Comment by microtherion
10 hours ago
I'm quite skeptical of Tesla's reliability claims. But for exactly that reason, I welcome a company like Lemonade betting actual money on those claims. Either way, this is bound to generate some visibility into the actual accident rates.
One thing that was unclear to me from the stats cited on the website is whether the quoted 52% reduction in crashes is when FSD is in use, or overall. This matters because people are much more likely to use FSD in situations where driving is easier. So, if the reduction is just during those times, I'm not even sure that would be better than a human driver.
As an example, let's say most people use FSD on straight US Interstate driving, which is very easy. That could artificially make FSD seem safer than it really is.
My prior on this is supervised FSD ought to be safer, so the 52% number kind of surprised me, however it's computed. I would have expected more like a 90-95% reduction in accidents.
I think this might be right, but it does two interesting things:
1) it let's lemonade reward you for taking safer driving routes (or living in a safer area to drive, whatever that means)
2) it (for better or worse) encourages drivers to use it more. This will improve Tesla's training data but also might negatively impact the fsd safety record (an interesting experiment!)
> ...but also might negatively impact the fsd safety record (an interesting experiment!)
As a father of kids in a neighborhood with a lot of Teslas, how do I opt out of this experiment?
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The insurance industry is a commercial prediction market.
It is often an indicator of true honesty, providing there is no government intervention. Governments intervene in insurance/risk markets when they do not like the truth.
I tried to arrange insurance for an obese western expatriate several years ago in an Asian country, and the (western) insurance company wrote a letter back saying the client was morbidly obese and statistically likely to die within 10 years, and they should lose x weight before they could consider having insurance.
I could see prediction markets handing insurance in the future, it could probably get fairer prices but would have to be done right to avoid bad incentives, interesting to think about how that might work.
> quite skeptical of Tesla's reliability claims
I'm sceptical of Robotaxi/Cybercab. I'm less sceptical that FSD, supervised, is safer than fully-manual control.
Where I live isn't particularly challenging to drive (rural Washington), but I'm constantly disengaging FSD for doing silly and dangerous things.
Most notably my driveway meets the road at a blind y intersection, and my Model 3 just blasts out into the road even though you cannot see cross traffic.
FSD stresses me out. It's like I'm monitoring a teenager with their learners permit. I can probably count the number trips where I haven't had to take over on one hand.
> I'm constantly disengaging FSD for doing silly and dangerous things.
You meant “I disable FSD because it does silly things”
I read “I disable FSD so I can do silly things”
it's edging into the intersection to get a better view on the camera. it's further than you would normally pull out, but it will NOT pull into traffic.
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Do you have HW3 or HW4?
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Having handed over control of my vehicles to FSD many times, I’ve yet to come away from the experience feeling that my vehicle was operating in a safer regime for the general public than within my own control.
Keeping a 1-2 car's length stopping distance is likely over a 50% reduction in at fault damages.
I think you greatly overestimate humans
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> I'm less sceptical that FSD, supervised, is safer than fully-manual control.
I'm very skeptical that the average human driver properly supervises FSD or any other "full" self driving system.
this ^^
They don’t bet money on just “I’m quite skeptical because I hate the man”, but on actual data provided by the company.
That’s the difference.
Lemonade will have some actual claim data to support this already, not relying on the word of Tesla.
> betting actual money on those claims
Insurance companies can let marketing influence rates to some degree, with programs that tend to be tacked on after the initial rate is set. This self driving car program sounds an awful lot like safe driver programs like GEICO Clean Driving Record, State Farm Good Driver Discount, and Progressive Safe Driver, Progressive Snapshot, and Allstate Drivewise. The risk assessment seems to be less thorough than the general underwriting process, and to fall within some sort of risk margin, so to me it seems gimmicky and not a true innovation at this point.