Are there any useful statistics yet regarding accidents/deaths per million miles driven in “self driving” vehicles?
It always comes off as click/rage bait to me when people report on these deaths when there are literally hundreds per day that don’t involve an autonomous vehicle.
Well if thats the tip of the spear of FSD tech we're fucked, no way I will take robotaxi to work before I retire. Extremely limited environment well under control, almost always sunny, doing the same area for what - 10 or 15 years?
Can it drive in rain & snow on narrow non-marked roads, then join traffic jams (or not) on highway at 120kmh, then enter city and navigate obscure construction works around it, crazy aggressive cyclists and scooters and get me where I need, 100% reliably? Or lets say >99.995%, thats roughly human frequent driver level.
This is what I am willing to pay for, either as shared taxi or our own car, nothing less. Anything less is me doing all the driving requiring full attention, have that already in dumb cars.
Waymo can indeed drive through rain and snow on narrow unmarked streets, as well as traffic jams and navigate obscure construction works with cyclists.
Other than snow, it does all of those things in SF. They do snow testing in Tahoe and Michigan, not to mention the former testing in NYC.
I always see this argument but it seems like they did fine through the recent SF storms https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/waymo-robotaxis-storm... Most of the US has non-freezing weather for most of the year, so aside from avoiding heavy rain, snow, and ice I’m not sure what more you want.
> straight roads
SF might have mostly straight roads, but it has complicated intersections, bed drivers, cyclists, double parked cars, etc.
Waymo would do fine in any major city most of the year under most conditions.
> Waymo would do fine in any major city most of the year under most condition
There is no proof of this. I have yet to see these ever ferry passengers in snow, which in case you are unaware, is a common driving condition for many living in North America.
I mean, I literally excluded snow from “most conditions” and snow is not common most of the year in major North American cities (and is often plowed quickly).
It is not easy to compare as there are lots of confounding variables - self-driving is not activated at random or all the time, but typically on highways, which are less accident-prone.
They are also deactivated in difficult conditions such as bad weather which are also hard for human drivers. You can imagine a future with all cars are equipped with a self-driving system that always "passes the buck" to a human when conditions degrade - of course the system will have less accidents than humans! The statistics will even show human drivers being worse than before the advent of self-driving!
But the most dangerous car model is the Hyundai Venue[1], which also brags about all their Hyundai SmartSense safety features. I'm sure the next few cars down the list also do the same. Maybe your ire should be directed at them as well?
It kind of says something when it turns out that Volvo, with their old-timey ‘dumb’ safety features, seems to be outperforming all the sexier brands on safety.
Maybe focusing on the dumb stuff brings a lot more bang for the buck than the sparkly new ‘smart’ safety widgets?
Volvo is known for actually caring about real-world safety, not just what the tests happen to test. Or, I guess, what looks good on the feature checklist.
Volvo sort of prides themselves on safety, including "smart" widgets.
2003 Blind Spot Information System (BLIS): BLIS uses cameras or radars to detect other cars approaching your car.
2008 City Safety: Emergency braking system using laser to detect, it helps reduce the risk of rear-end collisions at low speeds
2010 Pedestrian detection with full auto brake: Using radar and camera, this system warns the driver if somebody steps out in front of the car, and brakes by itself if the driver fails to do so.
2016 Connected safety: use the cloud to share critical data between vehicles, alerting the driver about slippery road sections or vehicles that have activated their hazard lights.
2018 Oncoming mitigation by braking: A Volvo car driving in a built-up highway with digitally rendered signs depicting oncoming mitigation by braking.
If an oncoming vehicle veers into your lane and a collision is unavoidable, this feature can help reduce your vehicle's speed to mitigate the force of the collision
2023 Lidar: Based on high-performance sensors, Lidar technology is key for creating safe autonomous cars. It helps autonomous cars detect other cars, pedestrians and cyclists
2023 Driver Understanding System: 2-camera system can detect if the driver is distracted, sleepy or even intoxicated. If needed, the system will activate a protective shield and take appropriate countermeasures to preserve safety margins.
> The study is based on QuoteWizard by LendingTree insurance inquiries from Jan. 1, 2024, through Dec. 31, 2024. They analyzed the 30 brands with the most inquiries in this period.
QuoteWizard. Based on inquiries. I don't trust this.
the amount of miles driven with tesla fsd with no crashes is so significantly higher it's laughable to even draw the comparison, this data is even publicly available via the API.
The study can't be trusted. Just look at the article: "The study is based on QuoteWizard by LendingTree insurance inquiries from Jan. 1, 2024, through Dec. 31, 2024".
An interesting tidbit is that FSD is almost guaranteed to turn off before any accident occurs. Last I looked, the data was not available to see how long after FSD deactivation the accident occurred.
Note: I have an older Tesla, and actually quite like it. I don't have FSD, but I do have enhanced autopilot (EAP) and like it as well. That said, it is very easy to believe that people ignore the road for longer than they should with FSD/EAP turned on.
The grandparent comment also didn't mention the split between FSD miles/non-FSD miles. It is possible that FSD is so good, that every Tesla driver becomes useless when they are required to drive for themselves, and that is what drives the higher accident rate.
>An interesting tidbit is that FSD is almost guaranteed to turn off before any accident occurs. Last I looked, the data was not available to see how long after FSD deactivation the accident occurred.
How can you make that assertion when there's no data? Are you just assuming the worst in the absence of data?
No, the statistics I've seen haven't really been useful.
It's typically comparing cars in whatever autonomous modes vs all cars operating within a country/state. But the autonomous modes don't operate in all conditions, so it's not a good comparison.
There's concern about making sure the control group is appropriate too, comparing against a representative subset of the population is important.
I think there's some reasonable data for automatic emergency braking, in that I think I've seen it compared as just cars with aeb equipped vs cars without, number/severity of injuries for all collisions and there's enough data to show a difference.
The best you can do is try and limit accident/deaths of similar events in the same areas during the same weather. But we don't collect proper stats on this stuff in order to make true apples to apples comparisons. They arent driving in the same scenarios as the many people yet.
There's a few I'm not going to link, but warn about them instead. They're often in the "lies, damned lies" category.
For example comparing self driving to average accidents often misses: non self driving cars having worse equipment (lack of collision warning, adaptive cruise control, etc.), comparison to all roads (self driving is activated mostly on known, well mapped areas and open highways), unknown accounting for self driving status (Teslas try to give back control just before the crash), and many other issues.
Unless some actually independent third party runs the numbers with a lot of explanations about the methodology, I'm ignoring them.
It always comes off as click/rage bait to me when people report on these deaths when there are literally hundreds per day that don’t involve an autonomous vehicle.