Comment by parineum
4 hours ago
> The 3x figure in the title is based on a comparison of the Tesla reports with estimated average human driver miles without an incident, not based on police report data. The comparison with police-report data would lead to a 9x figure instead, which the article presents but quickly dismisses.
I think OP's point still stands here. Who are people reporting minor incidents to that would be publicly available that isn't the police? This data had to come from somewhere and police reports is the only thing that makes sense to me.
If I bump my car into a post, I'm not telling any government office about it.
I don't know, since they unfortunately don't cite a source for that number, but I can imagine some sources of data - insurers, vehicle repair and paint shops. Since average miles driven without incident seems plausible to be an important factor for insurance companies to know (even minor incidents will typically incur some repair costs), it seems likely that people have studied this and care about the accuracy of the numbers.
Of course, I fully admit that for all I know it's possible the article entirely made up these numbers, I haven't tried to look for an alternative source or anything.
The article lists the crashes right at the top. One of 9 involved hitting a fixed object. The rest involved collisions with people, cars, animals, or injuries.
So, let's exclude hitting fixed objects as you suggest (though the incident we'd be excluding might have been anything from a totaled car and huge fire to zero damage), and also assume that humans fail to report injury / serious property damage accidents more often than not (as the article assumes).
That gets the crash rate down from an unbiased 9x to a lowball 2.66x higher than human drivers. That's with human monitors supervising the cars.
2.66x is still so poor they should be pulled of the streets IMO.
> So, let's exclude hitting fixed objects as you suggest (though the incident we'd be excluding might have been anything from a totaled car and huge fire to zero damage)
I don't know what data is available but what I really care about more than anything is incidents where a human could be killed or harmed, followed by animals, then other property and finally, the car itself. So I'm not arguing to exclude hitting fixed objects, I'm arguing that severity of incident is much more important than total incidents.
Even when comparing it to human drivers, if Tesla autopilot gets into 200 fender benders and 0 fatal crashes I'd prefer that over a human driver getting into 190 fender benders and 10 fatal crashes. Directionally though, I suspect the numbers would probably go the other direction, more major incidents from automated cars because, when are successful, they usually handle situations perfectly and when they fail, they just don't see that stopped car in front of you and hit it at full speed.
> That gets the crash rate down from an unbiased 9x to a lowball 2.66x higher than human drivers. That's with human monitors supervising the cars.
> 2.66x is still so poor they should be pulled of the streets IMO.
I'm really not here to argue they are safe or anything like that. It just seems clear to me that every assumption in this article is made in the direction that makes Tesla look worse.
I'm using the data listed immediately after the introductory paragraph of the article.
FTA:
>> However, that figure doesn’t include non-police-reported incidents. When adding those, or rather an estimate of those, humans are closer to 200,000 miles between crashes, which is still a lot better than Tesla’s robotaxi in Austin.
Insurers?
I can't be certain about auto insurers, but healthcare insurers just straight up sell the insurance claims data. I would be surprised if auto insurers haven't found that same "innovation."
That's a fair point, but I'll note that the one time I hit an inanimate object with my car I wasn't about to needlessly involve anyone. Fixed the damage to the vehicle myself and got on with life.
So I think it's reasonable to wonder about the accuracy of estimates for humans. We (ie society) could really use a rigorous dataset for this.
Tesla could just share their datasets with researchers and NHTSA and the researchers can do all the variable controls necessary to make it apples to apples.
Tesla doesn't because presumably the data is bad.