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GM Supercruise's 0 incident in 5.7 Million miles Vs Tesla Autopilot's 1 accident every 3.45 million miles (Safety Record Comparison)

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Bladerskb

Senior Software Engineer
Oct 24, 2016
3,202
5,533
Michigan

GM Supercruise All Time

Cadillac President Steve Carlisle told Fox News Autos at the new Escalade unveiling in Hollywood that the automaker isn’t aware of any accidents that have occurred while it was in use. His statement was reiterated by GM President Mark Reuss during the company’s Capital Markets Day event at the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday, when he said that Super Cruse has seen 5.2 million miles of “incident-free” operation in the real world since it first became available on the CT6 sedan in 2017.

Tesla AP Q4 2020

In the 4th quarter, we registered one accident for every 3.45 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.05 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot and without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 1.27 million miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 484,000 miles.*

Can't wait for @powertoold to come in and tell me how this is pure GM fake PR and marketing unlike Tesla which is 100% undenieable facts.
 
A few thoughts:
  1. Supercruise has only been used for 5.2 million miles in 4 years? That seems like hardly anything in "real world use" numbers (Tesla had 3 billion miles of autopilot use a year ago (5.5 years)
  2. Autopilot is used in a lot more scenarios (almost any surface streets & controlled access highways, etc.) than SuperCruise (only some controlled access highways)
  3. If we can extrapolate GM's claim to whatever future millions of miles, then a driver assist system that has a perfect record is pretty amazing
Per points 1 & 2 above, this comparison seems like apples and oranges and doesn't make much sense, but per point 3 above I'm still glad/hopeful for GM.
 
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Super Cruise was a very polished package on initial release of v1 in 2018. Pretty much flawless from what I could gather, but I only evaluated it for a couple hours. ACC, autosteering, and blind spot alerts are all mature products. Super Cruise v2 is supposed to be better, but I haven't tested it yet.

Regardless of how you measure safety, Super Cruise does not slam on the brakes constantly. I run into phantom braking on the average of once per 25 minutes of TACC freeway operation in the Tesla MX. It is below all other brands I've tested. It is the only car that I drive where I cover the ACCELERATOR in traffic instead of the brake pedal.
 
Not terribly surprising given such few miles, and the demographics of the CT6 owner.

As Super Cruise makes it way into lower end vehicles with drivers that are in other demographics I'm curious to see what happens. I do expect it to be safer overall that AP due to driver monitoring, being limited roads recently mapped, etc. But, how much safer?

It's a hands free system so there is a delay between the time something happens and the user correcting it. I personally don't believe it will cause much difference, but it would be nice to have data to back that up.

Once it reaches 100+ million miles we'll get a better sense of how much safer it is.
 
Super Cruise was a very polished package on initial release of v1 in 2018. Pretty much flawless from what I could gather, but I only evaluated it for a couple hours. ACC, autosteering, and blind spot alerts are all mature products. Super Cruise v2 is supposed to be better, but I haven't tested it yet.

Regardless of how you measure safety, Super Cruise does not slam on the brakes constantly. I run into phantom braking on the average of once per 25 minutes of TACC freeway operation in the Tesla MX. It is below all other brands I've tested. It is the only car that I drive where I cover the ACCELERATOR in traffic instead of the brake pedal.

How are you going to test enhanced Super Cruise?

I wanted to test enhanced Super Cruise, but then I learned that it can't do uninitiated lane changes like NoA can. I wanted to show that Enhanced Super Cruise could do Portland to Everett without incident, and NoA was a big pile of crap.

Now it still might be worth comparing the two where I use Enhanced AP with auto-lane changes,
 
How are you going to test enhanced Super Cruise?

I wanted to test enhanced Super Cruise, but then I learned that it can't do uninitiated lane changes like NoA can. I wanted to show that Enhanced Super Cruise could do Portland to Everett without incident, and NoA was a big pile of crap.

Now it still might be worth comparing the two where I use Enhanced AP with auto-lane changes,

They stopped selling Super Cruise v1 when they stopped production of the CT6 last year. The CT4/CT5/Escalade have the v2 which does lane changes. Ultra Cruise is the all-roads version that is being tested.
 
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They stopped selling Super Cruise v1 when they stopped production of the CT6 last year. The CT4/CT5/Escalade have the v2 which does lane changes. Ultra Cruise is the all-roads version that is being tested.
The Bolt EUV still uses Super Cruise v1 according to reports when it launched:
Chevy Bolt EUV's Super Cruise system misses out on one key feature
 
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5.7 *million* miles, not one accident.

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What does it even matter? All of these are garbage numbers. Just like Elon tweeting that AP is x times better than the average car.
Each of these vehicles are driven by the safest driving demographic on the road. Middle aged upper income drivers. You can't compare
a Caddy or Tesla to the avg 12 year old 10k car on the road that is driven by dangerous demographics that skew the numbers (like teenagers)
Any actuary in this business will tell you its the driver, not the car. If either of these safety systems fail, well gosh you have a human safety backup device.

People aren't dying in Volvos and they don't have AP or Supercruise. But they are driven by 30-60yr old owners who make 250k per year.
 
What does it even matter? All of these are garbage numbers. Just like Elon tweeting that AP is x times better than the average car.
Each of these vehicles are driven by the safest driving demographic on the road. Middle aged upper income drivers. You can't compare
a Caddy or Tesla to the avg 12 year old 10k car on the road that is driven by dangerous demographics that skew the numbers (like teenagers)
Any actuary in this business will tell you its the driver, not the car. If either of these safety systems fail, well gosh you have a human safety backup device.

People aren't dying in Volvos and they don't have AP or Supercruise. But they are driven by 30-60yr old owners who make 250k per year.
Except that Tesla also compares AP and non AP to its own fleet.

But where I do agree that numbers can be skewed is that for now, the vast majority of AP miles are on highways which are less prone to crashes. I would like to see the miles of AP vs non AP regarding highway miles only.
 

GM Supercruise All Time

Cadillac President Steve Carlisle told Fox News Autos at the new Escalade unveiling in Hollywood that the automaker isn’t aware of any accidents that have occurred while it was in use. His statement was reiterated by GM President Mark Reuss during the company’s Capital Markets Day event at the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday, when he said that Super Cruse has seen 5.2 million miles of “incident-free” operation in the real world since it first became available on the CT6 sedan in 2017.

Tesla AP Q4 2020

In the 4th quarter, we registered one accident for every 3.45 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.05 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot and without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 1.27 million miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 484,000 miles.*

Can't wait for @powertoold to come in and tell me how this is pure GM fake PR and marketing unlike Tesla which is 100% undenieable facts.
I know this isnt true because my friend got hit by one and sued GM and they settled out of court.
 

GM Supercruise All Time

Cadillac President Steve Carlisle told Fox News Autos at the new Escalade unveiling in Hollywood that the automaker isn’t aware of any accidents that have occurred while it was in use. His statement was reiterated by GM President Mark Reuss during the company’s Capital Markets Day event at the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday, when he said that Super Cruse has seen 5.2 million miles of “incident-free” operation in the real world since it first became available on the CT6 sedan in 2017.

Tesla AP Q4 2020

In the 4th quarter, we registered one accident for every 3.45 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.05 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot and without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 1.27 million miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 484,000 miles.*

Can't wait for @powertoold to come in and tell me how this is pure GM fake PR and marketing unlike Tesla which is 100% undenieable facts.

This definitely demonstrates again how useless both the Tesla and the GM statistics are. They are worse than meaningless because they give the impression that both systems are somehow safer than normal unassisted driving: we don’t know this, at all. Eventually we will, but it is going to take a lot more time, since the manufacturers aren’t apparently interested in figuring it out for us and publishing the data.
 
This definitely demonstrates again how useless both the Tesla and the GM statistics are. They are worse than meaningless because they give the impression that both systems are somehow safer than normal unassisted driving: we don’t know this, at all. Eventually we will, but it is going to take a lot more time, since the manufacturers aren’t apparently interested in figuring it out for us and publishing the data.

add the *
*Autonomous system statistics are based on having a human safety backup driver who, more often than not, is in the safest demographic driving category.
 
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Not terribly surprising given such few miles, and the demographics of the CT6 owner.
And given the much more limited set of roads that are supported.

Tesla Autopilot has driven three *billion* miles versus only 5.7 million miles. I mean, we could crack out the T-distribution table and speculate about whether 5.7 million miles driven without incident once is statistically different from 3.45 million miles driven almost a thousand times, with a thousand accidents, or we can just assume that it is within the margin of error (which it probably is).

When Supercruise has a few billion miles under its belt and a few accidents, we'll be able to make a meaningful comparison. As long as there are zero accidents, it could be another 20 million miles before the first one, or there could be one next week and a second one the day after that. We really have no idea, because there isn't enough data to draw conclusions.

But either way, given that most of those Supercruise miles were driven on a version that was much, much more limited than what Tesla has been doing for years, it would be surprising if their safety numbers weren't better, because TACC with lane keeping can't do half the stuff that's risky, so you're much more likely to be doing interesting stuff by hand, and those accidents likely don't count towards the accident statistics, because the car isn't in control.
 
I run into phantom braking on the average of once per 25 minutes of TACC freeway operation in the Tesla MX.

This guy is lying, isn't on the latest version, or is using an older hardware AP.

Tesla has essentially fixed phantom braking as of 2021.4.15, at least with AP enabled. I would think TACC wouldn't be that far off.

On the other hand, I'm still experiencing incorrect speed limits which cause the car to slow down, but this wouldn't be considered phantom braking, as there's a clear cause (incorrect map data / missed sign reading).
 
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