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Elon Musk: Tesla's Autopilot Software Could Save Half a Million Lives Every Year (fortune.com)
An anonymous reader writes: In the wake of a deadly crash involving a Model S that was driving with its Autopilot software turned on, Tesla CEO Elon Musk issued a few interesting remarks on the technology to Fortune. Notably, the publication recently ran a piece attempting to portray Tesla in a bad light by noting that Musk sold more than $2 billion worth of Tesla stock just 11 days after the aforementioned May, 2016 accident. And all the while, shareholders were kept in the dark up until recently. "Indeed, if anyone bothered to do the math (obviously, you did not) they would realize that of the over 1M auto deaths per year worldwide, approximately half a million people would have been saved if the Tesla autopilot was universally available. Please, take 5 mins and do the bloody math before you write an article that misleads the public.
Pilot-aid would be better and might have saved an extra life.
The Tesla autopilot running under ideal conditions (with a human backup) compared to a human driver under all conditions are not equivalent, and we cannot directly compare their failure rates. Beware of naive statistics.
How many years will it take for the automated car to be affordable for the common person? I can't afford a car with even the most minimal of automation right now save for standard cruise control. Did anyone catch the article on how the average family can't afford most cars as it is? Most people don't even see the point of buying a new car, much less an automated new car. Saving lives with automation is a pipe dream until there is a plan to make these something that everyone can buy which isn't going to happen any time soon. Stop making it an excuse to kill people with experimentation.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
That level of wealth alone would save far more lives. Anybody who could afford a Tesla could also afford clean drinking water, air conditioning, medicine, proper nutrition, etc. Musk is just taking in one figure and ignoring the fact that so much of the world is driving a run-down beater that doesn't have anti-lock brakes, or they're just driving motor scooters which are far more dangerous, or they're driving nothing at all and hauling water from toxic wells because of POVERTY. How about Musk buy a helmet for every 3rd world motor-scooter rider, then get back to us on this?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I think there's a huge unrealized danger to these quasi-autonomous cars because people will treat them like a a fully controlled car and do things they shouldn't (e.g. read the news paper, watch a movie, doze off, etc.). Right now the drivers of these expensive Tesla cars are not representative of the larger driving public. If we put this technology into 100% of the cars on the road I predict the number of accidents due to imperfect AI will rise significantly because of driver inattention. It may still prove to be an improvement over human controlled, but I doubt the numbers of lives saved will be what Musk claims.
Give me a car that will take me to work while I nap in the backseat. I have no interest in being on the road filled with semi-autonomous cars.
I love the idea of self-driving cars, but I think it's going to be hard to get it to work acceptably "as is", that is, the way the problem is being approached.
Much of the decision-making must remain "onboard" the car but I think self-driving vehicles will be vastly improved with some feedback and control signals from the road or a locale-specific traffic guidance computer.
In other words, in addition to its own decision-making software, the vehicle should also be receiving some sort of signals or guidance info from the road in the area it's currently passing through.
Sort of an air-traffic control system where responsibility for air traffic is handed off from control center to control center as the plane makes its way from point A to point B. The difference is that this guidance should be completely automated, and be an adjunct to what the car does, not its primary means of navigation. I'm see this primarily as speed and road condition management info.
I know, I know- what about hackers? Yeah, that'll be an issue for sure, but it can be mitigated by the use of some solid encryption routines and boundary-monitoring, i.e. to make sure that a Bad Guy(tm) doesn't hack the controller and tell all the vehicles in its area to all speed up to 100mph or whatever. Or to tell 1/2 to speed up and 1/2 to come to a dead stop. Some things shouldn't be able to be overridden, such as max speed and collision avoidance.
In short, I think autonomous vehicles would be better (and probably safer) if they not only thought for themselves, but also were receiving some sanity-checking and guidance info specific to the road or area they travel on.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
He's pulling the numbers out of his trunk.
If the Tesla that killed its driver was full of people, it would be 4 deaths in 130 million miles, twice as bad as the world-wide average, 3x worse than the USA average.
It's all marketing hype and mere armchair statistics.
Fortune doesn't know how to do the math, I don't know how to do the math, Musk doesn't know how to do the math, but perhaps a few readers of this comment could do the math.
It would take 275 million miles of autonomous driving to have any confidence at all that an autonomous car is safer than a human driver.
Ars Technica reported on it, and if you want to see the math, the RAND corporation, who are kind of experts at the math, have a detailed report available, which explains the math.
Basically, while the marketing engine can claim that autonomous driving is safer, it's not even possible to have any proof of it within any reasonable level of statistical confidence.
I mean, sure, we try to make driving safer, and assisted driving may help, but please, let's be realistic about where we're at.
It can only save normal people, not Darwin Award nominees.
Ezekiel 23:20
Tesla claims you still need to pay attention to the road around. Vehicle autopilot is no different than aircraft autopilot. It is a workload reduction device, and does not replace the driver/pilot. Interestingly this confusion about where the autopilot tasks begin and end is not limited to just cars, even aircraft pilots apparently goof this up. In the case of this Tesla crash the dumb*** was watching Harry Potter on his portable. The driver fracked up, by not paying attention. It's no different than if the pilot crew left the flight deck. Stuff happens and someone needs to be able to take over for the autopilot when it does. This driver's Tesla--which he nicknamed Tessy--saved him from another potentially serious accident of which he documented in his blog. Unfortunately that episode must have given him undue confidence/expectation in the autopilot system.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Tesla claims you still need to pay attention to the road around.
Its like having your wife in the car. She corrects you when you are doing something wrong, warns you when you get out of line, and expects you to pay attention. What a wonderful feature!
^And if anything goes wrong, its your fault.
The US average death rate when driving on a freeway is 1.08 deaths per 100,000,000 miles. Tesla autopilot's current death rate is 0.769 per 100,000,000 miles.
Come back with deaths per mile of people driving high end, less than 10 year old vehicles, and exclude miles driven in snow, ice or other treacherous conditions and also eliminate passenger deaths. That's just for starters.