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.
Those stats are misleading though. Autopilot only runs on highways, which are much safer per mile even for human drivers.
Tesla are basically comparing their system, which only runs in pristine, ideal conditions, against an average human that has to deal with the real world.
As far as I’m aware they haven’t released safety per mile data from the FSD cars yet, and until they do I will remain skeptical about how much safer it currently is.
It actually would be really hard to get an unbiased estimate of safety given the current systems, because the data is inherently cherry picked by drivers who can switch the feature on/off depending on how complex the driving task is. What a simple number like crashes per mile really measures is really how likely FSD drivers are to overestimate the system’s ability plus some unknown base rate of unavoidable accidents.
Probably the only way to control for this is looking at cars that are fully autonomous door to door and aren’t limited to pre-selected roads/areas. I don’t know that anyone is even doing that sort of testing.
Hmm you’re right about autopilot mainly being used on highways and those roads are a lot safer. I’ll edit my main comment