alt Hacker NewsAs much as I'd love to pile in on Tesla, it's unclear to me the severity of the incidents (I know they are listed) and if human drivers would report such things.
"Rear collision while backing" could mean they tapped a bollard. Doesn't sound like a crash. A human driver might never even report this. What does "Incident at 18 mph" even mean?
By my own subjective count, only three descriptions sound unambiguously bad, and only one mentions a "minor injury".
I'm not saying it's great, and I can imagine Tesla being selective in publishing, but based on this I wouldn't say it seems dire.
For example, roundabouts in cities (in Europe anyway) tend to increase the number of crashes, but they are overall of lower severity, leading to an overall improvement of safety. Judging by TFA alone I can't tell this isn't the case here. I can imagine a robotaxi having a different distribution of frequency and severity of accidents than a human driver.
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>they tapped a bollard
If a human had eyes on every angle of their car and they still did that it would represent a lapse in focus or control -- humans don't have the same advantages here.
With that said : i would be more concerned about what it represents when my sensor covered auto-car makes an error like that, it would make me presume there was an error in detection -- a big problem.
He compared to the estimated statistics for non-reported accident (typically your example, that involve only one vehicle and only result in scratched paint) to estimate the 3x. Else the title would have been 9x (which is in line with 10x a data analyst blogger wrote ~ 3month ago).
> roundabouts in cities (in Europe anyway) tend to increase the number of crashes
Not in France, according to data. It depends on the speed limit, but they decrease accident by 34% overall, and almost 20% when the speed limit is 30 or 50 km/h.