How soon will Tesla know if use of the new autopilot feature reduces overall auto accident rates amongst users? Given the greatly detailed information that Tesla gathers regarding driving patterns and events, one would presume… not that long from now.
Though I suppose that perhaps there may be advantages to waiting awhile to publicly reveal what’s known (presuming that the company does end up sharing publicly)?
It’ll also be interesting to see if there are substantial regional differences, or perhaps substantial differences even amongst cities in the same region. I’m particularly interested in seeing how the autopilot function performs during the winter months in snowy regions.
This topic was brought up recently on the Tesla Motors Club forum by a New York auto accident attorney in a post speculating on the subject. Here’s the comment:
I’m guessing the fleet is large enough that there are large sample sizes of:
1 – Pre-autopilot cars
2 – Autopilot cars with the feature turned on
3 – Autopilot cars with the feature turned off
Since Tesla knows where you are, your speed, and whether or not your car is using autopilot I would think they could very quickly amass data to form a conclusion as to whether or not Autopilot is reducing accident rates (despite the fact that it may in some cases make its own error, or lull some drivers into unsafe behavior) overall.
I would love to be a fly on the wall in whatever cubicle belongs to the Tesla data analyst(s) who are examining accident rates and their relationship (or lack of relationship) to the use of autopilot.
Having now used it for a couple of days on freeways in So Cal my gut guess is that it will reduce accident rates in the fleet even in its current, early beta form.
Despite its limited and imperfect “vision” and primitive decision making abilities, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that statistically, those weaknesses are overcome by its major strength – the fact that it never stops paying attention to its surroundings.
It doesn’t get distracted with a phone call, a cappuccino, a billboard, an attractive human being in a nearby car or a hundred other things – and it never gets road rage.
Interesting things to contemplate.
That last comment about road rage had me laughing a bit, but I can’t help but wonder if autonomous driving technologies will simply redirect road rage away from other drivers, and at the autonomous driving technology itself. Many people seem to get quite mad at computers (and phones, video games, etc) that don’t do exactly what they want them to do, when they want. I can quite easily picture a red-faced and obese person raging at an autonomous Roush-built Apple car. Can’t you? The future….