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Tesla’s autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher tha human drivers

electrek.co

191–200 of 286 posts

Re: Tesla’s autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher tha human drivers

#191
post #72

As far as I understand, those Robotaxis are only available within Austin so far. That is slow city traffic, the number of miles per ride is very small. However the number for human drivers seem to take all kind of roads into respect. Of course, highways are the roads where you drive most of the distance at the least risk for an accident. Has this been taken into account for the evaluation? It would be ironic that peo…

It does look extremely pessimistic. Like one of the 'incident' is that they hit a curb at a parking lot at 6 MPH. No human driver would report this kind of incident. A human driver would probably forget it after the next traffic light. While it's clearly Tesla's fault (if you hit any static object it's your fault), when you take this kind of 'incident' into account of course it'd look worse than humans.

The human data estimate they compare to to get the 3x number also includes this type of incident - even if of course no one reports it, you can get some idea of the number of such incidents based on service and paint shop data.

Re: Tesla’s autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher tha human drivers

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insurers? I can't be certain about auto insurers, but healthcare insurers just straight up sell the insurance claims data. I would be surprised if auto insurers haven't found that same "innovation."

That's a fair point, but I'll note that the one time I hit an inanimate object with my car I wasn't about to needlessly involve anyone. Fixed the damage to the vehicle myself and got on with life. So I think it's reasonable to wonder about the accuracy of estimates for humans. We (ie society) could really use a rigorous dataset for this.

Tesla could just share their datasets with researchers and NHTSA and the researchers can do all the variable controls necessary to make it apples to apples.

Tesla doesn't because presumably the data is bad.

Re: Tesla’s autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher tha human drivers

#194
post #81

Tesla has completely fumbled a spectacular lead in EVs and managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And instead of turning it around, we're supposed to believe they are going to completely pivot and then take over a market with far more developed competitors (e.g. Boston Dynamics). That Elon is riding this wave amidst the transparency of the whole thing is the funniest part. It's like watching people lose m…

Do you remember EVs before Tesla? They were glorified golf carts using lead-acid batteries. The performance and range were awful. The Roadster and the Model S changed all that. I'm not saying I remember this perfectly but as I recall, Tesla's original objective was to show that an EV could be a real car, look attractive (or at least normal), and to create demand for EVs that would force all manufacturers to start making them. The ultimate value in Tesla was supposed to be batteries, which all cars would eventually need.

Re: Tesla’s autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher tha human drivers

#195
post #23

I am so tired of people defending Tesla. I’ve wrote off Tesla long time ago but what gets me are the people defending their tech. We all can go see the products and experience them. The tech needs to be at least 100x more error free vs humans. It cannot be on par with human error rate.

Tesla was THE company that started the EV-revolution, while VW was actively manipulating emission data. I don't like Elon and his politics, but I'm very grateful for Tesla to have shaken up the car industry. Everyone is better for it.

Maybe? For years the highest selling EV was the Leaf.

I agree Tesla kind of increased the desirability of EVs at least in the US, but I'm not convinced it wouldn't have happened anyway.

It's a hard question to answer, because you're talking about a counterfactual.

I feel like there's probably some broader type of cognitive bias at play (where we assume something common wouldn't have been common otherwise, because it is common) but I don't know what the term for it might be.

Re: Tesla’s autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher tha human drivers

#196
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla could share real/complete data at any time. The fact that they don't is likely and indicator the data does not look good.

You can do this with every topic. XYZ does not share this, so IT MUST BE BAD.

It's a public company making money off of some claims. Not being transparent about the data supporting those claims is already a huge red flag and failure on their part regardless of what the data says.

Re: Tesla’s autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher tha human drivers

#197
post #150
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm skeptical. If someone really wants a Tesla, my guess is that they'll rationalize Musk's actions or least compartmentalize them.

I think Facebook is even more universally thought of as a bad company, and everyone still engages there, too.

Facebook as a monopoly of a sort and so is hard to get away from. If I don't like Tesla there are many other options. Even if you only buy EVs, there are a lot of options that you can buy today. The only people who have to buy Tesla are the type who are buying 10 year old EVs (the limited range on 10 year old Nissan rules them out).

Re: Tesla’s autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher tha human drivers

#198
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla (Elon Musk really) has a long history of distorting the stats or outright lying about their self driving capabilities and safety. The fact that folks would be skeptical of any evidence Tesla provided in this case is a self-inflicted problem and well-deserved.

He did promise his electric trucks to be more cost-effective than trains (still nothing in 2026...). And "world's fastest supercar". And full self-driving by "next year" in 2015. None of these are offered in 2026. There have never been truthful statements from his companies, only hype & fluff for monetary gains.

There used to be [EDIT: still is] a website[1] that listed all of Musk's promises and predictions about his businesses and showed you how long it's been since he said the promise would materialize. It's full of mostly old statements, probably because it's impossible to keep up with the amount of content being generated monthly.

1: https://elonmusk.today

Re: Tesla’s autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher tha human drivers

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not weird. They have a history of over promising to the point that one could say they just straight up lie on a regular basis. The bar is higher for them because they have abused the public’s trust and it has to be earned again. The results have to speak for Tesla very loudly and very clearly. And so far they don’t.

But this is more your feelings than actually factual. I mean sure you can say that the timelines did slip a lot but that doesn’t really have anything to with the rest that is insinuated here. I would argue a timeline slipping doesn’t mean you go about killing people and lie about it next. I would even go so far as to say that the timelines did slip to exactly avoid that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Tesla,_Inc.

https://www.tesladeaths.com/

https://elonmusk.today/

The data on this matter of lies, fraud, and bad faith is robust.

Re: Tesla’s autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher tha human drivers

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of your arguments are expounded upon in the article itself, and their conclusions still hold, based on the publicly available data. The 3x figure in the title is based on a comparison of the Tesla reports with estimated average human driver miles without an incident, not based on police report data. The comparison with police-report data would lead to a 9x figure instead, which the article presents but quickly di…

> The 3x figure in the title is based on a comparison of the Tesla reports with estimated average human driver miles without an incident, not based on police report data. The comparison with police-report data would lead to a 9x figure instead, which the article presents but quickly dismisses. I think OP's point still stands here. Who are people reporting minor incidents to that would be publicly available that isn't…

I don't know, since they unfortunately don't cite a source for that number, but I can imagine some sources of data - insurers, vehicle repair and paint shops. Since average miles driven without incident seems plausible to be an important factor for insurance companies to know (even minor incidents will typically incur some repair costs), it seems likely that people have studied this and care about the accuracy of the numbers.

Of course, I fully admit that for all I know it's possible the article entirely made up these numbers, I haven't tried to look for an alternative source or anything.

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