[ajross]

FTA: "For comparison, the average human driver in the US crashes about once every 500,000 miles."

Does anyone know what the cite for this might be? I'm coming up empty. To my knowledge, no one (except maybe insurance companies) tallies numbers for fender bender style accidents. This seems like a weirdly high number to me, it's very rare to find any vehicle that reaches 100k miles without at least one bump or two requiring repair.

My suspicion is that this is a count of accidents involving emergency vehicle or law enforcement involvement? In which case it's a pretty terrible apples/oranges comparison.

[pavon]

This NHTSA report agrees with those numbers[1]. It reports 6,138,359 crashes and 3,246,817,000,000 Vehicle Miles Traveled in the US for 2023, which comes to about 530k miles per crash. The data comes from FARS which only reports fatalities, and CRSS which only includes crashes reported to the police[2]. It also only includes crashes on roadways (or from cars driving off roadways), not parking lots and other private property.

[1] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

[2] https://www.nhtsa.gov/crash-data-systems/crash-report-sampli...

[ajross]

Again though, does that NHTSA report include "hit a garbage can" accidents or not? My strong suspicion is not[1], because they aren't required to be reported to anyone. So comparing it to an autonomy trial (which clearly is under such a requirement) isn't very informative. And putting it in the headline is straight up misleading.

[1] Source: I've hit a garbage can and told no one. Until this moment.

[habosa]

Yeah as much as I think that Tesla is full of shit, there’s no way this is true. I don’t know a single person that’s driven 500k miles lifetime but everyone I know has been in at least one minor accident.

[bryanlarsen]

The average American drives more than 600k miles in a lifetime.

[ajross]

Not to nitpick, but that means if you sample randomly then you're going to find that the great majority of Americans have, in fact, driven less than 500k miles in their life.

Also I don't think that's correct; that's a ton of driving! I strongly suspect the number you're citing is the number of miles an average American spends in a road vehicle, not actually driving it. But that counts the same "car-mile" multiple times for all the occupants, when the statistic we're arguing about right now is about the vehicle, not the occupants.

[furyofantares]

> This seems like a weirdly high number to me, it's very rare to find any vehicle that reaches 100k miles without at least one bump or two requiring repair.

It goes seem like a high number to me - in 30 years of pretty heavy driving I've probably done about 500k miles and I've definitely had more than one incident. But not THAT many more than one, and I've put 100k miles on a few vehicles with zero incidents. Most of my incidents were when I was a newer driver who drove fairly recklessly.

[_ea1k]

Somewhat amusingly, the human rate should also be filtered based upon conditions. For years people have criticized Tesla for not adjusting for conditions with their AP safety report, but this analysis makes the same class of mistake.

1/500k miles that includes the interstate will be very different from the rate for an urban environment.

[senordevnyc]

Yeah, I think that might be the stat for “serious” accidents