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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

> That is kind of deal breaker for me, when talking about 1+ ton metal box moving me around I will take "slow to market but not blind" instead.

The way Elon Musk tells it, they put it into production once it was safer per mile than human drivers. Which seems like a legitimate point.

You use something when it's better than what you would have to use in the alternative, not when it's 100% perfect with no possibility of ever making a mistake under any circumstances. Which is probably not even actually possible to do.

The problem is if human drivers kill more than 30,000 people in a year, it's not news, because it's been that way forever. But one autonomous car kills one person and it's the top story.

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> The way Elon Musk tells it, they put it into production once it was safer per mile than human drivers.

I'd caution you against believing anything that he says. It's easy to extract from the data an unfair comparison that shows the group with Tesla AP being safer, but comparing it against cars in totally different driving context or against the safety of motorcycles is just completely deceptive. The stats indicate that Tesla w/AP enabled on freeways is less safe than Tesla w/o AP enabled on freeways.

Last I checked insurance companies gave a discount for AP Tesla’s over non AP Tesla’s suggesting the opposite. Do you some support backing this up?

Tesla subsidized those discounts, it wasn't (or wasn't wholly) a factor of actuarial's assessment of AP safety.

But Tesla knew it would certainly be perceived as such.

>Tesla subsidized those discounts

How? I'm not trying to instigate something here, but a quick search of this isn't showing anything except a bunch of groaning about how unfair it is that Tesla gets all kinds of tax breaks for its cars because it's the only one selling electric at any kind of scale.

Tesla partnered with Liberty Mutual:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-liberty-mutual-create-...

"The firm's InsureMyTesla program is an example of Tesla working directly with an insurance partner to mitigate risks and keep rates low."

That doesn't say they subsidized it, just that they are working with some insurance companies.

I thought subsidize meant that they would be basically paying the difference.

If there's no money changing hands in this partnership, then either the insurance companies are really dumb and are just throwing money away, or there's some truth to the stats that tesla keeps bringing up (40% fewer crashes in cars with autopilot) (or there's something else i'm missing!)

> Last I checked insurance companies gave a discount for AP Tesla’s over non AP Tesla’s suggesting the opposite. Do you some support backing this up?

That's all marketing fluff.

The only U.S. insurance company offering such a discount is some random startup insurance company available to only a small percent of the population. The company is about 2 years old, requires significant tracking of your driving behavior, and it's entirely unclear why they are offering the discount.

The only UK insurance company offering such a discount said “it was too early to say whether the use of the autopilot system produced a safety record that justified lower premiums. It said it was charging less to encourage use of the system and aid research.” It made this decision working closely together with Tesla, it wasn't based on any actuarial data.

According to the article at [1] which another user just showed me, Liberty Mutual is one of the insurance companies, which absolutely doesn't fit your description.

Also, from that article, it looks like the NHTSA found that crashes were 40% lower in cars with autopilot. [2] I don't know enough about insurance and how it works to know if that counts at all, but it shows that it's not all marketing fluff.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-liberty-mutual-create-...

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-autopilot-cuts-crash-r...

FWIW, it's not Tesla-specific. Many luxury cars have similar features to Autopilot and get similar discounts for them.

"Liberty Mutual Insurance offers discounts for various electronic safety features; such as Adaptive Cruise Control, Adaptive Headlights, Collision Preparation Systems (including automatic braking), Blind Spot Warning, Lane Departure Warning and Rear-View Cameras"

I'd guess that's due more to Teslas being expensive cars that are generally driven by older, more responsible drivers and have a bunch of other safety features (AEB, stability control, etc.)

I'd be interested in seeing crash data for Teslas compared with other $50-$130k cars less than 5 years old.

The discount is for the same Tesla model with or without the self driving add on. It’s unlikely the type of drivers changes much.

There's no need to guess, the study was actually done on Teslas with and without AP hardware.

I don't know it well enough to know if there were other factors at play, but it wasn't just that Teslas in general were less likely to crash, only the ones with AP hardware installed.

Huh, I missed that. Thanks!

> Last I checked insurance companies gave a discount for AP Tesla’s over non AP Tesla’s suggesting the opposite. Do you some support backing this up?

Insurance companies may do this because it is a strong signal the customer is gullible to questionable upsells. Maybe they've found that statistically they can sell them more things like overpriced umbrella insurance through direct mail marketing pack ins with their car insurance bill.

(edit: opps, I misread AP as FSD)

> The way Elon Musk tells it, they put it into production once it was safer per mile than human drivers. Which seems like a legitimate point.

It's also only used/active when it is reasonably able to work. Therefore the miles used are inherently better/safer as it is (much less whiteout / torrential AP driving).

This is a luxury human drivers do not have, short of "do not drive those miles at all".

I have always hated this metric. It's disingenuous, and selective.

Precisely. During one nasty ice storm at night I might see more wrecked cars in a single hour than I see the rest of the year combined. And no currently available automation system would dare operate in those conditions, so human drivers take a huge statistical hit from conditions like that but the computers don't. All of these 'safer than humans' metrics are apples to oranges.

So look to other metrics, like the effect on crashes before and after the introduction of the autopilot feature. But those also show a safety improvement.

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-autopilot-cuts-crash-r...

They may not be taking the hardest miles, but the only way to improve the overall average is to be doing better than the status quo on the miles they are taking.

> they put it into production once it was safer per mile than human drivers

The thing is that I can take precautions to increase my safety margin - don't drive impaired, drive in good weather conditions, get lots of sleep, don't be aggressive, don't follow closely, etc. etc. etc.

I don't have a Tesla, but I imagine there's nothing I can do to voluntarily make it safer. It functions normally until it doesn't.

This is a very good point, and one I hadn't considered.

It's common knowledge that most people think they're better than average drivers, so we tend to compensate and believe we're no better than the statistical average driver. But yes indeed, most of us in fact are better than average drivers whenever we're doing our best to drive carefully.

In theory, you can take extra precautions sure, but will you take these precautions all the times? Human nature says no: you're in a hurry, you've eaten too much, you have a cold, all these things reduce your ability to drive safely..

You can pay attention and keep your hands on the wheel. From what I know all the people who had accidents failed to do this. The challenge seems to be how to overcome the false sense of security drivers get, precisely because the thing works so well most of the time.

> "You can pay attention and keep your hands on the wheel."

In that sense these Level 2 systems are a lot like q-tips. The box says you shouldn't stick them in your ear, but everybody knows that's what you buy them for. If everybody were to follow the directions, the consumer desirability of the product would plummet.

Even though you're not supposed to take your hands off the wheel, level 2 systems are often referred to as "hands off". And during a 60 Minutes interview Elon Musk is seen taking his hands off the wheel. Unofficially the point of Level 2 automation is that you can take your hands off the wheel. Officially, your hands must remain on the wheel. The unofficial usecase is what actually gets consumers enthusiastic, but the official usecase is what companies like Tesla cover their ass with.

They're having their cake and eating it too.

The actual point of a Level-2 system (other than as a safety measure, e.g. wrt emergency braking) is that it provides driver assistance for things other than having to pay attention to the road & surroundings at all times - and there are plenty of such things that can meaningfully impact driver's comfort. That's all there is to it. Don't think "Autopilot"; think "Fly-by-wire".

Yeah that's nice and all, yet when you have Elon Musk promoting his cars by taking his hands off the steering wheel, it's pretty clear that Tesla's Level 2 system is being sold to consumers as "hands off".

Why are people assuming in this thread that Tesla is the only auto maker that's providing Level-2 driver assistance? This couldn't be farther from the truth.

The topic of this thread is Tesla, specifically Tesla's implementation of automation features. That is why I am talking about Tesla's promotion of their Level 2 system.

> The way Elon Musk tells it, they put it into production once it was safer per mile than human drivers. Which seems like a legitimate point.

They were comparing crash and fatality statistics against things like motorcycles.

There's zero chance that they know it's safer per mile than humans. Incidents are so far in between you'd need way more more than what the paltry Tesla fleet is collecting before crash per mile could be accounted for with any meaningful accuracy

Tesla have been driven over a billion miles, seems like plenty to get a good estimate.

There are 11 fatality per billion miles driven, and that includes bikes and such, car do even better.

So no "over a billion" isn't plenty.

Are they safer? Possibly. Statistics show they are safer? That's bollocks. There's not enough data to say yet.

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