5 ms·

Yes but if I asked you to prove brakes were safer you'd be able to do it pretty easily. The fact that no one has actually set out and done a study proving that

Yes but if I asked you to prove brakes were safer you'd be able to do it pretty easily. The fact that no one has actually set out and done a study proving that autopilot is safer than human driving is disconcerting considering these vehicles are already being put on the road. Seeing people abandoning the precautionary principle so they can latch onto an over-marketed, over-promised Muskian view of the future is sad. And in five or ten years we're all going to be looking back wondering what made us so dumb to think that computers could actually drive cars.

chc 9y ago
After the first fatality while on Autopilot, the NHTSA did a study on whether Autopilot was inherently safe and whether it had any defects that needed to be addressed. It found that Teslas with Autopilot were substantially safer than Teslas without. I'd like to see a better study (since that one was mainly aimed at answering the question of whether Teslas with Autopilot should be recalled), but someone has looked into it at least.
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  That's not quite accurate, the NHTSA study was not designed, in any way, to compare human-driven miles and autopilot-driven miles for safety. The only thing it showed was that vehicles with TACC + Autosteer had less accidents than vehicles with just TACC. Whether TACC + Autosteer is safer than human drivers is up for debate.
  - URSpider94 9y ago
    True. However, it shows a very substantial decrease in accident rate in the population with Autopilot features, vs. the population without. Correlation, not causality. It could be that Model X drivers are inherently safer than Model S drivers (they would be in the latter set), or it could be that just having the features in the car makes drivers do better even without using them. However, the inference that Autopilot reduces incidents per mile seems very likely to be true.
Fricken 9y ago
Toyota came out saying you'd have to gather 8.5 billion miles of driving data to make any claims with statistical certainty about the ability of any autonomous driving system to prevent fatalities (I've heard other outrageous numbers thrown out to this effect, though I don't recall them off the top of my head). Though by the time you get to the 8 billionth mile the technology will have evolved, rendering the earlier data moot. So it will be pretty much impossible to do any sort of authoritative study on how safe this technology is until it is widespread, and mature.
- MarkMc 9y ago
  If a study could reliably demonstrate that autonomous vehicles have fewer collisions it would strongly hint that fatalities are also fewer.
  - carlmr 9y ago
    Number of collisions and number of fatalities will not necessarily have the same proportions as for humans. You could have a car that never gets into little collisions that often happen to human drivers because of carelessness, but are rarely deadly, but the same AI might have a faulty reasoning every once in a while leading it to accelerate to 200kph before running straight into a wall. This hypothetical AI would have very few collisions, but maybe still be much more deadly than a human. Humans are the only data we currently have significant numbers of miles logged for. Any extrapolation to AI is meaningless.

chc 9y ago

After the first fatality while on Autopilot, the NHTSA did a study on whether Autopilot was inherently safe and whether it had any defects that needed to be addressed. It found that Teslas with Autopilot were substantially safer than Teslas without. I'd like to see a better study (since that one was mainly aimed at answering the question of whether Teslas with Autopilot should be recalled), but someone has looked into it at least.

frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
That's not quite accurate, the NHTSA study was not designed, in any way, to compare human-driven miles and autopilot-driven miles for safety. The only thing it showed was that vehicles with TACC + Autosteer had less accidents than vehicles with just TACC. Whether TACC + Autosteer is safer than human drivers is up for debate.
- URSpider94 9y ago
  True. However, it shows a very substantial decrease in accident rate in the population with Autopilot features, vs. the population without. Correlation, not causality. It could be that Model X drivers are inherently safer than Model S drivers (they would be in the latter set), or it could be that just having the features in the car makes drivers do better even without using them. However, the inference that Autopilot reduces incidents per mile seems very likely to be true.

Fricken 9y ago

Toyota came out saying you'd have to gather 8.5 billion miles of driving data to make any claims with statistical certainty about the ability of any autonomous driving system to prevent fatalities (I've heard other outrageous numbers thrown out to this effect, though I don't recall them off the top of my head). Though by the time you get to the 8 billionth mile the technology will have evolved, rendering the earlier data moot. So it will be pretty much impossible to do any sort of authoritative study on how safe this technology is until it is widespread, and mature.

MarkMc 9y ago
If a study could reliably demonstrate that autonomous vehicles have fewer collisions it would strongly hint that fatalities are also fewer.
- carlmr 9y ago
  Number of collisions and number of fatalities will not necessarily have the same proportions as for humans. You could have a car that never gets into little collisions that often happen to human drivers because of carelessness, but are rarely deadly, but the same AI might have a faulty reasoning every once in a while leading it to accelerate to 200kph before running straight into a wall. This hypothetical AI would have very few collisions, but maybe still be much more deadly than a human. Humans are the only data we currently have significant numbers of miles logged for. Any extrapolation to AI is meaningless.