> My biggest concern is that Waymo and Tesla are juking the stats to make self-driving cars seem safer than they really are
Even intentional juking aside, you can't really compare the two.
Waymo cars drive completely autonomously, without a supervising driver in the car. If it does something unsafe, there's no one there to correct it, and it may get into a crash, in the same way a human driver doing that same unsafe thing might.
With Tesla FSD, we have no idea how good it really is. We know that a human is supervising it, and despite all the reports we see of people doing super irresponsible things while "driving" a Tesla (like taking a nap), I imagine most Tesla FSD users are actually attentively supervising for the most part. If all FSD users stopped supervising and started taking naps, I suspect the crash rate and fatality rate would start looking like the rate for the worst drivers on the road... or even worse than that.
So it's not that they're juking their stats (although they may be), it's that they don't actually have all the stats that matter. Waymo has and had those stats, because their trained human test drivers were reporting when the car did something unsafe and they had to take over. Tesla FSD users don't report when they have to do that. The data is just not there.
Even intentional juking aside, you can't really compare the two.
Waymo cars drive completely autonomously, without a supervising driver in the car. If it does something unsafe, there's no one there to correct it, and it may get into a crash, in the same way a human driver doing that same unsafe thing might.
With Tesla FSD, we have no idea how good it really is. We know that a human is supervising it, and despite all the reports we see of people doing super irresponsible things while "driving" a Tesla (like taking a nap), I imagine most Tesla FSD users are actually attentively supervising for the most part. If all FSD users stopped supervising and started taking naps, I suspect the crash rate and fatality rate would start looking like the rate for the worst drivers on the road... or even worse than that.
So it's not that they're juking their stats (although they may be), it's that they don't actually have all the stats that matter. Waymo has and had those stats, because their trained human test drivers were reporting when the car did something unsafe and they had to take over. Tesla FSD users don't report when they have to do that. The data is just not there.