this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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~~Although it’s far from perfect, autopilot gets into a lot less accidents per mile than drivers without autopilot.~~
~~They have some statistics here:~~ https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
EDIT: As pointed out by commenters in this thread, autopilot is mainly used on high ways, whereas the crash average is on all roads. Also Tesla only counts a crash if the airbag was deployed, but the numbers they compared against count every crash, including the ones without deployed airbags.
Oh yeah, potentially cherrypicked statistics straight from Tesla. I'll believe those statistics when they come from someone not with a horse in the race to adopt autonomous vehicles.
What's the motivation to cherrypick though?
Human drivers are bad enough that I don't think there's any doubt that autopilot puts them to shame with regards to safety, so they can either look way better and not be suspicious, or look way better and be suspicious... Sounds like an obvious choice to me
Where are the numbers to back this up?
Start with the numbers on humans driving drunk, tired, on their phone, while having a conversation, bored or in practically other state and work backwards. Driving is dangerous as fuck and it's pretty much universally accepted that the biggest challenge for autonomous vehicles is humans doing unpredictable and stupid shit
The biggest challenge when I'm driving is humans or AI doing unpredictable and stupid shit.
You still have not given any numbers to back up your claim. While we all expect that AI will one day be much better than humans in driving, there is no data to say that it currently is.
Ok so sure there's nothing on Tesla's autopilot, however that's not to say there's nothing on autonomous systems...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8431415/
https://www.orsa.org.uk/reducing-occupational-road-risk/reducing-driver-error-accidents/
There's your stats on humans being reckless and dangerous when driving cars, and of course there's nothing concrete for fully autonomous cars because they aren't legal anywhere, but here's some stats on pretty much every existing driver assist - notably they all prevent accidents compared to just a human driving: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8431415/
It really isn't a stretch from the 3 most frequent crash causes being human error and human assistance tools reducing accident frequency a bunch to say that all these systems coming together (as they cover near enough everything to do with driving a car) would be safer than a human driver, but I don't doubt you'll deny it as you're asking for something impossible to give (as governments haven't allowed full autonomous driving cars yet, so there's no statistics on their use) and so aren't actually looking for information but to confirm your biases and feel like you've "won", despite the fact there's no objectively unsuspicious data on the exact situation you're asking for meaning that you can't prove yourself right either beyond "I'm a little suspicious of this company so I must be right"