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Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

This one from The AP [0] says Tesla’s figure and its crash rate per 1,000 vehicles was substantially higher than the corresponding numbers for other automakers that provided such data, though Tesla is the only one that does it real time and "Other automakers, by contrast, must wait for reports to arrive from the field and sometimes don’t learn about crashes for months." There's quite a few more details in there, the comparisons make Tesla look worse than the others, though I'm not quite sure by how much when you consider all the differences in reporting? (this might also be in the WAPO article, I couldn't read it)

0: https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-5e6c354622582...

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One of the most contentious issues is that Tesla is able to provide a figure in terms of crashes per miles driven on Autopilot whereas other automakers can't do the same.

So they report crashes per 1000 vehicles, but that doesn't take into consideration how much people are using Autopilot vs how much people are using GM SuperCruise. If people with GM cars are hardly ever using SuperCruise but people with Teslas use Autopilot often, that's going to really skew the figure.

Sure, but is there a reason to assume (mere speculation allowed) that Tesla's software is being used more than GM's?

Yes; the quality of autopilot greatly influences how much I use it. 5 years ago Tesla's was kind of nerve-wracking and I rarely used it. Now it's pretty good on highways but I don't use it on city streets. I probably will when the quality goes up. So I've gone through 10x changes in usage as quality improved.

I don't know what GM's autopilot is like, but I wouldn't assume that usage would be similar even within an order of magnitude.

If by "pretty good" you mean an absolute f'ing nightmare for the other drivers on the road, especially the ones driving behind the Tesla who must be prepared to react to it slamming on the brakes at random intervals because Autopilot misidentified a shadow on the road.

Autopilot is about as good as a teenage driver getting in the car for the second time.

It's more capable. Autopilot can basically do 100% of highway driving from on ramp to off ramp. It can switch lanes, and it can also take an exit from one highway to another highway.

Either way, without data about how often people use each driver assist feature, it's not scientifically rigorous to assume that each system is used exactly in the same proportion. The NHTSA should have made this caveat very clear, and should have released data from Tesla about crashes per miles driven if it's available (even if it's not available for other automakers).

Unfortunately the mile-level data simply doesn't exist. From the NHTSA: "Reporting entities are not required to submit information regarding the number of vehicles they have manufactured, the number of vehicles they are operating, or the distances traveled by those vehicles. Data required to contextualize the incident rates are limited."

I have two cars with technologies like this, Nissan ProPilot and Tesla Autopilot. ProPilot steering assist is useless on my most common two lane curvy roads and just annoying enough to not be worth it on some four lane divided highways.

Tesla Autopilot handles both of those same streets, which are my most commonly driven streets, very well. It gets used much more frequently. Anecdotally, I hear similar reports about other systems.

I’ve used Autopilot (EAP, lane keeping, auto lane changes and highway transitions on intestates) more miles in four years (without an accident or death) than some people drive their car in it’s entire lifetime, and yet, my Tesla will only get counted as a single vehicle in the stats. Including miles is a necessary datapoint, statistically speaking.

Maybe it sucks less?

I have no opinion, informed or otherwise on the matter. This is pure speculation. But it seems plausible.

Great context. Impossible to know if this is good or bad without a point of comparison.

I can’t help but feel discouraged that other automakers will improve their reporting. It’s all downside, because you get articles like this, that inevitably build into narratives - true or not - that your cara are unsafe. Meanwhile, why bother when your deficiency is reflecting poorly on your competitor?

Faster reporting shouldn't affect long time averages. If the delay is x months 100*x/(n+x)% of crashes go unreported at month n with delayed reporting under simplified assumptions.

The challenge is that the availability of these systems is increasing exponentially at the moment. Long term it matters less, as the long term reporting can include mileage. Short term, the lags introduce a lot of bias.

I'm thinking largely of how quickly Super Cruise and Blue Cruise are expanding here. Other systems may not be expanding as quickly.

An exponential also gets squashed by an asymptotic. That math gets a bit more complicated (You need to evaluate an integral) but that does not categorically change the math. Also i find the notion of an exponential ramp up quiet dubious, polynomial would make more sense.

That's fair, but going back to the report I had misread it. It actually includes a lot more cars than I thought.

However, it relies on reporting of accidents that is likely missing a lot of them. It is very likely that only Tesla's data is close to accurate.

It's also worth noting that if Tesla is automatically collecting these crash stats from vehicle telemetry and other manufacturers are collecting them from customer reports or vechicle service calls, Tesla's numbers are probably inflated by a factor of three (or other manufacturers are deflated by three, however one wants to call that).

The first thing Waymo learned starting out on public roads from observing their own telemetry was that NHTSA numbers (based on reported crashes and service calls) are three times lower than actual collisions because there's huge incentive to not report a collision (insurance premiums). Comparing numbers from differing data-collection approaches is an apples-to-oranges comparison.

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