Self-Driving and Driver-Assist Technology Linked to Hundreds of Crashes, U.S. Data Shows
Source: New York Times
Over the course of 10 months, nearly 400 car crashes in the United States involved advanced driver-assistance technologies, the federal government’s top auto-safety regulator disclosed Wednesday, in its first-ever release of large-scale data about these burgeoning systems.
In 392 incidents cataloged by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from July 1 of last year through May 15, six people died and five were seriously injured.
Teslas operating with Autopilot, the more ambitious Full Self Driving mode or any of their associated component features were in 273 crashes. The disclosures are part of a sweeping effort by the federal agency to determine the safety of advanced driving systems as they become increasingly commonplace. Beyond the futuristic allure of self-driving cars, scores of car manufacturers have rolled out automated components in recent years, including features that allow you to take your hands off the steering wheel under certain conditions and that help you parallel park.
In Wednesday’s release, NHTSA disclosed that Honda vehicles were involved in 90 incidents and Subarus in 10. Ford Motor, General Motors, BMW, Volkswagen, Toyota, Hyundai and Porsche each reported five or fewer. “These technologies hold great promise to improve safety, but we need to understand how these vehicles are performing in real-world situations,” said Steven Cliff, the agency’s administrator. “This will help our investigators quickly identify potential defect trends that emerge.”
Speaking with reporters ahead of Wednesday’s release, Dr. Cliff also cautioned against drawing conclusions from the data collected so far, noting that it does not take into account factors like the number of cars from each manufacturer that are on the road and equipped with these types of technologies. “The data may raise more questions than they answer,” he said. About 830,000 Tesla cars in the United States are equipped with Autopilot or the company’s other driver-assistance technologies — offering one explanation why Tesla vehicles accounted for nearly 70 percent of the reported crashes.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/business/self-driving-car-nhtsa-crash-data.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
(supposed driver) was totally unengaged. What fury would emerge... 
Being more expensive, the odds are better that it's insured. Getting a computer to take responsibility, vs getting a texting driver to take responsibility? What are the odds?
About 100 per day. Averaging more than one person dead per crash.
Of 392 tech vehicle crashes, only six deaths.
~826,000 cars out of a total of over 3/4 billion (~278,000,000) cars in the U.S.
That's 0.2%.
And worldwide, it's estimated that there are ~43 million such autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles out of a worldwide total of upwards of 1.4 billion vehicles, which is about 3%.
The report was summarized here in a good article here-
By Andrew J. Hawkins@andyjayhawk Jun 15, 2022, 9:00am EDT
(snip)
ADAS crashes
Tesla’s numbers were much higher than other companies, most likely due to the fact that it sells more vehicles equipped with Level 2 systems than its rivals. (One estimate puts the number of Tesla vehicles with Autopilot or “Full Self-Driving” at 825,970.) Tesla collects real-time telematics data from its customers, giving it a much faster reporting process. Other automakers typically have to wait for reports to arrive from the field and sometimes don’t receive them for months. From July 20th, 2021, to May 21st, 2022, there were 273 crashes involving Tesla vehicles using Autopilot, according to the report.
The EV company’s crashes represent the bulk of the total 392 crashes reported during that period. Other automakers didn’t come close to Tesla’s number of reported crashes. Honda, which sells its ADAS features under the brand “Honda Sensing,” disclosed 90 crashes. Subaru, which packages its ADAS under “EyeSight,” reported 10 crashes. Ford disclosed five crashes, Toyota reported four crashes, BMW reported three crashes, and General Motors, maker of Super Cruise, only disclosed two crashes. Aptiv, Hyundai, Lucid, Porsche, and Volkswagen each reported one crash.
Of the 392 crash reports, only 98 included information about severity. There were six crashes that resulted in serious injuries and five that resulted in fatalities during the nine-month reporting period. NHTSA officials did not disclose the manufacturers that reported the fatalities but said that information would be included in the raw data released Wednesday.
Throughout the briefing, officials declined to address specific questions about Tesla, cautioning against drawing conclusions about any one company. But there’s no question that Tesla is an outlier when it comes to driver-assist technology.
(snip)
https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/15/23168088/nhtsa-adas-self-driving-crash-data-tesla
Because you are trying to compare different "levels" of autonomous functionality against other levels, then it completely skews the statistics, let alone try to compare to "all" (autonomous, no matter how much, plus non-autonomous).
The graph in the above excerpt gives a good idea of attempting to compare "apples to apples" and what the result was (notably when it comes to Tesla).
and "software", which is where this argument started and then devolved.
People can and do get "distracted" and that along with certain road conditions and possible faults in the vehicle itself, can cause an accident.
However the point of the "automated vehicle" was to remove the "distraction" part out of the equation and strictly react to the road conditions and/or conditions of the vehicle, and they are not there yet.
If the "software" is engaged at night and misses a deer darting out into the roadway that a human can "see" moving in the woods from outside of the car's camera/sensory periphery, then the human could "react" faster while the car does so too late.
So no, it's still not "apples" to "apples".
The graph does a "software to software" (company to company) comparison between types of vehicles with similar functionality and it suggests that improvements need to made for that one company within the meaning of "autonomous". But then throwing that into looking at accidents out of total vehicles is meaningless except maybe for minimizing the importance of improvements.
And there you have the big difference.
Although you might have multiple aircraft in the same airspace, unless you have a formation of fighters (jets or choppers), the aircraft are much further apart by regulation.
This is why whenever I see sci-fi films continually showing "jet cars", I always chuckle that we can't even drive in "1 dimension" (forward and back) let alone "3 dimensions" (forward/back - up/down - side to side)... and then I often throw this example in to illustrate -
This type of automation IS going to happen... eventually. We are in the embryonic stages of it. Aircraft have it, watercraft have it, and spacecraft have it. The one big difference is that the former 3 are being operated in a less congested space than a car, and that is where it will be tricky to improve to that level of granularity, but it will happen one of these days.
The closest to it is continually being updated in trains (that do travel on a track) and things like a PTC, as we know how "automated" and "distracted" can equal what happened here in Philly 7 years ago.
and also includes the "self-park" feaature that I have never used.
Yummy. 
