Am I missing something here (EAP expectations)?

AP is marketed as increasing safety.
Like a fence on a cliff. But the fence is Styrofoam, and painted as steel.

 

A problem I have is that the way that AP mis-behaviour matches absolutely nothing on my expectation list. If I take a teenage for a driving lesson I have a fair idea of the daft things they will do. Suddenly veering out of lane because there is more rain / sun than yesterday just isn't one of those things ... so there is no way for Humans to know how to Trust AP. But the risk is that because AP appears to be very good then people over-trust it (e.g. in the early days drivers made videos of them in the back seat / whatever ...)

Even on a road that AP has successfully driven you many, many times if e.g. the gore-point has been damaged / not reset you are at risk ... where you never were previously.

I drive 99% of my highway, dual-carriageway, miles on AP. I arrive far more refreshed than manual-driving, and because I have read these forums and know about incidents that people have had I am vigilant the whole time, and always have a hand on the wheel. Plenty of people here say hands-on-lap is sufficient, and clearly YouTube is full of people holding a shaky camera in one hand to video the dashboard - about which they give a commentary whilst driving, so clearly part of their concentration is making that video.

So I agree, I think it is very likely that people who have never read these forums (in particular) may be way too overconfident in their use of AP.

I don't think that will happen with AP. The AI stuff will progress at exponential rate, so "all of a sudden", to observers, it will be here. Quite possibly this year or next ...

Its not just marketing, the Statistical data proves it. Tesla have data for the MS fleet before AP was activated, and have thus been able to directly compare that with after AP was activated. Insurance in the UK will give you a discount if you have AP fitted (of course they have no idea if you actually use it ...). So IMO its not a Styrofoam fence.

As I've said before in these forums, I'm happy that either AP or ME detects trouble ... that's better than me on my own.

 

Sorry, but no. I would say there are too many confounders that are not accounted for in Tesla's claims.

 

I wonder if any drivers had the expectation cruise control could handle stop-and-go traffic in the 1950’s, and blamed the technology when they rear-ended the car in front of them?

 

Well, of course depends whether you believe Tesla, but (for me) not to do so is to assume conspiracy. Not impossible of course ...

AP accidents well publicised ... it makes good Copy for journalists of course. 2 AP fatal accidents (I think?) in a couple of years, both drivers, sadly, not paying attention.

I have not seen many other cases mentioned of AP-accidents (Firetruck. One or two other claimed, which Tesla have dismissed (although hard to say if "AP disengaged just before accident as part of user-intervention, or "Driver was lying/mistaken")

I have no idea what the likely accident rate would be given the [not huge] number of Tesla cars (with AP) on the roads compared to "national average for cars less than a couple of years old", so I don't know if the figure is high, or not. Either way, such a s low number is statistically insignificant, so could be that Tesla have been lucky ... or unlucky ... or could have been far more unlucky but still statistically insignificant.

Is the number of known AP accidents / fatalities, relative to cars-sold, High? low? Impossible to say?

 

Probably impossible to say, because number of incidents are so low compared to number of vehicles and kilometers travelled. I found some reports from Norway, but not my field and hard to translate. Anyway; accident frequency seem to range from 0,01 to 1,0 pr million vehicles travelled at a special road type/crossing etc. This makes for really difficult interpretations in my experience.

 

While true, it does suggest that it *likely* improves safety. There will always be confounds in this kind of real-world data. But that doesn't completely invalidate the real-world data or suggest that the opposite of what it suggests is likely to be true.