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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

#181

Post by ebbv »

agildehaus wrote: post #123
ebbv wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I believe most people are really terrible drivers. That being said, there were 210 million drivers in the US in 2009. There's probably a lot more today. That's just 0.01% of drivers. That fact makes me have to question just how bad people really are, despite my own personal opinion. Or maybe cars are just really safe. A better statistic might be number of accidents. In 2015 2.44 million people were injured…

They're not really safe when compared to other forms of transportation.

Other forms of transportation have better trained pilots. :)

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

#182

Post by jessriedel »

guelo wrote: post #128
Vik1ng wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just funny that the 40% from Autosteer seem to exactly match with the general AEB safety improvement rate also mentioned in the report... IIHS research shows that AEB systems meeting the commitment would reduce rear-end crashes[emphasis added] by 40 percent. IIHS estimates that by 2025 – the earliest NHTSA believes it could realistically implement a regulatory requirement for AEB – the commitment will prevent 28,000…

Yea, it really doesn't seem like autosteer would avoid that many crashes. All that autosteer does is keep you in your lane on a marked highway. Human errors that autosteer would correct are probably relatively rare, things like distractedly drifting into another lane or falling asleep at the wheel. AEB, on the other hand, helps avoid the most common type of crash, rear end collisions.

"Number of crashes" is not as important as "crashes weighted by severity". "Distracted driver" is the number 1 root cause of accidents, and "failure to stay in lane" is the number 1 proximate cause of fatal accidents in most states.

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-cause-of-the-most-fatal-c...

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

#183

Post by illumin8 »

illumin8 wrote: post #169
manicdee wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Credit rating is highly correlated with wealth, and is also highly correlated with reduced accident rates. This is evidenced by me personally, as I now get much better auto insurance rates with an 800+ credit rating than I did when I was in the 600s right out of college. I would be willing to bet money that the insurance actuaries that actually calculate risk disagree with your extremely prejudiced opinion.

If you disagree, commenting is probably more appropriate than downvoting.

I'm still waiting to hear how your personal opinion about wealthy drivers is more accurate than auto insurance actuaries that calculate risk for a living.

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

#184

Post by snewman »

illumin8 wrote: post #166
snewman wrote: post #2

Tesla comes off extremely well in this report. For one thing, the 40% statistic cited in the headline appears to be well supported by the NHTSA report (section 5.4) and actually manages to frame the incident in a very positive light: ODI analyzed mileage and airbag deployment data supplied by Tesla for all MY 2014 through 2016 Model S and 2016 Model X vehicles equipped with the Autopilot Technology Package, either in…

They published that the driver took absolutely no action, and that he had 7 seconds to take some action (7 seconds from the time the truck started to turn across his path until his car struck it). The last action he had taken was to enable the cruise control at 74mph 2 minutes before the crash.

Yes, from previous reports it was already pretty clear that the driver was asleep at the wheel (literally or otherwise). The car is not supposed to allow this; it's supposed to check for hands-on-steering-wheel and other indicators of driver attention. It would have been nice to find out how that system broke down in this case.

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

#185

Post by guelo »

jessriedel wrote: post #182
guelo wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, it really doesn't seem like autosteer would avoid that many crashes. All that autosteer does is keep you in your lane on a marked highway. Human errors that autosteer would correct are probably relatively rare, things like distractedly drifting into another lane or falling asleep at the wheel. AEB, on the other hand, helps avoid the most common type of crash, rear end collisions.

"Number of crashes" is not as important as "crashes weighted by severity". "Distracted driver" is the number 1 root cause of accidents, and "failure to stay in lane" is the number 1 proximate cause of fatal accidents in most states. http://www.businessinsider.com/the-cause-of-the-most-fatal-c...

OK but the cited 40% figure is just for crash rates, not for severity weighted crash rates.

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

#186

Post by celticninja »

randomdata wrote: post #172
celticninja wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I evidently misunderstood the original comment, when OP said less wealthy (better educated) he meant that there would be fewer wealthy (and better educated) owners. I don't agree with the sentiment and think OP didn't really explain his position well either.

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

#187

Post by hsod »

Shivetya wrote: post #15
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?

I think the primary issue many of us have is the name. the name implies far more capability than the system delivers. I have seen clear day demonstrations but am eagerly awaiting Tesla to show us a night time rainy video which I have seen references of testing having been done

Autopilot on planes still requires there to be human pilots for edge cases. I think everyone understands this, because everyone knows that there are still pilots on planes.

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

#188

Post by chc »

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…

The original NHTSA levels had this very clearly at level 3, but the SAE's levels seem kind of ambiguous as to whether that case would be level 3 or 4. I feel like it's more in the spirit of level 4 than level 3, though, as level 3 requires "prompt response" from the user to a request for intervention, while level 4 has the car still doing something sensible even if the user doesn't respond.

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

#189

Post by Animats »

It's interesting how vague this is. There's an NTSB investigation still pending into a specific Tesla crash.[1] The goals are different. NHTSA asks "do we need to do a recall?" NTSB asks "exactly what, in detail, happened here?" NTSB mostly does air crashes, but occasionally they do an auto crash with unusual properties. Here's the NTSB report for the Midland, TX crash between a train and a parade float.[2] That has detailed measurements of everything. They even brought in a train and a truck to reconstruct the accident positions.

It took a combination of problems to cause that crash. The police lieutenant who had informed the railroad of the parade in previous years had retired, and his replacement didn't do it. The police marshalling the parade let it go through red lights. They were unaware that the traffic light near the railroad crossing was tied in to the crossing gates and signals. That's done to clear traffic from the tracks when a train is approaching before the gates go down. So ignoring the traffic signal took away 10 seconds of warning time. The driver thought the police had taken care of safety issues and was looking backwards at the trailer he was pulling, not sideways along the track. People at the parade were using air horns which sounded like a train horn, so the driver didn't notice the real train horn. That's what an NTSB investigation digs up. Those are worth reading to see how to analyze a failure.

[1] https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Pages/HW...

[2] https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Pages/HA...

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

#190

Post by mikeash »

chc wrote: post #188
mikeash wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The original NHTSA levels had this very clearly at level 3, but the SAE's levels seem kind of ambiguous as to whether that case would be level 3 or 4. I feel like it's more in the spirit of level 4 than level 3, though, as level 3 requires "prompt response" from the user to a request for intervention, while level 4 has the car still doing something sensible even if the user doesn't respond.

Right, it's that "prompt" which seems critical here. If there is no constraint on how long the driver can take to respond then there isn't an issue, but if there's any requirement for how quickly they need to get back in the game, it seems doomed to failure.
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