That number always comes up, and it always needs to be said that a billion miles with driver assist and a billion miles under autopilot are not the same, and it’s a bogus figure. As to better than a human, it needs to be better than the humans who buy luxury sedans, sober, and awake. Better than a random selection of humans in a random selection of cars is no good. Conflating all vehicle deaths is like conflating all gun and knife violence; the average person on the streets of Chicago has far less risk of being shot than someone in a gang, or engaged in the commission of a felony. Yet you can make all of Chicago seem like a war zone by conflating the risks of different populations and dumping the raw statistics.

> sober, and awake

See you can try to move the goal post, but as soon as they would be saving lives by taking tired or drunk drivers off the road that's very useful.

As a matter of practical politics, that actually seems to be what the goalposts are. It might be better if things were different but in practice that's the standard a self driving car is going to need to meet to be accepted and allowed on the road.

>They seem to have a rather low number of mistakes per billion miles

I am curious on what numbers are you basing this on, the Tesla PR numbers are not valid statistics.

But you are referring at current Teslas ?

This cars require the driver to pay 100% attention, by law and by Tesla agreements so isn't obvious that driver+drive assist+expensive car has better average numbers then driver + average (maybe old) car ?

I would like to see the numbers of how many times a driver had to intervene to save the situation

It's an option so insurance companies compare the exact same car with and without that option.

In terms of paying attention I really doubt most people are doing this very well. I am going to be stuck in the car either way so by default I am going to be watching the road, but as long as my relative stress level drops that's a huge win.

PS: You can make your own estimates. If people pay attention sufficient to avid accidents 99% of the time the car might be in 100x more accidents without drivers assuming those drivers where perfect. Drop that to IMO more likely 75% and it's closer to 4x at the absolute best case.

But if say me+ a computer program together defeat you at chess you can't conclude that the computer is better then you, just that the computer helped me maybe in some tricky situation , you can't conclude that the computer will win without me.

Same with Tesla, this is why I would like to see the number the drivers had to intervene and prevent crashes, without this number the only conclusion is about driver asist and not autopilot/self driving

IMO the difference between self driving and driver assist is who is usually in charge of the car. If the car is going to hit the breaks because it thinks you are going to hit someone otherwise that's driver assist. If you as a driver need chose to hit the breaks because you don't trust the car that's self driving.

Further, the difference between OK and an accident is normally fractions of a second. So, my suspicion is humans are really bad at this role and only catch the most obvious cases. AKA crap I am an a corn field, not hmm it's not slowing down enough I need to apply slightly more breaking power or I am going to hit that guy simply because you don't have time to react with the second situation.

Having said that, humans may be preventing a lot of issues well before they turn into accidents. The 'wanted to make a wrong turn down a one way street' is something a person can deal with easily, though it's not necessarily going to cause an accident.

Autopilot/self driving is more complicated there are 5 levels I think.

Anyway I am waiting for some government institution or maybe the lawsuit to get more data then we can use that to make informed conclusions.

Sure, that could still happen. But, they introduced it in 2014 and they are still on the road so they seem to be past the wildly unsafe stage I was expecting.

IMO, the largest risk is an over the air update killing a large number of people.

Thank you for saying this. I'm tired and shocked of people not understanding such a basic thing.

>PS: You can make your own estimates. If people pay attention sufficient to avid accidents 99% of the time the car might be in 100x more accidents without drivers assuming those drivers where perfect. Drop that to IMO more likely 75% and it's closer to 4x at the absolute best case.

You can't invent numbers and statistics.

Remember the Tesla that crashed in a side barrier and killed the driver, people could reproduce the incident in the same spot , you can see it on youtube, so without a driver and with say 1000 Teslas driving trough that section in the problematic interval you would get at least 1000x more deaths.

Only if you include the people that reproduced the incident mentioned above you will get the Tesla stats much below human drivers.

Computer failures are reproducible, but you don't get "1000 Teslas driving trough that section in the problematic interval" which shows up in the actual statistics.

Computers fail in different ways than humans do. But, that does not mean you can't reason about failure modes. If you ask someone to pay attention to something for an hour without doing anything most people are just really bad at this. Based on that I am rather shocked how well Tesla's systems work as I was expecting vastly more problems.

Could I have flipped to far in the other direction probably. But, I base things on my experience and the data I have available not just unchanging gut feelings.

Collision aside, our insurance costs for liability / injury are lower for our 2017 Tesla than our 2014 Toyota.

To clarify I meant the same Tesla Model with and without autopilot. But, fair point.