[garrettjoecox]

Are there any useful statistics yet regarding accidents/deaths per million miles driven in “self driving” vehicles?

It always comes off as click/rage bait to me when people report on these deaths when there are literally hundreds per day that don’t involve an autonomous vehicle.

[xnx]

Yes. Waymo is safer than other drivers and makes the roads safer for everyone. https://waymo.com/blog/2024/09/safety-data-hub

No other company is even close (i.e. 5-10 years behind) to where Waymo is on self driving maturity.

[jajko]

Well if thats the tip of the spear of FSD tech we're fucked, no way I will take robotaxi to work before I retire. Extremely limited environment well under control, almost always sunny, doing the same area for what - 10 or 15 years?

Can it drive in rain & snow on narrow non-marked roads, then join traffic jams (or not) on highway at 120kmh, then enter city and navigate obscure construction works around it, crazy aggressive cyclists and scooters and get me where I need, 100% reliably? Or lets say >99.995%, thats roughly human frequent driver level.

This is what I am willing to pay for, either as shared taxi or our own car, nothing less. Anything less is me doing all the driving requiring full attention, have that already in dumb cars.

[belter]

"Lies, Damn Lies, and Waymo Statistics" - https://ojoyoshidareport.com/lies-damn-lies-and-waymo-statis...

[lm28469]

> No other company is even close (i.e. 5-10 years behind) to where Waymo is on self driving maturity.

Not too hard when you stay inside like three or four cities with good weather, straight roads, &c.

[aredox]

It is not easy to compare as there are lots of confounding variables - self-driving is not activated at random or all the time, but typically on highways, which are less accident-prone.

They are also deactivated in difficult conditions such as bad weather which are also hard for human drivers. You can imagine a future with all cars are equipped with a self-driving system that always "passes the buck" to a human when conditions degrade - of course the system will have less accidents than humans! The statistics will even show human drivers being worse than before the advent of self-driving!

[lm28469]

idk but tesla has the highest fatality rate despite bragging about all their "smart" safety features: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebanker/2025/02/11/tesla-ag...

[gruez]

But the most dangerous car model is the Hyundai Venue[1], which also brags about all their Hyundai SmartSense safety features. I'm sure the next few cars down the list also do the same. Maybe your ire should be directed at them as well?

[1] https://www.carpro.com/blog/list-of-the-most-dangerous-cars-...

[2] https://www.hyundaiusa.com/us/en/vehicles/venue

[ivewonyoung]

Your comment says fatality rate while the 'article' says accident rate.

Those are two very different things.

Even the accident rate is below other cars if you adjust by miles driven.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42151851

[bilbo0s]

It kind of says something when it turns out that Volvo, with their old-timey ‘dumb’ safety features, seems to be outperforming all the sexier brands on safety.

Maybe focusing on the dumb stuff brings a lot more bang for the buck than the sparkly new ‘smart’ safety widgets?

[ronnier]

> The study is based on QuoteWizard by LendingTree insurance inquiries from Jan. 1, 2024, through Dec. 31, 2024. They analyzed the 30 brands with the most inquiries in this period.

QuoteWizard. Based on inquiries. I don't trust this.

[honeybadger1]

the amount of miles driven with tesla fsd with no crashes is so significantly higher it's laughable to even draw the comparison, this data is even publicly available via the API.

[toast0]

No, the statistics I've seen haven't really been useful.

It's typically comparing cars in whatever autonomous modes vs all cars operating within a country/state. But the autonomous modes don't operate in all conditions, so it's not a good comparison.

There's concern about making sure the control group is appropriate too, comparing against a representative subset of the population is important.

I think there's some reasonable data for automatic emergency braking, in that I think I've seen it compared as just cars with aeb equipped vs cars without, number/severity of injuries for all collisions and there's enough data to show a difference.

[nickthegreek]

The best you can do is try and limit accident/deaths of similar events in the same areas during the same weather. But we don't collect proper stats on this stuff in order to make true apples to apples comparisons. They arent driving in the same scenarios as the many people yet.

[viraptor]

There's a few I'm not going to link, but warn about them instead. They're often in the "lies, damned lies" category.

For example comparing self driving to average accidents often misses: non self driving cars having worse equipment (lack of collision warning, adaptive cruise control, etc.), comparison to all roads (self driving is activated mostly on known, well mapped areas and open highways), unknown accounting for self driving status (Teslas try to give back control just before the crash), and many other issues.

Unless some actually independent third party runs the numbers with a lot of explanations about the methodology, I'm ignoring them.