> For Tesla, there is one fatality, including known pedestrian fatalities, every 320 million miles in vehicles equipped with Autopilot hardware. If you are driving a Tesla equipped with Autopilot hardware, you are 3.7 times less likely to be involved in a fatal accident.
That's very curious wording. The important number would seem to be "millions of miles per fatality while Autopilot is enabled", not "millions of miles per fatality in Autopilot-equipped vehicles". The way it's phrased, I wonder what part of that 3.7x multiplier is unrelated to Autopilot and is just due to the car's high safety rating in a collision, recent release (no long tail of older, less safe models contributing to the statistics), and luxury status (more likely to be driven conservatively by old rich people.)
I think there's automatic collision avoidance always on that uses the autopilot sensors. So even if you're not actively using autopilot, the car can avoid hitting an obstacle it sees on the road.
Yup and this has saved me from at least 2 collisions! The first time was right after I got the car and I was totally not watching the road but instead playing around with the controls and suddenly the screen started flashing red. The second time was a car to my right as I tried switching lanes. I rarely let the car drive itself, but when I have it often alerts that I don’t have my hands on the wheel and I’m like uhh literally holding the wheel so I take the data that indicates the driver not holding the wheel with a grain of salt...
Yeah, and automatic emergency braking is a clear-cut enough win for safety that there's been talk of making it mandatory on all new cars in a few years' time. Tesla seem to have adopted a deliberate strategy of conflating the safety benefits of an uncontroversial feature many cars have with the much more questionable safety of their autopilot mode in order to promote the latter. The big example Elon Musk was pushing of Autopilot preventing an accident and likely saving someone's life was the result of automatic emergency braking in conditions very far from those autopilot mode could be used in (heavy rain in an urban area at night, if I remember correctly).
Yes, this conflation has bother me as well. In the long term it's an absolute slam dunk to transition to autonomous vehicles, but I'm a bit worried that they're feeling they need to hide the most important numbers in 2018 in an attempt to avoid an irrational / unwise response from the public.
From their blog: "In the US, there is one automotive fatality every 86 million miles across all vehicles from all manufacturers. For Tesla, there is one fatality, including known pedestrian fatalities, every 320 million miles in vehicles equipped with Autopilot hardware. If you are driving a Tesla equipped with Autopilot hardware, you are 3.7 times less likely to be involved in a fatal accident."
Notice it says one fatality per "320 million miles in vehicles equipped with Autopilot hardware." But, how many of those miles (or what percent of the time) does a Tesla driver use Autopilot? Also, maybe those good stats are due to the structural safety features and not the autopilot. It may be more fair to compare to other cars with excellent crash protection but no autopilot.
I think it would be a great service to the world to improve driving safety, but maybe we need to really start looking at the stats and get some more hubris as we transition to full autopilot. For example, require that drivers keep their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. When more cars have autopilot, then mesh behavior between vehicles, and e-road features, then maybe we'll be more ready for driver-less cars.
> In the US, there is one automotive fatality every 86 million miles across all vehicles from all manufacturers.
Also note that this includes trucks and motorcycles, which have much, much higher fatality rates than passenger cars. Motorcycles are around 10x-50x higher fatality rate than cars! So already Tesla's blog is doing a misleading comparison to more deadly vehicle classes.
Additionally, there could be all sorts of other variables that make it hide even comparison. Are Tesla drivers physically comparable to regular drivers? Are they older? Younger? Both elderly and young kids have a higher accident rates. Are Teslas driven in rural areas and urban areas the same as regular cars? Because rural areas have a higher fatality rate.
So we need to make sure that the Tesla driver matches driving conditions of typical cars to make autopilot comparisons valid.
Right now, it appears Tesla's autopilot is a death-trap.
And don't forget to only compare against 2012+ luxury sedans. The median age of U.S. passenger cars is nearly 12 years. There are exactly 0 autopilot equipped 12 year old cars. As vehicles have become significantly safer in the past 12 years, I wouldn't be surprised if the fatality rate of 2012 and newer luxury sedans was a third of the U.S. median.
> Right now, it appears Tesla's autopilot is a death-trap.
I agree with all the holes you poked in their stats, but then with the last sentence you just went way off the deep end. What does "death trap" mean to you? To me, it seems likely the Autopilot engaged is about as dangerous as disengaged.
Do you find yourself veering dangerously close to a traffic barrier on a regular basis (waiting for the day that the crash attenuator becomes defunct so you can slam into it)? I don't and any machine that does that qualifies as a death trap.
They definitely know. They collect your driving data even when auto pilot is off, so I'd imagine they collect everything when the autopilot is actually engaged.
Tesla specifically said that the information was in the car and wasn't transmitted to HQ, so they didn't know. If what you say is true, they're lying to the USG.
Let me share an example. I had an accident in a Model S, front-end, which didn't cause a loss of power. Tesla called me a couple of minutes later, saying that they knew I'd had an airbag-deploying accident, and asking if I needed an ambulance. From the description of this accident, power to the Tesla was lost before there was time to phone home.
Edit: in a posting today, Tesla has said more: https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-last-week’s-accident but at the time of the earlier blog posting, Tesla says they did not know yet.