Comment by hedora

> 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.