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NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction

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Re: NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction

#91

Post by frgtpsswrdlame »

fmihaila wrote: post #85
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you should be looking for data that shows that traffic-aware cruise control increases or matches safety of human drivers then? Seems strange to just assume one side of the argument if there's no proof either way.

I can rephrase my original comment according to your terms: there is no evidence that TACC reduces safety. That's equivalent to what I said. Do you have evidence to the contrary? Moreover, if experience showed that TACC reduces safety, NHTSA and its counterparts in other countries would have noticed and put the brakes on it. If you don't think this is a reasonable assumption, so be it.

Editted to respond to edit. (perhaps my original comment was a bit brash as well)

The problem here is that you're mis specifying the null hypothesis. We have had human drivers for 100 years. New automated systems start to come into the fray. We're trying to figure out if they are safer than humans. The null in this case is that they are not. That's what we assume until proven otherwise.

Re: NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction

#92

Post by scotty79 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #61
mikeash wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't there been a lot of tests of self-driving technology on public roads? Tesla has released a couple of videos of theirs, and Google has put a couple million miles on theirs. What hasn't happened yet is a production-ready, customer-owned vehicle on public roads.

Not unsupervised. Unleashing a robot into school zones without a human in the loop is still considered too dangerous legally if not physically.

That's pretty much the rule about all robots operating in proximity to humans (except perhaps elevators, escalators, automatic doors and toy robots).

Re: NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction

#93

Post by fabianhjr »

mikeash wrote: post #24
stale2002 wrote: post #6

Oh, hey, will you look at that. The imperfect, incomplete, beta, level 2 self driving cars that were supposed to be the "dangerous" area of self driving are ALREADY better than human drivers. Can we stop the politics and deploy all the real self driving cars to the road immediately, since the government has proven that even the shitty variety is safer than humans?

Level 3 is the real danger area. That's the level where the driver is able to do other things, but must be prepared to retake control at any time. Those two ideas are basically contradictory: if you're not already involved with driving, it takes too long to get back into it to do anything useful. Tesla's system is level 2, meaning that the driver must (as in, is supposed to) remain engaged and aware of the driving ta…

Wouldn't Level 3 be like Otto? (Automated, No human attention required on Highways; Human driving otherwise)

The truck would know well in advance which exit it would take and could give the driver a heads-up some minutes before they need to take the wheel.

Re: NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction

#94

Post by trevyn »

mikeash wrote: post #80
t112512512 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Level 3 require instant attention? I thought it allowed the car to require some parameters (such as road type or weather). If my car can handle the hours-long uninterrupted highway sections of a road trip, yet still require manual driving on city streets, that is still a huge value proposition for time & safety.

It doesn't require instant attention, no. But it's hard envision a scenario where the car needs attention at some point in the future, not particularly soon, but can't drive itself. Maybe I'm drawing the line at the wrong point, though. If a car can drive itself but may occasionally need to pull over and ask the driver to tell it which way to go, at the driver's leisure, is that level 3 or level 4? I thought 4, but I…

Level 4: "Such a design anticipates that the driver will provide destination or navigation input, but is not expected to be available for control at any time during the trip. This includes both occupied and unoccupied vehicles." (emphasis added)

In my mind, if a level 4 vehicle is unable to reach a given valid destination without assistance, that would be considered a failure.

In reality, macro-scale rerouting around obstacles that the self-driving system does not know how to overcome is not a particular challenge, GPS systems do this easily. The definition doesn't say it has to take the most efficient route. ;)

Re: NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction

#95

Post by Klathmon »

mikeash wrote: post #80
t112512512 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Level 3 require instant attention? I thought it allowed the car to require some parameters (such as road type or weather). If my car can handle the hours-long uninterrupted highway sections of a road trip, yet still require manual driving on city streets, that is still a huge value proposition for time & safety.

It doesn't require instant attention, no. But it's hard envision a scenario where the car needs attention at some point in the future, not particularly soon, but can't drive itself. Maybe I'm drawing the line at the wrong point, though. If a car can drive itself but may occasionally need to pull over and ask the driver to tell it which way to go, at the driver's leisure, is that level 3 or level 4? I thought 4, but I…

my (completely uninformed) understanding was that level 3 was more like "level 4 in perfect conditions". So it would need to pull over, or warn the driver to take over if it starts raining or snowing or the road (or it's lines) is uneven or ill-defined. Or perhaps that it's 100% self driving in all conditions on a highway, but still needs manual driving for "surface roads".

Many of those scenarios would allow some time for the driver to take over, and would most likely be able to pull over if the driver can't or won't for some reason.

Re: NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction

#96

Post by frgtpsswrdlame »

stale2002 wrote: post #88
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should really read the report. It's comparing Tesla TACC to Tesla TACC+Autosteer. Aka the safety increase when going from Level1 to Level2. It doesn't have anything to do with being safer than human drivers.

Level 1 is Human drivers, level 2 is computer "lane assist" and "automated cruise control". So yes, it is literally human Vs computer driven safety.

Level 1 is Driver Assistance. Level 0 is No Automation. It's literally a graphic in the report... Someone kindly posted the pdf link if you'd like to read it.

Re: NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction

#97

Post by [deleted] »

lamontcg wrote: post #84
Roritharr wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really would like to know the absolute numbers for this reduction. It's really questionable if this would hold up with millions of Teslas on the road in the hands of less wealthy(probably better educated) drivers.

> wealthy (probably better educated) drivers. You mean drivers like the ones behind the wheel of all the BMWs and Audis that cut me off with no turn signals, speed, make aggressive lane changes, tailgate, and generally act like giant douches because a simple traffic ticket is nothing to their pocketbook while their time == money? Those people are going to be a hell of a lot safer behind the wheel of an autonomous (le…

[deleted]

Re: NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction

#98

Post by laichzeit0 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #25
Tepix wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your point?

The dream remains a dream. Being able to call your car like batman did the batmobile, a car able to navigate unsupervised is still a decade, perhaps decades, away.

Oh jeez. So what if it's 10 years away? Even if it's 20 years away it's a piss drop in terms of time. Do you remember what the Internet was like in 1994? I do. It was shit. There wasn't even Google. Forget about looking things up on your mobile, there wasn't even mobile, nevermind Internet on mobile. It's barely 20 years and the world has _completely_ changed because of it. Self-driving cars are barely at the 1994 Internet stage. It's more like at the BBS stage with 9600 baud modems.

Just sit back and chill. It's going to happen.

Re: NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction

#99

Post by gwern »

sxp wrote: post #23

The 40% number isn't very informative. The report has multiple notes about it: ODI analyzed data from crashes of Tesla Model S and Model X vehicles involving airbag deployments that occurred while operating in, or within 15 seconds of transitioning from, Autopilot mode. Some crashes involved impacts from other vehicles striking the Tesla from various directions with little to no warning to the Tesla driver. ODI analy…

Reading it, I think it is essentially a 'before October 2015' vs 'after October 2015' comparison of overall accident rates, given the caveats there. So the -40% here should be a lower bound, since it includes a time period with 0% Autopilot usage (before October 2015) and a time period with an unknown but This strikes me as suspiciously high: what fraction of airbag-worth accidents are supposed to happen on the highways where one can use Autopilot at all? So maybe there's some other trend going on which is driving this decrease.
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