> Former NHTSA senior safety adviser Missy Cummings, a professor at George Mason University’s College of Engineering and Computing, said the surge in Tesla crashes is troubling.<p>> <i>“Tesla is having more severe — and fatal — crashes than people in a normal data set,”</i> she said in response to the figures analyzed by The Post. One likely cause, she said, is the expanded rollout over the past year and a half of Full Self-Driving, which brings driver-assistance to city and residential streets. “The fact that … anybody and everybody can have it. … Is it reasonable to expect that might be leading to increased accident rates? Sure, absolutely.”<p>Absolutely terrifying that these beta tests are being conducted on public roads without everyone's consent.
I despise whoever wrote this article. It is almost completely devoid of any real information. Trying to gain an understanding of the situation based on the on the information presented here (Total crash and fatality numbers all time and last year, motorcycle numbers too) is impossible.<p>If you want to talk about this subject, find the following data:
Crash RATES of humans autopilot as well as other driver assistance systems in total and split over various time periods, compared to the number of systems in use in that period, and split over various categories like highway vs rural roads, or type of vehicles involved.<p>If you can not find this information then you know nothing and don't have anything to say. Just make your article about the fact that these numbers are important and do your best to get an idea. State the absolute number but explain how it is meaningless.<p>Right now this is just embarrassing.
These numbers don’t really tell you anything useful about whether Tesla is an outlier unless they’re normalized in some way, such as crashes per vehicle equipped with a driver assistance system.
Who could have predicted that a vaporware implementation that's not even beta would be the cause of all these fatalities?<p>Autopilot my ass. Just call it what it is (assisted driving) and set realistic expectations with the drivers to what its capabilities are.