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by interblag 1434 days ago
This kind of point comes up a lot in these discussions. I'd suggest a slight alternative:

"Death per million person kilometers, broken down by car age and road type."

The expectation of death in modern cars during highway driving should be very low. Given that tools like Autopilot are only installed on new cars and only enabled in highway driving risks spurious comparisons if all miles of driving are treated equally...

1 comments

An article from 2018 [1] attempted an even stricter apples-to-apples comparison. The author’s estimates of fatality rates for Autopilot-driven Teslas vs. human-driven Teslas suggested that Autopilot was more deadly than human drivers but still the same order-of-magnitude.

The author also called Musk’s comparison of Autopilot’s fatality rate to NHTSA’s fatality rate an “apples-to-aardvarks” comparison because NHTSA’s statistic includes bicycles, pedestrians, motorcycles, and buses.

[1]: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1119936_tesla-fatal-cra...