[yazaddaruvala]

You might not like the data, but it exists. Tesla cars are 2x more likely to get into an accident when not in Autopilot mode.

Tesla cars in Autopilot mode are roughly 8x less likely to get into an accident compared with the average number of reported accidents in the US.

Note: There is a bias about when Autopilot is enabled (i.e. on highways). There is a bias in the type of person that can buy a Tesla car.

That said: Tesla is legally obligated to report all Autopilot accidents. Most accidents are not reported, only the major accidents are reported. So it’s likely that Tesla car’s accident rate are even better than the data suggests.

https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

[kergonath]

> There is a bias about when Autopilot is enabled (i.e. on highways). There is a bias in the type of person that can buy a Tesla car.

Yes. This makes any extrapolation to the population as a whole impossible without a lot of assumptions. In particular, things like this are meaningless because of sampling bias:

> Tesla cars in Autopilot mode are roughly 8x less likely to get into an accident compared with the average number of reported accidents in the US.

[prophesi]

It's almost as if we need a society that doesn't revolve around owning high speed vehicles. But we've missed that boat, so automation is our next goal to drastically reduce the thousands of yearly deaths.

I don't understand how this is a controversial opinion. The moment self-driving cars is mentioned, safety is the first thing that comes to mind. As a parent comment stated, Tesla is legally obligated to report every accident. And if a huge accident occurs, it will be in the news. Meanwhile it takes a 100 car pileup for any other vehicular accident to make it into a tiny sliver of the news cycle.

I don't own a Tesla or any of their stock, but the crux of the argument is that companies developing driving automation are already heavily regulated and will be put to the fire if mishaps do occur. We desperately need this automation if we do claim to not accept thousands of vehicle-related fatalities per year in our society, since better machine vision is always possible while better human judgement and reaction times are not.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

> Note: There is a bias about when Autopilot is enabled (i.e. on highways). There is a bias in the type of person that can buy a Tesla car.

This is such an enormous bias, it invalidates the rest of the comment.