Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Normalized crash data shows Autopilot is much less safe than Tesla claims

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 462 posts

Re: Normalized crash data shows Autopilot is much less safe than Tesla claims

#71

Post by sdoering »

tacLog wrote: post #36
gnicholas wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the fact that autopilot isn't worse is pretty promising! Presumably drivers take over when it makes mistakes, which tilts the stats a bit. > When I was 19 probably safer to use autopilot. As a parent, I wonder about what safety tech I would let my kids use when learning to drive. I want to make sure they fully learn how to drive, which makes me think I shouldn't let them use too much semi-autonomous tech. At the sa…

> At the same time, it seems foolish to tell them not to use blind spot monitors, or to even expect them to "check their blind spot" the old-fashioned way if their cars have monitors. I have never owned a car with blind spot monitoring. Do people really just rely on them completely? Even in dense urban environments with bikes around? Or is it more of a judgement call? Different perspectives on this would be nice. I h…

> Different perspectives on this would be nice.

Driving for ~25 years. Did quite some kilometers when I was between 19 and 30.

My current car is the first one with a lot of assistance systems. I actually see them as additional safety level, but as a first instance still use my senses. Blind spot monitoring is something that I learned to value as a slice in the Swiss Cheese Model of Security [1].

And I detect myself driving extra carefully when driving a car without them. Way more careful than I was driving before I ever had blind spot monitoring.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model?wprov=sfla1

Re: Normalized crash data shows Autopilot is much less safe than Tesla claims

#72

Post by NikolaNovak »

sandworm101 wrote: post #55
NikolaNovak wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean... I am "Tesla Hater" in that I don't like the direction they're proceeding in; but every human being I ever met in real actual life does rolling stops under some conditions. Last time I can confidently state that "I never rolled through a stop at very slow speed" is when I was 17, and only NOW do I realize how much of an annoying bum I was :P. So if a car does a rolling stop through a stop sign when there are…

It is one thing to note that humans regularly break the law. It is another thing to task people with programing a robot to break that law. I'm very sure that many people break the speed limit regularly. But I would never expect to get away with programing a car to break that limit. No sane person would ever tell an employee or customer that rolling stops are OK, not in writing. And 5.6mph isn't rolling. That's beyond…

I fully support the noble notions and idealistic ideas.

But let's make it real, and let's ask a question about the real world:

Does that mean that expectation is all automated cars will go exactly the speed limit on the left lane of North American superhighways?

If so, those cars will inherently be a danger to life and limb. I don't care about any self-righteous driver who indicates houghtily "I drive speed limit on left lane of American super highway", I've spoken to advanced driver safety instructors, highway police officers and city councilors who all agree those people need to bloody well move it along - it's just not safe.

Re: Normalized crash data shows Autopilot is much less safe than Tesla claims

#73

Post by spywaregorilla »

paxys wrote: post #22

I have felt since day 1 that "autopilot is better than the average driver!" is the most misleading fact/statistic in the industry. The "average driver" involved in an accident includes drunk drivers, road ragers, habitual speeders, teenagers, people driving in bad conditions (rain, snow), people driving without sleep and several other risky groups that most people buying Teslas aren't part of. To be worth it, the car…

So how much better than the median randomly assigned uber driver does it need to be?

Re: Normalized crash data shows Autopilot is much less safe than Tesla claims

#74

Post by M2Ys4U »

endisneigh wrote: post #10

Are there stats that even show that any self driving system is safer than the median driver? Basically accidents involve two people. Said accidents have responsibility divided between both individuals. A hypothetically perfect driver could still be involved in fatal accidents by virtue of the other driver. The worse drivers obviously will cause these accidents. The questions are three fold: 1. Are self driving vehicl…

>Basically accidents involve two people.

Not always, no. It's perfectly possible to crash a car with nobody else around.

Re: Normalized crash data shows Autopilot is much less safe than Tesla claims

#75

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

Natsu wrote: post #4
gnicholas wrote: post #2

Underlying study is here. [1] Full disclosure, I co-wrote the piece for The Daily Beast [2] that originally suggested that Tesla's methodology was seriously flawed. I am not a Tesla-hater though — I just thought it was odd that the company was playing quite so fast and loose with their safety claims. 1: https://engrxiv.org/preprint/view/1973/3986 2: https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-tesla-and-elon-musk-exagge...

The study says this: > An estimated 15% of injury crashes and 24% of property damage-only crashes are never reported to police (M. Davis and Company, Inc., 2015), while9% of injury crashes and 24% of property damage-only crashes are reported but not logged (Blincoe et al., 2015). Even with robust data, establishing the statistical significance of automated vehicle safety can be expensive. Kalra and Paddock (2016)demo…

Why would injury crashes go unreported?

Re: Normalized crash data shows Autopilot is much less safe than Tesla claims

#76

Post by spywaregorilla »

mrtksn wrote: post #69
paxys wrote: post #22

I have felt since day 1 that "autopilot is better than the average driver!" is the most misleading fact/statistic in the industry. The "average driver" involved in an accident includes drunk drivers, road ragers, habitual speeders, teenagers, people driving in bad conditions (rain, snow), people driving without sleep and several other risky groups that most people buying Teslas aren't part of. To be worth it, the car…

If I remember correctly, they also cover the easy part of the road and make the human take over at tricky situations. So at the end of the day, you have spotless records for the autopilot that was driving many many miles on the straight line and humans having accidents at short intersections or construction sites. This translates into very favorable numbers for autopilot when presented as accidents per miles driven.

If it were the case that autopilot was benefiting from dumping all of the difficult parts on the humans, you would expect to see much higher than average rates of accidents per mile on the human driven parts, because they're only getting the hard parts. This tends not to be true, so I'm doubting it's a real effect.

Re: Normalized crash data shows Autopilot is much less safe than Tesla claims

#77

Post by JoshTko »

nja wrote: post #44

I was just watching this video of a Tesla trying and miserably failing to drive itself through the streets of Boston: https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1488555256162172928 A number of these near-crashes seem to be pretty odd errors (a couple of times it just decided to drive on the wrong side of the street?) -- albeit ones that one _could_ see drivers unfamiliar with the area making. If a human driver started dri…

To be fair Boston city roads are like horse carriage routes that were converted to streets and will probably one of the last places FSD optimizes for.

Re: Normalized crash data shows Autopilot is much less safe than Tesla claims

#78

Post by spywaregorilla »

gameswithgo wrote: post #6

EDIT: After reading the full paper and not just the twitter graphs, some of what I said is wrong. That is, they also controlled for age, and when controlling for age and road type, autpilot was just worse. On the one hand I had the same suspicion about the unadjusted data, on the other hand the fact that autopilot isn't worse is pretty promising! However, average human rates include people driving drunk, tired, elder…

The road and age adjusted graph shows tesla still being better, by a trivial amount

Re: Normalized crash data shows Autopilot is much less safe than Tesla claims

#79

Post by [deleted] »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #62

How is this still front page? Somebody sleeping? In case you missed them, there have been 5 tesla stories nuked from the front page today: 'Self driving' Tesla fails miserably on the streets of South Boston 30 points 22 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30173566 Tesla Australia admits its sales figures were wrong 39 points 14 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30176635 Tesla drivers report a su…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN