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Comment by ThunderBee | Hacker News Reader

Musk was definitely overly optimistic on the FSD timeline but the hate is pretty wild.

Please correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t Teslas autopilot something like ~10x as safe as the average driver?

Tesla driving stats are cherry-picked, biased by the population of people with enough money to own a Tesla, biased by the locations where Teslas are driven, and doesn’t consider the failure modes that Autopilot faces that human drivers generally avoid (e.g. shearing off the side of a parked ambulance).

you haven't made a convincing refutation of what he asked. For example, Tesla autopilot might have failure modes that human drivers avoid, but while that could be a PR nightmare for the technology wouldn't necessarily outweigh Teslas doing other things better that humans are poor at. And if people who can afford better cars driving better is true(?), that's a fact you'd get downvoted to hell for (unfairly) around here if you just stated it in a freestanding way.

Most importantly: biased by the locations where drivers feel comfortable using autopilot.

These numbers should only be compared to miles on cruise control in other cars.

The closer you look at those statistics the more questionable they are. You can’t directly compare ‘overall crashes per kilometre across all human drivers and conditions’ with ‘crashes per kilometre while autopilot is active’ when autopilot being active implies:

- driving on a divided highway (what’s the actual prerequisite?)

- good enough weather for autopilot to engage

- in a relatively new, high end luxury vehicle which is likely to be well maintained and have better handling and braking than average vehicles

- likely to be driven by older middle-class drivers less prone to risk-taking

- unclear what the cutoff is between ‘autopilot driving’ and ‘human driving’ during a crash, if autopilot disengaged before impact does that count as human or autopilot driving?

I sold my Tesla last summer but as of then, my anecdotal experience is that it drove like a drunk teenager. Very uncomfortable to sit there and pray, I only used it in traffic jams (which it handled like a champ) and when the road was mostly empty (which made it a lot less stressful wondering what it does next).

Among what others have stated, I guess it depends upon what you mean by "safe". It's possible that Tesla autopilot avoids fender benders but increases chances of fatal crashes.

If you're looking at deaths, in the USA, there's about 1.5 every 100 million miles driven (this includes pedestrians/etc). That's a pretty high bar. Way higher than most autopilot apologists imply.

I'm not saying autopilot won't ever be safer than humans. Just that it isn't as easy as it appears.

"isn’t Teslas autopilot something like ~10x as safe as the average driver? "

Bruh. 10x as dangerous would still be a low number.

Only according to Tesla's marketing. In reality it can barely drive from point A to point B in a dense city without killing someone.

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