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by kybernetikos 3627 days ago
> but in comparison it will never fail as often as human do.

Maybe eventually, but what I'm interested in is right now, does the tesla autopilot fail more often than a human driving in similar conditions. My suspicion is that it does.
2 comments
jobead 3627 days ago
The data already gathered would indicate that your suspicion is wrong. Currently the US averages 1 fatality for every 89 million miles driven. Autopilot is at almost twice that with only 1 fatality. So autopilot already fails less often than a human.

Consider this anecdote: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/756004029239472132

Then rethink if you really believe that this pedestrian deserves to be dead because you don't trust the data and the world-class engineers for which this is literally their job everyday.

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ProblemFactory 3627 days ago
> Currently the US averages 1 fatality for every 89 million miles driven.

This is the average for all cars on all roads, in all driving conditions.

To have a meaningful comparison, we would need to know the fatality rate for new luxury sedans on divided highways in good weather conditions.

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kybernetikos 3627 days ago
Either you've not read my comments in this thread or I've not clearly explained my point.

Your statistic ignores the fact that autopilot is only used in relatively simple situations, and since you're measuring fatalities only, you need to compare it only with cars of equivalent safety ratings.

If you have statistics comparing humans and autopilot in relevant situations I'd be very interested, but the ones you quote are exactly the ones I'm complaining about as being nonrepresentative.

Even considering all miles equally, a rate of 1 per 130 million autopilot miles (a much too small statistic from which to generalise) still does not compare particularly well to a lot of cars driven by humans, e.g. the BMW 7 series.

Incidentally, it's not at all clear that the situation described in your anecdote even involved the autopilot functionality, as it sounds like it was autonomous breaking which is a standard feature on many cars.

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tikl1 3627 days ago
I don't know for Tesla but I think google autonomous cars are already there, so Tesla must not be far.
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