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Fatality data is extremely skewed. 44% of drivers aren't using a seatbelt, 29% are speeding related, I recall alcohol involvement being about 30%, though it's n

Fatality data is extremely skewed. 44% of drivers aren't using a seatbelt, 29% are speeding related, I recall alcohol involvement being about 30%, though it's not listed in the link I checked. About 20% of automobile fatalities aren't in cars but are pedestrians or bicyclists struck by cars (add another 16% if you want to include motorcyclists, though only half of which involve another vehicle). I recall the percentage of vulnerable road user deaths is much higher in urban areas. (https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/detail/yearly-snapshot https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...) The majority of drivers are good, but some drivers are really bad. Life in USA is extremely car-centric and taking away a license is often infeasible and the offender usually drives without their license anyways. If anything, I'd like autonomous cars to give a legal out to remove bad drivers. You get a DUI, or commonly speeding? You may only take an autocar.

BugsJustFindMe 19d ago
> "The majority of drivers are good, but some drivers are really bad." I take issue with this. The majority of drivers are "mostly fine as long as circumstances are favorable", not "good". People for the most part do not even know about the concept of defensive driving let alone practice it. Even the best people are fundamentally complacent in basically everything they do. They zone out sometimes, they get too close, they don't always look where they're going. They don't get into more collisions because the world doesn't throw more obstacles at them, not because they're good at driving.
- Retric 19d ago
  Good here is in reference to the average crash statistics. Most drivers are safer than the average, because you can’t go below 0 and some people are really bad.
  - ryandrake 19d ago
    I know someone who's been at fault in at least 12+ car accidents, and she keeps driving (as someone else put it you almost have to drive in the USA). There are colossally bad drivers out there and we don't yet have a viable system for keeping them off the road.
    - GrinningFool 18d ago
      How is she able to get insurance coverage?
      - BugsJustFindMe 18d ago
        1) What makes you think she has insurance coverage? 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actuarial_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actuarial_science
        GrinningFool 18d ago
        With that many accidents, I'd assume bankruptcy if she didn't. re: 2) yes that was the point. She'd have to be paying multiple thousands in an assigned-risk pool policy with that record of at-faults.
        jakzurr 18d ago
        Unfortunately, if you make (or are born with) enough resources, you might skate for quite a while. Eventually you might get a lot of fines and even some jail time, but afterwards, some people just take their chances and drive anyway.
        phainopepla2 18d ago
        An estimated 1 in 6 drivers in Los Angeles don't have insurance. I know at least a dozen people who have been hit by uninsured drivers, and that's not counting hit and runs, who probably are also mostly uninsured. The victim's own insurance will pay if they have uninsured motorist coverage (you'd be a fool not to have it, living in LA at least), but there is basically no punishment for the uninsured driver, assuming a fender-bender. The police won't do anything. The insurance companies don't think it's worth their time to try to squeeze out something from someone who probably has almost nothing anyway.
        darkmarmot 18d ago
        Here in Washington state, it's a fine of over $500 to not be able to present insurance proof on demand when pulled over...
  - BugsJustFindMe 19d ago
    You cannot measure driver goodness (skill and vigilance) by looking at crash statistics, because crashes are definitively circumstantial. Most very clearly bad/dangerous/unskilled/unvigilant operations of automobiles do not lead to crashes.
    - Retric 18d ago
      Population level statistics let you look for statistical aberrations that you can’t detect at the individual level. Further suppose you define “good driving” as a set of behaviors but failed to include narcolepsy or similar medical conditions in your definition, then some of your “good” drivers would represent a significant risk to the general public. Thus the actual criteria the defines good driver behavior is accidents.
      - BugsJustFindMe 18d ago
        Why would I fail to include driving with untreated narcolepsy in my definition? > as a set of behaviors I think you're thinking about "set" and "behaviors" incorrectly here. The definition wouldn't need to state "and doesn't fall asleep", because abstractions like "being attentive" and "anticipating things that might go wrong" already cover that.
        Retric 18d ago
        > Why would I fail to include driving with untreated narcolepsy in my definition? It’s an illiterate example not a literal one. The point is trying to state the full set of behaviors that represent safe driving will fail. > The definition wouldn't need to state "and doesn't fall asleep", because abstractions like "being attentive" and "anticipating things that might go wrong" already cover that. And here you failed, “Being attentive” is a proxy for the behavior you want not inherently valuable. Information saturation also results in accidents, though this is more commonly recognized in aviation the same is true of driving. Specificity is required not just platitudes.
        18d ago
  - saalweachter 18d ago
    It looks like the median/mode is 1-2 car accidents (50% of drivers), and the average is 3-4. 25% of drivers have no accidents (as far as insurance companies are concerned, ie, no claims or police reports). I'm curious how this looks with various ways of normalizing for amount driven; is that no-accident crowd the quartile of drivers who don't drive very much? The biggest factor in being in the opposite group (the 10% of drivers with 50% of accidents) is "drive all the time, commercially or otherwise".
- seizethecheese 19d ago
  I disagreed with you and went looking in the article for evidence (yeah bad, epistemologically). I actually found evidence for your point. The largest cause of fatal crashes is Generally distracted or "lost in thought" (daydreaming) at 64%. That happens to most people,.
  - Gigachad 18d ago
    The human brain was not designed for a task which requires hours of siting down doing mostly nothing while being hyperfocused the entire time ready to take over in an instant on the rare occasion something happens. While running or cycling your brain is actively engaged keeping yourself upright and avoiding obstacles which keeps you alert.
    - nomel 18d ago
      Seems at least somewhat comparable to walking through a forest full of predators, while, say, hunting/gathering. Evidence that is is compatible with our psyche is the fact that we're at 1.19 fatalities per 100 million miles driven, and ~50% of those being booze and/or speeding.
    - tialaramex 18d ago
      That's true. Humans are bad at this task. On the railways they have a problem with this too, "Lookout" seems like a ludicrously easy job, but it's basically impossible because you must pay attention to an incredibly boring thing for hours or your friends might die. Getting rid of human lookouts should be a priority but it feels easy and so it's hard to motivate this.
      - annzabelle 18d ago
        This is also a big challenge for airline pilots. The planes mostly fly themselves these days, and most takeoffs and landings are uneventful. Being an airline pilot involves an absolutely massive amount of business as usual and preparation, for the very rare times something happens and you suddenly need a team of very focused experts to solve a difficult problem in a stressful environment.
- bad_haircut72 19d ago
  The people OP is talking about, the 0.05% absolute worst drovers, are not merely complacent, they're doing things like getting hammered and going street racing (shamefully I can say, I was 19 once...) or speeding away from crimes etc edit: someone else replied with data contrary to this, maybe they are right but Im leaving this here to represent the counterargument
  - BugsJustFindMe 19d ago
    It's a category error to say that everyone else are good just because they're not the worst you can imagine. It doesn't matter what your worst 0.05% do. It doesn't make most people actually good drivers.
    - notahacker 18d ago
      It's more of a category error to imply that robotaxis are 92% safer than human-driven taxis if it turns out that the raw accident rate they're baselining against is disproportionately caused by people who not only aren't full time professional drivers but shouldn't be allowed near a car [in their current state]...
      - BugsJustFindMe 18d ago
        The article uses robotaxis as its example self-driving group, but it's not an article about robot vs human taxis. It's an article about self-driving vs non-self-driving vehicles. The nice thing about a future where all cars are self-driving (this probably will happen) is that it won't only be the taxis that get replaced.
  - ummonk 19d ago
    The other reply doesn't contradict what you're saying. Someone who was street racing is going to tell the cops / insurance company that they were lost in thought.
- Veserv 18d ago
  The fatality rate is 1.19 per 100 million vehicle miles [1], ~83 million miles per fatality. The mean driver averages ~15,000 miles per year. So, the mean driver encounters a fatal crash after ~5,500 years of driving. If you started driving when the Great Pyramid was built, you would still have another 1,000 years before you would expect to die in a fatal crash. The mean driver in the context of the USA driving environment is shockingly safe. Being safer than even the mean human driver in the USA is hard and takes a shocking amount of data to verify. Anybody downplaying it as "lol humans are so unsafe" to argue the problem feels easy to solve or can be solved by the end of the year with a little bit of elbow grease is utterly clueless. [1] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813809 https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
  - davidgay 18d ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... has the US at 7th highest out of 22 countries (for which this data is available) for the most accidents per km driven. So it's clearly not that hard to be safer than the mean human driver in the USA. 3 of the 22 countries manage to have less than half the US rate.
    - dzhiurgis 18d ago
      80% of the data (for fatalities per km) in that table is missing
    - Veserv 18d ago
      Sir this is a Wendy's, I mean a discussion about autonomous vehicles. The benchmark for the autonomous vehicles in the USA is in comparison to humans in the USA. That means autonomous vehicles need to go ~5,500 person-years worth of driving between crashes to equal the mean driver. The mean US driver is a very high bar to reach for technology, that is why Waymo has just maybe barely reached that bar after nearly two decades and billions of dollars.
      - 18d ago
- jcranmer 18d ago
  As a point of evidence in favor of this viewpoint: Multi-dozen car pileups aren't particularly rare, with the common cause for a lot of these being "one car hits an icy patch, hits another car, car behind them tries but fails to stop in time due to the ice, rinse and repeat a few dozen times". And the root cause of that is every single driver in that collision driving too fast for conditions and unable to make the requisite emergency stop in time.
  - mordymoop 18d ago
    In my callow youth I was responsible for a couple of fender benders and the cause was always a highly imperfect understanding of the appropriate stopping distance of my car. This obviously gets worse, the worse the conditions are. My Tesla never makes this kind of mistake.
- derac 18d ago
  A huge percentage of the cars I see on the highway are tailgating. People are awful drivers.
- jojobas 18d ago
  This is not supported by crash data. In Australia alcohol is involved in some 30% of fatal crashes. A lot of crashes are caused by a very small number of hoon drivers, distracted drivers etc. Autonomous cars beating the average that includes the above are still worse than a diligent driver, which anyone can resolve to be.
  - rigrassm 17d ago
    > hoon drivers That's a term I haven't heard before, care to enlighten me? Don't know what it means but its fun to say lol.
    - jojobas 15d ago
      You might know them as street racers and/or "these assholes with loud pipes at 3AM".
      - rigrassm 15d ago
        Ahhh yes, I know them well. Both having been a young and stupid member of the club and now the old man that shakes his fist in the air at them lol
- Guvante 18d ago
  I mean when comparing to machines though the only thing the machines are better at is maybe not getting distracted while humans tend to be better at adapting which is usually important for safety to put it mildly After all the first Tesla auto drive fatality was literally "that is probably a sign not a trunk"...
- whatevaa 18d ago
  Autocars also currently only work in favorable conditions. Maybe driving in unfavorable conditions is just actually hard.
  - BugsJustFindMe 18d ago
    I said favorable circumstance, not favorable conditions. I mean the person in front of you doesn't stop quickly or veer into your lane very often regardless of whether there is e.g. fog or some confusing signage. Knowing what to do in a confusing situation is a hard problem, but avoiding a crash when someone stops abruptly with full visibility requires mostly safe management of speed, distance, and lane exit options, which people are terrible at.
binary0010 19d ago
Yeah, there's a woman who is quite old and has a severe disability who drives regularly through our neighborhood who's car every few weeks has a new giant dent, missing fender, broken windshield, etc. It's sad we don't have a better way for people in these situations to do what they need without driving. It will be incredible to have autonomous driving just for older and or disabled drivers like this.
- Robotbeat 19d ago
  I believe Tesla’s FSD is already better than such unassisted drivers. Particularly with the current FSD limitations which require monitoring driver attentiveness. If every drunk who attempted to drive was using FSD, deaths due to drunk driving would be virtually eliminated. Heck, even advanced lane keeping and smart cruise control from other manufacturers, while much more crude, would still help tremendously.
  - dzhiurgis 18d ago
    I wonder how much of drunk driving crashes are because driver turns into speeding asshole vs dozing off. You wouldn't be able to force them to use FSD, especially in a fun car like Tesla. Maybe if it derated itself if it detects erratic driving. They already released a feature where it avoids crashes even when FSD is disabled (but does require subscription).
    - Robotbeat 18d ago
      I think people are just incredibly bad drivers when drunk, but they do it because they don’t want to hire a cab or leave their car at the bar overnight, etc. Having FSD handle driving would be way safer.
- sensanaty 18d ago
  You could always invest in actual public transport & sane infrastructure, rather than relying on clogging the streets up with more cars, autonomous or otherwise? My mother-in-law is in a wheelchair and zooms by on the bike paths faster than I do thanks to her handbike (it's seriously insane how fast people can move with handbikes), and if she needs to travel large distances she hops onto a train instead. The best part of proper infrastructure and public transport is that it makes life for the drivers easier, too!
giancarlostoro 19d ago
> Life in USA is extremely car-centric Mostly yes, but some states like NYC its more common to take trains, taxi cabs / Uber / Lyft, etc.
- GrinningFool 18d ago
  It says a lot that 3 of the 4 options you gave involve cars.
  - giancarlostoro 18d ago
    You don't have to own the cars is my argument.
- driverdan 18d ago
  As much as people who live in NYC like to believe they're a state they're not, they're a city. Most of the state of New York does not have good public transit.
  - JoeAltmaier 18d ago
    Pedantically true. By population density, NYC is essentially the whole state, or what matters anyway, to the huge majority of residents.
    - fwip 18d ago
      About 60% of New Yorkers are outside of NYC.
      - JoeAltmaier 17d ago
        And what fraction of the traffic?
  - bluGill 18d ago
    Even in New York City, a very large number of people are not taking transit, there are a lot of cars. Generally gets about a third though different boroughs have different numbers, Manhattan, most people are walking, everywhere else cars are significant, though subway and transit are also there. But you can't really say overall for the city that transit is how people get around.
scotty79 18d ago
> The majority of drivers are good Well, 80% of us believes ourselves to be above average, so there's that.
ricardobeat 18d ago
Does that skew really matter? Nearly all of those conditions are avoided by autonomous vehicles.
- alexgoodhart 18d ago
  Using public safety as a cudgel to mandate adherence to any technology is a nonstarter. The imposition is huge. We’re talking about privacy, movement and its relationships with housing/work/family management/safety. At the very least, it needs to be plainly stated that this concept is not being studied out of curiosity. A few companies have a gigantic investment in seeing massive, government-facilitated adoption that creates guaranteed customers and gated entry.
  - simianwords 18d ago
    i'm kinda hating how privacy is becoming a boogeyman to oppose literally anything. i'm predicting that public will catch hold of this rhetoric eventually. literally any. single. thing. gets opposed on privacy grounds. and its a good move because technology by definition works by passing information around so it lends to being opposed this way everywhere. i think Foucault is partly responsible for this with his whole panopticon nonsense.
    - LtWorf 18d ago
      What rhetoric? It's not like it's made up…
    - philipallstar 18d ago
      > i'm kinda hating how privacy is becoming a boogeyman to oppose literally anything It isn't.
    - berytos_storm 18d ago
      [dead]
kyleblarson 18d ago
My tesla has yet to ask for a road beer while in FSD.
- blitzar 18d ago
  Can of coke and a ciggy, fsd'll be right as rain.
TulliusCicero 18d ago
> Fatality data is extremely skewed. 44% of drivers aren't using a seatbelt, 29% are speeding related, I recall alcohol involvement being about 30%, though it's not listed in the link I checked. How is that 'skewed'? It sounds like you're just listing dangerous things, and yeah of course dangerous things are associated with fatalities, duh. It's like saying that accidental gun deaths are 'skewed' because they're associated with keeping your gun loaded and not locking it up in a safe.
- mostly_harmless 18d ago
  skewed in the sense that 2-5% of the population is a terrible driver and 90-95% are sufficient. It's an outlier effect. Like the mean networth of a USA household is around $1 million dollars. But that figure alone gives you an extremely poor view of overall financial health of the median american.
maerF0x0 18d ago
Another wonderful usecase of safety, when the elderly get too old to drive themselves an autocar may improve the quality of life of later years. I sure hope it's around by the time I'm too old to drive.
Shocka1 17d ago
Unfortunately I find speeding makes me a lot more engaged, only on highways and higher speed roads when there is a lot of visibility and less traffic though, which makes it safer IMO. I do not tailgate, always leaving 5 or 10 car lengths to soak up the energy if needed... I also don't listen to podcasts because they tend to take my mind off the road. I got a ticket 20 years ago when I was a new driver doing 40 in a 35, but other than that, once I established my hardline safety rules I've done 85 to 95 in 65/70 zones with no issues, no close calls, and no tickets. I see the person with the radar/laser well beforehand and know what is going on around me because I feel as though I'm paying very good attention. That being said, I would think speeding combined with moving violations/phone distraction would be a better metric for banning people to autocars.

BugsJustFindMe 19d ago

> "The majority of drivers are good, but some drivers are really bad." I take issue with this. The majority of drivers are "mostly fine as long as circumstances are favorable", not "good". People for the most part do not even know about the concept of defensive driving let alone practice it. Even the best people are fundamentally complacent in basically everything they do. They zone out sometimes, they get too close, they don't always look where they're going. They don't get into more collisions because the world doesn't throw more obstacles at them, not because they're good at driving.

Retric 19d ago
Good here is in reference to the average crash statistics. Most drivers are safer than the average, because you can’t go below 0 and some people are really bad.
- ryandrake 19d ago
  I know someone who's been at fault in at least 12+ car accidents, and she keeps driving (as someone else put it you almost have to drive in the USA). There are colossally bad drivers out there and we don't yet have a viable system for keeping them off the road.
  - GrinningFool 18d ago
    How is she able to get insurance coverage?
    - BugsJustFindMe 18d ago
      1) What makes you think she has insurance coverage? 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actuarial_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actuarial_science
      - GrinningFool 18d ago
        With that many accidents, I'd assume bankruptcy if she didn't. re: 2) yes that was the point. She'd have to be paying multiple thousands in an assigned-risk pool policy with that record of at-faults.
        jakzurr 18d ago
        Unfortunately, if you make (or are born with) enough resources, you might skate for quite a while. Eventually you might get a lot of fines and even some jail time, but afterwards, some people just take their chances and drive anyway.
        phainopepla2 18d ago
        An estimated 1 in 6 drivers in Los Angeles don't have insurance. I know at least a dozen people who have been hit by uninsured drivers, and that's not counting hit and runs, who probably are also mostly uninsured. The victim's own insurance will pay if they have uninsured motorist coverage (you'd be a fool not to have it, living in LA at least), but there is basically no punishment for the uninsured driver, assuming a fender-bender. The police won't do anything. The insurance companies don't think it's worth their time to try to squeeze out something from someone who probably has almost nothing anyway.
        darkmarmot 18d ago
        Here in Washington state, it's a fine of over $500 to not be able to present insurance proof on demand when pulled over...
- BugsJustFindMe 19d ago
  You cannot measure driver goodness (skill and vigilance) by looking at crash statistics, because crashes are definitively circumstantial. Most very clearly bad/dangerous/unskilled/unvigilant operations of automobiles do not lead to crashes.
  - Retric 18d ago
    Population level statistics let you look for statistical aberrations that you can’t detect at the individual level. Further suppose you define “good driving” as a set of behaviors but failed to include narcolepsy or similar medical conditions in your definition, then some of your “good” drivers would represent a significant risk to the general public. Thus the actual criteria the defines good driver behavior is accidents.
    - BugsJustFindMe 18d ago
      Why would I fail to include driving with untreated narcolepsy in my definition? > as a set of behaviors I think you're thinking about "set" and "behaviors" incorrectly here. The definition wouldn't need to state "and doesn't fall asleep", because abstractions like "being attentive" and "anticipating things that might go wrong" already cover that.
      - Retric 18d ago
        > Why would I fail to include driving with untreated narcolepsy in my definition? It’s an illiterate example not a literal one. The point is trying to state the full set of behaviors that represent safe driving will fail. > The definition wouldn't need to state "and doesn't fall asleep", because abstractions like "being attentive" and "anticipating things that might go wrong" already cover that. And here you failed, “Being attentive” is a proxy for the behavior you want not inherently valuable. Information saturation also results in accidents, though this is more commonly recognized in aviation the same is true of driving. Specificity is required not just platitudes.
        18d ago
- saalweachter 18d ago
  It looks like the median/mode is 1-2 car accidents (50% of drivers), and the average is 3-4. 25% of drivers have no accidents (as far as insurance companies are concerned, ie, no claims or police reports). I'm curious how this looks with various ways of normalizing for amount driven; is that no-accident crowd the quartile of drivers who don't drive very much? The biggest factor in being in the opposite group (the 10% of drivers with 50% of accidents) is "drive all the time, commercially or otherwise".
seizethecheese 19d ago
I disagreed with you and went looking in the article for evidence (yeah bad, epistemologically). I actually found evidence for your point. The largest cause of fatal crashes is Generally distracted or "lost in thought" (daydreaming) at 64%. That happens to most people,.
- Gigachad 18d ago
  The human brain was not designed for a task which requires hours of siting down doing mostly nothing while being hyperfocused the entire time ready to take over in an instant on the rare occasion something happens. While running or cycling your brain is actively engaged keeping yourself upright and avoiding obstacles which keeps you alert.
  - nomel 18d ago
    Seems at least somewhat comparable to walking through a forest full of predators, while, say, hunting/gathering. Evidence that is is compatible with our psyche is the fact that we're at 1.19 fatalities per 100 million miles driven, and ~50% of those being booze and/or speeding.
  - tialaramex 18d ago
    That's true. Humans are bad at this task. On the railways they have a problem with this too, "Lookout" seems like a ludicrously easy job, but it's basically impossible because you must pay attention to an incredibly boring thing for hours or your friends might die. Getting rid of human lookouts should be a priority but it feels easy and so it's hard to motivate this.
    - annzabelle 18d ago
      This is also a big challenge for airline pilots. The planes mostly fly themselves these days, and most takeoffs and landings are uneventful. Being an airline pilot involves an absolutely massive amount of business as usual and preparation, for the very rare times something happens and you suddenly need a team of very focused experts to solve a difficult problem in a stressful environment.
bad_haircut72 19d ago
The people OP is talking about, the 0.05% absolute worst drovers, are not merely complacent, they're doing things like getting hammered and going street racing (shamefully I can say, I was 19 once...) or speeding away from crimes etc edit: someone else replied with data contrary to this, maybe they are right but Im leaving this here to represent the counterargument
- BugsJustFindMe 19d ago
  It's a category error to say that everyone else are good just because they're not the worst you can imagine. It doesn't matter what your worst 0.05% do. It doesn't make most people actually good drivers.
  - notahacker 18d ago
    It's more of a category error to imply that robotaxis are 92% safer than human-driven taxis if it turns out that the raw accident rate they're baselining against is disproportionately caused by people who not only aren't full time professional drivers but shouldn't be allowed near a car [in their current state]...
    - BugsJustFindMe 18d ago
      The article uses robotaxis as its example self-driving group, but it's not an article about robot vs human taxis. It's an article about self-driving vs non-self-driving vehicles. The nice thing about a future where all cars are self-driving (this probably will happen) is that it won't only be the taxis that get replaced.
- ummonk 19d ago
  The other reply doesn't contradict what you're saying. Someone who was street racing is going to tell the cops / insurance company that they were lost in thought.
Veserv 18d ago
The fatality rate is 1.19 per 100 million vehicle miles [1], ~83 million miles per fatality. The mean driver averages ~15,000 miles per year. So, the mean driver encounters a fatal crash after ~5,500 years of driving. If you started driving when the Great Pyramid was built, you would still have another 1,000 years before you would expect to die in a fatal crash. The mean driver in the context of the USA driving environment is shockingly safe. Being safer than even the mean human driver in the USA is hard and takes a shocking amount of data to verify. Anybody downplaying it as "lol humans are so unsafe" to argue the problem feels easy to solve or can be solved by the end of the year with a little bit of elbow grease is utterly clueless. [1] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813809 https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
- davidgay 18d ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... has the US at 7th highest out of 22 countries (for which this data is available) for the most accidents per km driven. So it's clearly not that hard to be safer than the mean human driver in the USA. 3 of the 22 countries manage to have less than half the US rate.
  - dzhiurgis 18d ago
    80% of the data (for fatalities per km) in that table is missing
  - Veserv 18d ago
    Sir this is a Wendy's, I mean a discussion about autonomous vehicles. The benchmark for the autonomous vehicles in the USA is in comparison to humans in the USA. That means autonomous vehicles need to go ~5,500 person-years worth of driving between crashes to equal the mean driver. The mean US driver is a very high bar to reach for technology, that is why Waymo has just maybe barely reached that bar after nearly two decades and billions of dollars.
    - 18d ago
jcranmer 18d ago
As a point of evidence in favor of this viewpoint: Multi-dozen car pileups aren't particularly rare, with the common cause for a lot of these being "one car hits an icy patch, hits another car, car behind them tries but fails to stop in time due to the ice, rinse and repeat a few dozen times". And the root cause of that is every single driver in that collision driving too fast for conditions and unable to make the requisite emergency stop in time.
- mordymoop 18d ago
  In my callow youth I was responsible for a couple of fender benders and the cause was always a highly imperfect understanding of the appropriate stopping distance of my car. This obviously gets worse, the worse the conditions are. My Tesla never makes this kind of mistake.
derac 18d ago
A huge percentage of the cars I see on the highway are tailgating. People are awful drivers.
jojobas 18d ago
This is not supported by crash data. In Australia alcohol is involved in some 30% of fatal crashes. A lot of crashes are caused by a very small number of hoon drivers, distracted drivers etc. Autonomous cars beating the average that includes the above are still worse than a diligent driver, which anyone can resolve to be.
- rigrassm 17d ago
  > hoon drivers That's a term I haven't heard before, care to enlighten me? Don't know what it means but its fun to say lol.
  - jojobas 15d ago
    You might know them as street racers and/or "these assholes with loud pipes at 3AM".
    - rigrassm 15d ago
      Ahhh yes, I know them well. Both having been a young and stupid member of the club and now the old man that shakes his fist in the air at them lol
Guvante 18d ago
I mean when comparing to machines though the only thing the machines are better at is maybe not getting distracted while humans tend to be better at adapting which is usually important for safety to put it mildly After all the first Tesla auto drive fatality was literally "that is probably a sign not a trunk"...
whatevaa 18d ago
Autocars also currently only work in favorable conditions. Maybe driving in unfavorable conditions is just actually hard.
- BugsJustFindMe 18d ago
  I said favorable circumstance, not favorable conditions. I mean the person in front of you doesn't stop quickly or veer into your lane very often regardless of whether there is e.g. fog or some confusing signage. Knowing what to do in a confusing situation is a hard problem, but avoiding a crash when someone stops abruptly with full visibility requires mostly safe management of speed, distance, and lane exit options, which people are terrible at.

binary0010 19d ago

Yeah, there's a woman who is quite old and has a severe disability who drives regularly through our neighborhood who's car every few weeks has a new giant dent, missing fender, broken windshield, etc. It's sad we don't have a better way for people in these situations to do what they need without driving. It will be incredible to have autonomous driving just for older and or disabled drivers like this.

Robotbeat 19d ago
I believe Tesla’s FSD is already better than such unassisted drivers. Particularly with the current FSD limitations which require monitoring driver attentiveness. If every drunk who attempted to drive was using FSD, deaths due to drunk driving would be virtually eliminated. Heck, even advanced lane keeping and smart cruise control from other manufacturers, while much more crude, would still help tremendously.
- dzhiurgis 18d ago
  I wonder how much of drunk driving crashes are because driver turns into speeding asshole vs dozing off. You wouldn't be able to force them to use FSD, especially in a fun car like Tesla. Maybe if it derated itself if it detects erratic driving. They already released a feature where it avoids crashes even when FSD is disabled (but does require subscription).
  - Robotbeat 18d ago
    I think people are just incredibly bad drivers when drunk, but they do it because they don’t want to hire a cab or leave their car at the bar overnight, etc. Having FSD handle driving would be way safer.
sensanaty 18d ago
You could always invest in actual public transport & sane infrastructure, rather than relying on clogging the streets up with more cars, autonomous or otherwise? My mother-in-law is in a wheelchair and zooms by on the bike paths faster than I do thanks to her handbike (it's seriously insane how fast people can move with handbikes), and if she needs to travel large distances she hops onto a train instead. The best part of proper infrastructure and public transport is that it makes life for the drivers easier, too!

giancarlostoro 19d ago

> Life in USA is extremely car-centric Mostly yes, but some states like NYC its more common to take trains, taxi cabs / Uber / Lyft, etc.

GrinningFool 18d ago
It says a lot that 3 of the 4 options you gave involve cars.
- giancarlostoro 18d ago
  You don't have to own the cars is my argument.
driverdan 18d ago
As much as people who live in NYC like to believe they're a state they're not, they're a city. Most of the state of New York does not have good public transit.
- JoeAltmaier 18d ago
  Pedantically true. By population density, NYC is essentially the whole state, or what matters anyway, to the huge majority of residents.
  - fwip 18d ago
    About 60% of New Yorkers are outside of NYC.
    - JoeAltmaier 17d ago
      And what fraction of the traffic?
- bluGill 18d ago
  Even in New York City, a very large number of people are not taking transit, there are a lot of cars. Generally gets about a third though different boroughs have different numbers, Manhattan, most people are walking, everywhere else cars are significant, though subway and transit are also there. But you can't really say overall for the city that transit is how people get around.

scotty79 18d ago

> The majority of drivers are good Well, 80% of us believes ourselves to be above average, so there's that.

ricardobeat 18d ago

Does that skew really matter? Nearly all of those conditions are avoided by autonomous vehicles.

alexgoodhart 18d ago
Using public safety as a cudgel to mandate adherence to any technology is a nonstarter. The imposition is huge. We’re talking about privacy, movement and its relationships with housing/work/family management/safety. At the very least, it needs to be plainly stated that this concept is not being studied out of curiosity. A few companies have a gigantic investment in seeing massive, government-facilitated adoption that creates guaranteed customers and gated entry.
- simianwords 18d ago
  i'm kinda hating how privacy is becoming a boogeyman to oppose literally anything. i'm predicting that public will catch hold of this rhetoric eventually. literally any. single. thing. gets opposed on privacy grounds. and its a good move because technology by definition works by passing information around so it lends to being opposed this way everywhere. i think Foucault is partly responsible for this with his whole panopticon nonsense.
  - LtWorf 18d ago
    What rhetoric? It's not like it's made up…
  - philipallstar 18d ago
    > i'm kinda hating how privacy is becoming a boogeyman to oppose literally anything It isn't.
  - berytos_storm 18d ago
    [dead]

kyleblarson 18d ago

My tesla has yet to ask for a road beer while in FSD.

blitzar 18d ago
Can of coke and a ciggy, fsd'll be right as rain.

TulliusCicero 18d ago

> Fatality data is extremely skewed. 44% of drivers aren't using a seatbelt, 29% are speeding related, I recall alcohol involvement being about 30%, though it's not listed in the link I checked. How is that 'skewed'? It sounds like you're just listing dangerous things, and yeah of course dangerous things are associated with fatalities, duh. It's like saying that accidental gun deaths are 'skewed' because they're associated with keeping your gun loaded and not locking it up in a safe.

mostly_harmless 18d ago
skewed in the sense that 2-5% of the population is a terrible driver and 90-95% are sufficient. It's an outlier effect. Like the mean networth of a USA household is around $1 million dollars. But that figure alone gives you an extremely poor view of overall financial health of the median american.

maerF0x0 18d ago

Another wonderful usecase of safety, when the elderly get too old to drive themselves an autocar may improve the quality of life of later years. I sure hope it's around by the time I'm too old to drive.

Shocka1 17d ago

Unfortunately I find speeding makes me a lot more engaged, only on highways and higher speed roads when there is a lot of visibility and less traffic though, which makes it safer IMO. I do not tailgate, always leaving 5 or 10 car lengths to soak up the energy if needed... I also don't listen to podcasts because they tend to take my mind off the road. I got a ticket 20 years ago when I was a new driver doing 40 in a 35, but other than that, once I established my hardline safety rules I've done 85 to 95 in 65/70 zones with no issues, no close calls, and no tickets. I see the person with the radar/laser well beforehand and know what is going on around me because I feel as though I'm paying very good attention. That being said, I would think speeding combined with moving violations/phone distraction would be a better metric for banning people to autocars.