Comment by mozumder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mozumder | Hacker News Reader

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The IIHS compares car model fatality rates: http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/driver-death-rates

If you want to do the numbers to compare the Tesla to other cars, where they measure driver fatalities per million registered years, do this:

130,000,000 miles / 12,000 average miles per year per car = 10,833 years.

That's 10,833 registered years for the Model S.

The IIHS site normalizes to deaths per million registered years, so multiply that number by 92.3, and since we have one death so far, the Tesla Model S is now at 92.3 driver deaths per million registered car years.

Let's compare to other car models:

  Ford Taurus 2WD: 20 deaths
  Hyundai AccentL: 86 deaths
  Lexus LS 460 2WD: 18 deaths
  Acura TL 2WD: 5 deaths
  Audi A4 4WD: 0 deaths (yes, a bunch of car models had zero driver deaths)
  And average for ALL 2011 vehicles: 28 deaths.

So, right now, it looks like the Tesla Model S is about 4x deadlier than the average car when using Autopilot, and about 10-20x deadlier than the safest cars.

When these automated cars can complete a journey __without__ handing back to the human, only then can those journey miles be added to the miles driven under autopilot claim. Until such time, consider all automated cars a considerable risk to other road users.

How are you defining automated? No truly autonomous cars are available yet, so they're all some form of driver assist. How are these a risk to other road users, and at which point do they become a risk and not a safety benefit?

Auto-pilot is semi-autonomous... I gather you consider that a risk...

What about Subaru EyeSight? It can autonomously brake. I can drive for hours on the freeway without ever hitting the brake nor gas, even in stop and go traffic. It has warned me multiple times of a sudden slowdown just as I noticed it. It hasn't yet saved me from anything, but if any of those circumstances I'd been distracted (even for a legit reason) it could have. It once warned me of a motorcycle in my path on a very dark night when the dim tail-light of the motorcycle was overwhelmed by the much brighter tail-lights of the cars to its left and right. I would have seen it soon enough, but the car saw it first. Is that a risk to other road-users? Yet, it's automated by some definition.

What about various other manufacturer's lane keeping features? That automation to some degree.

What about ABS? Stability control? Again... automation to some degree.

All of these have their detractors, yet I think statistics clearly show an improvement with each level of driver assist.

>So, right now, it looks like the Tesla Model S is about 4x deadlier than the average car when using Autopilot, and about 10-20x deadlier than the safest cars.

How you can draw such a conclusion from a singular data point? That's beyond ridiculous.

Seems as valid (and invalid) as the implied conclusion here:

> This is the first known fatality in just over 130 million miles where Autopilot was activated. Among all vehicles in the US, there is a fatality every 94 million miles. Worldwide, there is a fatality approximately every 60 million miles.

Fair enough. I think the framing matters a bit though.

"4 Times Deadlier!" certainly comes across as sensationalist based on such flimsy data (never mind that the real figure is actually 3.2 and the parent chose to round up rather than down to serve his/her purpose).

Whereas Tesla's statement comes across more as a statement of fact (albiet quite self-serving.. no question about that).

The 130 million miles is not Model S overall, but Model S with autopilot engaged. It's also only the first 130 million miles, so the sample size is currently 1. This will be much more interesting to look at in 5 years, and at the moment it tells us nothing about Model S.

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