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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 h

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.

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.