before posting comments.
  • Ar-Curunir 10y ago
    So "better" drivers saw 40% reduction; doesn't that indicate that worse drivers will see even greater reduction in accidents?
  • lamontcg 10y ago
    > wealthy (probably better educated) drivers. You mean drivers like the ones behind the wheel of all the BMWs and Audis that cut me off with no turn signals, speed, make aggressive lane changes, tailgate, and generally act like giant douches because a simple traffic ticket is nothing to their pocketbook while their time == money? Those people are going to be a hell of a lot safer behind the wheel of an autonomous (level 4) vehicle where they can be on the phone and their laptop as the vehicle obeys the speed limits and safe following distance.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • celticninja 10y ago
      He said less wealthy, better educated drivers.
      • lamontcg 10y ago
        Pretty certain he meant it the way I quoted it.
        • celticninja 10y ago
          Ah it now makes sense, I did ask him to clarify but I just parsed in my brain when reading your reply he meant fewer wealthy (better educated drivers) as opposed to less wealthy meaning not as wealthy. Thanks for your help.
          • brokenmachine 10y ago
            I read it as less wealthy meaning not as wealthy as well. Funny how ambiguous some sentences can be.
            • delecti 10y ago
              Well it's really that he used the wrong word. "Less wealthy drivers" can't correctly refer to the number of drivers.
• tehlike 10y ago
  I didnt read the report, but is this measurement done on a a/b testing way? There is usually some data skew/bias when they are done on different time scale.
  • vvanders 10y ago
    Same cars pre/post OTA. There was a ~6 month peroid where AP HW was out in the wild but not used.
    • pps43 10y ago
      Confounding factors. For example, crashes can be more likely after sunset or during inclement weather so seasonality can play a role. Or maybe the drivers who had Tesla longer got used to it.
      • celticninja 10y ago
        Could this be accounted for if the sample period was large enough, ie over 12 months to cover seasonality and a few months for time of day.
        • tehlike 10y ago
          this particular one, maybe, but there might be others. like the user base pre-ota and post ota (number-wise) could be different. I think there is a good SaaS business with A/B testing robot/car software OTA. I would imagine some metrics would be: 1. car speed 2. battery consumption per mile. 3. user comfort metrics (if it's possible to measure, maybe like hearthrate, body temperature etc - i can imagine if robots were driving bad, it'd be visible in heart rate or something like that).4 The list probably goes on. It would be interesting to see how much battery consumption changed after OTA, for example.
        • pps43 10y ago
          I suspect OTA update was applied simultaneously rather than staggered over the course of the year, so probably not. You can control for seasonality using some other data as a proxy, but the more adjustments you make, the more potential there is for introducing errors. Randomized test/control split is almost always better than before/after comparison.
• Vik1ng 10y ago
  Just funny that the 40% from Autosteer seem to exactly match with the general AEB safety improvement rate also mentioned in the report... IIHS research shows that AEB systems meeting the commitment would reduce rear-end crashes[emphasis added] by 40 percent. IIHS estimates that by 2025 – the earliest NHTSA believes it could realistically implement a regulatory requirement for AEB – the commitment will prevent 28,000 crashes and 12,000 injuries.
  • GrantS 10y ago
    Here is some of that IIHS research [1] from Jan 2016 that gives lots of raw crash numbers broken down by manufacturer, type of system (AEB/FCW), injuries involved, etc. Really informative. Some excerpts from "Effectiveness of Forward Collision Warning Systems with and without Autonomous Emergency Braking in Reducing Police-Reported Crash Rates", January 2016: "FCW alone and FCW with AEB reduced rear-end striking crash involvement rates by 23% and 39%, respectively. " "Among the 15,802 injury crash involvements in these states, the percentage of injury crash involvements that were rear-end striking crashes was larger among vehicles without front crash prevention (15%) than among vehicles with FCW alone (12%) or FCW with AEB (9%). Only 4% of rear- end injury crashes involved fatalities or serious (A-level) injuries." "Approximately 700,000 U.S. police-reported rear-end crashes in 2013 and 300,000 injuries in such crashes could have been prevented if all vehicles were equipped with FCW with AEB that performs similarly as it did for study vehicles." [1] http://orfe.princeton.edu/~alaink/SmartDrivingCars/Papers/IIHS-CicchinoEffectivenessOfCWS-Jan2016.pdf http://orfe.princeton.edu/~alaink/SmartDrivingCars/Papers/II...
  • yohui 10y ago
    For those unaware, "AEB" stands for "Autonomous Emergency Braking". See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_avoidance_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_avoidance_system Did Tesla cars have AEB prior to Autopilot installation? If not, then this suggests the 40% reduction in crashes may simply be due to the installation of an AEB system. What effect Autopilot's other features may have would remain uncertain.
    • celticninja 10y ago
• sfifs 10y ago
  Is the base size and confidence levels reported anywhere? I get professionally suspicious when reports publish percentage figure comparisons of rare events.
  • celticninja 10y ago
    What events do you consider rare? Car crashes?
    • usrusr 10y ago
      Crashes of cars that were hard enough to trigger the airbag, but still not so hard that the car would not get an autopilot update later in it's life. The "before autosteer" column does not include miles or crashes of Teslas that did not survive until OTA availability.
    • semi-extrinsic 10y ago
      Presumably they meant airbag deployment crashes in Teslas. We can estimate the absolute number from Tesla's press release in December stating that 1.3 billion miles have been driven on Autopilot, while the NHTSA report states the accidents they count occur 0.8 times per million miles. So in that case it's data from about 1000 crashes in the Autopilot case, and more in the non-Autopilot case. Which tells us that the statistics should be good enough (anything else would be a major scandal). However, that is not what they are comparing! As the NHTSA report states in footnote 21, they're not actually comparing Autopilot miles to normal driving. They are comparing crash rates in vehicles before and after Autopilot was installed in those vehicles. That muddies the waters quite a bit in my opinion, especially when they don't tell us how significant this decrease is. I'm not saying it's wrong, but I'm also not very confident that it is a causal effect, as opposed to just a correlation. Here is a PDF link to the NHTSA report, since TFA only links to a Scribd (thus unusable) version. https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2016/INCLA-PE16007-7876.PDF https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2016/INCLA-PE16007-7876.PDF
      • jayjay71 10y ago
        So they're comparing miles driven manually before a certain date to miles driven manually and automatically after a certain date? It certainly implies that Autopilot is safer, but why not separate it properly (Autopilot vs manual) and give us far more accurate information? It just seems...odd.
• DonHopkins 10y ago
  The car should immediately pull over and shut down if it detects any activity on the driver's Twitter or Facebook feeds: Social Media Strike Out!
  • 6stringmerc 10y ago
    ...then fashion a start-up based on "Ownership" of the vehicle and code and sell devices to Tesla owners to over-ride any part of the system they don't like, then profit!
    • gravypod 10y ago
      Then sell the customers list to law enforcement to make side money! What a fantastic time to live in SV!
      • abakker 10y ago
        Sell the list of those using social media in the car to existing advertisers too. Extra high levels of engagement!
        • nitrogen 10y ago
          Then post a joke thread about it on HN. Maximum Reddit! [Seriously, though. I don't want to downvote everyone in a chain but there's probably a more HN/SNR-friendly way to comment on potential abuses of automaker access to social media feeds.]
      • criley2 10y ago
        >Then sell the customers list to law enforcement to make side money! What a fantastic time to live in SV! implying that law enforcement won't work with homeland security to subpoena your data at cost under a gag order :)
  • celticninja 10y ago
    Would require you to link your social media accounts to your car so easily avoided.
• whyileft 10y ago
  > data supplied by Tesla
  • andruc 10y ago
    Where else could it possibly come from? Tesla is the only one collecting this data.
    • whyileft 10y ago
      bingo
• illumin8 10y ago
  They published that the driver took absolutely no action, and that he had 7 seconds to take some action (7 seconds from the time the truck started to turn across his path until his car struck it). The last action he had taken was to enable the cruise control at 74mph 2 minutes before the crash.
  • snewman 10y ago
    Yes, from previous reports it was already pretty clear that the driver was asleep at the wheel (literally or otherwise). The car is not supposed to allow this; it's supposed to check for hands-on-steering-wheel and other indicators of driver attention. It would have been nice to find out how that system broke down in this case.
    • mikeash 10y ago
      It doesn't require continuous engagement. You can drive with hands off the wheel for several minutes at a time in many situations.
      • xorxornop 10y ago
        Besides, it's perfectly possible to fall asleep but with your hands still touching (even gripping!) the steering wheel.
        • gambiting 10y ago
          That's also a solved problem - Mercedes cars have "attention assist" which can figure out how attentive you are by measuring how you drive. If you are literally falling asleep at the wheel, the system will get very annoying and insist that you stop for some rest. Of course, whatever algorithm they are using won't work if the car is driving itself, you can't judge the reaction time if all the driver is doing is holding the wheel.
          • Piskvorrr 10y ago
• greglindahl 10y ago
  A lot of people are asking what was in the October 2015 Autopilot 7.0 update. That was the introduction of autosteer. Automatic emergency braking (AEB) was initially released in 6.2, see https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/tesla_model_s_software_6_2.pdf https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/tesla_model_s_soft... 6.2 was announced in March, 2015.