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Comment by crca | Hacker News Reader

Tesla publishes their safety numbers in terms of accidents per x millions of miles driven. If you believe their numbers then Autopilot in its current configuration is clearly safer than a purely human operated vehicle. Having driven on Autopilot for about 85% of the total time I’ve spent in a Tesla, its been a life changer. But obviously YMMV.

It really sucks that this specific interchange has cost so many lives - and it’s apparent that there’s some frailty of the code that makes autopilot vehicles more susceptible.

In general when it comes to crashes on Autopilot, it’s important to keep perspective. If you take your hands off the wheel and look at your phone for 6 seconds in any other car you’re going to have a bad time. On Autopilot, it took a confluence of bad road design, poor road maintenance, and an unlikely software fault to initiate a crash.

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> If you believe their numbers then Autopilot in its current configuration is clearly safer than a purely human operated vehicle.

And you shouldn't, because their numbers don't adjust for demographics, type of road use, or driving conditions.

Do Ford Focus drivers have more accidents than Tesla Model S owners? Yes. Is it that down to the fact that Tesla owners are primarily middle-aged nad Ford Focus's are owned by spotty teenagers? Who knows.

There are fewer crashes when you're on autopilot. Is that because Autopilot is better than humans or is it because Autopilot only gets enabled when its safe? Who knows.

> If you take your hands off the wheel and look at your phone for 6 seconds in any other car you’re going to have a bad time.

Which is why you don't do it in any other car. I don't know much about autopilot, but because we as humans don't know when it can go wrong, it's easier to get it into situations it wasn't designed for. This is not true for the 6 seconds any other car scenario as we will be predicting what the steering wheel and traffic in front of us might do.

Very true. Tesla has done a lot to try and make it clear to drivers that they must remain vigilant - in this particular case it sounds like the driver ignored several auditory tactile warnings to resume control of the vehicle, in addition to the standard warnings when Autopilot is activated. Short of changing the name I think they’ve done everything they can to manage expectations for Autopilot once you’re in the car, but humans don’t always work like that.

I do think changing the name would be the responsible thing to do.

If you call something a knife you can't 100% blame the customers if they try to use it to cut stuff, even if you say "Knife™ should not be used for cutting"

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