7 ms·

That metric is tracked indirectly, by the lower number of accidents that AVs are involved in per distance travelled compared to human-driven vehicles.

by olex 3y ago

reneherse 3y ago
It would be interesting if some kind of active/inductive measurement could be made. As a human driver, I'm keenly aware of the "close calls" I've had where I've narrowly avoided a probable collision through good decisions and/or reaction times. I'm probably less aware of the times when I've just gotten lucky. No doubt self-driving companies have internally available data on this stuff. Can't wait til superior performance to human drivers is a major selling point!
delfinom 3y ago
I still want that metric restricted to geographical area. The average across the entire country seems many times outright malicious to use.
CSMastermind 3y ago
> by the lower number of accidents that AVs are involved in per distance travelled compared to human-driven vehicles Just a note that this number is hard to calculate accurately with an acceptable degree of certainty. Anyone claiming that AVs are involved in fewer accidents per distance traveled than human drivers is either extrapolating from incomplete data or baking some unreliable assumptions into their statement. Welch Labs has a good introductory video to this topic: https://youtu.be/yaYER2M8dcs?si=XEB4aWlYf6gnnTqM https://youtu.be/yaYER2M8dcs?si=XEB4aWlYf6gnnTqM
- Steltek 3y ago
  Can someone summarize the video? That was my first thought as well: crash data for humans is clearly underreported. For example, police don't always write reports or human drivers agree to keep it off the books.
  - serial_dev 3y ago
    And I'm not even sure how reliable is the "miles driven" metric. I mean I'm sure you can estimate it somehow, but what's the margin of error there?
    - viraptor 3y ago
      Odometers are pretty well regulated and insurance companies will often have a good record of the readings over long periods. I'm not sure how the org doing the data collection does it precisely, but pretty accurate data is out there.
  - CSMastermind 3y ago
    The probability of a human driver causing a fatality on any given mile driven is 0.00000109% (1.09 fatalities occur per 100 million miles driven). Applying some basic statistics to show to a 95% confidence level that a self driving system causes fewer fatalities than a human you would have to drive 275 million autonomous miles flawlessly. This would require a fleet of 100 vehicles to drive continuously for 12.56 years. And in practice self-driving vehicles don't drive perfectly. Best estimates on the actual number of miles driven to validate their safety is around 5 billion autonomously driven miles and that's assuming that they actually are safer than a human driver. Then you get into the comparison itself. In practice AVs don't drive on all the same roads, at the same times, as human drivers. A disproportionate number of accidents happen at night, in adverse weather, and on roads that AVs don't typically drive on. Then you have to ask if comparing AVs to all drivers and vehicles is valid comparison. We know for instance that vehicles with automated breaking and lane assist are involved in fewer accidents. Then of course if minimizing accidents is really what you care about there's something easy we could do right now: just mandate all vehicles must have an breathalyzer ignition. We do this for some people who have been convicted of DUI but doing it for everyone would eliminate a third of fatalities.
    - BobaFloutist 3y ago
      Then of course if minimizing accidents is really what you care about there's something easy we could do right now: just mandate all vehicles must have an breathalyzer ignition. We do this for some people who have been convicted of DUI but doing it for everyone would eliminate a third of fatalities. In a similar vein, if we put geo-informed speed governors in cars that physically prevented you from exceeding, say, 20% of the speed limit, fatalities would also likely plummet. But people haaaaate that idea.
- jjoonathan 3y ago
  Tesla just announced 500 million miles driven by FSD [1]. Per the video, were it fully autonomous they could have a 95% CI on "safer than human" at only 275 million miles [2], but obviously having human supervision ought to remove many of the worst incidents from the dataset. Does anyone know if they publish disengagement data? [1] https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/IR/TSLA-Q3-2023-Update-3.pdf https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/... [2] https://youtu.be/yaYER2M8dcs?t=477 https://youtu.be/yaYER2M8dcs?t=477
  - CSMastermind 3y ago
    Note that it would need to drive those 275 million miles without incident to be safer than a human. Which for Tesla's FSD is obviously not the case. https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-fsd-autopilot-crashes-investigations https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-fsd-autopilot-crashes-...
    - jjoonathan 3y ago
      Your video and my response were talking about fatal crashes. Humans don't go 100 million miles between crashes. Has FSD had a fatality? Autopilot (the lane-follower) has had a few, but I don't think I've heard about one on FSD, and if their presentations on occupancy networks are to be believed there is a pretty big distinction between the two.
      - JonChesterfield 3y ago
        Isn't "FSD" the thing they're no longer allowed to call self driving because it keeps killing cyclists? Google suggests lots of Tesla+cyclist+dead but with Tesla claiming it's all fine and not their fault, which isn't immediately persuasive.
        jjoonathan 3y ago
        > Google suggests lots of Tesla+cyclist+dead but with Tesla claiming it's all fine and not their fault, which isn't immediately persuasive. With human drivers -- are we blaming Tesla for those too? You do you, but I'm here to learn about FSD. It looks like there was a public incident where FSD lunged at a cyclist. See, that's what I'm interested in, and that's why I asked if anyone knew about disengagement stats.
Mathnerd314 3y ago
Not sure that's fair - the number of accidents in human-driven vehicles varies significantly by the human driving it. Do you compare with the teen that just obtained their license and is more interested in their phone than in driving properly, or the 65-year old doctor who's been driving for work and other purposes every day for the past 40 years? According to https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/age-of-driver/ https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/age-of-dr... it's at least a 6x difference.
- saagarjha 3y ago
  Teens who’ve just gotten their license are often quite good drivers. It’s after that when they drive poorly. (This also applies to adults, to a lesser extent.)
- hcurtiss 3y ago
  I think you compare it to the average as that's who you are encountering when on the road. You have no way of selecting the other drivers to bias toward the doctor.
- a_wild_dandan 3y ago
  You compare what matters — mean accidents per mile driven. And like any actuary, you can compare distributions with finer granularity data (location, tickets, ages, occupations, collusion severity, etc). None of this is new or intractable. We can have objective standards with confident judgements of what’s safe for our roads. As an aside, public acceptance of driverless cars is another story. A story filled with warped perspectives due to media outlets stoking the audience emotions which keep outlets in business — outrage, fear, and drama. For every story covering an extreme accident involving human drivers, there might be 100 stories covering a moderate driverless accident. No matter how superhuman autonomous cars perform, they’ll have a massive uphill battle for a positive image.
stouset 3y ago
Although things are changing, the overwhelming majority of AV miles are generally-safer miles on protected highways. And yet their statistics are typically compared against vehicle miles on all road types. Further, most AVs explicitly disengage when they encounter situations beyond their understanding. So again, we’re selecting AV statistics based on generally favorable conditions, but we don’t track human-operated miles the same way. It’s not really a fair comparison.
- l33t7332273 3y ago
  > most AVs explicitly disengage when they encounter situations beyond their understanding What do you mean by disengage? Cruise’s AVs don’t have a driver to take over.
  - stouset 3y ago
    I’m lumping things like Tesla FSD. But also, there are explicitly times and areas where Cruises don’t operate due to being insufficiently able to operate. And times where they do just pull over and wait for human intervention when they don’t know what else to do. Both of which are safe and reasonable, but which also selects themselves into a safer set of miles actually traveled.
    - Zanni 3y ago
      Human drivers "disengage" also, though we don't think of it that way. I have aging friends who refuse to drive at night. I'll stay home in bad weather. When I was younger, I'd sometimes ask a passenger to back out of tricky parking space for me.
      - stouset 3y ago
        Yes, but we’re still comparing a highly selected set of AV miles vs the massive variety of human-driven miles.
- xnx 3y ago
  It's not too useful to lump Tesla, Cruise, and Waymo together here. Tesla is years behind Cruise and cruise is years behind Waymo in terms of driving capability. Waymo doesn't even drive on highways, so we don't know how safe it would be (probably very safe).
Guy_w_Keyboard 3y ago
Well, obviously the number of autonomous vehicles involved in accidents is going to be lower, but that's because barely any of them exist compared to the vast majority of people driving their cars. If you had statistics on proportions though, that might be a different story.
- viraptor 3y ago
  You missed "per distance travelled" - that partially normalises the results. You still have to adjust for situation and road type (which Tesla conveniently doesn't do in their advertised numbers) for a better result.

That metric is tracked indirectly, by the lower number of accidents that AVs are involved in per distance travelled compared to human-driven vehicles.

by olex 3y ago

That metric is tracked indirectly, by the lower number of accidents that AVs are involved in per distance travelled compared to human-driven vehicles.

reneherse 3y ago

It would be interesting if some kind of active/inductive measurement could be made. As a human driver, I'm keenly aware of the "close calls" I've had where I've narrowly avoided a probable collision through good decisions and/or reaction times. I'm probably less aware of the times when I've just gotten lucky. No doubt self-driving companies have internally available data on this stuff. Can't wait til superior performance to human drivers is a major selling point!

delfinom 3y ago

I still want that metric restricted to geographical area. The average across the entire country seems many times outright malicious to use.

CSMastermind 3y ago

> by the lower number of accidents that AVs are involved in per distance travelled compared to human-driven vehicles Just a note that this number is hard to calculate accurately with an acceptable degree of certainty. Anyone claiming that AVs are involved in fewer accidents per distance traveled than human drivers is either extrapolating from incomplete data or baking some unreliable assumptions into their statement. Welch Labs has a good introductory video to this topic: https://youtu.be/yaYER2M8dcs?si=XEB4aWlYf6gnnTqM https://youtu.be/yaYER2M8dcs?si=XEB4aWlYf6gnnTqM

Steltek 3y ago
Can someone summarize the video? That was my first thought as well: crash data for humans is clearly underreported. For example, police don't always write reports or human drivers agree to keep it off the books.
- serial_dev 3y ago
  And I'm not even sure how reliable is the "miles driven" metric. I mean I'm sure you can estimate it somehow, but what's the margin of error there?
  - viraptor 3y ago
    Odometers are pretty well regulated and insurance companies will often have a good record of the readings over long periods. I'm not sure how the org doing the data collection does it precisely, but pretty accurate data is out there.
- CSMastermind 3y ago
  The probability of a human driver causing a fatality on any given mile driven is 0.00000109% (1.09 fatalities occur per 100 million miles driven). Applying some basic statistics to show to a 95% confidence level that a self driving system causes fewer fatalities than a human you would have to drive 275 million autonomous miles flawlessly. This would require a fleet of 100 vehicles to drive continuously for 12.56 years. And in practice self-driving vehicles don't drive perfectly. Best estimates on the actual number of miles driven to validate their safety is around 5 billion autonomously driven miles and that's assuming that they actually are safer than a human driver. Then you get into the comparison itself. In practice AVs don't drive on all the same roads, at the same times, as human drivers. A disproportionate number of accidents happen at night, in adverse weather, and on roads that AVs don't typically drive on. Then you have to ask if comparing AVs to all drivers and vehicles is valid comparison. We know for instance that vehicles with automated breaking and lane assist are involved in fewer accidents. Then of course if minimizing accidents is really what you care about there's something easy we could do right now: just mandate all vehicles must have an breathalyzer ignition. We do this for some people who have been convicted of DUI but doing it for everyone would eliminate a third of fatalities.
  - BobaFloutist 3y ago
    Then of course if minimizing accidents is really what you care about there's something easy we could do right now: just mandate all vehicles must have an breathalyzer ignition. We do this for some people who have been convicted of DUI but doing it for everyone would eliminate a third of fatalities. In a similar vein, if we put geo-informed speed governors in cars that physically prevented you from exceeding, say, 20% of the speed limit, fatalities would also likely plummet. But people haaaaate that idea.
jjoonathan 3y ago
Tesla just announced 500 million miles driven by FSD [1]. Per the video, were it fully autonomous they could have a 95% CI on "safer than human" at only 275 million miles [2], but obviously having human supervision ought to remove many of the worst incidents from the dataset. Does anyone know if they publish disengagement data? [1] https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/IR/TSLA-Q3-2023-Update-3.pdf https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/... [2] https://youtu.be/yaYER2M8dcs?t=477 https://youtu.be/yaYER2M8dcs?t=477
- CSMastermind 3y ago
  Note that it would need to drive those 275 million miles without incident to be safer than a human. Which for Tesla's FSD is obviously not the case. https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-fsd-autopilot-crashes-investigations https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-fsd-autopilot-crashes-...
  - jjoonathan 3y ago
    Your video and my response were talking about fatal crashes. Humans don't go 100 million miles between crashes. Has FSD had a fatality? Autopilot (the lane-follower) has had a few, but I don't think I've heard about one on FSD, and if their presentations on occupancy networks are to be believed there is a pretty big distinction between the two.
    - JonChesterfield 3y ago
      Isn't "FSD" the thing they're no longer allowed to call self driving because it keeps killing cyclists? Google suggests lots of Tesla+cyclist+dead but with Tesla claiming it's all fine and not their fault, which isn't immediately persuasive.
      - jjoonathan 3y ago
        > Google suggests lots of Tesla+cyclist+dead but with Tesla claiming it's all fine and not their fault, which isn't immediately persuasive. With human drivers -- are we blaming Tesla for those too? You do you, but I'm here to learn about FSD. It looks like there was a public incident where FSD lunged at a cyclist. See, that's what I'm interested in, and that's why I asked if anyone knew about disengagement stats.

Mathnerd314 3y ago

Not sure that's fair - the number of accidents in human-driven vehicles varies significantly by the human driving it. Do you compare with the teen that just obtained their license and is more interested in their phone than in driving properly, or the 65-year old doctor who's been driving for work and other purposes every day for the past 40 years? According to https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/age-of-driver/ https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/age-of-dr... it's at least a 6x difference.

saagarjha 3y ago
Teens who’ve just gotten their license are often quite good drivers. It’s after that when they drive poorly. (This also applies to adults, to a lesser extent.)
hcurtiss 3y ago
I think you compare it to the average as that's who you are encountering when on the road. You have no way of selecting the other drivers to bias toward the doctor.
a_wild_dandan 3y ago
You compare what matters — mean accidents per mile driven. And like any actuary, you can compare distributions with finer granularity data (location, tickets, ages, occupations, collusion severity, etc). None of this is new or intractable. We can have objective standards with confident judgements of what’s safe for our roads. As an aside, public acceptance of driverless cars is another story. A story filled with warped perspectives due to media outlets stoking the audience emotions which keep outlets in business — outrage, fear, and drama. For every story covering an extreme accident involving human drivers, there might be 100 stories covering a moderate driverless accident. No matter how superhuman autonomous cars perform, they’ll have a massive uphill battle for a positive image.

stouset 3y ago

Although things are changing, the overwhelming majority of AV miles are generally-safer miles on protected highways. And yet their statistics are typically compared against vehicle miles on all road types. Further, most AVs explicitly disengage when they encounter situations beyond their understanding. So again, we’re selecting AV statistics based on generally favorable conditions, but we don’t track human-operated miles the same way. It’s not really a fair comparison.

l33t7332273 3y ago
> most AVs explicitly disengage when they encounter situations beyond their understanding What do you mean by disengage? Cruise’s AVs don’t have a driver to take over.
- stouset 3y ago
  I’m lumping things like Tesla FSD. But also, there are explicitly times and areas where Cruises don’t operate due to being insufficiently able to operate. And times where they do just pull over and wait for human intervention when they don’t know what else to do. Both of which are safe and reasonable, but which also selects themselves into a safer set of miles actually traveled.
  - Zanni 3y ago
    Human drivers "disengage" also, though we don't think of it that way. I have aging friends who refuse to drive at night. I'll stay home in bad weather. When I was younger, I'd sometimes ask a passenger to back out of tricky parking space for me.
    - stouset 3y ago
      Yes, but we’re still comparing a highly selected set of AV miles vs the massive variety of human-driven miles.
xnx 3y ago
It's not too useful to lump Tesla, Cruise, and Waymo together here. Tesla is years behind Cruise and cruise is years behind Waymo in terms of driving capability. Waymo doesn't even drive on highways, so we don't know how safe it would be (probably very safe).

Guy_w_Keyboard 3y ago

Well, obviously the number of autonomous vehicles involved in accidents is going to be lower, but that's because barely any of them exist compared to the vast majority of people driving their cars. If you had statistics on proportions though, that might be a different story.

viraptor 3y ago
You missed "per distance travelled" - that partially normalises the results. You still have to adjust for situation and road type (which Tesla conveniently doesn't do in their advertised numbers) for a better result.