Tesla Autopilot feature was involved in 13 fatal crashes, US regulator says

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/26/tesla-autopilot-fatal-crash

by pseudolus • 2 years ago

35 20 2 years ago

theguardian.com

dools• 2 years ago

It does seem rather ridiculous that they’re allowed to call this feature either autopilot or full self driving beta.

BugsJustFindMe• 2 years ago

Oh, I don't know. When my brain is on autopilot I'm prone to accidents too.

al_borland• 2 years ago

It seems like this number need context. Ideally computers would never make mistakes, but are these numbers better than a human driver? By how much?

I see people distracted and not paying attention every time I drive, and they don’t have anything in the car helping them. The only reason they don’t hit me is because I moved out of the way when they come in my lane.

sjrjsksjf• 2 years ago

The root cause to problem is more important precisely because people will decide to recontextualise statistically to justify their poor performance. In good faith and bad

hnlmorg• 2 years ago

Agreed though it’s also worth noting that every time an autopilot fatality hits the news it’s combined with the driver also not paying attention. Often it’s claimed that the driver isn’t paying attention because of their faith in autopilot. And that is the real issue. Even Tesla themselves say it shouldn’t be relied upon, despite what their marketing suggests.

this_user• 2 years ago

The real question is how many fatal accidents have been prevented by Autopilot.

vagrantJin• 2 years ago

Such being the case, a person recklessly endangering your life can and will be held to account. Im afraid human lives perishing because of a bug in the software is less than tolerable. Who can hold the software to account? The court? Internal QA?

If these systems actually did the hard part of driving, avoid crashes with super-human reaction times - then they would be extremely valuable. But that's not the case and they are essentially worthless. Might as well hire a driver for you of you feel driving isn't for you. Save you and the whole planet the trouble until these systems actually do the stuff that matters.

add-sub-mul-div• 2 years ago

Another problem with bugs is that they'll affect the entire fleet overnight with a software update. But human behavior (collectively) is predictable and stable.

Terr_• 2 years ago

I'd like to point out that accident rate is not the only thing to look at here.

We also want to know whether there are correlations between the accidents that happen that are outside of factors we would consider normal among humans.

A contrived the example to prove the point: We wouldn't be satisfied with an automatic driver that got into only half the accidents humans did... but also possessed an inexplicable tendency to charge at people wearing certain color-combinations of clothes.

creativeSlumber• 2 years ago

but are these numbers better than a human driver

This is a wrong way to look at it. recently a Tesla just ran over a motorcyclist. These people would have been alive if it was a normal human driving. These are fault modes that did not exist before. Also, we have adapted to drive along with other human drivers. Bikers are taught to make sure they are seen on the road and make eye contact with drivers etc.. How do you make sure a Tesla's ML model recognized you? What does that recognition even mean?

ripjaygn• 2 years ago

These people would have been alive if it was a normal human driving

That's the wrong way to look at it. 109 people were killed on the road today. How many would've been alive if Autopilot was active?

Assuming your goal was to reduce fatalities.

Veserv• 2 years ago

Nobody knows.

Tesla does not disclose the information needed to make a proper apples to apples comparison to the public or researchers. They do not disclose the number of miles or the number of accidents, let alone the conditions or circumstances that would be needed to account for bias or confounding variables and determine the corresponding comparable metric. Of the reports they make to NHTSA [1] which are public by default, they declare the vast majority of contained information as confidential business information and their lawyers force NHTSA redact it.

A company kills a bunch of people and nobody is allowed to know how safe it is because that is confidential. That alone should worry you.

But, that is not all. Tesla does not know either. If you look at the reports you will see that of the over 1,000 crashes, Tesla declined to investigate to determine if anybody was injured in ~95% of cases. Of the reported confirmed fatalities, Tesla telemetry missed the majority of them. I will say that again, they can not even detect the majority of fatalities while their system is active. Their data collection procedures are so grossly inadequate that you can not even determine the upper bound on the fatality rate, let alone more nuanced safety measures.

To quote the safety investigation mentioned in the article [2]: "Tesla largely receives data for crashes only with pyrotechnic deployment, which are a minority of police reported crashes. A review of NHTSA’s 2021 FARS and Crash Report Sampling System (CRSS) finds that only 18 percent of police-reported crashes include airbag deployments." Tesla bases their safety statistics on data collection conditions that under-report actual crash rates by a factor of 500% on average.

The statistics Tesla releases do not even attempt to account for the glaring discrepancies and under-reporting that is clearly visible in their fatality reports and data collection conditions and instead intentionally state the under-reporting that benefits them as simple fact. They are intentionally overstating product safety based on data that any competent professional knows is faulty and inadequate to push product. That level of misconduct is criminal.

[1] https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/ffdd/sgo-2021-01/SGO-2021-01_In...

[2] https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2022/INCR-EA22002-14496.pdf

x86x87• 2 years ago

After closing the first investigation, regulators opened another, this one into whether that recall to install new Autopilot safeguards was adequate.

Tesla in a nutshell.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

[dupe]

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40170135

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40171540

mrkandy• 2 years ago

3,855/278,870,463 = 0.00138% - average for all

13/6,000,000 = 0.00021% - average per tesla

7e2• 2 years ago

Are you trolling, or a pro-Tesla bot?

It's not 13 fatalities. It's 13 incidents involving a total of 29 deaths. https://www.tesladeaths.com has the total fatality account involving Slaugherpilot at 42.

Also, you're omitting all the deaths in Teslas for which it hasn't yet been proven that "Autopilot" was involved. Teslas are driven my more affluent people, are newer, and incorporate safer non-Autopilot tech. than the average car.

Finally, 6M is the worldwide number of cars Tesla has sold, which you're comparing to a U.S. count of non-Teslas.

7e2• 2 years ago

tesladeaths.com has the total number of Tesla fatalities, from any cause, at 500.

snapplebobapple• 2 years ago

The math is wrong but the idea isn't wrong. Its never going to be zero, what matters is how it compares to humans driving.

olliej• 2 years ago

It remains absurd that we have a mechanism that n the road to allow self driving” cars, but only if there’s a person in the drivers seat that has greater focus and skill than an airline pilot.

Tesla Autopilot feature was involved in 13 fatal crashes, US regulator says

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