I really would like to know the absolute numbers for this reduction. It's really questionable if this would hold up with millions of Teslas on the road in the hands of less wealthy(probably better educated) drivers.
You mean drivers like the ones behind the wheel of all the BMWs and Audis that cut me off with no turn signals, speed, make aggressive lane changes, tailgate, and generally act like giant douches because a simple traffic ticket is nothing to their pocketbook while their time == money?
Those people are going to be a hell of a lot safer behind the wheel of an autonomous (level 4) vehicle where they can be on the phone and their laptop as the vehicle obeys the speed limits and safe following distance.
Anecdotally I have a lot more near-incidents with 4WDs and little hatchback getabouts. In my experience the 4WDs have been distracted or drifting outside their lane, and the little getabouts have been tailgating and driving aggressively. Having "P" plates (1) also raises the chances massively.
Could just be the numbers of those kinds of cars in my area though.
Generally I feel that a douche can drive any type of car, and I try to drive in fear like everyone else on the road is a drunk prison escapee.
(1) provisional licence holders - new drivers (and also people who have lost their licence) have to display "P" plates for a year here (Australia).
I actually agree that douches drive any kind of car. I singled out BMWs and Audis because the prior post was claiming that highly educated/wealthy drivers would be 'better'.
I've seen jalopies driven like someone has been up on speed for 4 days straight.
Or the drivers in cheap sensible cars that are terrified of merging onto the freeway faster than 40 mph.
And the distracted drivers who realize they're about to miss their exit so they hammer on the brakes and put on their turn signal and completely fail to match speeds.
Ricers with after market exhaust are another kind of car that usually drives way too fast and aggressive compared to how their lowered suspension actually performs.
The people in road tanks who seem to split the difference between terrified and aggressive and expect you to just get out of their way because they're bigger.
I'm probably missing entire swaths of shitty drivers that I can't think of right now because my blood sugar is a bit low.
> because a simple traffic ticket is nothing to their pocketbook
Finland has a system where a traffic ticket is a certain percentage of your monthly income. For example, running a red light is typically fined for 25% of your monthly income.
Ah it now makes sense, I did ask him to clarify but I just parsed in my brain when reading your reply he meant fewer wealthy (better educated drivers) as opposed to less wealthy meaning not as wealthy. Thanks for your help.
Stop being so self righteous. Do you own a BMW or Audi? I do, and I'm totally polite driving mine. Also, when you have a car that handles and responds better you tend to drive it harder and you forget that everyone else is in some inferior product.
> when you have a car that handles and responds better you tend to drive it harder and you forget that everyone else is in some inferior product.
You can buy traction control, ABS, better suspension, steering, better tires, etc. None of that will make the idiot behind the wheel any better, although it may lead to overconfidence.
Makes sense, but its still interesting how the result would change when applied to the general population. Would VW Beetle drivers have the same reduction?
If you read the abstract you will see that the studies involve driver behavior.
"Results Studies 1 and 2. Our first two studies were naturalistic field studies, and examined whether upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals while driving. In study 1, we investigated whether upper-class drivers were more likely to cut off other vehicles at a busy four-way intersection with stop signs on all sides. As vehicles are reliable indicators of a person's social rank and wealth (15), we used observers’ codes of vehicle status (make, age, and appearance) to index drivers’ social class. Observers stood near the intersection, coded the status of approaching vehicles, and recorded whether the driver cut off other vehicles by crossing the intersection before waiting their turn, a behavior that defies the California Vehicle Code. In the present study, 12.4% of drivers cut in front of other vehicles. A binary logistic regression indicated that upper-class drivers were the most likely to cut off other vehicles at the intersection, even when controlling for time of day, driver's perceived sex and age, and amount of traffic, b = 0.36, SE b = 0.18, P < 0.05"
Do you think peoples ability to behave/drive responsibly vs recklessly could be at all linked to their demographic profile? I am talking statistically, not looking for anecdotes...
Yes, it's very likely that different demographic profiles have different driving behaviors.
But given that they've shown this 40% crash rate reduction in their current demographic, it's reasonable to expect to see a similar reduction in other demographics (maybe not of the same magnitude, but at least in the same direction).
Varying insurance rates based on age and gender seem to indicate that, yes, demographics play a role in driving responsibility.
A Tesla is not a cheap car. I kind of suspect the average Tesla driver is more responsible than the average driver. It may be the case that the average Tesla driver is very well off, and treat the cars as expensive toys though, so it's tough to say without numbers. If i had to bet right now, i'd bet on the more responsible side though.
I suspect the average Tesla driver is more irresponsible than the average driver, simply because they're rich and are used to getting their way.
If you study rich drivers I have no doubt that you would find that they cut people off more, overtake in more dangerous situations, use their indicators less, drive over the speed limit more, proceed through amber signals later, run red lights more often, and generally show less regard for the rules than other drivers.
This behaviour will also correlate to other areas of life where richer people simply care less for the rules. They're more likely to use social contacts or money (e.g.: "lawyer up") to get themselves out of any trouble they find themselves in.
Teslas are not cheap cars. Given that money is (social evidence of) power, the people buying Teslas (and other expensive cars in general) are likely to expect other drivers to respect their status as powerful people.
Credit rating is highly correlated with wealth, and is also highly correlated with reduced accident rates. This is evidenced by me personally, as I now get much better auto insurance rates with an 800+ credit rating than I did when I was in the 600s right out of college.
I would be willing to bet money that the insurance actuaries that actually calculate risk disagree with your extremely prejudiced opinion.
Credit rating is highly correlated with wealth, and is also highly correlated with reduced accident rates.
You're assuming that accident rates are directly correlated with claim rates, however. A wealthy individual is less likely claim for a minor accident, preferring to pay out of pocket for small repairs rather than take a big hit on their premiums. Someone less wealthy may not have that option.
There are other reasons why wealth may reduce your risk to insurers that are unrelated to safe driving. You're less likely to leave a car parked insecurely in a dodgy part of town, for example.
Finally, "drivers of luxury brand cars" certainly aren't the same set as "wealthy people with good credit records". Plenty of lower net worth people can still manage a lease on a BMW or Mercedes, or buy a used one.
If you disagree, commenting is probably more appropriate than downvoting.
I'm still waiting to hear how your personal opinion about wealthy drivers is more accurate than auto insurance actuaries that calculate risk for a living.
> If you disagree, commenting is probably more appropriate than downvoting.
FWIW, in case you were unaware, Hacker News doesn't allow commenters to downvote direct replies. So whoever might've downvoted you wasn't the parent, and someone corrected it with an upvote or undown (your comment isn't gray as of this writing).
This list is not strongly related to risk /of/ accident, but is correlated with severity (a small change is likely to have a small correlation with severity).
* over the speed limit
This list is highly subjective and extremely situation dependent.
* overtake in (more) dangerous situations
* through amber signals later
(IMO: Most lights should have longer yellow signals, a mechanism for telling fresh and stale apart should also be standard)
All of these are very bad things that everyone should avoid doing, and signals should be given starting 5-10 seconds before the action.
* use indicators less
* cut people off
* run red lights
Which seems like the current driver profile is possibly safer than the overall population since it's unlikely a large percentage of young drivers own a $100k car. It seems like the effect of widespread autopilot could be greater if it included this cohort.
Personally I believe most people are really terrible drivers. That being said, there were 210 million drivers in the US in 2009. There's probably a lot more today. That's just 0.01% of drivers. That fact makes me have to question just how bad people really are, despite my own personal opinion. Or maybe cars are just really safe. A better statistic might be number of accidents.
In 2015 2.44 million people were injured in car accidents. That's a much more telling figure of just how bad most drivers are. Apparently our cars are just really safe.
I believe most people are inconsistent drivers. Usually they do a reasonable job, but some fraction of the time they're worried about a sick kid, or a job interview, or a recent breakup, or whatever, and they aren't paying attention.
There are some truly consistently horrible drivers. But in general most people do ok most of the time. I think the real challenge is cutting of that really bad end of the distribution, which autopilot seems to be doing.
Those same drivers are, unfortunately, also likely to be those least amenable to actually using it. Some people I know have expressed disgust toward the idea of autonomous driving; coincidentally, almost all are horrible drivers that I wouldn't want to be with as a passenger.
I had an econ professor assert that as cars got safer there were more accidents because people trusted the car to protect them more.... Logically, to reduce accidents due to carelessness we should put a 12" sharpened spike right in the middle of the steering wheel pointing at the drivers chest. If all accidents were deadly wouldn't drivers then exercise the utmost care?
There was a coach bus crash in the Alps a few years ago, and in the investigation they found out that one of the factors contributing to the crash was that the driver only had few years of experience, and only ever drove modern, top of the line buses. The problem with those is that they drive as easily as a small hatchback, despite being 20 meters long and weighing 17 tonnes. The engines are powerful, the transmissions are usually automatic, the brakes are strong - so you can easily forget that you are driving a 17-tonne fridge, and no matter how good your brakes are, you can't be braking continuously on a 15km long mountain descent, because the whole system will fail. The bus was equiped with engine and magnetic retarder for the drive, but like I said, on a modern bus that drives this easily, the driver just never had any need to use them. I think the report concluded that a driver with more experience in driving older vehicles, where you couldn't rely on assisted disc brakes, where all you had was a set of brake drums and just had to know how to use the 2 other braking systems, would have saved the bus.
Similarily, airplane pilots spend so much time in autopilot mode that they forget how to operate a plane in emergency situations.
It's a great joke, but a poor strategy. Remember the end game: minimize harm. The universal solutions that remove human error have a better long-run potential to minimize harm, since they can exceed the effectiveness of even the most attentive and cautious human driver.
10 accidents where everybody walks away is much better than 1 accident where someone dies.
20 years ago they redid the traffic pattern where I used to live to something many people found really confusing and many people claimed felt dangerous. A study 2 years later found that, while it was true that accidents on that part of the road had increased, the number of injuries due to accidents had plummeted. A follow up study a few years later found that accidents had dropped back to around their original level and serious injuries where still basically at zero.
The problem with this theory is that the rate of fatalities has gone sharply down as cars have become safer. There may well be some degree of compensation where people drive in a more dangerous manner, but the added safety far more than compensates for it.
The average driver goes about 10 years between a crash, which doesn't seem to be all that good.
Another factor is the extent to which bad driving doesn't result in an accident, either because of infrastructure, other drivers reacting, or just a lack of cars. For example, most red light runners don't cause a crash because stoplights usually have an all-red period to compensate, there often aren't other cars to crash into, and other cars might brake to avoid crashing into the culprit.
Many crashes require two bad drivers to misbehave at about the same time. For example, I couldn't tell you how many times I've had somebody change lanes into me, but it hasn't (yet) resulted in a crash because I've seen it and gotten out of the way before they hit.
Probably as the technology scales up to millions of people using it, the numbers will actually be even better for safety. There is a network effect that compounds the safety factor - as more self-driving cars are on the road, there are fewer rogue human drivers. So with millions of Teslas driving around there will be that many fewer people causing accidents by human error.
no. he needs more parens to make the order of operations clear. also, love the standard internet response to data. "the data in not perfect, or is incomplete, thus I will hold steadfast to my intuition"
It's very reasonable, when presented with data that doesn't pass a sniff check, to mentally bitbucket that data. Unfortunately, lots of people's noses are miscalibrated - And what's worse we're not sure which ones.
I also found that confusing. I think in this case "less wealthy" is within the context of Tesla owners, which is basically upper middle class(?), which sort of makes sense. At least that's how I read it.
No, i just took education as one possible factor that might be different between Tesla and Camry or Hummer drivers. Tesla Owners have a specific selection bias, its just hard to describe what that bias actually is, so i just took a stab in a direction to get the discussion going.
Assuming by education you mean formal schooling: Consider that wealth is accumulated over time. While outliers certainly exist, the older you get, the more wealthy you are apt to be, at least to the point when you retire and start to use those reserves to live on. Also consider that in 1970s, the time when the boomers started coming of age, having 'high school or more' was reserved for just 50% of the population. Only a mere 25% for the oldest segment of the population. It has steadily climbed to more than 80% for the youngest adults. But they, statistically, haven't had time to amass a large amount of wealth yet.
They said it was a 40 percent drop after the roll out of auto-pilot features. That means it dropped 40 percent with the same driver base. Please read the article before posting comments.
Are you assuming the more wealthy owners have lower levels of education? Or have I misinterpreted your statement? I would have assumed tesla owners would fall into the more educated category. No idea which assumption is correct just wondering about your reasoning.
For my assumption I assume that due to the higher cost of a Tesla better educated people are opting for them over the alternative because of the environmental benefits.
I would have assumed due to the high cost of a Tesla that the owners would tend to be older, and thus a generation educated in much fewer numbers. Today's youth are much more educated, but they are still young, which hasn't given them much time to build wealth.
I mean, who do you think is more likely to buy a Tesla: A 20 year old fresh college graduate, or his 'uneducated' father who has been saving and investing for 30 years and just sold his lifelong home in San Francisco? My bet is on the latter. The boomers in particular are considered the wealthiest generation ever, but not the most educated generation ever.
I'm rather fascinated by how many are questioning the education thing here though. Coming from a farming community, where every (older) farmer I know is multimillions simply by virtue of having purchased farmland when they were young, it's difficult to see how education had any impact on that wealth. Some of them do have educations, some don't. It doesn't seem to make any difference.
I evidently misunderstood the original comment, when OP said less wealthy (better educated) he meant that there would be fewer wealthy (and better educated) owners. I don't agree with the sentiment and think OP didn't really explain his position well either.
You don't agree that wealthy people tend to be older? Even though time is the easiest way to increase wealth (compound interest is your friend). Or you don't agree that older people are less educated? Even thought the data suggests otherwise.
I didnt say that and I am unsure how you inferred it from what I said.
OP linked wealth with being better educated, he also inferred that better educated and wealthy meant they would be better drivers. However as others have pointed out there are studies showing that wealthier individuals make worse drivers (the studies don't appear factor in education level and wealth is determined by brand of vehicle).
I disagreed with OPs sentiment that fewer wealthy (and therefore worse educated - in OPs opinion) drivers would result in more crashes.
Doesn't that contradict what you said before: "Are you assuming the more wealthy owners have lower levels of education?" Although I think it is quite reasonable to assume that the wealthy do have less education, statistically speaking, give the nature of wealth and the more recent focus of educating the populace.
Heck, when I graduated high school in 2000, only 64% of us did graduate. The graduation rate for high school, less than two decades later, is now over 80%. That's substantial growth over what is a fairly short period of time, all things considered. And the rate gets worse the further back you go.
> I disagreed with OPs sentiment that fewer wealthy (and therefore worse educated - in OPs opinion) drivers would result in more crashes.
That was my misunderstanding. I thought you meant that you did not agree with the sentiment that wealthy people could be less educated. Thanks for the clarification.
