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

electrek.co

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

#71

Post by coryrc »

noncoml wrote: post #51
cbeach wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We tend to defend companies that push the frontiers of self-driving cars, because the technology has the potential to save lives and make life easier and cheaper for everyone. As engineers, we understand that the technology will go from unsafe, to par-with-humans, to safer-than-humans, but in order for it to get to the latter, it requires much validation and training in an intermediate state, with appropriate safegua…

> other approaches, which use sensors like LIDAR as a crutch for their more rudimentary software. Do me a favor and take Musk and get on a plane with just a bunch of cameras instead of sevsors like radar, airspeed sensor, altimeter, GPS, ILS, etc. No need for those crutches. Do autopiloting like a real man!

Human-piloted planes have altimeters and airspeed indicators; the failure of which have caused many accidents.

Tesla cars have speed sensors as well as GPS. (Altimeter and ILS not being relevant). I agree with Musk's claim they don't need LIDAR because human drivers don't; it's self-evidently true. But I think they _should_ have it because they can then be safer than humans; why settle for our current accident and death rate?

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

#72

Post by _ph_ »

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 people are claiming the Tesla numbers for Autopilot are to optimistic, as it is used on highways only and at the same time don't notice that city-only numbers for the FSD would be pessimistic statistics-wise.

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

#73

Post by mbreese »

SilverBirch wrote: post #2

To be honest I think the true story here is: > the fleet has traveled approximately 500,000 miles Let's say they average 10mph, and say they operate 10 hours a day, that's 5,000 car-days of travel, or to put it another way about 30 cars over 6 months. That's tiny! That's a robotaxi company that is literally smaller than a lot of taxi companies. One crash in this context is going to just completely blow out their stat…

The more I think about your comment on statistics, the more I change my mind.

At first, I think you’re right - these are (thankfully) rare events. And because of this, the accident rate is Poisson distributed. At this low of a rate, it’s really hard to know what the true average is, so we do really need more time/miles to know how good/bad the Teslas are performing. I also suspect they are getting safer over time, but again… more data required. But, we do have the statistical models to work with these rare events.

But then I think about your comment about it only being 30 cars operating over 6 months. Which, makes sense, except for the fact that it’s not like having a fleet of individual drivers. These robotaxis should all be running the same software, so it’s statistically more like one person driving 500,000 miles. This is a lot of miles! I’ve been driving for over 30 years and I don’t think I’ve driven that many miles. This should be enough data for a comparison.

If we are comparing the Tesla accident rate to people in a consistent manner (accident classification), it’s a valid comparison. So, I think the way this works out is: given an accident rate of 1/500000, we could expect a human to have 9 accidents over the same miles with a probability of ~ 1 x 10^-6. (Never do live math on the internet, but I think this is about right).

Hopefully they will get better.

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

#74

Post by [deleted] »

LunicLynx wrote: post #68
xnx wrote: 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.

[deleted]

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

#76

Post by gruez »

fabian2k wrote: post #12
z7 wrote: post #7

The comparison isn't really like-for-like. NHTSA SGO AV reports can include very minor, low-speed contact events that would often never show up as police-reported crashes for human drivers, meaning the Tesla crash count may be drawing from a broader category than the human baseline it's being compared to. There's also a denominator problem. The mileage figure appears to be cumulative miles "as of November," while the…

I think it's fair to put the burden of proof here on Tesla. They should convince people that their Robotaxis are safe. If they redact the details about all incidents so that you cannot figure out who's at fault, that's on Tesla alone.

>I think it's fair to put the burden of proof here on Tesla.

That just sounds like a cope. The OP's claim is that the article rests on shaky evidence, and you haven't really refuted that. Instead, you just retreated from the bailey of "Tesla's Robotaxi data confirms crash rate 3x worse ..." to the motte of "the burden of proof here on Tesla".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

More broadly I think the internet is going to be a better place if comments/articles with bad reasoning are rebuked from both sides, rather than getting a pass from one side because it's directionally correct, eg. "the evidence WMDs in Iraq is flimsy but that doesn't matter because Hussein was still a bad dictator".

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

#77

Post by andsoitis »

andrewaylett wrote: post #28
nkrisc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s unfair to group all those features into “things for people who want to multitask while driving”. I’m a decent driver, I never use my phone while driving and actively avoid distractions (sometimes I have to tell everyone in the car to stop talking), and yet features like lane assist and automatic braking have helped me avoid possible collisions simply because I’m human and I’m not perfect. Sometimes a ran…

There are two layers, both relating to concentration. Driving a car takes effort. ADAS features (or even just plain regular "driving systems") can reduce the cognitive load, which makes for safer driving. As much as I enjoy driving with a manual transmission, an automatic is less tiring for long journeys. Not having to occupy my mind with gear changes frees me up to pay more attention to my surroundings. Adaptive cru…

What about lane assist and follow technology in other cars? Do they also fall in the category of thing that replace attention?

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

#79

Post by nkrisc »

mikkupikku wrote: post #11
fragmede wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We made drunk driving super illegal and that still doesn't stop people. I would rather they didn't in the first place, but since they're going to anyway, I'd really rather they have a computer that does it better than they do. FSD will pull over and stop if the driver has passed out.

If we could ensure that only drunk people use driver assistance features, I'd be all for that. The reality is that 90% of the sober public are now driving like chronic drunks because they think their car has assumed the responsibility of watching the road. Ban it ALL.

No, remove their licenses if they can’t drive safely. Let safe and responsible drivers use these safety-enhancing features.

If someone is driving dangerously despite these safety features, they should not have a license to operate a motor vehicle on public roads.

These features are still valuable even to safe drivers simply because safe drivers are human and will still make mistakes.

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

#80

Post by raincole »

_ph_ wrote: 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.

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