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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. Ye

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 6y 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 6y ago
  Tesla's self driving cars are students that are under constant supervision of their teachers.
  - klmadfejno 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago
        You are artificially adding in a detail that the student is only driving in limited courses to imply there might be unfamiliar conditions to a self driving car where we shouldn't trust its performance. That is a better point, but also just a different point from the one originally made.
    - davrosthedalek 6y ago
      Not if the student gives control back to the teacher every time there is a problem the student can't handle. The real metric is "dangerous/complicated driving situations mastered" and "miles driven" is only a stand-in. A bad one if the student can deselect the few miles which had the dangerous bits.
      - klmadfejno 6y ago
        If we're really pushing this analogy however, then you would expect the teacher to have a much higher accident rate than the average driver because you're claiming the teacher only does the hard stuff, or, in the very least, misses out on the majority of the easy stuff (assuming, for comparability, that the teacher is an average competence driver). Specifically, if you're claiming only 99/100 miles are easy and have no chance of crashes, then if a human only drives for the 1/100 miles that are hard, they should have a 100x higher crash rate than the human that drives all 100. They should probably have an even worse crash rate because of the switching cost of suddenly taking control, unless you want to make the weird argument that suddenly taking control of an autopilot car is safer. The tesla report says autopilot experiences a crash every 4 million miles. With autopilot disengaged, it's every 2 million miles. The baseline national average is every 0.5 million miles. I can't find the perfect statistics, but one study suggest uneducated people are 4x more likely to die in a car crash, so let's give some generous rounding and say, normalized to wealth, tesla drivers not actively using autopilot are at comparable levels to the average driver (1 per 2 million miles). Unless telsa drivers are phenomenal emergency handlers, its difficult to explain how the non-autopilot crash rate could be so low, while also claiming tesla is hiding the true crash rate of its autopilot features by pushing difficult miles to human drivers, because the human drivers are receiving normal crash rates on what you claim is a much more difficult set of miles. Its possible (probable) that the autopilot would experience a higher crash rate if it were not allowed to call in a human. But to ask generally if autopilot is reducing the total number of accidents that the drivers would experience otherwise, I'd say 'probably'.
  - Tomminn 6y ago
    This shouldn't be downvoted to light grey. The analogy is excellent. I presume this comment is talking about student drivers where the teacher has an override steering wheel. So the student gets into accidents at a lower than average rate because every time they get close to doing so the teacher takes over.
    - klmadfejno 6y ago
      1) Most student hours aren't in override steering wheel cars 2) For this analogy to make sense, it needs to be an average driver, not a driving teacher 3) Unless you're claiming AI and human drivers are uniquely suited to solving different types of driving, if the effect you're claiming is true, you would expect the rate of human/teacher driving hours to be much worse than average because they miss out on all of the "easy" miles. So far, no evidence of this.
bscphil 6y ago
Why do you say that? Student drivers certainly do get into accidents, despite the fact that some driver's ed cars allow the instructor to take partial control. When my partner was in a program, the student driving the car they were in rear-ended another car. Maybe you mean that it doesn't go on their driving record, but is that really true? The one reference I could quickly find of this happening says that the student was issued an infraction: https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2018/04/04/Student-driver-crashes-into-DMV-during-road-test/6151522848041/ https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2018/04/04/Student-driver-crash...
- XorNot 6y ago
  You're missing the point: if you don't have a good sample size, then you don't have good data. Data which also excludes situations (i.e. autopilot throwing control back to the human and counting that time as "autopilot not in use") is bad data.
  - bscphil 6y ago
    I think you replied to the wrong comment, I'm talking about student drivers, not Teslas.
    - XorNot 6y ago
      You're getting really into the weeds on a broader point. Suppose we give a new driver their license - but they've never driven before. Technically they have a perfect driving record. Even 1 or 2 hours in on road, still a perfect driving record. Most student drivers in fact will have in fact, completely perfect driving records. That accidents happen is irrelevant - just think - those stats for the first couple of months probably look spectacular compared to the normal population. The original comparison is all about this use of a biased dataset to draw an invalid conclusion. Except with student drivers we know that actually we shouldn't trust that conclusion, because in practice they have an insufficient amount of experience and have not likely dealt with many challenging road situations. With Tesla, it's the same sort of problem.
rictic 6y ago
Do you mean that any individual student driver is likely to have a perfect record because they haven't driven much? That seems like it wouldn't apply here, because Teslas have, in fact, driven a large number of miles. Or are you claiming that supervised student drivers are much safer because they, like self driving cars today, are supervised? Maybe I'm totally missing the point of your analogy, but it seems like it doesn't clarify much.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
A student driver ran into my neighbors yard on our non-busy street.

klmadfejno 6y 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 6y ago
Tesla's self driving cars are students that are under constant supervision of their teachers.
- klmadfejno 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago
      You are artificially adding in a detail that the student is only driving in limited courses to imply there might be unfamiliar conditions to a self driving car where we shouldn't trust its performance. That is a better point, but also just a different point from the one originally made.
  - davrosthedalek 6y ago
    Not if the student gives control back to the teacher every time there is a problem the student can't handle. The real metric is "dangerous/complicated driving situations mastered" and "miles driven" is only a stand-in. A bad one if the student can deselect the few miles which had the dangerous bits.
    - klmadfejno 6y ago
      If we're really pushing this analogy however, then you would expect the teacher to have a much higher accident rate than the average driver because you're claiming the teacher only does the hard stuff, or, in the very least, misses out on the majority of the easy stuff (assuming, for comparability, that the teacher is an average competence driver). Specifically, if you're claiming only 99/100 miles are easy and have no chance of crashes, then if a human only drives for the 1/100 miles that are hard, they should have a 100x higher crash rate than the human that drives all 100. They should probably have an even worse crash rate because of the switching cost of suddenly taking control, unless you want to make the weird argument that suddenly taking control of an autopilot car is safer. The tesla report says autopilot experiences a crash every 4 million miles. With autopilot disengaged, it's every 2 million miles. The baseline national average is every 0.5 million miles. I can't find the perfect statistics, but one study suggest uneducated people are 4x more likely to die in a car crash, so let's give some generous rounding and say, normalized to wealth, tesla drivers not actively using autopilot are at comparable levels to the average driver (1 per 2 million miles). Unless telsa drivers are phenomenal emergency handlers, its difficult to explain how the non-autopilot crash rate could be so low, while also claiming tesla is hiding the true crash rate of its autopilot features by pushing difficult miles to human drivers, because the human drivers are receiving normal crash rates on what you claim is a much more difficult set of miles. Its possible (probable) that the autopilot would experience a higher crash rate if it were not allowed to call in a human. But to ask generally if autopilot is reducing the total number of accidents that the drivers would experience otherwise, I'd say 'probably'.
- Tomminn 6y ago
  This shouldn't be downvoted to light grey. The analogy is excellent. I presume this comment is talking about student drivers where the teacher has an override steering wheel. So the student gets into accidents at a lower than average rate because every time they get close to doing so the teacher takes over.
  - klmadfejno 6y ago
    1) Most student hours aren't in override steering wheel cars 2) For this analogy to make sense, it needs to be an average driver, not a driving teacher 3) Unless you're claiming AI and human drivers are uniquely suited to solving different types of driving, if the effect you're claiming is true, you would expect the rate of human/teacher driving hours to be much worse than average because they miss out on all of the "easy" miles. So far, no evidence of this.

bscphil 6y ago

Why do you say that? Student drivers certainly do get into accidents, despite the fact that some driver's ed cars allow the instructor to take partial control. When my partner was in a program, the student driving the car they were in rear-ended another car. Maybe you mean that it doesn't go on their driving record, but is that really true? The one reference I could quickly find of this happening says that the student was issued an infraction: https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2018/04/04/Student-driver-crashes-into-DMV-during-road-test/6151522848041/ https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2018/04/04/Student-driver-crash...

XorNot 6y ago
You're missing the point: if you don't have a good sample size, then you don't have good data. Data which also excludes situations (i.e. autopilot throwing control back to the human and counting that time as "autopilot not in use") is bad data.
- bscphil 6y ago
  I think you replied to the wrong comment, I'm talking about student drivers, not Teslas.
  - XorNot 6y ago
    You're getting really into the weeds on a broader point. Suppose we give a new driver their license - but they've never driven before. Technically they have a perfect driving record. Even 1 or 2 hours in on road, still a perfect driving record. Most student drivers in fact will have in fact, completely perfect driving records. That accidents happen is irrelevant - just think - those stats for the first couple of months probably look spectacular compared to the normal population. The original comparison is all about this use of a biased dataset to draw an invalid conclusion. Except with student drivers we know that actually we shouldn't trust that conclusion, because in practice they have an insufficient amount of experience and have not likely dealt with many challenging road situations. With Tesla, it's the same sort of problem.

rictic 6y ago

Do you mean that any individual student driver is likely to have a perfect record because they haven't driven much? That seems like it wouldn't apply here, because Teslas have, in fact, driven a large number of miles. Or are you claiming that supervised student drivers are much safer because they, like self driving cars today, are supervised? Maybe I'm totally missing the point of your analogy, but it seems like it doesn't clarify much.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

A student driver ran into my neighbors yard on our non-busy street.