yup, nothing beats billions of miles from hundreds of thousands of cars. unfortunately, tesla’s software team is not the best when compared with top ai sexperts at fang. too many unnecessary accidents with stupid drivers thinking its self-driving mode allows drivers to surf porn, watch movies, or go to sleep while cars are in motion at high speed.
Yes but hats off to Tesla for their business model. Getting free beta testers who pay full dollar for the product. While waymo has to pay for its own limited fleet to gather real data.
On the point of safety, got this from electrek, which shows autopilot is still safer than human drivers. Sam should be happy as it reduces traffic accidents.
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For over a year now, Tesla has been releasing a voluntarily quarterly safety data report “in order to provide critical safety information about our vehicles to the public.”
The data is not perfect, but it’s the best we have right now to statistically study the safety of Autopilot within a large fleet.
Today, Tesla released the report for the fourth quarter of 2019:
“
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 compares to the following stats from
the previous quarter:
- one accident for every 4.34 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged
- one accident for every 2.70 million miles driven in which drivers didn’t have Autopilot engaged but with active safety features
- one accident for every 1.82 million miles driven in which drivers didn’t have Autopilot engaged nor any active safety feature
It represents a significant increase in the number of accidents per mile for Autopilot.
The increase can be partly explained by the tougher road conditions due to the winter starting in some markets.
The data from the same quarter for the previous year show a very slight improvement of accidents per mile for Autopilot.
However, the data still looks good for Autopilot when compared to the entire auto market. With a crash every 479,000 miles for vehicles overall, Autopilot is about 6 times safer with a crash every 3.07 million miles based on this very simplistic way to look at the situation
