Focus: Tesla braces for its first trial involving Autopilot fatality
www.reuters.com
Tesla Inc is set to defend itself for the first time at trial against allegations that failure of its Autopilot driver assistant feature led to death, in what will likely be a major test of Chief Executive Elon Musk's assertions about the technology.

Tesla braces for its first trial involving Autopilot fatality::Tesla Inc is set to defend itself for the first time at trial against allegations that failure of its Autopilot driver assistant feature led to death, in what will likely be a major test of Chief Executive Elon Musk’s assertions about the technology.

  • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.worldEnglish
    54·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • underisk@lemmy.mlEnglish
      14·
      1 year ago

      I think it’s been reported that the FSD statistics they put out are worthless because it tends to disable itself right before collisions.

    • 1rre@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      123·
      1 year ago

      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

      • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.worldEnglish
        13·
        1 year ago

        They have a financial motivation. You ucould also just Google self driving car safety, and one of the first Google hits is an article that calculated the safety of human drivers from data collected in 2021. Turns out humans are already pretty damn safe, there’s roughly 99.9998 of driving with zero accidents.

        • 1rre@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          44·
          1 year ago

          there’s roughly 99.9998 of driving with zero accidents

          I assume you mean accidents with a fatal injury, given there is a ~1% chance that any given death will be from a car accident (17.4 deaths per 100k per year * 70 years = 1.2%) - using your statistic yields closer to 2.5% however this works with only one driver dying.

          Turns out humans are pretty damn safe

          Turns out you’ve been tricked by statistics, driving is fucking lethal and chances are most people know or are friends with someone who has died or will die in a car accident (assuming ~80 friends/acquaintances per person)

          • Honytawk@lemmy.zipEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Why the arbitrary number of 70 years?

            If you calculate the chance of having an accident per route traveled (about 2.57 per person per day), you get a number much closer to NocturnalMorning’s statistics.

            • 1rre@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              A rough estimate for global life expectancy. It’s actually slightly over 73, so the chances of dying in a car accident are marginally higher than I said.

              The data I used wasn’t related to driving frequency or age, it was purely the number of people in a random global sample of 100,000 people you would expect to die in a car accident in a given year. That of course includes people of all ages and people who never drive at all, but also taxi & HGV drivers. Even if we say people aren’t in cars so much under the age of 5 or over the age of 60, that would push up the deaths per 100,000 people per year between 5 and 60 by the exact amount to keep the chance per year over a human lifetime at 17.4/100000.

      • silvercove@lemdro.idEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        I don’t think there’s any doubt that autopilot puts them to shame with regards to safety

        Where are the numbers to back this up?

        • 1rre@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          14·
          1 year ago

          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

          • silvercove@lemdro.idEnglish
            5·
            1 year ago

            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.

            • 1rre@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
              15·
              1 year ago

              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/

              In 2018 and 2017, 6,735,000 and 6,453,000 traffic crashes occurred in the United States, which resulted in 33,919 and 34,560 deaths, respectively.

              https://www.orsa.org.uk/reducing-occupational-road-risk/reducing-driver-error-accidents/

              In reality, car crashes aren’t accidents and 94% are due to human error In 2011, British police officers attended 118,404 road traffic collisions (figures from the Department of Transport). In 42% of these crashes, the most frequently reported factor was that the driver ‘failed to look properly’. The second most commonly listed factor for 21% of the crashes was the driver ‘failing to judge the other person’s path or speed’. The third most common contributing factor was the driver being actually ‘careless, reckless or in a hurry’ and this accounted for 16% of the crashes.

              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”