Cars have gotten so safe though. There's all this measures put in place to ensure your survival _in case of a crash_. Wouldn't it be more relevant to calculate the chances of getting injured / end up in a crash at all?
I mean just being caught up in a traffic accident and have no bodily harm done to you can be a traumatic event.
You're not wrong. There are plenty of accidents caused by inattention and poor driving that aren't fatal, but that do result in injuries... a quick search didn't give me much information but crashes with injuries appear to be about 100x more common than fatal crashes. This doesn't take into account how serious the injuries are, however.
So if we assume that serious injuries are 10x more common than fatalities, that raises the odds to one incident per 750 years, or 1 incident per 75 years of any accident at all. You're still talking about things that happen to people once or twice in their entire lives. Of course there will be outliers (I've been in 5 accidents myself, only 1 with injuries) but the odds of being in a crash don't seem to be worth the risk of trying to automate mousetraps... we should concentrate on replacing car-based transportation instead of trying to use magical black boxes to make it theoretically safer.
Yes, this is a very important distinction. Humans have gotten pretty good at not getting killed in car accidents, mostly due to increasing safety engineering and assistance features in cars. Humans are not very good at avoiding collisions entirely. In 2016 there were 6.3 million motor vehicle accidents reported to police. And NHTSA estimates about 10 million accidents go unreported each year (mostly minor fender benders and people damaging their own vehicles on fixed objects). To me, that's pretty clear evidence that humans are poor drivers.
Humans are not very good at avoiding collisions entirely.
So far, neither are Teslas...And the point of this reddit thread is that any progress that Tesla does make on this front can be instantly reverted in a future update.
I mean just being caught up in a traffic accident and have no bodily harm done to you can be a traumatic event.