Earlier quoted context omitted.
> data supplied by Tesla
Where else could it possibly come from? Tesla is the only one collecting this data.
bingo
NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction
171–180 of 327 posts
Re: NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction
#172Earlier 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.
Are you assuming the more wealthy owners have lower levels of education? Or have I misinterpreted your statement? I would have assumed tesla owners would fall into the more educated category. No idea which assumption is correct just wondering about your reasoning. For my assumption I assume that due to the higher cost of a Tesla better educated people are opting for them over the alternative because of the environmen…
I would have assumed due to the high cost of a Tesla that the owners would tend to be older, and thus a generation educated in much fewer numbers. Today's youth are much more educated, but they are still young, which hasn't given them much time to build wealth.
I mean, who do you think is more likely to buy a Tesla: A 20 year old fresh college graduate, or his 'uneducated' father who has been saving and investing for 30 years and just sold his lifelong home in San Francisco? My bet is on the latter. The boomers in particular are considered the wealthiest generation ever, but not the most educated generation ever.
I'm rather fascinated by how many are questioning the education thing here though. Coming from a farming community, where every (older) farmer I know is multimillions simply by virtue of having purchased farmland when they were young, it's difficult to see how education had any impact on that wealth. Some of them do have educations, some don't. It doesn't seem to make any difference.
Re: NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Varying insurance rates based on age and gender seem to indicate that, yes, demographics play a role in driving responsibility. A Tesla is not a cheap car. I kind of suspect the average Tesla driver is more responsible than the average driver. It may be the case that the average Tesla driver is very well off, and treat the cars as expensive toys though, so it's tough to say without numbers. If i had to bet right now,…
I suspect the average Tesla driver is more irresponsible than the average driver, simply because they're rich and are used to getting their way. If you study rich drivers I have no doubt that you would find that they cut people off more, overtake in more dangerous situations, use their indicators less, drive over the speed limit more, proceed through amber signals later, run red lights more often, and generally show…
There have been a few studies that show generally wealthier drivers do behave more recklessly/selfishly. https://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/12/the-rich-drive-d...
Re: NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is the base size and confidence levels reported anywhere? I get professionally suspicious when reports publish percentage figure comparisons of rare events.
What events do you consider rare? Car crashes?
Crashes of cars that were hard enough to trigger the airbag, but still not so hard that the car would not get an autopilot update later in it's life. The "before autosteer" column does not include miles or crashes of Teslas that did not survive until OTA availability.
Re: NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've done a few thousand miles with Tesla's Autopilot and I find it to be much easier to stay awake with it than without. Constantly making little adjustments is pretty tiring. Paying attention to the the road and other cars is enough to keep my attention. Your experience may, of course, vary.
I don't know how long your durations on the wheel are - but microsleep[1] is notoriously hard to self-diagnose, even for drivers of non-self-driving cars. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsleep
It goes along with overall fatigue, right? I feel a lot less tired after a lot of Autopilot driving than after a similar amount of non-Autopilot driving.
As for durations at the wheel, I did a Virginia to Wisconsin round-trip over the holidays, and have done other trips of similar lengths in the past. Of course, I'm not spending more than about three hours at the wheel at a time, since the car needs to charge and I have various physiological needs.
Re: NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction
#176I don't really know why this is surprising. Computers are already better than humans at most tasks that involve a limited set of behaviors and they have infinitely better response time than humans (and continue to get better). How could anyone think that a report like this was going to end up any differently?
It's okay to withhold judgement and to be skeptical until seeing actual data. Especially for rapidly developing technologies like self-driving cars.
I didn't say it wasn't ok to be skeptical, just that I wasn't surprised by the results. Teslas have been on the road for over a year with AutoPilot and there haven't been any accidents caused by the system. Why anyone is surprised that AutoPilot is safer than a human driver is what I'm not understanding. Based on the votes, though, apparently computers are evil and shouldn't be trusted and we should all be amazed when they don't just kill us.
Re: NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction
#177What other car company can even recover the airbag deployment rate per mile?
I believe that GM's OnStar also collects that data.
Re: NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction
#178I don't really know why this is surprising. Computers are already better than humans at most tasks that involve a limited set of behaviors and they have infinitely better response time than humans (and continue to get better). How could anyone think that a report like this was going to end up any differently?
The history of self driving cars shows that it is not an easy task. We've been working on this for over 15 years. I was on a self driving car team during 2008-2010. We won multiple intercollegiate competitions. At that time I was certain it would be 20+ years before we had something that could drive on the roads. The progress has been spectacular.
No, programming the self-driving car is not an easy task. A car that's already been programmed, though, is definitely going to be safer than a human driver and driving for the computer is an easy task.
Re: NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The politics will hopefully be solved soon. A few red states, that are anti government and pro innovation (like Arizona or something) , will make them legal, and then we will start collecting irrefutable data that they are 10 times safer.
I think you are missing a /s there ...
However, Arizona would be a beautiful place to have fully autonomous cars.
The snow bunnies make driving there a nightmare.
Re: NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is the base size and confidence levels reported anywhere? I get professionally suspicious when reports publish percentage figure comparisons of rare events.
What events do you consider rare? Car crashes?
Presumably they meant airbag deployment crashes in Teslas.
We can estimate the absolute number from Tesla's press release in December stating that 1.3 billion miles have been driven on Autopilot, while the NHTSA report states the accidents they count occur 0.8 times per million miles.
So in that case it's data from about 1000 crashes in the Autopilot case, and more in the non-Autopilot case. Which tells us that the statistics should be good enough (anything else would be a major scandal).
However, that is not what they are comparing! As the NHTSA report states in footnote 21, they're not actually comparing Autopilot miles to normal driving. They are comparing crash rates in vehicles before and after Autopilot was installed in those vehicles. That muddies the waters quite a bit in my opinion, especially when they don't tell us how significant this decrease is. I'm not saying it's wrong, but I'm also not very confident that it is a causal effect, as opposed to just a correlation.
Here is a PDF link to the NHTSA report, since TFA only links to a Scribd (thus unusable) version.
https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2016/INCLA-PE16007-7876.PDF