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4. There is another completely unknown variable - how many times would the autopilot have crashed if the human hadn't taken over. So Tesla's statistics are ac

by smoyer 9y ago

4. There is another completely unknown variable - how many times would the autopilot have crashed if the human hadn't taken over. So Tesla's statistics are actually stating how safe the autopilot and human are when combined, not how safe the autopilot is by itself.

melling 9y ago
I thought the autopilot was always supposed to be combined with the human. It’s not a self-driving car. It’s really an advanced cruise control.
- teppix 9y ago
  The statistics also includes all the cases where drivers are not paying attention as they should, and it's still safer than the average car (at least according to Tesla).
  - mozumder 9y ago
    > it's still safer than the average car (at least according to Tesla). This is Tesla's big lie. In all their marketing, Tesla is comparing crash rates of their passenger cars to ALL vehicles, including trucks and motorcycles, which have higher fatality rates. Motorcycles are about 10x-50x more dangerous than cars. Not only that, they aren't controlling for variances in driver demographics - younger and old people have higher accident rates than middle-aged Tesla drivers - as well as environmental factors - rural roads have higher fatalities than highways. Never-mind the obvious "accidents in cars with Autopilot" vs "accidents in cars with Autopilot on". If you do a proper comparison, Tesla's Autopilot is probably 100x more fatal than other cars. It's a god-dammed death trap. And remember, there are several extremely normal cars with ZERO fatalities: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/record-9-models-have-zero-driver-deaths-iihs-says-n296036 https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/record-9-models-have-... This is not a problem that will be solved without fundamental infrastructure changes in the roads themselves. Anyone that believes in self-driving cars should never be employed, since they don't know what they're talking about.
    - vatueil 9y ago
      I agree that the comparison with all motor vehicle deaths is misleading, and that we ought to be looking at accident rates for Tesla cars with Autopilot on versus off. That Tesla hasn't answered the latter despite having the data to do so is concerning. However, I don't see the evidence for the claim that "Tesla's Autopilot is probably 100x more fatal than other cars". The flip side of the complaint that Tesla hasn't released information to know how safe Autopilot really is, is that we don't know how unsafe it really is either. If this is merely to say "I think Autopilot is likely very unsafe" then just say so, rather than giving a faux numerical value. As for the claim that self-driving cars can't work without "fundamental infrastructure changes" and everybody working on self-driving cars should be fired, I think you're talking way beyond your domain of expertise.
    - uhhhhhhh 9y ago
      You're complaining about one side using wildly misleading and baseless stats, but then turn around and throw out a completely baseless and fairly absurd claim with no attempt to even back or source it, and then claim that because some cars have 0 fatalities that means something. The truth is somewhere in between Tesla's marketing and your wildly absurd 100x more fatal claim, but its much closer to Tesla than you. Tesla's statistics (i.e. real numbers, but context means everything) do involve a whole whack of unrelated comparisons (buses, 18-wheelers, motorcycles) that all server to skew the stats in various ways, we can ignore them claiming to be slightly safer than regular cars. However comparing more like to like, IIHS numbers for passenger cars driver deaths on highways puts Tesla at 3.2x more likely than all other cars to be involved in a fatal crash (1 death/428,000,000 miles driven vs tesla's 1 death/133,000,000 miles driven). Of course this too is an unfair comparison. A 133hp econobox/prius vs a sports car in terms of performance is considered equal in that comparison. If one was really interested in accuracy, a comparison of high power AWD cars in similar price ranges driven on the same roads by the same demographics would be needed. So by even standards clearly biased against Tesla, they are no where near 100x more fatal than other cars. Tesla's own numbers claim autopilot reduces accidents, and supposedly NHS numbers back them up. Its important and critical to not believe marketing hype and lazy statistics. If you want people to take you seriously, countering hype and bad stats with equal or worse hype and worse counter stats is not the way to do it.
  - smoyer 9y ago
    Drivers not paying attention in non-autopilot vehicles is an increasing problem with the prevalence of smart phones. In places where it's illegal to text and drive I don't think you're going to get out of a ticket by telling the police officer "it's okay because Tesla was driving". I do believe "it's still safer than the average car" because there's not a big tank of explosive - I'm most curious to hear what caused such a massive fire in this crash. But you're talking about the autopilot and it's statistically incorrect to say it's safer than the average car. It's merely safer than a driver alone - this should be no surprise as you'll find that cars with backup cameras and alarms don't hit have as many accidents while in reverse as cars without them.
    - userbinator 9y ago
      I do believe "it's still safer than the average car" because there's not a big tank of explosive - I'm most curious to hear what caused such a massive fire in this crash. How does a Tesla get such good range? There's still a lot of energy in those batteries, and damaging them is far easier to cause a fire than leaking fuel --- the former can self-ignite just from dissipating its own energy into an internal short, while the latter needs an ignition source. In addition, the batteries are under the entire vehicle and thus more likely to be damaged; a fuel tank has a smaller area and is concentrated in one place. It is extremely rare for fuel tanks to explode in a crash.
      - jsight 9y ago
        I see how that is intuitively true, but it isn't really true in practice. Post crash fires with ICE are unusual, but not extremely rare. Similarly, post-repair car fires (leaky fuel lines) are not as unusual as most people think. So far, experiential evidence with Tesla seems to be showing a lower than average risk of fires, though the breadth and nature of the battery leads to challenges in managing the fire itself. All cases that I'm aware of proceeded at a slow enough pace to allow evacuation of the vehicle.
    - rem1313 9y ago
      It is the opposite, LiIon/LiPo batteries are inherently dangerous and can cause chemical fire for various reasons (overcharging, undercharging, puncture, high temperature, etc.). These things are monitored/controlled in any modern application in normal usage, but in a crash you have to remember that you are literally few inches away from a massive stored up potential chemical energy. The fire burns very hot, the smoke is toxic and assuming somebody gets to you in time, it can only be extinguished reliably using special dry powder fire extinguishers (Class D)...
  - Vik1ng 9y ago
    I bet Tesla's are still safer without Autosteer, because the average car includes a lot of old cars and more young drivers.
    - q3k 9y ago
      I would also think that the average Tesla owner is less likely to experience constant stress, long commute hours, tiredness and possible mental health issues that can contribute to car accidents.
    - ilovecars2 9y ago
      What is the catchment range for new (inexperienced) drivers? 18-25? There are a lot of people who have been driving for a long time who are not good at driving at all and lack all kind of self awareness. For example, following the car in front too close.
      - Franciscouzo 9y ago
        Young people are also less risk averse.
- antirez 9y ago
  That's true but is against any good sense: cars don't allow you to play a video while driving, and allow you to have the false sense of security that somebody else is driving while instead you have to pay constant attention?
  - mattmcknight 9y ago
    This morning I saw a minivan drifting all over the road. As we passed him, my passenger noticed that he had CNN playing on a phone attached by suction cup to the middle of the windshield.
- smoyer 9y ago
  That's what Tesla says but that's not how people are using it - and as people grow more comfortable with the autopilot, the less vigilant they'll become. I have this picture in my head where people are trying to recoup their commute time as though they're using public transport. I suspect we'll get there some day but today is not that day. While the Tesla spokespeople are good at saying it's driver assist, their marketing people haven't heard - https://www.tesla.com/autopilot/ https://www.tesla.com/autopilot/. That page states "All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver." but as I noted above, we don't know how much of that safety should be attributed to the human. Tesla apparently knows when the driver's hands are on the steering wheel and I presume they can also tell when the car brakes, so they may have the data to separate those statistics. At a minimum, their engineers should be looking at every case where the autopilot is engaged but the human intervenes. They should probably also slam on the brakes (okay ... more gently) if the driver is alerted to take over but doesn't. As an aside, just the name "Autopilot" implies autonomy.
  - davej 9y ago
    "All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver." This is perhaps a case of purposely confusing marketing. All vehicles have the hardware for full self-driving capability but not yet the software. The full self-driving is to be enabled later on through an over-the-air software update.
    - notahacker 9y ago
      They can't even honestly claim they've got the hardware, when a "full safe driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver" is at this stage something in the realms of hypothesis, and the software which gets closest to doing so relies on far more hardware than a Tesla to achieve this. It's not merely purposely confusing. It's at best, not an outright lie only because they hope it's true.
    - 9y ago
- ldesegur 9y ago
  From https://www.tesla.com/autopilot https://www.tesla.com/autopilot: "All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver" Why do we keep referring to something that we understand should require human supervision as "auto"? Stop the marketing buzzfeed and let's be real.
  - blauditore 9y ago
    I'm not sure whether it's intentionally been worded that way, but that sentence makes only a statement about hardware, not software. So technically, it's correct that the hardware is more capable than that of a human ("sees" and "hears" more), but it's the software that's not up to par.
    - princeb 9y ago
      bizarre statement is there any point in saying that a hypothetical brain-dead, comatose bodybuilder is stronger than a starving man?
      - StavrosK 9y ago
        Yes, if the bodybuilder can be software-upgraded remotely out of the coma.
        falcolas 9y ago
        And if the coma was remote software upgrade induced? Stretching the analogy a bit, but a lot of people hype Tesla’s remote updates without considering how many remote updates tend to brick our devices.
        StavrosK 9y ago
        Then there's still point in making the claim.
danso 9y ago
That doesn't sound like something that has been extensively studied -- it's strange to me how Tesla keeps citing [0] miles driven by "vehicles equipped with Autopilot hardware", as if it couldn't estimate the subset of miles in which Autopilot was activated -- and it seems like something very hard to measure anyway. How can Tesla or the driver know whether an accident was bound to happen if the accident was prevented? However, I would think that testing Autopilot-alone seems impractical. It's been asserted that AP has no ability to react to or even detect stationary objects in front of it. Can't we assume that in all those cases, non-driver intervention would result in a crash? [0] https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-last-week%E2%80%99s-accident https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-last-week%E2%80%99s-accide...

by smoyer 9y ago

melling 9y ago

I thought the autopilot was always supposed to be combined with the human. It’s not a self-driving car. It’s really an advanced cruise control.

teppix 9y ago
The statistics also includes all the cases where drivers are not paying attention as they should, and it's still safer than the average car (at least according to Tesla).
- mozumder 9y ago
  > it's still safer than the average car (at least according to Tesla). This is Tesla's big lie. In all their marketing, Tesla is comparing crash rates of their passenger cars to ALL vehicles, including trucks and motorcycles, which have higher fatality rates. Motorcycles are about 10x-50x more dangerous than cars. Not only that, they aren't controlling for variances in driver demographics - younger and old people have higher accident rates than middle-aged Tesla drivers - as well as environmental factors - rural roads have higher fatalities than highways. Never-mind the obvious "accidents in cars with Autopilot" vs "accidents in cars with Autopilot on". If you do a proper comparison, Tesla's Autopilot is probably 100x more fatal than other cars. It's a god-dammed death trap. And remember, there are several extremely normal cars with ZERO fatalities: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/record-9-models-have-zero-driver-deaths-iihs-says-n296036 https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/record-9-models-have-... This is not a problem that will be solved without fundamental infrastructure changes in the roads themselves. Anyone that believes in self-driving cars should never be employed, since they don't know what they're talking about.
  - vatueil 9y ago
    I agree that the comparison with all motor vehicle deaths is misleading, and that we ought to be looking at accident rates for Tesla cars with Autopilot on versus off. That Tesla hasn't answered the latter despite having the data to do so is concerning. However, I don't see the evidence for the claim that "Tesla's Autopilot is probably 100x more fatal than other cars". The flip side of the complaint that Tesla hasn't released information to know how safe Autopilot really is, is that we don't know how unsafe it really is either. If this is merely to say "I think Autopilot is likely very unsafe" then just say so, rather than giving a faux numerical value. As for the claim that self-driving cars can't work without "fundamental infrastructure changes" and everybody working on self-driving cars should be fired, I think you're talking way beyond your domain of expertise.
  - uhhhhhhh 9y ago
    You're complaining about one side using wildly misleading and baseless stats, but then turn around and throw out a completely baseless and fairly absurd claim with no attempt to even back or source it, and then claim that because some cars have 0 fatalities that means something. The truth is somewhere in between Tesla's marketing and your wildly absurd 100x more fatal claim, but its much closer to Tesla than you. Tesla's statistics (i.e. real numbers, but context means everything) do involve a whole whack of unrelated comparisons (buses, 18-wheelers, motorcycles) that all server to skew the stats in various ways, we can ignore them claiming to be slightly safer than regular cars. However comparing more like to like, IIHS numbers for passenger cars driver deaths on highways puts Tesla at 3.2x more likely than all other cars to be involved in a fatal crash (1 death/428,000,000 miles driven vs tesla's 1 death/133,000,000 miles driven). Of course this too is an unfair comparison. A 133hp econobox/prius vs a sports car in terms of performance is considered equal in that comparison. If one was really interested in accuracy, a comparison of high power AWD cars in similar price ranges driven on the same roads by the same demographics would be needed. So by even standards clearly biased against Tesla, they are no where near 100x more fatal than other cars. Tesla's own numbers claim autopilot reduces accidents, and supposedly NHS numbers back them up. Its important and critical to not believe marketing hype and lazy statistics. If you want people to take you seriously, countering hype and bad stats with equal or worse hype and worse counter stats is not the way to do it.
- smoyer 9y ago
  Drivers not paying attention in non-autopilot vehicles is an increasing problem with the prevalence of smart phones. In places where it's illegal to text and drive I don't think you're going to get out of a ticket by telling the police officer "it's okay because Tesla was driving". I do believe "it's still safer than the average car" because there's not a big tank of explosive - I'm most curious to hear what caused such a massive fire in this crash. But you're talking about the autopilot and it's statistically incorrect to say it's safer than the average car. It's merely safer than a driver alone - this should be no surprise as you'll find that cars with backup cameras and alarms don't hit have as many accidents while in reverse as cars without them.
  - userbinator 9y ago
    I do believe "it's still safer than the average car" because there's not a big tank of explosive - I'm most curious to hear what caused such a massive fire in this crash. How does a Tesla get such good range? There's still a lot of energy in those batteries, and damaging them is far easier to cause a fire than leaking fuel --- the former can self-ignite just from dissipating its own energy into an internal short, while the latter needs an ignition source. In addition, the batteries are under the entire vehicle and thus more likely to be damaged; a fuel tank has a smaller area and is concentrated in one place. It is extremely rare for fuel tanks to explode in a crash.
    - jsight 9y ago
      I see how that is intuitively true, but it isn't really true in practice. Post crash fires with ICE are unusual, but not extremely rare. Similarly, post-repair car fires (leaky fuel lines) are not as unusual as most people think. So far, experiential evidence with Tesla seems to be showing a lower than average risk of fires, though the breadth and nature of the battery leads to challenges in managing the fire itself. All cases that I'm aware of proceeded at a slow enough pace to allow evacuation of the vehicle.
  - rem1313 9y ago
    It is the opposite, LiIon/LiPo batteries are inherently dangerous and can cause chemical fire for various reasons (overcharging, undercharging, puncture, high temperature, etc.). These things are monitored/controlled in any modern application in normal usage, but in a crash you have to remember that you are literally few inches away from a massive stored up potential chemical energy. The fire burns very hot, the smoke is toxic and assuming somebody gets to you in time, it can only be extinguished reliably using special dry powder fire extinguishers (Class D)...
- Vik1ng 9y ago
  I bet Tesla's are still safer without Autosteer, because the average car includes a lot of old cars and more young drivers.
  - q3k 9y ago
    I would also think that the average Tesla owner is less likely to experience constant stress, long commute hours, tiredness and possible mental health issues that can contribute to car accidents.
  - ilovecars2 9y ago
    What is the catchment range for new (inexperienced) drivers? 18-25? There are a lot of people who have been driving for a long time who are not good at driving at all and lack all kind of self awareness. For example, following the car in front too close.
    - Franciscouzo 9y ago
      Young people are also less risk averse.
antirez 9y ago
That's true but is against any good sense: cars don't allow you to play a video while driving, and allow you to have the false sense of security that somebody else is driving while instead you have to pay constant attention?
- mattmcknight 9y ago
  This morning I saw a minivan drifting all over the road. As we passed him, my passenger noticed that he had CNN playing on a phone attached by suction cup to the middle of the windshield.
smoyer 9y ago
That's what Tesla says but that's not how people are using it - and as people grow more comfortable with the autopilot, the less vigilant they'll become. I have this picture in my head where people are trying to recoup their commute time as though they're using public transport. I suspect we'll get there some day but today is not that day. While the Tesla spokespeople are good at saying it's driver assist, their marketing people haven't heard - https://www.tesla.com/autopilot/ https://www.tesla.com/autopilot/. That page states "All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver." but as I noted above, we don't know how much of that safety should be attributed to the human. Tesla apparently knows when the driver's hands are on the steering wheel and I presume they can also tell when the car brakes, so they may have the data to separate those statistics. At a minimum, their engineers should be looking at every case where the autopilot is engaged but the human intervenes. They should probably also slam on the brakes (okay ... more gently) if the driver is alerted to take over but doesn't. As an aside, just the name "Autopilot" implies autonomy.
- davej 9y ago
  "All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver." This is perhaps a case of purposely confusing marketing. All vehicles have the hardware for full self-driving capability but not yet the software. The full self-driving is to be enabled later on through an over-the-air software update.
  - notahacker 9y ago
    They can't even honestly claim they've got the hardware, when a "full safe driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver" is at this stage something in the realms of hypothesis, and the software which gets closest to doing so relies on far more hardware than a Tesla to achieve this. It's not merely purposely confusing. It's at best, not an outright lie only because they hope it's true.
  - 9y ago
ldesegur 9y ago
From https://www.tesla.com/autopilot https://www.tesla.com/autopilot: "All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver" Why do we keep referring to something that we understand should require human supervision as "auto"? Stop the marketing buzzfeed and let's be real.
- blauditore 9y ago
  I'm not sure whether it's intentionally been worded that way, but that sentence makes only a statement about hardware, not software. So technically, it's correct that the hardware is more capable than that of a human ("sees" and "hears" more), but it's the software that's not up to par.
  - princeb 9y ago
    bizarre statement is there any point in saying that a hypothetical brain-dead, comatose bodybuilder is stronger than a starving man?
    - StavrosK 9y ago
      Yes, if the bodybuilder can be software-upgraded remotely out of the coma.
      - falcolas 9y ago
        And if the coma was remote software upgrade induced? Stretching the analogy a bit, but a lot of people hype Tesla’s remote updates without considering how many remote updates tend to brick our devices.
        StavrosK 9y ago
        Then there's still point in making the claim.

danso 9y ago

That doesn't sound like something that has been extensively studied -- it's strange to me how Tesla keeps citing [0] miles driven by "vehicles equipped with Autopilot hardware", as if it couldn't estimate the subset of miles in which Autopilot was activated -- and it seems like something very hard to measure anyway. How can Tesla or the driver know whether an accident was bound to happen if the accident was prevented? However, I would think that testing Autopilot-alone seems impractical. It's been asserted that AP has no ability to react to or even detect stationary objects in front of it. Can't we assume that in all those cases, non-driver intervention would result in a crash? [0] https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-last-week%E2%80%99s-accident https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-last-week%E2%80%99s-accide...