> In the 4th quarter, we registered one accident for every 3.07 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.10 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot and without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 1.64 million miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 479,000 miles.
It's pretty unsurprising that at least augmenting human attention and input with machine attention and input reduces accidents. I agree that the cross-over point in time for full automation being safer than human drivers is a total unknown though.
Autopilot tends to be engaged on freeways / motorways where accidents are much lower than driving through town. If you do the stats properly Tesla's autopilot is probably more crash prone than just having a human drive.
There were some stats that if you compare model S deaths to other luxury cars in the same price range they are about 3x higher for the S. Death rates in luxury cars are much lower than the average vehicle.
I think self driving tech will cut roads deaths eventually but it needs more work.
The vast majority of the data I'm able to find on road types covers only fatalities, not accidents... but New York has accident rates per road type (and junctions!) for several years[1], and their rates are very roughly 1 accident per 300k-500k for rural roads, and 1 per 500k-1m for "[fully] controlled access" (which I read as highways, with divided being by far the lowest rate).
So even if it's just on highways, Autopilot is still out-performing humans by 2-3x, if not more.
On average, ignoring better luxury car rates mentioned elsewhere, and that I have no clue if this is representative. I would be surprised if broader data was so much worse that it would reverse the relationship though.
Still, there is IMHO a sampling error that makes the comparison not fully accurate.
The pool of "all vehicles" traveling on the road, comprises very old cars and pickup/trucks/vans, and all kind of drivers, including teens (or however inexperienced drivers) and older people that may be more likely to have slower response times or some other condition, like (say) poorer vision.
Besides the fact that Tesla's are at the most a few years old and being on the pricy end (which should imply that they are properly maintained), they are "sport cars" (in the sense that they have very good handling and breaking) and they are driven (I believe) by a certain subset of drivers, relatively young but with no or very few inexperienced drivers.
To play devil's advocate slightly, you could pretty easily argue that self-driving tech is most useful to apply to the lower-safety brackets, which pull down that average.
So even if it's not as good as the healthy-and-wealthy bracket that might be safer, if it's better than the average then it'd be potentially significantly better than the non-healthy-and-wealthy. In that light this seems like a massive win.
Yep, only that the lower-safety bracket cannot afford it, not today nor - presumably - in a near future.
And - to be fair - think "Sabrina" (the movie with Audrey Hepburn), really rich people traditionally had professional drivers (chauffers) which maybe had an even lower rate of accidents.
Those figures are not as good as you seem to suggest.
First of all. Tesla counts the number of miles for every Tesla being involved in an accident. The other figure you quote is for all miles driven by motor vehicles before getting involved in an accident. Given that accidents tend to involve two or more vehicles the number of miles traveled before an accident involving a Tesla without autopilot or safety measures would be closer to 820.000 miles.
In that figure of 479.000 miles commercial traffic is also included. Commercial traffic makes up around 60% of all accidents. We cannot translate this to miles per accident comparable to Tesla, because commercial traffic tends to drive more miles than passenger vehicles do, but there are far less of them, etc. Another big category that needs to be excluded from the general figure is motor cycles, that generous source of donor organs, to make it comparable. Passenger vehicles in general are more safe than the overal figure and thus closer to Tesla's figure.
Second point is that Teslas are hardly part of the second hand or n-hand market yet. It is even a question if Tesla will tracks that data in those markets. In those markets you will see more young people as drivers (something to do with income). They are responsible for a majority of the traffic accidents involving passenger vehicles (something to do with tendencies to discount the future and to overestimate their own capabilities).
Third point is that the really good figure comes from auto pilot, but that only works in places and under conditions that are already far less accident prone like highways under normal weather conditions.
The good news from the figures is that enabling the safety measures make Tesla drivers better drivers: From 1.6 miles to 2.1 miles roughly a 25% increase in miles traveled before an accident. That would lead us in the direction of mandating level-2 automation in all new cars for more safety rather than trying to push for level-5 for some brands.
> First of all. Tesla counts the number of miles for every Tesla being involved in an accident. The other figure you quote is for all miles driven by motor vehicles before getting involved in an accident. Given that accidents tend to involve two or more vehicles the number of miles traveled before an accident involving a Tesla without autopilot or safety measures would be closer to 820.000 miles.
You're doing that the wrong way, aren't you?
If 479k is total miles across an average of two cars, then the single-car equivalent, the number you'd compare to the Tesla numbers, is 240k.
It doesn't really make sense to adjust the Tesla numbers to do the comparison, but if you did you'd be doubling them, not halving them.
> We cannot translate this to miles per accident comparable to Tesla, because commercial traffic tends to drive more miles than passenger vehicles do, but there are far less of them, etc.
Just the opposite of GP's opinion, I think basing the statistics solely on Telsa will half the figure rather than doubling it. Suppose the average interval of accident is t and the average speed of car is v, as Telsa cars only represent a small portion of all vehicles, we have
- Only Telsa: distance_travelled / num_accidents = v t / 1
- Two cars involved, but counted as one accident : distance_travelled / num_accidents = 2 v t / 1
That's a nice bit of advertising, but; They cheat. When the car detects an unusual or difficult situation developing it prompts the driver to take over. This means that all the really tricky bits of driving are done by the human and all the easy bits are done by the machine..
There was a competing study done against cars with similar price/age/safety equipment that didn't have the auto pilot option and Tesla caused considerably more accidents.
It also lets them blame the driver for their failure. Tesla is more than happy to share the cars data logs to “prove” it wasn’t the fault of Tesla... remember though, according to Tesla marketing the driver is only there because the lawyers say so....
Am I correct in thinking that most people use autopilot in the most boring parts of or most boring drives?
It seems to me that knowing the autopilot isn't 100% perfect is a good reason to not rely on it in more dangerous or complicated scenarios (construction, roads with poor markings, school areas).
I haven't followed too closely here though, just curious if that is a reasonable hypothesis.
When you are comparing numbers. You compare like-to-like. Tesla specifically prohibits engaging Autopilot in difficult situations and encourages during long boring straight drives.
> In the 4th quarter, we registered one accident for every 3.07 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.10 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot and without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 1.64 million miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 479,000 miles.
It's pretty unsurprising that at least augmenting human attention and input with machine attention and input reduces accidents. I agree that the cross-over point in time for full automation being safer than human drivers is a total unknown though.