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Comment by rhacker | Hacker News Reader

I get that in 5-10 years we MAY have SDVs that are superior than human drivers. But I think a lot of people have a mental model of SDVs _right now_ being superior to human drivers. I can't remember the crash stats, but I think the only way to know for sure is to calculate the number of miles a single human generally drives on average before they are involved in a collision or crash, etc...

Now I don't have the numbers memorized, but in previous Tesla, Uber, Google threads - only Google had reached records similar to human level crash safety. Keeping in mind however that they are still working on driving through snow, construction sites, non-existant (paint gone) lane lines... so the test areas are quite specific still.

I realize Tesla isn't advertising level 5 autonomy - I'm just responding to the above poster.

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We don't have exact numbers for Tesla but there are 2 confirmed casualties in what is conservatively over a billion Autopilot miles. The average casualty rate for human drivers is something around 1.25 death per 100 million miles. Those numbers are not directly comparable given that Autopilot is not something that is used during 100% of all driving miles and Tesla drivers are not average car drivers. However, there is nothing that screams "Teslas with Autopilot are a death trap" like some people in this thread are implying.

Autopilot will only be engaged on roads and under conditions that are favorable to autonomous driving, but fatal accidents tend to happen more under unfavorable conditions for human drivers. The non-Tesla numbers also include cars that are smaller, cheaper and less sophisticated, so much more likely to lead to fatal outcomes in crashes. So these numbers are heavily skewed in favor of Tesla. The proper comparison would be waymos performance and they’ve been without a fatal crash afaik. As an alternative you could pull the numbers for cars of similar build on similar roads for human drivers.

I don't think it's fair to compare an L2 system to an L5 system, though. My sense is that a very good ADAS (L2) system will reduce overall fatalities, while causing a small number of additional ones through human misuse of the system. This accident seems like the latter case.

Keep in mind that a billion miles is a very small number in this context. People in the U.S. alone drive well over 3 trillion miles every year [1]. We simply don't have enough data yet to say that autonomous vehicles are safer.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/21/516512439...

I completely agree and should have put something about sample size in that comment. However there are no red flags yet in the statistics and I think that is important.

Think of it like flipping a coin. We decide to flip a coin 4 times and get 2 heads and 2 tails. That wouldn't be enough to draw any meaningful conclusions about whether the coin is fair or if it is weighted to one side, but I would feel a lot better about that result than if the coin ended up on the same side 4 times.

Can you point me to a source for the billion Autopilot miles? This is something I've been trying to track down without any luck so far.

The best source I've been able to find so far is a tweet by Elon Musk in 2016 saying "Cumulative Tesla Autopilot miles now at 222 million".

[1]https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/784487348562198529?ref_s...

I wish Tesla would update those numbers more frequently, but it looks like they stopped doing that in 2016. However they did enough updates in 2016 that allow us to estimate a trend of something on the order of 1 million miles per day.

4/9/2016 - 47 [1]

5/24/2016 - 100 [2]

6/30/2016 - 130 [3]

10/7/2016 - 222 [4]

11/13/2016 - 300 [5]

This rate continuing linearly would put us at roughly 900 million today. A linear accumulation of miles ignores that Tesla has roughly twice the cars on the road that they had in 2016 when those numbers were published. I have no idea their current mileage total has reached, but I feel safe in saying it is over a billion miles.

[1] - https://twitter.com/Tesla/status/718845153318834176

[2] - https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/24/11761098/tesla-autopilot-...

[3] - https://www.tesla.com/blog/tragic-loss

[4] - https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/784487348562198529

[5] - https://electrek.co/2016/11/13/tesla-autopilot-billion-miles...

Fantastic, thank you!

> I realize Tesla isn't advertising level 5 autonomy

To my reading they are, and then disclaiming it in the small print. They clearly want to leave an impression its close to level 5.

Tesla might not be advertising L5, but they're certainly claiming that Autopilot is safer than human drivers right now.

They're claiming that human+Autosteer+TACC is safer than a human. They're not claiming that Autopilot while you use your phone or watch a movie is safer than human driving. And they remind you of this every time you engage the feature.

Consider AEB. AEB is safety improvement on pure human driving. But it'd be hugely foolish to rely 100% on AEB to do your braking for you. It's not designed for that -- it can help you in a lot of situations, but not all of them. The same is true for Autopilot.

If they where better now, than humans (fully sdv) than everybody would be selling them, using them etc. That wasnt my point. My point is, even wheb they become safer, maybe even many many times safer, we are going to see some accidents, that you could argue, a human would have avoided. And it will be terrible for the people involved, there will be outcries etc. But the sum, will still be that many many lives are saved.

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