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That statistic is wildly and purposefully misleading. It compares the safety of Autopilot (which only drives on the freeway) with human drivers on any road. Acc

by evv 8y ago

That statistic is wildly and purposefully misleading. It compares the safety of Autopilot (which only drives on the freeway) with human drivers on any road. Accidents-per-mile are already much lower on the freeway. Plus, the statistic ignores the fact that responsibility is actually shared between humans and the car. If autopilot gets into an unsafe situation and gives control to the human at the last moment, the car company might claim that the accident happened under human control. We have a long way to go before we can truly understand the safety of semi-autonomous vehicles.

sandworm101 8y ago
>> If autopilot gets into an unsafe situation and gives control to the human at the last moment We have lots of experience with the reverse, where the human drives but the autopilot rips control away when things go wrong. Traction control, radar-triggered braking, even basic ABS is a machine taking over from the human once things get hairy. Several AirForce fighters have systems that will sometimes ignore the pilot's inputs and save the aircraft from a crash. That's the real path for semi-autonomous cars imho: you do all the driving until the robot steps in to save your ass. (I cannot wait for the day someone tries to sell a car that will automatically obey speed limits regardless of driver input. That's a stock to short.)
Faark 8y ago
I'd even expect their human driven statistics not actually representative or useful for comparisons. Their cars are expensive, mostly excluding young and thus often unexperienced drivers. They also don't particularly target older people, the other group with high accident rates. Controlling for all those variables is hard and not to their benefit, thus I'd never expect their pr team to do so. But I wonder if that might even creep into their automated driving stats... e.g. by drivers taking control in dangerous situations.

by evv 8y ago

sandworm101 8y ago

>> If autopilot gets into an unsafe situation and gives control to the human at the last moment We have lots of experience with the reverse, where the human drives but the autopilot rips control away when things go wrong. Traction control, radar-triggered braking, even basic ABS is a machine taking over from the human once things get hairy. Several AirForce fighters have systems that will sometimes ignore the pilot's inputs and save the aircraft from a crash. That's the real path for semi-autonomous cars imho: you do all the driving until the robot steps in to save your ass. (I cannot wait for the day someone tries to sell a car that will automatically obey speed limits regardless of driver input. That's a stock to short.)

Faark 8y ago

I'd even expect their human driven statistics not actually representative or useful for comparisons. Their cars are expensive, mostly excluding young and thus often unexperienced drivers. They also don't particularly target older people, the other group with high accident rates. Controlling for all those variables is hard and not to their benefit, thus I'd never expect their pr team to do so. But I wonder if that might even creep into their automated driving stats... e.g. by drivers taking control in dangerous situations.