Accoring to the math in this video: :
- 150 000 000 miles have been driven with Teslas “FSD”, which equals to
- 375 miles per tesla purchased with FSD capabilities
- 736 known FSD crashes with 17 fatalities
- equals 11.3 deaths per 100M miles of teslas FSD
Doesnt sound to bad, until you hear that a human produces 1.35 deaths per 100M miles driven…
Its rough math, but holy moly that already is a completely other class of deadly than a non FSD car
a human produces 1.35 deaths per 100M miles driven
My car has been driven around 100k miles by a human, i.e. it has produced 0.00135 deaths. Is that like a third of a pinky toe?
Yeah, another 900k, and you’ll be ded.
That number is like 1.5 billion now and rising exponentially fast.
Also those deaths weren’t all FSD they were AP.
The report says 1 FSD related (not caused by but related) death. For whatever reason the full details on that one weren’t released.
Edit: There are billions of miles on AP. In 2020 it was 3 billion
Edit: Got home and I tried finding AP numbers through 2024 but haven’t seen anything recent, but given 3 billion 2020, and 2 billion in 2019, and an accelerating rate of usage with increased car sales, 2023 is probably closer to 8 billion miles. I imagine we’d hear when they reach 10 billion.
So 8 billion miles, 16 AP fatalities (because that 1 FSD one isn’t the same) is 1 fatality per 500,000,000 miles, or put into the terms above by per 100mil miles, 0.2 fatalities per 100 million miles or 6.75 times less than a human produces. And nearly all of these fatal accidents were from blatant misuse of the system like driving drunk (at least a few) or using their phone and playing games.
I just read on LinkedIn a post from a Tesla engineer laid off.
He said “I checked my email while auto piloting to work”.
The employees know more than anyone its capabilities and they still take the same stupid risk.
Just like fight club, they’re imagining them crashing into every transport they come close to
Obviously the time to react to the problem was before the system told you about it, that’s the whole point, THE SYSTEM IS NOT READY. Cars are not ready to drive themselves, and obviously the legal system is too slow and backwards to deal with it so it’s not ready either. But fuck it let’s do it anyway, sure, and while we’re at it we can do away with the concept of the driver’s license in the first place because nothing matters any more and who gives a shit we’re all obviously fucking retarded.
Tesla has very misleading marketing surrounding the “autonomy” of their vehicles. Mercedes Benz is the first (and only) company in the US to have a level 3: fully self-driving.
I’ve often wondered why the FTC allows it to be marketed as “Full Self-Driving”. That’s blatant false advertising.
You can literally type in an address and the car will take you there with zero input on the driver’s part. If that’s not full self-driving then I don’t know what is. What FSD was capable of a year ago and how it performs today is completely different.
Not only does these statistics include the way less capable older versions of it, it also includes accidents caused by autopilot which is a different system than FSD. It also fails to mention how the accident rate compares to human drivers.
If we replace every single car in the US with a self-driving one that’s 10x safer driver than your average human that means you’re still getting over 3000 deaths a year due to traffic accidents. That’s 10 people a day. If one wants to ban these systems because they’re not perfect then that means they’ll rather have 100 people die every day instead of 10.
It also fails to mention how the accident rate compares to human drivers.
That may be because Tesla refuses to publish proper data on this, lol.
Yeah, they claim it’s ten times better than a human driver, but none of their analysis methods or data points are available to independent researchers. It’s just marketing.
It’s not even the closest thing to self driving on the market, Mercedes has started selling a car that doesn’t require you to look at the road.
Only works under 40 mph. Only available in 2 states. Not available until the end of this year.
So, greater than any speed on a Tesla and available in more states?
Might want to check your facts there. FSD works anywhere in the US, both cities and highways. Even on unmapped roads and parking lots.
“Fuck this guy for bringing facts into our circlejerk” - The downvoters, probably
What Tesla is (falsely IMO) advertising as “full self driving” is available in all new Mercedes vehicles as well and works anywhere in the US.
Mercedes is in the news for expanding that functionality to a level where they are willing to take liability if the vehicle causes a crash during this new mode. Tesla does not do that.
works anywhere in the US
The system Mercedes is using is extremely limited and hardly compareable to FSD in any way.
Drivers can activate Mercedes’s technology, called Drive Pilot, when certain conditions are met, including in heavy traffic jams, during the daytime, on spec ific California and Nevada freeways, and when the car is traveling less than 40 mph. Drivers can focus on other activities until the vehicle alerts them to resume control. The technology does not work on roads that haven’t been pre-approved by Mercedes, including on freeways in other states.
If I understand that person correctly, you are confusing the two systems.
Mercedes has two systems. One of a driver assist system that does everything the current version of FSD can do. It is unlimited in the same way that Tesla’s FSD is unlimited.
They have an additional system, that you cite, that is Level 3, a true hands-off self-driving system. It is geographically limited.
So, the question is, does Tesla have any areas where you can legally drive hands free using their software?
That is the new system. Tesla has no equivalent to it. Or to phrase it differently:
Drivers can not activate teslas’s equivalent technology, no matter what conditions are met, including not in heavy traffic jams, not during the daytime, not on spec ific California and Nevada freeways, and not when the car is traveling less than 40 mph. Drivers can never focus on other activities. The technology does not exist in Tesla vehicles
If you are talking about automatic lane change, auto park, etc (what tesla calls autopilot or full self driving) these are all features you can find in most if not all high end cars nowadays.
The new system gets press coverage, because as I understand it, if there is an accident while the system is engaged Mercedes will assume financial and legal responsibility and e.g. cover all expenses that result from said accident. Tesla doesn’t do that.
Oops, you fell for the Tesla marketing BS. FSD isn’t actually full self driving like the Mercedes system. With Tesla, you have to keep your hands on the wheel at all times and pay close attention to the road. You are completely responsible for anything that happens. Mercedes takes responsibility for any accidents their software causes.
As is “autopilot”. There’s no automatic pilot. You’re still expected to keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road.
I am so sick and tired of this belief because it’s clear people have no idea what Autopilot on a plane actually does. They always seem to assume it flies the plane and the pilot doesn’t do anything apparently. Autopilot alone does not fly the damned plane by itself.
“Autopilot” in a plane keeps the wings level at a set heading, altitude, and speed. It’s literally the same as cruise control with lane-centering, since there’s an altitude issue on a road.
There are more advanced systems available on the market that can be installed on smaller planes and in use on larger jets that can do things like auto takeoff, auto land, following waypoints, etc. without pilot input, but basic plain old autopilot doesn’t do any of that.
That expanded capability is similar to how things like “Enhanced Autopilot” on a Tesla can do extra things like change lanes, follow highway exits on a navigated route, etc. Or how “Full Self-Driving” is supposed to follow road signs and lights, etc. but those are additional functions, not part of “Autopilot” and differentiated with their own name.
Autopilot, either on a plane or a Tesla, alone doesn’t do any of that extra shit. It is a very basic system.
The average person misunderstanding what a word means doesn’t make it an incorrect name or description.
I say let Tesla market it as Autopilot if they pass similar regulatory safety frameworks as aviation autopilot functions.
I’d wager most people, when talking about a plane’s autopilot mean the follow waypoints or Autoland capability.
Also, it’s hard to argue “full self driving” means anything but the car is able to drive fully autonomously. If they were to market it as “advanced driver assist” I’d have no issue with it.
I’d wager most people, when talking about a plane’s autopilot mean the follow waypoints or Autoland capability.
Many people are also pretty stupid when it comes to any sort of technology more complicated than a calculator. That doesn’t mean the world revolves around a complete lack of knowledge.
My issue is just with people expecting basic Autopilot to do more than it’s designed or intended to do, and refusing to acknowledge their expectation might actually be wrong.
Also, it’s hard to argue “full self driving” means anything but the car is able to drive fully autonomously. If they were to market it as “advanced driver assist” I’d have no issue with it.
Definitely won’t get an argument from me there. FSD certainly isn’t in a state to really be called that yet. Although, to be fair, when signing up for it, and when activating it there are a lot of notices that it is in testing and will not operate as expected.
At what point do we start actually expecting and enforcing that people be responsible with potentially dangerous things in daily life, instead of just blaming a company for not putting enough warnings or barriers to entry?
Please, most people don’t know how to use a scientific calculator at all.
I never said it was a scientific calculator.
Fair enough
Flight instructor here.
I’ve seen autopilot systems that have basically every level of complexity you can imagine. A lot of Cessna 172s were equipped with a single axis autopilot that can only control the ailerons and can only maintain wings level. Others have control of the elevators and can do things like altitude hold, or ascend/descend at a given rate. More modern ones have control of all three axes and integration with the attitude instruments, and can do things like climb to an altitude and level off, turn to a heading and stop, or even something like fly a holding pattern over a fix. They still often don’t have any control over the power plant, and small aircraft typically cannot land themselves, but there are autopilots installed in piston singles that can fly an approach to minimums.
And that’s what’s available on piston singles; airline pilots seldom fly the aircraft by hand anymore.
I love to hate on musky boi as much as the next guy, but how does this actually compare to vehicular accidents and deaths overall? CGP Grey had the right idea when he said they didn’t need to be perfect, just as good as or better than humans.
Grey had the right idea when he said they didn’t need to be perfect, just as good as or better than humans.
The better question - is Tesla’s FSD causing drivers to have more accidents than other driving assist technologies? It seems like a yes from this article and other data I’ve linked elsewhere in this thread.
I appreciate this response amongst all the malding! My understanding of the difference in assistive technologies across different companies is lacking, so I’ll definitely look more into this.
CGP Grey also seems to believe self driving cars with the absence of traffic lights is the solution to traffic as opposed to something like trains.
/c/fuckcars is that way, thanks for stopping by
Cars will never be dethroned. Yes, trains are cool - choo choo motherfucker. Yes, bikes are environmentally friendly. Yes, the car is a truly fucking horible answer to the question “how to get from A to B”.
But that’s because cars are the answer to the question “how to get from A to B comfortably”. I don’t want my baby and my in-law to get on the back of my bike when we’re going camping. I don’t want to take the train and then walk 2 miles from the station every single fucking day with 20kg of tools in my hand, because shit, the train doesn’t stop next to my house, and it doesn’t stop next to my work. I want to be able to have acces to comfortable transportation.
So the answer will still be the car. Even with everyone crying about it. Cause the cat’s out of the bag with cars, we made them efficient and cheap enough to not be considered luxury items anymore. And some countries (see: US) have their entire infrastructure built with cars in mind. You’re never putting the lid back on this, even if it’s a decent idea.
The solution to broken infrastructure isn’t to double down. Nobody wants your baby and in-law on the back of your bike or for you to walk 2 miles per day, that isn’t the criticism of cars. The criticism is that cars are more expensive and more dangerous than public transportation solutions, period.
Ideally, we develop towards a both/and solution in the future. We have cars, bus systems, and bike infrastructure which can do last-mile transportation, then we have high-speed rail between major cities. This reduces upkeep cost and makes travel safer for everyone.
This also isn’t saying to rip everything up to implement this system, but we already have crumbling infrastructure in the US due to lack of federal and state funding which will need to be replaced. As we expand and maintain our infrastructure, we can start to implement better, safer ideas for transportation, rather than doubling down on what is convenient yet unsustainable.
To kind of piggyback off this, some newer cities in the US do get built with curbing cars in mind. But there’s definitely no easy fix for our systemic problem with infrastructure, and even if there was, cars are so deeply engraved in Americana that people here would fight it. It’s an uphill battle, and self driving cars can help mitigate existing issues while we figure the rest out.
In smaller and mid size cities where I live, buses are the pretty decent form of public transportation, and I could absolutely see self driving sneak its way into there.
I get that conditions aren’t ideal and that sucks, but progress comes in baby steps, and as long as the larger problems remain out of reach, these smaller ones help.
What the fuck are you on about? Where did I ever say anything close to anything you are talking about? You clearly have some sort of beef that you need to deal with. I wish you peace.
A comment above points to a nearly 11x increase over human caused fatalities
That comment was wrong. I pointed out why in a reply.
Yeah and that’s the problem, they’re no where near “as good”
“Hey, you guys know that I love to hate on musk… but…”
and the pedestrian-emergency-break on tesla cars, and many other cars with that feature will malfunction sometimes causing people behind you to rear-end you.
Yeah but that’s usually the fault of the driver behind you. They’re too close, should’ve left more distance for emergency braking.
Move fast, break shit. Fake it till you sell it, then move the goal posts down. Shift human casualties onto individual responsibility, a core libertarian theme. Profit off the lies because it’s too late, money already in the bank.
VERGE articles seem to be getting worse over the years, they’ve almost reached Forbes level, yes this does raise some valid safety concerns. No Tesla isn’t bad just because it’s Tesla.
It doesn’t really give us the full picture. For starters, there’s no comparison with Level 2 systems from other car makers, which also require driver engagement and have their own methods to ensure attention. This would help us understand how Tesla’s tech actually measures up.
Plus, the piece skips over extremely important stats that would give us a clearer idea of how safe (or not) Tesla’s systems are compared to good old human driving.
We’re left in the dark about how Tesla compares in scenarios like drunk, distracted, or tired driving—common issues that automation aims to mitigate. (probably on purpose).
It feels like the article is more about stirring up feelings against Tesla rather than diving deep into the data. A more genuine take would have included these comparisons and variables, giving us a broader view of what these technologies mean for road safety.
I feel like any opportunity to jump on the Elon hate wagon is getting tiresome. (and yes i hate Elon too).
“And yes, I hate elon too, but”
a more genuine take would have included a series of scenarios (e.g. drunk/distracted/tired driving)
I agree. they did tesla dirty. a more fair comparison would’ve been between autopilot and a driver who was fully asleep. or maybe a driver who was dead?
and why didn’t this news article contain a full scientific meta analysis of all self driving cars??? personally, when someone tells me that my car has an obvious fault, I ask them to produce detailed statistics on the failure rates of every comparable car model
a driver who was fully asleep. or maybe a driver who was dead?
why does it need to become a specious comparison for it to be valid in your expert opinion? because those comparisons are worthless.
Fuck cars, those ones specifically
When I see this comment it makes me wonder, how do you feel when you see someone driving a car?
Should I feel guilty for owning a car. I’m 41 and I got my first car when I was 40, because I changed careers and it was 50 miles away.
I rarely used it outside of work and it was a means to get me there. I now work remote 3 days so only drive 2.
I don’t have social media or shop with companies like Amazon. I have just been to my first pro-Palestine protest.
Am I to be judged for using a car?
I believe what they mean is “fuck car centric societal design”. No reasonable person should be mad that someone is using the current system to live their life (i.e. driving to work). What the real goal is spreading awareness that a car centric society is inherently isolating and stressful, and that one more lane does absolutely nothing to lessen traffic (except for like a month ish)
Probably not you personally, but the system, oil companies, and people like Musk and his followers that want to prioritize private driving over public transportation.
I say fuck cars, and I have one too. I try to avoid using it, but it’s easy to be lazy. I’m also fortunate to live someplace with great public transportation.
Don’t take it personally, just realize life can be better if we could learn to live without these huge power-hungry cargo containers taking us everywhere.
They just recalled all the Cybertrucks, because their ‘smort’ technology is too stupid to realize when an accelerator sensor is stuck…
The accelerator sensor doesn’t get stuck, pedal does. The face of the accelerator falls off and wedges the pedal into the down position.
Is the investigation exhaustive? If these are all the crashes they could find related to the driver assist / self driving features, then it is probably much safer than a human driver. 1000 crashes out of 5M+ Teslas sold the last 5 years is actually a very small amount
I would want an article to try and find the rate of accidents per 100,00, group it by severity, and then compare and contrast that with human caused accidents.
Because while it’s clear by now Teslas aren’t the perfect self driving machines we were promised, there is no doubt at all that humans are bad drivers.
We lose over 40k people a year to car accidents. And fatal car accidents are rare, so multiple that by like 100 to get the total number of car accidents.
The question isn’t “are they safer than the average human driver?”
The question is “who goes to prison when that self driving car has an oopsie, veers across three lanes of traffic and wipes out a family of four?”
Because if the answer is “nobody”, they shouldn’t be on the road. There’s zero accountability, and because it’s all wibbly-wobbly AI bullshit, there’s no way to prove that the issues are actually fixed.
Because if the answer is “nobody”, they shouldn’t be on the road
Do you understand how absurd this is? Let’s say AI driving results in 50% less deaths. That’s 20,000 people every year that isn’t going to die.
And you reject that for what? Accountability? You said in another comment that you don’t want “shit happens sometimes” on your headstone.
You do realize that’s exactly what’s going on the headstones of those 40,000 people that die annually right now? Car accidents happen. We all know they happen and we accept them as a necessary evil. “Shit happens”
By not changing it, ironically, you’re advocating for exactly what you claim you’re against.
Hmmm I get you point but you seem to be taken the cavalier position of one who’d never be affected.
Let’s proposed this alternative scenario: AI is 50% safer and would reduce death from 40k to 20k a year if adopted. However, the 20k left will include your family and, unfortunately , there is no accountability therefore, nobody will pay to help raise your orphan nephew or help grandma now that your grandpa died ran over by a Tesla… Would you approve AI driving going forward?
Yes, unless you mean I need to literally sacrifice my family. But if my family was randomly part of the 20k, I’d defend self-driving cars if they are proven to be safer.
I’m very much a statistics-based person, so I’ll defend the statistically better option. In fact, me being part of that 20k gives me a larger than usual platform to discuss it.
No, I do mean literally your family. Not because I’m trying to be mean to you, I’m just trying to highlight you’d agree with a contract when you think the price does not apply to you… But in reality the price will apply to someone, whether they agree with the contract and enjoy the benefits or not
It’s the exact same situation with real life with the plane manufacturers. They lobby the government to allow recalls not to be done immediately but instead on the regular maintenance of the planes. This is to save money but it literally means that some planes are put there with known defects that will not be addressed for months (or years, depending on the maintenance needed)
Literally, people who’d never have a loved one in one of those flights decided that was acceptable to save money. They agreed, it’s ok to put your life at risk, statistically, because they want more money
If there are 20k deaths vs 40k, my family is literally twice as safe on the road, why wouldn’t I take that deal?
Read the proposition… It’s a thought experiment what we were discussing
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I’ve never heard of anyone screaming because they had to scan their own groceries at a self-checkout. Is this a common thing?
No. No idea what they’re talking about. If someone really feels that way, there are usually other aisles with people that can scan the groceries.
These are spanning from the earliest adopters, up until August of last year. Plenty of idiots using a cruise control system and trusting their lives to beta software. Not the same as the current FSD software.
Your own car insurance isn’t based on your driving skill when you had your learners permit. When Tesla takes on the liability and insurance for CyberCab, you’ll know it’s much safer than human drivers.
But Tesla had a video in 2016 saying that people were only in the driver seat for legal reasons. Musk even said it was only an issue with regulators.
Oh, who to believe!
Notice, when talking about new features, Tesla shills love to promote how great it is and how often it saves then from problems (I can’t imagine how badly they must drive. We intervened on our grandmother after a couple of close calls). Then, when there is news about these accidents, they are so quick to blame the driver.
Also, all these problems are with the old versions, the new versions clean up everything.
I do agree with OP here about one thing - don’t take anything Tesla and Musk say about the cars’ capabilities seriously (including how that might impact stock price) until Tesla is willing to take financial responsibility for accidents. Until then, it’s all Musk bullshit.
It only matters if the autopilot does more kills than an average human driver on the same distance traveled.
If the cars run over people while going 30kmh because they use cameras and a bug crashed into the camera and that caused the car to go crazy, that is not acceptable, even if the cars crash “less than humans”.
Self driving needs to be highly regulated by law and demand to have some bare minimum sensors, including radars, lidars, etc. Camera only self driving is beyond stupid. Cameras cant see in snow or dark or whatever. Anyone who has a phone knows how fucky the camera can get under specific light exposures, etc.
Noone but tesla is doing camera only “self driving” and they are only doing it in order to cut down the cost. Their older cars had more sensors than their newer cars. But Musk is living in his Bioshock uber capitalistic dream. Who cares if a few people die in the process of developing visual based self driving.
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I’ve heard Elon Musk (or was it Karpathy?) talking about how camera should be sufficient for all scenarios because humans can do it on vision alone, but that’s poor reasoning IMO. Cars are not humans, so there’s no reason to confine them to the same limitations. If we want them to be safer and more capable than human drivers, one way to do that is by providing them with more information.
We built things like Lidars and ultrasound because we want better than our eyes at depth and sight.
Obviously?
Why wouldn’t we want other types of sensors…?
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My eyes are decent, but if I had a sixth sense that gave me full accurate 3D 360 spatial awareness regardless of visibility, I would probably not turn it off just to use my eyes. I’d use both.
this is bullshit.
A human can be held accountable for their failure, bet you a fucking emerald mine Musk won’t be held accountable for these and all the other fool self drive fuckups.
So you’d rather live in a world where people die more often, just so you can punish the people who do the killing?
That’s a terrifically misguided interpretation of what I said, wow.
LISTEN UP BRIGHT LIGHTS, ACCOUNTABILITY ISN’T A LUXURY. It’s not some ‘nice to have add-on’.
Musk’s gonna find out. Gonna break all his fanboys’ hearts too.
Nothing was misguided and if anything your tone deaf attempt to double down only proves the point I’m making.
This stopped being about human deaths for you a long time ago.
Let’s not even bother to ask the question of whether or not this guy could ultimately be saving lives. All that matters to you is that you have a target to take your anger out on the event that a loved one dies in an accident or something.
You are shallow beyond belief.
This stopped being about human deaths for you a long time ago.
Nope, it’s about accountability. The fact that you can’t see how important accountability is just says you’re a musk fan boy. If Musk would shut the fuck up and do the work, he’d be better off - instead he’s cheaping out left and right on literal life dependent tech, so tesla’s stock gets a bump. It’s ridiculous, like your entire argument.
This is the actual logical way to think about self driving cars. Stop down voting him because “Tesla bad” you fuckin goons.
Tesla’s self driving appears to be less safe and causes more accidents than their competitors.
“NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation said in documents released Friday that it completed “an extensive body of work” which turned up evidence that “Tesla’s weak driver engagement system was not appropriate for Autopilot’s permissive operating capabilities.”
No one else has the same capability in as wide a geographic range. Waymo, Cruise, Blue Cruise, Mercedes, etc are all geolocked to certain areas or certain stretches of road.
Ok? Nobody else is being as wildly irresponsible, therefore tesla should be… rewarded?
I’m saying larger sample size == larger numbers.
Tesla announced 300 million miles on FSD v12 in just the last month.
Geographically, that’s all over the U.S, not just in hyper specific metro areas or stretches of road.
The sample size is orders of magnitude bigger than everyone else, by almost every metric.
If you include the most basic autopilot, Tesla surpassed 1 billion miles in 2018.
These are not opinions, just facts. Take them into account when you decide to interpret the opinion of others.
I don’t quite understand what they mean by this. It tracks drivers with a camera and the steering wheel sensor and literally turns itself off if you stop paying attention. What more can they do?
The NHSTA hasn’t issued rules for these things either.
the U.S. gov has issued general guidelines for the technology/industry here:
https://www.transportation.gov/av/4
They have an article on it discussing levels of automation here:
https://www.nhtsa.gov/vehicle-safety/automated-vehicles-safety
By all definitions layed out in that article:
BlueCruise, Super Cruise, Mercedes’ thing is a lvl3 system ( you must be alert to reengage when the conditions for their operation no longer apply )
Tesla’s FSD is a lvl 3 system (the system will warn you when you must reengage for any reason)
Waymo and Cruise are a lvl 4 system (geolocked)
Lvl 5 systems don’t exist.
What we don’t have is any kind of federal laws:
https://www.ncsl.org/transportation/autonomous-vehicles
Separated into two sections – voluntary guidance and technical assistance to states – the new guidance focuses on SAE international levels of automation 3-5, clarifies that entities do not need to wait to test or deploy their ADS, revises design elements from the safety self-assessment, aligns federal guidance with the latest developments and terminology, and clarifies the role of federal and state governments.
The guidance reinforces the voluntary nature of the guidelines and does not come with a compliance requirement or enforcement mechanism.
(emphasis mine)
The U.S. has operated on a “states are laboratories for laws” principal since its founding. The current situation is in line with that principle.
These are not my opinions, these are all facts.
Stop. Using. Cars.
OK.
Question: how do you propose I get to work? It’s 15 miles, there are no trains, the buses are far too convoluted and take about 2 hours each way (no I’m not kidding), and “move house” is obviously going to take too long (“hey boss, some rando on the internet said “stop using cars” so do you mind if I take indefinite leave to sell my house and buy a closer one?”).
Buy a motorcycle. Not technically a car!
There should be viable mass transit. This is a systemic problem.
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