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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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!

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.

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