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Note, the original NHTSA report compares accidents per mile traveled in Tesla vehicles with and without autopilot, and notes that vehicles WITH autopilot have 4
by URSpider94 9y ago
Note, the original NHTSA report compares accidents per mile traveled in Tesla vehicles with and without autopilot, and notes that vehicles WITH autopilot have 40% fewer accidents than those without.
This seems like very clean data, as it doesn't actually consider how often autopilot is turned on, and it's over a fairly large sample of drivers, locales and miles driven.
This is just correlation, not causality, but the effect is too big to be by chance.
- dwaltrip 9y agoThe comment you are replying to is suggesting that the miles driven with autopilot may have been inherently safer miles, e.g. autopilot was more likely to be turned during the safer parts of a drive. If true, this would be an unfortunate example of selection bias.
- URSpider94 9y agoYou are missing the point. The report doesn't compare miles driven with and without autopilot. It compares ALL miles driven in cars with Autopilot function, whether it is turned on or not, vs. cars without Autopilot function. To boot, these are, for the most part, the same cars before and after, since Tesla shipped cars for almost a year with the Autopilot hardware built in but not activated, then activated it for all cars at virtually the same time via an OTA. Before that date, any miles clocked show up in the "no autopilot" column, the next day they show up in the "with Autopilot" column. To further flog an expired equine, the study showed a 40% reduction in airbag actuations per million miles driven across all miles driven in cars with vs. without Autopilot function, not comparing only miles where Autopilot was turned on. There are certainly possibilities for this data to be skewed or biased, but it's definitely not a comparison of safe Autopilot miles vs. unsafe manual miles.