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Some people are quoting the recent Tesla safety report [1] as evidence that Autopilot is on average much safer than a human driver. This is a classic case of th

• jacquesm 5y ago
  The marketing and messaging around auto-pilot simultaneously argues that auto-pilot is safer than a human driver but blames the driver when there is an accident.
  • smnrchrds 5y ago
    Heads I win, tails you lose. What's so difficult to understand? /s
  • josephcsible 5y ago
    A human and Autopilot working together is safer than just a human driving. Autopilot by itself is currently less safe than just a human driving (which is why it's still level 2). There's no mixed messaging.
    • smnrchrds 5y ago
      > A human and Autopilot working together is safer than just a human driving. I am not so sure. The data from Tesla is always comparing apples and oranges and I have not seen a good third-party analysis confirming this hypothesis.
    • legolas2412 5y ago
      There's no mixed messaging? The driver is there just for regulatory purposes, all cars self driving in 2016!, cross country summon in 2017, coast to coast autonomous drive in 2018, Tesla self driving taxis in 2019, FSD making teslas worth 250k$ in 2020! Etc etc There are a lot of statements by Elon Musk
      • josephcsible 5y ago
        Those are all "coming soon". Tesla and Elon Musk are 100% clear that today, you still need to be an attentive driver while using Autopilot.
        • jonny_eh 5y ago
          All those years are in the past.
          • bmicraft 5y ago
            But those were never guaranteed dates, just very poor/optimistic predictions
            • orloffm 5y ago
              They were, Musk always used that phrase "not a question mark".
            • Slartie 5y ago
              "I'll sell you this box. I know it is empty today, but I assure you, tomorrow it will contain a lump of gold!" On the next day: "I'll sell you this box. I know it's empty today, but tomorrow..."
  • aeternum 5y ago
    Autopilot in a plane can make things significantly safer by reducing cognitive load for the pilot. However the plane autopilot will in no way avoid a collision. Pilots are still primarily at fault if the plane crashes.
    • bildung 5y ago
      Teslas aren't planes, though, so how does the etymology of the word "autopilot" help here?
      • brokenmachine 5y ago
        The etymology doesn't help. It was an intentionally misleading word for Tesla to choose.
      • fastball 5y ago
        Um. > Autopilot is such a misleading term. >> The functionality is almost identical to the only other time we regularly use "autopilot", in airplanes. >>> Yeah but like, who cares about etymology and stuff? Misleading af.
        • bildung 5y ago
          Ok, I'll try in other words: Statistically speaking, about zero persons know how the autopilot in a plane works (me included), while they do know the word autopilot. Therefore, they can't infer the limitations of Teslas autopilot from a plane's autopilot.
          • fastball 5y ago
            I seriously don't understand this disconnect. You know the word autopilot because it is a technology in airplanes. That is the only reason you know of the word. Statistically speaking, 100% of people know that 1. Airplanes can have autopilot 2. Passenger jets still have multiple pilots in the cockpit, even with autopilot. You don't need to know the intricacies of how autopilot functions to recognize the significance of those two facts (which I'm sure you knew) and apply the same to Tesla.
• bryanlarsen 5y ago
  To avoid #2, Tesla specifically counts any accidents within 5 minutes after autopilot disconnect as an autopilot accident.
  • lancesells 5y ago
    Can you explain how that avoids it? Not sure I understand.
    • HWR_14 5y ago
      It avoids a variant of point 2. The case where the driver disengages the autopilot to avoid the crash and fails. It avoids chalking that crash up to human error. It does not avoid the initial point you made that the human accident avoidance avoids the crash (and thus statistic) on the N miles of autopilot usage before it is disengaged.
  • nilkn 5y ago
    Does that really avoid #2? My understanding of that situation was this: 1. The driver senses an impending accident or dangerous situation, so they disengage autopilot. 2. The driver personally maneuvers the car so as to avoid any accident or crash. 3. The driver re-engages autopilot afterwards. In this scenario, there is no accident, so there's nothing for Tesla to count either way. The idea is that there could have been an accident if not for human intervention. Unless Tesla counts every disengagement as a potential accident, I don't really see how they could account for this.
    • tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
      You need to look at the whole system. The end result (of autopilot + human) is no accident. If the human prevents 99% of autopilot could-have-been accidents, and as a result, 10 people die per X miles driven whereas through purely human driving 20 people die, then driving with autopilot is safer. Unless you're trying to answer "is autopilot ready for L5", this is the right metric to look at.
      • 5y ago
• Hamuko 5y ago
  Does the safety report account for vehicle age and price? Because I imagine there's a difference in accident-free miles if you were to compare a new Mercedes-Benz S-Class to a 15-year-old Camry.
  • camjohnson26 5y ago
    No it doesn’t, that’s one of the main criticisms along with comparing highway miles to city miles.
    • tyingq 5y ago
      And Tesla owner demographics (presumably mostly affluent + older) with "everyone".
• buran77 5y ago
  As I like to point out to people when they quote this self driving statistic, student drivers have the best driving record out there. No fines, no accidents. Yet nobody would ever confuse a student driver for a good driver even if they are probably better than current self driving tech.
  • klmadfejno 5y ago
    That's a pretty weak argument regardless of your stance on self driving cars. Student driver records aren't meaningful because we don't have enough data to make a judgement. We have lots of data on self driving cars. There are other ways to cast doubt on self driving car records but this isn't one of them.
    • imtringued 5y ago
      Tesla's self driving cars are students that are under constant supervision of their teachers.
      • klmadfejno 5y ago
        That's just a bad analogy though. If a student driver accumulates a million miles of driving with no accidents, they're probably a fine driver even if the teacher was in there the whole time. Conversely, you're not a safer driver if tomorrow a driving instructor decides to sit in the back seat of your car tomorrow.
        • edmundsauto 5y ago
          It means they are probably fine to drive the courses they have been driving. However, we know with self-driving that it isn't necessarily representative of what they will be asked to drive. It is also not a particularly relevant comparison to human drivers, unless we normalize a bit for road/driving conditions.
          • klmadfejno 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
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• riffic 5y ago
  Just for the record, people who study the problem space concerning traffic safety have disavowed the word "accident" because it all too often dismisses the preventable root causes that can be learned from here. context: * https://laist.com/2020/01/03/car_crash_accident_traffic_violence_language.php https://laist.com/2020/01/03/car_crash_accident_traffic_viol... * https://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/04/04/associated-press-cautions-journalists-that-crashes-arent-always-accidents/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/04/04/associated-press-caut... * https://chi.streetsblog.org/2021/04/05/laspatas-ordinance-would-remove-reference-to-traffic-accidents-from-municipal-code/ https://chi.streetsblog.org/2021/04/05/laspatas-ordinance-wo... It'd be nice if folks here would be mindful of the role language plays. Here's also a preemptive "intention doesn't matter" because the first post I share covers that in the section "The Semantics of Intention", where it argues that the decisions have already been made in both the designs of our streets and in the choices people make behind the wheel, and those have known and changeable outcomes. last edit I swear, but a good catchphrase I've seen recently that I'll be pinching is "Accidents happen, crashes don’t have to."
  • andrew_v4 5y ago
    Wow, how unhelpful. I don't know the acceptable way to call this out, but how about focusing on substance instead of just bringing pedantic language stuff into the mix. I see this happening a lot, when people can't find a real way to contribute, they start debating the position of commas or whether it should be called inquiry or enquiry or whatever. It distracts from real debate, and maybe gets you some attention (lots of bureaucratic leader types love this sort of thing) but it's really wasting everybody's time. (Edit, the irony isn't lost on me of providing a low value comment that doesn't contribute to the discussion in response to one I accuse of something similar. But I've seen so much time wasted and so many people getting ahead and in some cases basically build a career on engaging with these kind of language things instead of doing any actual work, I wanted to bring it up)
    • shkkmo 5y ago
      His comment added a lot more to the conversation that your comment (or mine.) Sometimes pedantism is important and useful. In this case I have no problems imagining that we could reframe our understanding of how to design traffic systems by reframing the language we use to talk about how those systems fail. Not that I necessarily agree, but I don't think you can dismiss the argument by waving your hands and saying "pedantism is bad".
• ogre_codes 5y ago
  I believe autopilot's safety features were disabled so these statistics are meaningless. I'm not talking about simply forcing it into autopilot, but disabling autopilot's ability to control the vehicle's acceleration. The reason I think this is the case is due largely to the speed the vehicle was traveling which is... unlikely under autopilot which limits speeds to 5 MPH over the speed limit. If you are pushing on the gas pedal, the car can only steer and has no control over speed. This weird sort of hybrid riding where the car is controlling the steering and the driver is controlling the speed puts the car in an untenable situation. It is a driver with no brakes and no control over the gas pedal. Maybe Tesla should disable this mode entirely. Tesla (very reasonably) limits speeds to 5MPH over the speed limit when you are in autosteer mode, so lots of people like the ability to bypass the speed. Personally, I very much like being able to push the speed when it's reasonably safe to do so. If you are operating the system as designed, it's no less safe than cruise control.
  • davidgould 5y ago
    Tesla does not limit the speed over the speed to 5 mph over the speed limit.
    • ogre_codes 5y ago
      When auto steer is engaged, it limits the speed to 5MPH over the speed limit unless you are holding the gas pedal down. If you hold the gas pedal down, the automatic braking and speed controls are not active. At that point, the car isn't in control. If you are on the highway, it is different. But this car was in a residential area.
    • caf 5y ago
      It's not clear exactly what the rules it uses are, but there are definitely some roads where the set speed is limited to 0 above the speed limit when autopilot is engaged.
      • ogre_codes 5y ago
        This is consistent with my experience: > - On highways: Autosteer and Traffic Aware Cruise Control have speed limits of 90 mph. > - Off highways: Autosteer is no longer restricted to 35 mph. Autosteer has a speed limit of 5 mph faster than the detected speed limit, unless you’ve specified a lower speed limit offset. > - If Model S does not detect a limit, then the maximum speed the vehicle can drive is 45 mph. https://insideevs.com/news/332446/tesla-autopilot-update-bumps-autosteer-speed-up-to-90-mph/ https://insideevs.com/news/332446/tesla-autopilot-update-bum... We know it wasn't a divided highway. Even if they were on a 2 lane highway the speed limit would have been limited to 60MPH. They wrapped the car around a tree, destroyed the integrity of the battery, and both passengers were disabled enough they couldn't escape the car. The car doesn't peg the accelerator under autopilot so even getting to 60MPH in "A couple hundred yards" seems unlikely unless there was someone applying the gas pedal. I suppose the alternative explanation is there was a malfunction which caused uncontrolled acceleration and ejected the driver into the back seat?
• reissbaker 5y ago
  I have read the criticism of how the Autopilot miles aren't apples-to-apples comparisons with national averages many times. However, this cherry-picks a single number from the safety report and ignores the other reported statistics. If the explanation for why Autopilot miles were so much safer than non-Autopilot miles is that people turn it off in dangerous situations — and thus equal or greater numbers of crashes were occurring for Autopilot users overall compared to the national average, they were just occurring when Autopilot was off — the crash rate without Autopilot engaged would have to be higher than the national average. Otherwise, where would the crashes go? However, it isn't. The crash rate with Autopilot off (but with other safety features on) is about 4x better than the national average. And with all safety features turned off, it's still 2x better. I don't think you can explain away the high safety record of Autopilot by claiming the crashes are concentrated in the non-Autopilot miles, because they aren't. While Autopilot miles are safer than non-Autopilot miles, non-Autopilot miles are no more dangerous than the national average (and in fact are less dangerous). Autopilot+human is considerably safer than human alone.
  • nnm 5y ago
    The total crash rate in Tesla cars is not necessary less than that of say Prius cars. Comparing Tesla cars crash rate with that of the overall population is dishonest: 1. drivers are biased population 2. the age of the car is biased
    • reissbaker 5y ago
      It is not "dishonest." Toyota, AFAIK, does not publish these numbers; comparing to the national average is just the best you can do. Publishing the numbers without any comparison would be silly; what does it mean to know Tesla's accidents per mile if you not only don't know it for any other manufacturer, you also don't even know what the national average is? And while I couldn't find numbers for Prius specifically, it seems that hybrid cars are actually on average more dangerous than other cars, so I would be surprised if Tesla were not handily besting the Toyota Prius given Tesla's safety record: https://www.thecarconnection.com/news/1022235_hybrid-drivers-more-ticket-and-accident-prone https://www.thecarconnection.com/news/1022235_hybrid-drivers... Yes, there may be biases in driver population that make Tesla owners slightly more or less likely to crash. However, I think it is a very large stretch to claim that this would result in the fairly astoundingly different safety numbers. As for the age of the car: car age is mostly a statistical factor due to safety systems in newer cars. (It is also important in terms of deaths due to safety standards like crumple zones and airbags, but we are talking about a count of accidents, not deaths; if a crumple zone has been used, it is an accident.) Tesla publishes the statistics both with safety features on (4x better than national average), and the numbers for if they have been disabled which is still 2x better. I think if the claim that the crashes are concentrated in the non-Autopilot miles were true, and that Autopilot+human is more dangerous than human alone, it would be very hard to understand how the crash rate was still 2x better than the national average with safety features disabled and Autopilot off.
• nnm 5y ago
  The Tesla Safety Report is so misleading: 1. The accident rate does not take into account of drivers age, credit score and prior safety record, or the age / value of the car. 2. Most people only turn on autopilot when driving is easy (e.g. on a highway).
  • hurflmurfl 5y ago
    Sorry, a non-American here. By "credit score" are you referring to the financial credit score or some sort of "points system" for drivers? If the former, then why would it be important to include it?
    • igorstellar 5y ago
      In some states auto insurance companies are using credit score because there is correlation between insurance claims and credit score [1]. I guess you can establish "crash-free" and insurance claim correlation even more easier. [1] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/auto-insurance-score/ https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/auto-insurance-...
      • IncRnd 5y ago
        Not some states but 94% of the states, according to your link.
        • oses 5y ago
          Looks like that article may be out of date, according to experian [1] 4 states completely disallow using credit scores to set auto insurance rates, and 3 more restrict it. However, this is still significantly more than "some states" [1] https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/which-states-prohibit-or-restrict-the-use-of-credit-based-insurance-scores/ https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/which-states-pro...
    • skissane 5y ago
      Credit score is correlated with personality traits such as conscientiousness, risk-taking, etc, which in turn influence driving safety
• deleted 5y ago
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• emodendroket 5y ago
  The problem of people overestimating the capability of the car or just losing their attention when Autopilot is engaged could easily wipe out whatever wins you do get.
• eevilspock 5y ago
  This is a tangent about the Simpson's Paradox that may or may not be relevant to Autopilot. Specifically about the archetypal example given in the Wikipedia article, "UC Berkeley gender bias": Even if the deeper data analysis showed a "small but statistically significant bias in favor of women" in terms of admission rates in individual departments, it doesn't prove that there isn't another kind of bias behind the overall admission rates (44% for men, 35% for women). Specifically, why doesn't the university rebalance department sizes, so that all departments are similarly competitive? It would result in the overall male and female rates converging. It would also make a lot of sense from a supply and demand perspective. It is entirely possible that there was no urgency or desire to do so because of bias on the part of administrators, who were mostly male. Might the quickness to dismiss the issue as a Simpson Paradox reflect another bias?
• nuker 5y ago
  Valid stat comparison will be average accident rate of all cars with autopilot vs same of all cars without, and with $30k - $50k current market value. This will equalise many things. I, personally, wont trust some autopilot scripts, at least in this decade.
• autokad 5y ago
  its really really annoying that even smart people puppet 'self driving cars are safer than human ones'. self driving cars are orders of magnitude more dangerous than human drivers. its absurd to say otherwise, and to do so requires a level of stupidity that can only be explained by dogma.
• jcoq 5y ago
  I don't want to detail the conversation too much, or distract from the excellent points you have made... But how is this simpson's paradox? Simpson's paradox is easier to understand geometrically. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Simpson_paradox_vectors.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Simpson_paradox_vectors... L1 and L2 in the diagram have smaller slopes than B1 and B2, and yet their sum is higher. It's not hard to characterize when this happens. So the canonic example is that a drug might be more effective against all sub-cases (e.g. mild, severe illness) and yet appear less effective overall. You, on the other hand, seem to be describing selection bias.
  • jeremysalwen 5y ago
    Simpson's paradox can be thought of as selection bias as well. To make the Simpson's paradox clear, consider the following simplified scenario: autopilot has more accidents per city mile, and more accidents per highway mile, but because highway miles have fewer accidents, and autopilot is tested on a much higher proportion of highway miles, on average it has fewer accidents per mile overall.
• cookiengineer 5y ago
  I totally agree with your argument. But playing the role of the devil's advocate here one might argue that the major benefit of autopilots is that the data will be accumulated to the set of happened accidents, so that they don't happen again in future. When comparing accidents of manual vs automated driving, manual cases don't have any learning effect (let alone communication of it and availability of that to other human drivers). Automated driving on the other hand has the theoretical benefit, if it's openly shared, that all edge cases of untrained accidents go asymptotically to zero over time. But in order to achieve that there must be a law that enforces the use of the same dataset, and that defines this dataset as public domain so that all autopilots can learn from that knowledge. This was actually my initial hope for OpenAI. And oh boi have I been disappointed there. Nothing changed when it comes to reproducability of training or availability of datasets, and most research of OpenAI seems to be spent on proprietary concepts.
  • pauljurczak 5y ago
    > manual cases don't have any learning effect Not true. The traffic and safety regulations are in part based by analysis and lessons learned from crashes. The infrastructure, e.g. road profile, speed limit, signage, etc. benefits from the same.
    • cookiengineer 5y ago
      So we should simply make more bumpers on the side and limit speeds to 10km/h to prevent crashes? I was not talking about changing environment constraints. I was talking about changing the perception and measuring of inputs in human drivers.
      • pauljurczak 5y ago
        Environment constraints and performance of human drivers are not independent. Your argument suggested that they are.
• pauljurczak 5y ago
  > I'm not saying that Autopilot isn't safer than a human driver I'm saying that Autopilot isn't safer than a human driver. The fatal accidents involving Autopilot so far, mostly crashing into stationary objects, were easily avoidable by a marginally competent driver. Tesla is playing with fire.
  • aeternum 5y ago
    There are definitely accidents with Autopilot that could have been avoided by humans, but we need to compare those against the cases where autopilot prevents accidents that are unlikely to be avoided by humans, like this one: https://youtu.be/bUhFfunT2ds?t=116 https://youtu.be/bUhFfunT2ds?t=116 It's pretty clear that human paying attention + autopilot is safer than either: 1) human only 2) autopilot only.
    • jjav 5y ago
      > but we need to compare those against the cases where autopilot prevents accidents that are unlikely to be avoided by humans Right, but do any examples of this exist, ever? Your link is clearly not an example. Any aware driver would've done the same. I'm sceptical there can ever be a scenario were tesla autopilot can outdo an aware, conscious driver.
      • davrosthedalek 5y ago
        Some of the examples in the video are actually pretty impressive. I'm not sure I would have seen some of these cars coming. But they only show that human driver with autopilot assist is potentially better than human alone, i.e. human driver, with autopilot backup. I would be surprised if that is not better. But the way autopilot is supposed to be used is that it's only autopilot with human backup. And I would argue that the "with human backup" often has a "because of law, not necessity" undertone)
    • pauljurczak 5y ago
      I would agree, if the Autopilot didn't need a significant amount of human attention to avoid a simple, potentially deadly crash. Your equation should be rewritten to: human paying attention to driving + human preventing Autopilot from crashing + Autopilot I seriously doubt this divided attention produces a safer system with today's technology. Except
• anfilt 5y ago
  There is also an other problem with only trying to better than average driver. If your system is only slightly better than average. That means basically 1 out of 2 people are better than your software. Autonomous, driving should be multiple sigmas better than average. Especially given the reaction times that are possible for a computer vs a human. If its only good as average a large amount of drivers would be safer to drive themselves. Basically it should be as good if not better than the most capable drivers. Average is way to low of a bar to aim for.
  • davrosthedalek 5y ago
    The reaction time is actually an interesting question. Reactions in humans which do not require thought/planning can be quite quick, and the human vision system is /very/ quick, especially for movement. How fast is the vision system in a Tesla? Not only frequency, what's the latency from vision change to decision? My guess is the Tesla is faster, but by less than an order of magnitude. I would not be surprised that it's slower for some cases. But I really don't know.
• whatever1 5y ago
  Volvo xc90 had no fatal accident from 2002 to 2018. Beat that for starters. https://www.expressandstar.com/news/motors/2018/04/17/no-fatal-crashes-in-volvo-xc90-since-2002-release/ https://www.expressandstar.com/news/motors/2018/04/17/no-fat...
  • runeks 5y ago
    What about the people that the XC90 rams into?
    • whatever1 5y ago
      That famous xc90 was modified by Uber and Volvo’s safety features were disabled. Literally the only xc90 that have killed are the ones driven by artificial neural networks. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/uber-disabled-volvo-suv-s-standard-safety-system-before-fatality https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/uber-disa...
• Iv 5y ago
  Can't we easily avoid these pitfalls by just comparing accidents/km on autopilot-equipped cars vs others? And disregard whether or not the autopilot is engaged.