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

techcrunch.com

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

#321

Post by mikeash »

camiller wrote: post #78
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…

I had an econ professor assert that as cars got safer there were more accidents because people trusted the car to protect them more.... Logically, to reduce accidents due to carelessness we should put a 12" sharpened spike right in the middle of the steering wheel pointing at the drivers chest. If all accidents were deadly wouldn't drivers then exercise the utmost care?

The problem with this theory is that the rate of fatalities has gone sharply down as cars have become safer. There may well be some degree of compensation where people drive in a more dangerous manner, but the added safety far more than compensates for it.

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

#322

Post by robotjosh »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #205
robotjosh wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real safety payoff will be when manual driving is banned on public roads. We will have to fight the "freedom is doing whatever I want" people who are going to defend the right to manually drive on public roads.

Or just the not-rich people who have old, not-autodriving cars? First-world problems I guess.

The non-rich will adopt self driving cars faster than anyone. They will use these cars as a service and not need to own one or pay for insurance. It will be rich people with their sports cars and fancy motorcycles fighting us on this.

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

#323

Post by brighton36 »

The truck was visible for at least 7 seconds prior to the crash in the full report - another article here:

http://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/01/after-fatal-tesla-crash-...

Strangely enough, giving more people autopilot would probably be better than letting people drive. I think Tesla's picked the right time to enable it, since the cross-over point between autopilots being better than humans in general use cases has been reached.

Call it a beta if you want, but it's a pretty damn promising beta.

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

#324

Post by loup-vaillant »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #307
loup-vaillant wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Step 1: don't recall the robot surgeon. While it does have a fatal bug, recalling eat would kill 79% more patients. Oops. Step 2: Correct the bug, so the robot stops killing patients. The Tesla autopilot may be in a similar situation. Even if there is a number of fatality inducing bugs, disabling it would be even worse. That said, 40% crash reduction is not enough. I want to see 75%, 90%, and more.

You are omitting the PR angle: "I DON'T CARE THAT FAR MORE PEOPLE WOULD DIE OTHERWISE - BAN KILLER ROBOTS NOW!!!!"

That one is easily dealt with: "Our robot surgeon reduces the fatality rate by 98.5%. Our study of the remaining fatalities suggest we can reduce them further. We hope to reach near-zero fatality rate within the year.

Don't even speak of the bug. Just state what matters: this stuff is better than what we had before, and it can (and will) be even better. This may prevent talks about killer robots.

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

#325

Post by agildehaus »

ebbv wrote: post #181
agildehaus wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Other forms of transportation have better trained pilots. :)

Precisely. Which is what self-driving cars aim to give cars.

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

#326

Post by grogenaut »

gambiting wrote: post #288
blazespin wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing that matters is "NHTSA notes that crash rates involving Tesla cars have dropped by almost 40 percent since the wide introduction of Autopilot" Even if autopilot was faulty in some way, if more people were living than dying - does it matter?

Well, yeah. Imagine there's heart surgery which has only 20% success rate. So every time 100 people go in for that surgery, only 20 survive. Now, someone makes a robot that has 100% success rate, but every 100 operations, it has a glitch in the sofware, where it stabs and kills the patient instead. It has been calculated that on average, using the robot only kills 1-2 out of 100 people going in for surgery, compared…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

The therac arguably saved way more people than it killed. However... it's one of the most infamous software bugs in history.

It's the same story you came up with above... except it's real, and it got pulled.

They did however improve since then.

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

#327

Post by mannykannot »

yohui wrote: post #113
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…

For those unaware, "AEB" stands for "Autonomous Emergency Braking". See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_avoidance_system Did Tesla cars have AEB prior to Autopilot installation? If not, then this suggests the 40% reduction in crashes may simply be due to the installation of an AEB system. What effect Autopilot's other features may have would remain uncertain.

Exactly - this is a significant weakness of the study.
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