It comes down to your driving style. Defensive drivers will not like how AP drives, and it makes driving much more tiring, not less. If you are comfortable with the way AP drives, though, I could see it being relaxing. Hell, some people sleep when AP is cruising down the highway, so clearly there is a spectrum.
There's been a number of occasions where I would have been in an accident had it not been for the software saving me. Obviously it is possible that one day the software will result in an accident that would not have happened had I been driving alone, but thus far that has not happened, and so, thus far, I can conclude that the combination is better than me alone.
It’s fairly rare for a driver to be involved in “a number of accidents” in just a few years. Most drivers go decades with zero collisions, so if you’re experiencing multiple per year, saved only by Tesla software, you might try to see if there are other avenues that you could explore to reduce your risk to be more like the population average.
I get what you're trying to say, but if anything, you're just making the case for Tesla software.
Consider that there is a range of drivers, from "good" to "bad". If most drivers go decades with zero collisions, that's great, and it probably puts me closer to the "bad" end of the spectrum. By your own admission drivers like me should explore avenues to reduce our risk. Why is Tesla software not a valid avenue?
If you're a "good" driver, you don't need it, and that's fine, you can get some other car or drive with autopilot off or whatever. But for us "bad" drivers, the software makes us safer (both personal risk and to others on the road) so why not use it? What other avenues would you suggest exploring?
I would say close calls are fairly common, especially in urban areas with lots of traffic. It’s not just your driving but the people around you. It takes two to get into an accident.
Right. I suspect that the net effect is that the Tesla software transforms these what would have been close calls into…still close calls where the Tesla software gets credit for a “save”.
If a Tesla “saved” a driver 5 times in 20K miles, my first question is always going to be “how many collisions did they have in the prior 20K miles in their other car?”
One person cannot drive enough miles in their lifetime to allow making a determination that one system is definitely safer than the other. The reliability that we require from an autonomous system means you might never experience a safety failure (again, even if you drive every minute of the rest of your life), but the system is still less safe.
True, but manufacturers can look at aggregate miles traveled and come to some conclusions about the safety of vehicles without any safety systems, with active safety systems like automatic emergency braking, and in Tesla’s case, Autopilot. They publish the statistics regularly and crashes are far less common per million miles driven when autopilot is engaged.
I think these stats aren’t very useful because 1) Tesla drivers are different than other drives as they are rich. Comparing miles driven by rich people to all miles driven isn’t useful for knowing if Teslas are safer; 2) Tesla has really low numbers so it’s hard to compare a small sample to a huge amount. It would be like comparing walking accidents by 7th Day Adventists. They may walk a million miles among the whole population but that’s nothing compared to the trillion miles of the entire population.
The data is not transparent, they publish what they want. How many times drivers intervened? Does Tesla or the fans consider those as a +1 for human and a -1 for the AI in the stats? Nope.