drees said:
Autopilot is already safer than regular drivers.
Don't agree with this at all. Tesla's made a bunch of misleading assertions (e.g. at https://www.tesla.com/blog/tragic-loss) and lots of people have run with them.
(For the below, the reference to "above" I made to is what someone else posted "The differences are not very subtle at all. Autopilot doesn't even deal with things like traffic lights and stop signs...")
As I've posted elsewhere:
There are TONS of conditions and things that autopilot can't handle like the above. IIRC, it can't deal w/pedestrians nor make left or right turns beyond changing lanes. It most definitely can't handle gestures from police officers esp. if they contradict traffic lights.
AP was presumably only engaged in conditions that are safe/relatively safe for AP and that AP could handle. It's being compared to overall miles driven, many of which AP can't handle. And, in some parts of the world, the driving behavior there is nuts (e.g. India and Taiwan) and AP surely couldn't handle those.
If AP were on all the time, all over the world, the accident and death rate would surely be WAY worse.
The only fair comparison would be to only include miles that AP can safely handle when comparing the three.
And:
"TMC" had a pointer to
http://ideas.4brad.com/man-dies-while-driven-tesla-autopilot, who is supposedly a consultant to Google sometimes.
To quote him:
"Tesla’s claim of 130M miles is a bit misleading, because most of those miles actually were supervised by humans. So that’s like reporting the record of student drivers with a driving instructor always there to take over. And indeed there are reports of many, many people taking over for the Tesla Autopilot, as Tesla says they should. So at best Tesla can claim that the supervised autopilot has a similar record to human drivers, ie. is no better than the humans on their own. Though one incident does not a driving record make."
I agree w/the instructor taking over analogy. So, yes, this is yet another problem w/their misleading stats. If people couldn't take over from AP and AP were on all the time, w/all its current limitations and quirks, the AP death rate per xx million miles would probably be horrific vs. human drivers.
BTW, re: India, just search on YouTube for
traffic in india. Or, take a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVUDFizBLxw, which I believe I've seen at work before. I'm sure Tesla autopilot in its current form wouldn't be able to handle driving there w/o the driver constantly needing to take over.