Saturday, March 24, 2018

Tesla's own numbers show Autopilot has higher crash rate than human drivers

 concerned with EMF exposure, know this, an Tesla is like entering an EMF oven. A personal self imposed and financed EMF radiation hot bed, frying your genitals along with everything else.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Tesla’s claim that its Autopilot driver-assistance software is safer than a human driver. A fucking lie. A lie that is getting people killed and usually, by being burned alive, sitting on a thermonanite bomb.
After a fatal Autopilot crash last May, the company said the death was the first in 130 million miles of Autopilot driving—and noted that, “among all vehicles, in the U.S., there is a fatality every 94 million miles.”Which turned out to be a lie, according to independent researchers who show that 1 in 4 Tesla crashes are CAUSED by auto pilot, intentionally steering into objects.
The clear implication: Autopiloted Teslas are safer than human-piloted cars, and lives would be saved if every car had Autopilot. This oft repeated lie is to sell govt control and take away personal control of the individual. Who then, if the govt doesn't like them, will be "Tesla'd" into a car at high speed ala Michael Hastings.
But Tesla’s statistics are questionable at best. The small sample size—one crash—makes any calculation of Autopilot fatality rate almost meaningless.
Furthermore, Tesla compared its Autopilot crash rate to the overall U.S. traffic fatality rate—which includes bicyclists, pedestrians, buses, and 18-wheelers. This is not just apples-to-oranges. This is apples-to-aardvarks.
One statistician called Tesla’s comparison “ludicrous on the face of it.”

A better yardstick for comparison is the fatality rate for U.S. drivers of cars and light trucks compiled by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
By that yardstick, the Tesla Autopilot driver fatality rate is almost forty times higher than typical passenger vehicles.
But even that comparison is suspect because it measures the Autopilot Tesla against vehicles as disparate as the hulking Ford F-150 and the tiny Smart ForTwo.
In the end, I concluded, “…perhaps the only valid comparative benchmark for the Autopilot Tesla is the non-Autopilot Tesla.”
So let’s do that comparison.
Seven Model S fatalities
“Bubslug,” a writer for the stock market website Seeking Alpha, recently compiled a list of fatal Model S crashes in the U.S.
According to his list, there have been six in all, including the May Autopilot crash in Florida.

Just last week, however, a seventh fatal crash occurred in Indianapolis. To date, there’s no suggestion that Autopilot was engaged before that crash.
So, in the U.S.,  that’s a total of one Autopilot and six human-pilot fatal crashes.
To arrive at comparative fatal crash rates, simply divide by the total miles driven by each kind of pilot.
Conveniently, Tesla itself has provided just those numbers.
On October 7, Elon Musk tweeted “Cumulative Tesla Autopilot miles now at 222 million.”
Earlier this year, Tesla announced that total Tesla miles driven had surpassed the two-billion mile mark, and published a chart projecting future total mileage.

rate than human drivers Page 2


According to that chart projection, total Tesla miles driven through September 2016 were predicted to be right at three billion miles.
We’ll accept that figure, with the caveat that it presumably includes European and Chinese cars. (We’re counting only U.S. incidents, remember.)
But we believe this discrepancy applies to both Autopilot and human-pilot cars in roughly equal measure, and should thus cancel each other out.
So, using round numbers,  let’s do the math.
Human-piloted Teslas: six crashes, 2.8 billion miles.  That’s one every 470 million miles.
Autopiloted Teslas:  one crash, 220 million miles.  One every 220 million miles.
And there it is, in hard numerical data.
Conclusion: Auto-piloted Teslas have forty times the fatal-crash rate of human-piloted Teslas.

Still not statistically significant?
Clearly, the sample-size ogre raises its ugly head in this calculation: any statistic with a sample size of one will have a huge margin for error.
But these numbers, while not definitive, are far more meaningful than Tesla’s original comparison.
That’s because at least the comparative yardstick—Autopilot Teslas vs human-pilot Teslas—is reasonably valid.
If Tesla continues to throw around Autopilot crash statistics, it should at least get the comparative yardstick right.
Based on this more accurate comparison,  Autopilot safety appears to be a far murkier and more troubling subject than Tesla has been letting on.

 https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1107109_teslas-own-numbers-show-autopilot-has-higher-crash-rate-than-human-drivers/page-2