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Firstly, wealthy drivers can afford to keep their cars in better shape and can afford better cars in the first place. Neither of these factors depend on self-dr

by pja 9y ago

Firstly, wealthy drivers can afford to keep their cars in better shape and can afford better cars in the first place. Neither of these factors depend on self-driving technology. Secondly, Tesla themselves makes it clear that their self-driving can't be relied upon to driver the car unsupervised - the driver has to be paying attention at all times in case the Tesla self-driving code decides to do something catastrophically stupid. Hence the same factors that correlate with driver attentiveness in the ordinary population will also affect the Tesla population. Wealth correlates with health correlates with better reaction times & general fitness. The Tesla autopilot tends to turn itself off precisely in situations where driving is difficult and complex - which in turn implies that these human factors will remain just as important as they are in the general driving population. (Of course it may simply be that the reason wealthy people have a lower death rate on the roads per mile is that they can afford cars that are safer in crashes; the above is my supposition, not evidentially backed.)

kristianc 9y ago
What I'm looking for really is anything specific to auto-pilot technology to suggest that the safety benefits won't also be met, or exceeded, when extrapolated across the whole population. All other factors taken into account, driving has become much, much safer in recent years, and is now safer than it ever was. When you start to use technology to eliminate driver errors in that self-same error-prone cohort, there's no reason to think that the safety dividend won't be even more pronounced than it is today. If you want to link crash rates to wealth, you would also have to account for countries like Germany, that has a similar median wealth figure to the US, but a vastly lower motorway death rate [1] It seems you can't both say 1) Tesla drivers are less likely to have accidents because they are wealthy and error-prone, and 2) Extending self-driving technology that eliminates basic errors to less-wealthy and/or more error-prone drivers won't have a net benefit on driver safety. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405844015302322#fig0005 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584401...
- pja 9y ago
  I’m suggesting that Tesla drivers are both relatively wealthy & /less/ error prone! Clearly /if/ Tesla self-driving code is safer than the average driver then extending that to the general driving population would be a net good. But if the apparent safety is an artefact of the statistics due to Tesla cars themselves being intrinsically safer just as practically every other modern vehicle is a safer car than one built 20 years ago then extending self-driving to every vehicle might not be a net safety benefit Likewise, if the driver cohort is different (and we know that it is different) from the general population & that cohort is required to drive the vehicle precisely at the times that the self-driving code can't cope which are probably the times when driving places the most demand on the driver, then that different in driver cohort matters: the statistical difference in death rates could easily be a result of differences in driver populations. You can't tell from the data as given & the fact that Tesla keeps repeating the aggregate figures in their PR is suspicious frankly. (NB. that paper you link simply underlines my point - In both countries, the lowest wealth quartile has a vastly greater death rate on the roads than the rest of the population. It doesn't matter whether Germany is worse or better than the US. If Tesla draws disproportionately from higher income deciles, then we should a priori expect them to have a far lower death rate than the mean. Quoting the mean as a benchmark to compare the Tesla death rate against is outright misleading.)
chris_t 9y ago
>Wealth correlates with health correlates with better reaction times & general fitness I agree with your general point, but you can't just join up 2 correlations like that, that isn't always going to work when there are other confounding factors (and there always are). Wealth also correlates with age which anticorrelates with reaction times and general fitness.
- pja 9y ago
  Agreed, hence my parenthetical note at the bottom of the comment.
- leereeves 9y ago
  According to insurance adjusters, age correlates with lower accident rates.
  - the-dude 9y ago
    And having a hotmail emailaddress with higher accident rates.
  - ryandrake 9y ago
    Lower accident rates, or a lower percentage of injury or fatal accidents? I find it hard to believe 80 year olds are getting into fewer accidents than 40 year olds unless it’s because they drive less frequently.
    - emn13 9y ago
      Which would be fine for an insurer of course. Heck, even if they got into more incidents, but the incidents were cheaper, that would be fine for an insurer too. And not all markets are equally competitive. Just because insurance rates differ doesn't mean risks necessarily do the same way. And let's not forget that while insurers are professional risk assessors that doesn't mean they're infallible either, or immune to other distortions (e.g. pass-the-buck subprime mortgage kind of issues).
- credit_guy 9y ago
dghughes 9y ago
> Wealth correlates with health correlates with better reaction times & general fitness. But at some point between wealthy and rich the person hires a (non-wealthy) driver and now they're back to square one.
- learnstats2 9y ago
  Wealthy people can better control the quality of the driver.

by pja 9y ago

kristianc 9y ago

What I'm looking for really is anything specific to auto-pilot technology to suggest that the safety benefits won't also be met, or exceeded, when extrapolated across the whole population. All other factors taken into account, driving has become much, much safer in recent years, and is now safer than it ever was. When you start to use technology to eliminate driver errors in that self-same error-prone cohort, there's no reason to think that the safety dividend won't be even more pronounced than it is today. If you want to link crash rates to wealth, you would also have to account for countries like Germany, that has a similar median wealth figure to the US, but a vastly lower motorway death rate [1] It seems you can't both say 1) Tesla drivers are less likely to have accidents because they are wealthy and error-prone, and 2) Extending self-driving technology that eliminates basic errors to less-wealthy and/or more error-prone drivers won't have a net benefit on driver safety. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405844015302322#fig0005 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584401...

pja 9y ago
I’m suggesting that Tesla drivers are both relatively wealthy & /less/ error prone! Clearly /if/ Tesla self-driving code is safer than the average driver then extending that to the general driving population would be a net good. But if the apparent safety is an artefact of the statistics due to Tesla cars themselves being intrinsically safer just as practically every other modern vehicle is a safer car than one built 20 years ago then extending self-driving to every vehicle might not be a net safety benefit Likewise, if the driver cohort is different (and we know that it is different) from the general population & that cohort is required to drive the vehicle precisely at the times that the self-driving code can't cope which are probably the times when driving places the most demand on the driver, then that different in driver cohort matters: the statistical difference in death rates could easily be a result of differences in driver populations. You can't tell from the data as given & the fact that Tesla keeps repeating the aggregate figures in their PR is suspicious frankly. (NB. that paper you link simply underlines my point - In both countries, the lowest wealth quartile has a vastly greater death rate on the roads than the rest of the population. It doesn't matter whether Germany is worse or better than the US. If Tesla draws disproportionately from higher income deciles, then we should a priori expect them to have a far lower death rate than the mean. Quoting the mean as a benchmark to compare the Tesla death rate against is outright misleading.)

chris_t 9y ago

>Wealth correlates with health correlates with better reaction times & general fitness I agree with your general point, but you can't just join up 2 correlations like that, that isn't always going to work when there are other confounding factors (and there always are). Wealth also correlates with age which anticorrelates with reaction times and general fitness.

pja 9y ago
Agreed, hence my parenthetical note at the bottom of the comment.
leereeves 9y ago
According to insurance adjusters, age correlates with lower accident rates.
- the-dude 9y ago
  And having a hotmail emailaddress with higher accident rates.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  Lower accident rates, or a lower percentage of injury or fatal accidents? I find it hard to believe 80 year olds are getting into fewer accidents than 40 year olds unless it’s because they drive less frequently.
  - emn13 9y ago
    Which would be fine for an insurer of course. Heck, even if they got into more incidents, but the incidents were cheaper, that would be fine for an insurer too. And not all markets are equally competitive. Just because insurance rates differ doesn't mean risks necessarily do the same way. And let's not forget that while insurers are professional risk assessors that doesn't mean they're infallible either, or immune to other distortions (e.g. pass-the-buck subprime mortgage kind of issues).
credit_guy 9y ago

dghughes 9y ago

> Wealth correlates with health correlates with better reaction times & general fitness. But at some point between wealthy and rich the person hires a (non-wealthy) driver and now they're back to square one.

learnstats2 9y ago
Wealthy people can better control the quality of the driver.