Tesla’s Autopilot found partly to blame for 2018 crash on the 405

https://qz.com/1414132/teslas-first-accident-report-claims-i...

Tesla’s autopilot miles are primarily driven on highway miles (in low speed, bumper to bumper Bay Area/LA traffic), in new cars (with well engineered safety cages and multiple airbag systems) which are well maintained (Tesla owners are unlikely the be driving on bald tires and experience blowouts), unlikely to rollover (one of the most fatal accident types) due to battery weight distribution. The car, without autopilot, is much less likely to experience fatal accidents. Couple that with the type of autopilot miles driven, and I expect sober human drivers in the 30-69 age bracket would have been less likely to experience accidents in those same miles.

I expect Tesla is intentionally trying to cloud the statistics to build the public narrative that self driving cars are safer. I believe that Tesla truly expects them to be safer eventually, but they’re smart enough to have the numbers on equivalent human driver crash rates... I’m sure that data was compiled by a very energetic Tesla engineer, put into an power point deck and emailed around. Perfect for a lawyer to subpoena.... and prove that Tesla knew their product wasn’t.....

And Tesla isn’t the only self driving aspirational car company pushing the “self driving cars are safer narrative”. Even Waymo (or maybe the media) claims their vehicles are involved in fewer accidents per mile... but they’re not self driven cars. They’re self driving cars with a human overriding the car’s decision every ~10k miles. Human drivers have an accident approximately every 500k miles (eliminating the under 25 and over 70 age bracket, and non-sober drivers - I expect that number to be closer to an accident per 500k-1M miles). So, a self driving car, without a human, would have been in some type of bad situation 50 times in those 500k miles a human would have driven with just one accident. My suspicion is that in a high fraction of those 50 disengagements, there would have been an accident had a human not intervened. My real suspicion is that self driving cars without human supervision are 50-100x worse than humans.

Lawyers are the only ones who are paid to figure out if my statistical assumptions are correct and to bring them to light.

And yet, I drive with Tesla Autopilot every day. Why? Because I believe that on a portion of my commute, it’s absolutely a better driver than I am. That portion of my commute is straight high speed traffic, periodically interrupted by people slamming on the brakes. It’s boring and mentally draining at the same time. I wish everyone on that portion of the freeway was driving with Tesla autopilot, as accidents are the major cause of my commute delays. Those 20 miles of new, well maintained, straight, properly marked freeway miles, driven during perfect weather, not into the sun, are ideal for Tesla autopilot. Nobody should take those ideal miles and extrapolate them to the rest of my much more dangerous commute.

Copying: When the last lead vehicle changed lanes—3 to 4 seconds before the crash—revealing the fire truck on the path of the Tesla, the system was unable to immediately detect the hazard and accelerated the Tesla toward the stationary truck. By the time the system detected the stationary vehicle and gave the driver a collision warning—0.49 second before impact —the collision was imminent and the warning was too late, particularly for an inattentive driver. The AEB system did not activate. Had the driver been attending to the driving task, he could have taken evasive action to avoid or mitigate the collision.

So there you have it: "particularly for an inattentive driver".

Not really an expert in the field, but I think a major problem with self-driving in general is handing over from an autopilot to a human. This is something that cannot be easily solved just by throwing smarter technology at the problem. Even if autopilot technology manages to be reliable 99.9% of the time, this won't be good enough, because people will invariably think they can rely on it 100% of the time and fall asleep or get distracted. So this 0.1% can be potentially catastrophic, because you cannot go from being asleep to full alertness in 0.5 seconds. Besides, even if one actually wants to maintain alertness, it may be harder to be alert and not doing anything than being alert and doing something (driving).

So, unless autopilots can really really handle anything thrown at them, this will be a real issue. Although there is much willingness for people to convince others and be convinced that this kind of autopilot is very close to being a reality, I suspect it may be not.

Everyone believes, without reason, that he is a good driver and will always beat those janky autopilots. HN threads about autonomous vehicles are always full of unrepresentative anecdotes and angry moral denunciations of technology. It's sad.

Why not? Statistically, you're safer with an autonomous system. Unless you're sure you're a much better driver than average, your position is irrational.