this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2024
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It reminds me of the debate around self driving cars. Tesla has a flawed implementation of self driving tech, that's trying to gather all the information it needs through camera inputs vs using multiple sensor types. This doesn't always work, and has led to some questionable crashes where it definitely looks like a human driver could have avoided the crash.
However, even with Tesla's flawed self driving, They're supposed to have far fewer wrecks than humans driving. According to Tesla's safety report, Tesla's in self driving mode average 5-6 million miles per accident vs 1-1.5 million miles for Tesla drivers not using self driving (US average is 500-750k miles per accident).
So a system like this doesn't have to be perfect to do a far better job than people can, but that doesn't mean it won't feel terrible for the unlucky people who things go poorly for.
Wow Tesla said that Tesla was safe!?!? This changes everything.
That report fails to take into account that the Cybertruck is already a wreck when it rolls off the assembly line.
Unfortunately, this is bad statistics.
The Teslas in self driving mode tend to be used on main roads, and most accidents per mile happen on the small side streets. People are also much safer where Teslas are driven than the these statistics suggest.
There's not much concrete data I can find on accident rates on highways vs non-highways. You would expect small side streets accidents to have lower fatality rates though, with wrecks at highway speeds to have much higher fatality rates. From what I see, a government investigation into how safe autopilot is determined there were 13 deaths, which is very low number given the billions of miles driven with autopilot on (3 billion+ in 2020, probably 5-10billion now? Just guessing here since I can't find a newer number).
But yeah, there are so many factors with driving that it's hard get an exact idea. Rural roads have the highest fatality rates (making up to 90% of accident fatalities in some states), and it's not hard to image that Tesla's are less popular in rural communities (although they seem to be pretty popular where I live).
But also rural roads are a perfect use case for autopilot, generally easy driving conditions where most deaths happen due to speeding and the driver not paying attention. Increased adoption of self driving cars in rural communities would probably save a lot of lives.